#95 Mulengro by Charles de Lint

Mulengro (1985) is the fourth novel by Canadian author Charles de Lint (1951-    ).  De Lint is a frequent World Fantasy and BFA nominee, and won the former in 2000 for his collection Sweetgrass & City Streets.

Cover art by Fletcher Sibthorp

As the cover notes, this is "a Romany tale," which is to say that the novel is largely based on gypsy lore and culture (which the author admits to not being an expert on, and, my own expertise being less than his, I really don't know enough to evaluate for accuracy).  The main character is Janfri, a gypsy who lives among the gaje (i.e., non-gypsies) in Ottowa, whose house is burnt down by an unknown enemy.  Meanwhile, another gyspy from Janfri's kumpania is murdered in a bizarre fashion, and the death is investigated by two policemen, Briggs and Sandler who don't have time for any of this magic nonsense.  Neither of them actually say, "I'm getting to old for this shit," but I always felt that that would be the next line whenever they showed up.  Anyway, many of the gypsies believe that the killer is a dark magician, bent on purifying the gypsies, who he feels have been tainted by modern society. Janfri is sent to find Ola, a young gypsy woman with great power who's the key to stopping the killer.  And while Janfri is searching for Ola, the police and the killer are searching for him.

On the one hand, it's neat to see an urban crime mystery set in Canada, which we don't get much of.  While the forays into Romany culture were often interesting, I was underwhelmed.  As I said before, I don't know enough about gypsy culture to call anything out as wrong, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that the gypsy kumpania in Mulengro was very carefully crafted to be a template of gypsy social groups, kind of like the difference between a model house and a house people actually live in.  

In the end, Mulengro is an entertaining horror/urban fantasy/mystery novel, but I don't really see anything to set it apart from other books of the same type.

Just the stats:

Published: Oct 1985 (Ace Books paperback edition), Canada

Pages: 357

Awards:

Placed 12th for 1986 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
Nominated for the 1986 Prix Aurora Award for Prix Casper - English

The Devil and Daniel Webster (From Page to Screen to Screen)

The Story:

Stephen Vincent Benét, best known for John Brown's Body, had "The Devil and Daniel Webster" published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1936.  The story is presented as an old New England folktale, about the time a down on his luck farmer, Jabez Stone, sold his soul to the devil for seven years good luck, only to regret his decision and ask Daniel Webster (the real life congressman and orator, often held to be one of, if not the, most eloquent and honest men to ever serve in the US government) to represent him and get him out of the contract.  The devil agrees to a trial, stocks the jury with cutthroats and traitors from American history, and sets an unrepentant judge from the Salem witch trials to justice.  Old Dan'l speaks all night and convinces the jury that a man's freedom is too valuable, and the sinners relent, giving Jabez Stone his life back.

The story's themes of perseverance through tough times, and the resilience of the American people (especially farmers), would strike a special chord with audiences in the middle of the great depression.  It's a wonderful story and you can read it here on Gutenburg Australia.

The Films:

Director: William Dieterle

Runtime: 107 minutes

The first film adaptation was released in 1941, with a screenplay co-written by Benét.  The plot is much the same as the story, with some additions, most notably a seductive demon (at least that's what we're led to assume) that supplants Jabez's wife.  There's more time devoted to the plight of poor farmers, and the corrupting influence of wealth is hammered down a bit more, in a way that may seem trite today.  There's a lot of folksy New England humor, like when Jabez's Ma points out that "hard luck - well, we made New England out of it.  That and codfish."

Jabez and Ma Stone

While the entire cast ranges from adequate to great, the standout star of the film is Walter Huston (father of John Huston, Academy Award winner for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), who plays the Devil, or Scratch, as he's often called in New England.

Unfortunately, the scene I wanted to embed wasn't on Youtube, but if you have six minutes, watch Webster's speech to the damned.

All That Money Can Buy (which was titled as such to avoid confusion with The Devil and Miss Jones) was a flop at the box office, despite receiving an Academy Award for its score (which is great) and a best leading actor nomination for Huston.  A restored version of the film was released in the 1990s, with the intended title, The Devil and Daniel Webster.  While certain aspects have aged poorly, it's nonetheless a great film.

Director: Alec Baldwin

Runtime: 106 minutes

The fact that Alec Baldwin used a pseudonym for his directorial credit should be a sign of how this 2003 film turned out.  Baldwin (who also produced the film) stars as Jabez Stone, a down-on-his-luck writer in Manhattan with a bit of talent but no success.  After a fantastically bad day in which he loses his job, is humiliated by a publisher (whose name is Daniel Webster, played by Anthony Hopkins), finds out a friend of his has sudden remarkable success (making him jealous), is mugged, and later kills an elderly woman by throwing a typewriter out a window, Stone is approached by the Devil, who is played by Jennifer Love Hewitt.  She offers to give him ten years of success (and unkills the old lady) in exchange for his soul.  Jabez agrees.  As opposed to the original story and the 1941 film, in which the deal is made official by a contract signed in blood, Stone and the devil seal the deal by, well, sealing the deal.

fig. 1.1 Contract Law

The first half hour or so of the movie works pretty well, but things quickly devolve from their.  This may be the most over-edited movie I've ever seen.  Nearly every other scene ends with either an iris in/out or with tonally inappropriate wipes, as well as an inexplicable frequent use of slow motion shots, which don't make things more dramatic, as the editor intended, but merely more baffling.

This film has a great supporting cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Dan Ackroyd, and Amy Poehler, although the latter two never get much chance to prove how funny they can be.  Like in the original story, Jabez ends up regretting his deal, and enlists the help of Daniel Webster.  The Webster in this case has no connection to the historical figure.  He's just a publisher named Daniel Webster who happens to have considerable experience in suing the devil.  The courtroom scene is a real mess, with Webster using at least a few different defenses, and no real emotional power like the 1941 version.  Hewitt's devil isn't sure whether to be menacing, erotic, or inscrutable, making the performance none of the above (although this isn't Hewitt's fault.  There's only so much she could have done with the script). One point that bugs me deals with the jury in this case.  Stone has become a massively successful author, though one that's critically panned.  The jury, rather than traitors and scoundrels, is composed of authors.  Only four are named, though many are identifiable by appearance (e.g. Woolf and Joyce).  The four named authors are Truman Capote, Jacqueline Susanne, Ernest Hemingway, and Mario Puzo.  Susann and Puzo are best known for writing books that were massively successful but critically panned, so putting them on the jury doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.  Anyway, Webster and Stone win the case, and time is reversed to before the deal is made.

#97: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Mythago Wood, by the British novelist Robert Holdstock (1948-2009), first appeared in short form in 1981 (for which it received the British Science Fiction Association award for best short story), before being expanded and published as a novel in 1984, which won the 1985 World Fantasy Award.  Going over Holdstock's oeuvre is intimidating due to its sheer size. Under his own name, Holdstock published sixteen novels, two short story collections, two film novelizations, and co-wrote/edited ten anthologies and non-fiction works.  Under various pseudonyms he wrote fourteen novels and seventeen novelizations.

The novel in question is the first in a series of seven novels, dealing with Ryhope Wood, a place of great power in Herefordshire.  Viewed from afar, Ryhope Wood is a small area of ancient growth, one of the few wild forests left in England.  The novel's protagonist, Stephen Huxley, grew up near this wood with his father, mother and brother, Christian.  His father had an intense interest in the woods, often disappearing for weeks at a time, an interest which clearly took precedence over his wife and children, breeding a lifetime of resentment.  Stephen enlists in World War II, and retires to France when hostilities end, only to return home after his father's death.  Now it's infodump time.  Ryhope Wood is a place of great psychic resonance, in which Mythagos (from "myth imagos") are created.  A prominent example of a Mythago is Robin Hood, who is described as a Jack-in-the-Woods type Mythago.  These mythagos come into being as a result of the ancestral memory of within mankind's subconscious, yet they are physically real, though they cannot travel outside the forest for very long.  These mythagos, not only of creatures but of architecture, go back as far as human history on the British Isles (there are similar woods elsewhere in the world).  The main plot of the story, beyond the exploration of the major concept, is as follows:  Stephen's father was obsessed with finding or bringing about the first mythago, at the root of human subconscious.  While doing so, the mythago Guiwenneth came into being.  Both Stephen's father and his brother Christian were obsessed by her, with Christian claiming her affection after his father died.  Guiwenneth died soon after as well, and Christian blames this on the fact that this version of Guiwenneth was created by his father, not himself.  So he journeys into the forest, which expands the deeper you penetrate, to find a new version of her.  He disappears for months upon months.  In the meantime, a version of Guiwenneth appears at the house, and she and Stephen fall in love.  All is well until Christian returns, taking Guiwenneth.  This battle between brothers provides the framework for what remains of the novel.

I left out quite a bit in that summary, a lot of it things that fans of the novel would, rightly, consider important.

To me, Mythago Wood seemed an incredibly British novel, not only in the sense that it dealt with British history, folklore, and geography.  Perhaps "Old world" would be a good term for it.  Because it is based on a continuity, of a single location gradually changing over thousands of years of habitation and changing rule.  In the New World, much of the older myths were lost with the large scaled destruction of the indigenous people, and the new myths were primarily transplants from Europe and Africa.  The characters in Mythago Wood are connected to this mythic world through blood and soil.  In this sense, it seems to speak to a culture that is much more connected to a local, ancient history, both real and fictive, than we generally find in the U.S.


Just the stats:

Pages: 215 (Hardcover, Arbor House edition)
Published: 1984, Gollancz
Awards: 1984 British Science Fiction Award for best novel; 1985 World Fantasy Award for best novel

What I'm Reading/Watching

I've seen some other lit blogs have a similar weekly-ish post like this, so I figured I might as well, as well.

I'm nearing the end of Dan Simmons' SFF novel Hyperion (1989), the first novel of a tetralogy called the Hyperion Cantos.  Beyond the fantastic world-building, Simmons does a great job of melding science fiction and fantasy elements in the same worlds as a group of unlikely pilgrims go on a quest to find the mysterious and deadly Shrike.  I can't help but feel that Hyperion had a big aesthetic influence on Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga series.

I also saw Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland (screenwriter for 28 Days Later and Dredd).  It's a solid, absorbing SF piece, with fantastic acting by Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander.   The less you know going in, the better.

Ponies by Kij Johnson

One of my favorite contemporary short stories, and winner of the 2010 Nebula award for the short story, is "Ponies" by Kij Johnson.  You can read it here on tor.com or listen to a reading of it here.  (Sorry, audio player wouldn't embed.)

1984: The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King

The Authors:

Peter Straub (1943-     ) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He attended the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he received a B.A., in 1965, then Columbia University where he received an M.A.  In 1966, Straub married Susan Bitker, with whom he now has two children.  After a short period teaching High School English in Wisconsin, Straub moved to Ireland, planning to get his doctorate from University College, Dublin.  He dropped the doctorate path to focus on writing.  

His first novel, Marriages, a mainstream story about an American businessman in Europe, was published in 1973.  Unable to find a publisher for a second mainstream novel, Straub began to write horror at the suggestion of his agent.  His first horror novel, Julia, was published in 1975.  His first major success came with the publication of Ghost Story (1979), and was followed by other well-received horror novels, winning multiple World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards.    

After the publication of Ghost Story, Straub moved back to the United States.  He had been friends with Stephen King, and the two of them decided to collaborate on a novel, The Talisman.  Since 1984, Straub has published eleven novels and four short story collections, as well as editorial work on the Library of America's Lovecraft anthology.  

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines.

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list.


The Book:   

Subject/Genre: Heroic Journey/Dark Fantasy


The Talisman begins with twelve year old Jack Sawyer and his mother, a retired B-movie actress, heading to a New Hampshire sea-side tourist town off-season.  Sawyer's father has been dead some years, and his business partner, Morgan Sloat, is trying to get control of Jack's father's share of the company (cliche 1: Evil businessman).  Jack suspects his mother is sick and has come to this town to die.  Here, he meets Speedy Parker, an wise old black man (cliche 2).  Parker gives Jack some information, that he (Parker), Jack's father, Sloat, and nameless others, can traverse between worlds: ours and a fantasy realm known only as "The Territories."  Not only that, but many people have 'Twinners', versions of themselves that exist in the other world.  There's no twinner of Jack, but his mother's twinner is the queen.  Jack must retrieve a special object known only as the talisman and save his mother and the queen (cliche 3).  He'll need to travel across the U.S. and The Territories, from New Hampshire to California, flipping back and forth to avoid danger.  Jack, Parker tells us, is special and has a great destiny (cliche 4).  Why?  Well, we'll find out in the last 100 pages.  

Despite it's reliance on standard fantasy plot devices, The Talisman is a fun read.  It tends to jump around a lot in terms of tone, going from almost cutesy to grotesque to heart-warming with little warning.  One of my big problems is with a couple aspects that are common in fantasy novels but are so over-used and, in some ways, just bad writing.  One is the 'mysterious artifact.'  Parker (and other characters) give Jack seemingly benign or mysterious objects.  They won't tell him what they're for, only that he'll know it when he sees it.  The problem here is that it's more often than not a mixture of Chekhov's gun and deus ex machina.  All seems lost, but this innocuous item that has been sitting in Jack's backpack for a few hundred pages is suddenly able to fix everything.  The other trope is needlessly withheld information.  This is particularly bad in The Talisman, because people who are on Jack's side refuse to tell him information that would help him.  In some cases, characters even make it clear that they can't say more, but why they can't is never explained or even hinted at.  Too much of the story relies on revelations that were inexplicably withheld from our hero.  

That said, there are parts of the journey that, on their own, buoy up the work (The Sunlight Home is a pretty strong piece of horror writing in and of itself).  Jack is a reasonably complex character who the reader can really get behind.  His sidekicks get a bit infuriating before eventually developing beyond a couple grating character traits.  


The Talisman has a sequel, 2001's Black House, co-written by Straub and King.  The two have said that they are interested in writing a third, but nothing has been officially determined.  

If you're a fan of dark fantasy, The Talisman is a good choice.  I read a lot of Stephen King books in high school, and if I were to rank The Talisman on a scale of 10 (10 being The Stand or Dark Tower I-IV, and 1 being The Regulators or Dark Tower VI) I'd give it a strong 6.


Bestsellers of 1984:

1. The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King
2. The Aquataine Progression by Robert Ludlum
3. The Sicilian by Mario Puzo
4. Love and War by John Jakes
5. The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss
6.  ...And the Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer
7. The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth
8. Full Circle by Danielle Steel
9. The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz by Joan Rivers
10. Lincoln by Gore Vidal

Also Published in 1984:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

Sources:

King, Stephen and Straub, Peter. The Talisman. 1984. New York: Berkley, 1985. Print.

"Peter Straub." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

1982: E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial by William Kotzwinkle

The Author:

William Kotzwinkle (1938-      ) was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  He dropped out of Penn State in 1957 and headed to New York where he worked as a short-order cook and later as an editor before publishing his first piece, a children's story titled The Fireman (1969).  A prolific author, he published eleven children's books and eight adult novels in 1970s, winning the O. Henry Prize in 1975 and the World Fantasy Award for Doctor Rat (1976).  In 1982, Steven Spielberg, impressed by Kotwinkle's novel about the Greenwich Village art scene (The Fan Man, 1974), asked Kotzwinkle to write the novelization of Melissa Mathison's screenplay for his upcoming film, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).  This prompted a sequel, E.T., the Book of the Green Planet: A New Novel (1985).  (He also wrote the novelization of Superman III, which we as a society should just collectively forget.)  Since then, Kotzwinkle has remained prolific and eclectic, writing everything from a novel about a fading Hollywood star who slips into the consciousness of a WWII German black-marketeer (The Exile, 1987) to a series of children's books with the self-explanatory title, Walter, the Farting Dog.

The Book:

Length: 265 pages
Subject/Genre: Aliens/Movie Novelization

While I think it's safe to assume everyone here has seen Steven Spielberg's E.T., a quick recap for anyone who's forgotten.  A spaceship lands in a forest and a bunch of aliens start collecting plant samples.  Government officials show up, causing the aliens to evacuate, except for one who gets left behind.  He finds his way into a suburb and befriends Elliott.  Elliott, along with his big brother and little sister, have to hide E.T. from their mom and the outside world while helping him build a device to send a signal to his shipmates.  E.T. and Elliott develop a somewhat telepathic connection, they both get sick, but recover.  The mom discovers E.T. as do the government agents.  But they escape and E.T.'s ship comes back for him and he flies off into the cosmos.  Roll credits.  

Kotzwinkle's novelization is actually highly-regarded as a stand-alone piece of Sci-fi. One thing that the novel does that the film couldn't do is tell much of the story through E.T.'s perspective.  In addition to learning a lot about E.T.'s background (he's 10 million years old, for example), we find out he can communicate with plants and animals (and cheese apparently).  This does lead to interesting questions about the ethics of eating a salad when all its components are sentient.  

The novel, like the film, starts with the ship's landing.  In this version, E.T., we discover, is a bit of a daredevil, who decides to sneak into the suburb, something none of his species had done before. This is why he, specifically, gets left behind.  The novel then cuts to Elliott's household, where Elliott and his friends are playing Dungeons & Dragons while his mother, Mary, sits in the other room doing her best Jewish Mother impression:

"Have I raised my babies to be Dungeon Masters? For that, I work eight hours a day?"  

While the mother may have been a bit uptight in the movies, in the novel she comes across as uptight and extremely paranoid. After the family dog, Harvey, barks at E.T.'s passing, Mary, upstairs notes that:

"The animal was ridiculously suspicious of things that passed in the dark; it made her feel the neighborhood was filled with sex fiends."    

Guess how many times the words "pervert" or "sex fiend" show up in  a novelization of E.T.?  The answer is "a lot more than you'd expect."  After Elliott throws a ball into the toolshed, only to have something (i.e. E.T.) throw it back out at him, he comes back into the house, screaming about something hiding in the shed.

"She drew herself up, tossed her head bravely, and grabbed the flashlight.  If it was a sex fiend, she'd go out and, like a mother partridge, offer herself as a decoy.

She just hoped it was a halfway charming fiend."  

Putting aside any ornithological uncertainties I might have, what the heck?!  The mom consistently comes across as a twitching bundle of neuroses, insecurities, and delusions. The problem is, I keep expecting her to be a mom more in line with the movie, flawed, but not on the verge of a complete mental breakdown.  The other characters don't fare any better.  Here's our description of Elliott:

"All in all, a blossoming neurotic, a twerp. His path in life led nowhere, but if a place could be pointed to on a map of the soul, Elliott's destination was mediocrity, miserliness, and melancholy; the sort of person who falls under a train."    

It also recontextualizes some famous scenes.  One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when Gertie (the little sister, played by a six-year-old Drew Barrymore) meets E.T. for the first time.  She screams which scares E.T. into screaming and slapstick. But what went through Mary's mind?

"'Oh, God...' She rose from the kitchen table.  What savage ritual was her family enacting now?  It sounded like they were pulling Gertie's pants down.  In twenty years, Gertie'd be trying to recollect it, on a psychiatrist's couch."  

SERIOUSLY?!  Why is this the first thing that comes into her mind?  She is pathologically determined to believe her kids are all drug-addled sexual deviants, and it's really freakin' weird.

But to be fair, she may have good reason to think this, considering Elliott's friends:

"He stared at Elliott, who, so far as he knew, had been like every other brother in the world, taking pleasure in playing with his sister only when the game was interesting--for example, tickling her until she nearly had a nervous breakdown, a game he often enjoyed with his own sister.  Or tying her to a tree and then tickling her.  Or crashing into the bathroom with four or five other guys while she was taking a bath, and then standing around laughing while she screamed.  Those were the right games.  But this?  Thoughtful drops of spittle ran of Greg's lower lip, onto his neon shirt."    

The tone of the novel is incredibly different from that of the movie.  As I mentioned earlier, the novel is largely through E.T.'s perspective, which, I think, kind of explains much of this tone shift.  The movie is about an average kid who finds an alien and has to help the alien get home.  The novel is a ten-million year old botanist from a technologically advanced society who finds himself stranded amidst a bunch of far inferior creatures (although, E.T. frequently comes across less as a genius and more as some kind of slapstick-savant).  The major conflict then becomes: How can E.T. get this fundamentally dysfunctional family to pull itself together and get him off this planet?  The tone is much less innocent and wondrous, although it frequently has moments of awe and depth.  

Strangely enough, I liked the novel because of it's relative darkness, that is, once I got past my initial confusion.  Once I stopped constantly comparing it to my memories of the film, I realized that it's a solid SF/F young adult novel.  

But how did a novelization, albeit of a very popular film, get to be the #1 bestseller of the year.  This is at least partially a case of technological limitations.  The first VCR's were released in 1970's, but were extremely expensive and very few films were available on VHS.   Even into the beginning of the 1980s, the future of the VCR was unclear.  VCR was competing with the technologically superior Betamax, and the important Sony vs. Universal case didn't reach the supreme court until 1984.  The fact is, in 1982, if you wanted to rewatch a movie you either had to shell out a lot of cash for a VHS or Betamax (and for copy of the film) or wait for it to air on TV.  Or you could buy the novelization. Novelizations filled a niche that really doesn't exist anymore.

 


While E.T. is still famous, Kotzwinkle's novelization had some notable consequences.  I personally believe (though can't prove), that the success and quality of his E.T. was responsible for Kahn's Return of the Jedi taking the top spot in 1983.  It also influenced the design of the (since replaced) E.T. ride at Universal Studios (this may seem like a useless tidbit, but anyone who grew up going to Universal Studios will have many fond memories of this).    

Kotzwinkle's E.T. is a strange and entertaining supplement to the film, with all the events filtered through a radically different perspective.

Bestsellers of 1982:

1. E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial by William Kotzwinkle
2. Space by James Michener
3. The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum
4. Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon
5. Mistral's Daughter by Judith Krantz
6. The Valley of Horses by Jean Auel
7. Different Seasons by Stephen King
8. North and South by John Jakes
9. 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
10. The Man from St. Petersburg by Ken Follett

Also published in 1982:

The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Noises Off by Michael Frayn
Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally
Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella
The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Sources:

Kotzwinkle, William. E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. 1982. New York: Scribner, 2002. Print.

"William Kotzwinkle." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web.

The (First) Wizard of Oz

Any discussion of the modern film industry will invariably end up with a lamentation of its reliance upon remakes and reboots.  Such discussions tend to forget that this is not a new trend in film.  Many classics, like the Boris Karloff Frankenstein and the Judy Garland The Wizard of Oz are themselves remakes.  Courtesy of archive.org, I present the oldest surviving film adaptation of the latter, the 1910 silent film, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

1977: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Author:

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) was born in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State (later a province of South Africa) where his father worked as a banker. At the age of three John Ronald Reuel Tolkein, his mother Mabel and his younger brother Hilary moved to England.  His father died of rheumatic fever in South Africa, leaving his family destitute. The Tolkiens lived by the aid of Mabel's family.  However, Mabel's family cut off financial support after she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900.  In 1904, Mabel died of diabetes.  Guardianship of the twelve year old Tolkien and his brother was given to Father Francis Xavier Morgan of Birmingham.

In 1911, Tolkien began attending Oxford college, graduating with honors in English Language and Literature in 1915. In 1913, after a five year, interrupted courtship, Tolkien and Edith Bratt became engaged.  The two married in March 1916, a few months before Tolkien shipped out for service in World War One.  He was sent back to England in October of that year after contracting trench fever.  While recovering in England, Tolkien began work on The Book of Lost Tales.  After the war, Tolkien worked compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, then was a professor at the University of Leeds where he worked on translations as well as teaching.  In 1925, he began teaching at Oxford University, where he taught until his retirement in 1959.  In 1936, Tolkien published The Hobbit, which sold well enough for his publishers to request a sequel.  This wish was fulfilled by The Lord of the Rings, the three volumes published in 1954 and 1955.  The books ended up becoming popular enough to allow Tolkien and his wife to retire in comfort.

In 1972, the queen appointed Tolkien a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was given an honorary doctorate from Oxford.


The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 458 pages
Subject/Genre: Middle Earth/Fantasy

The Silmarillion was the first of Tolkien's works about Middle Earth to be published since The Lord of the Rings.  Published after his death, The Silmarillion was edited by J.R.R.'s son, Christopher.  The Silmarillion is a history of Middle Earth, comprised of legend, folklore, and 'official' histories.  It starts with the creation of the Earth (one that is very Judeo-Christian inspired), and the creation of the elves, dwarves, men, and other great and terrible creatures that roamed Middle Earth.  

Before I speak more about the content of The Silmarillion, I should point out the oddity of it being the single bestselling novel of the year.  The Silmarillion is a very dense, frequently dry book that I can only see as being of interest to those who are already fans of The Lord of the Rings.  While some sci-fi and horror are on the list in the coming decades, this is the only fantasy novel that made it, and it's not a very accessible novel at that.  Add to that that it was published more than two decades after the books that made it popular, The Silmarillion would seem to have a lot going against it.  However, in the sixties and seventies, Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings received massive popularity within the U.S. counter culture.  Between the publication of TLOR and The Silmarillion, bands like Led Zeppelin, Rush, and Genesis, wrote songs explicitly and allusively about Middle Earth, and that's ignoring the bands that have since faded into obscurity, or details like T. Rex's drummer changing his name to Stephen Peregrin Took and whatever the hell this thing Leonard Nimoy made is:

All this is a way of saying that Middle Earth had gone from cult status to cultural trend, leading to bestseller status of this week's subject.   While those who have read The Lord of the Rings know that it's full of names, dates, geography, history, and myth, in terms of density it falls far short of The Silmarillion.  Of the novels 458 pages, over 15% comprise glossaries, family trees, and indices.  In fact, the Index of Names alone takes up 54 pages.  The fact is, Tolkien wrote a history book; Its main function is to deliver information, fictional though it may be.   And so we get the thousands of years of the history of Middle Earth preceding the events of The Hobbit, which tells of the evil Melkor, the creation of the elvish kingdoms, the rise of Suaron and the arrival of men in Middle Earth. If you haven't read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I can't recommend The Silmarillion.  If you have, and have a strong desire to know more about the world it takes place in, then this is a great place to start. Bestselling novels of 1977: 1. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien 2. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough 3. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach 4. The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré 5. Oliver's Story by Erich Segal 6. Dreams Die First by Harold Robbins 7. Beggarman, Thief by Irwin Shaw 8. How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong 9. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin 10. Daniel Martin by John Fowles Also Published in 1977: The Public Burning by Robert Coover A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick The Shining by Stephen King Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Sources: Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. 1977. New York: Ballantine, 1984. Print.

 

Book Review: "S." by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst

     S. was released late last year, a collaboration between J.J. Abrams (Lost, Star Trek, etc.) and Doug Dorst (Alive in Necropolis, The Surf Guru).  The writing is Dorst's, but, as we are told on the back blurb, the book was "conceived by" J.J. Abrams.  

     One thing to know about S., is that it is not simply the content (and contents) of the book that matters, but the book as an object.

    S. is a book within a book (or a book within a box), but in a more literal sense than something like House of Leaves or The Blind Assassin.  The book exists as a physical object instead of mere pages within the containing novel.  As you could see in the two above pictures, the novel within the novel is made to look like an old library book.  This isn't only visual, but tactile as well.  The binding mimics the binding on hardcovers from the '50s.  

     So what's this book about?  Well, the novel, Ship of Theseus, follows a man named S. who awakes in a strange city, sopping wet, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.  He is almost immediately shanghaied aboard a mysterious and disturbing ship, for reasons unknown.

    Ship of Theseus covers the spectrum from fun to philosophical to spooky, and does so gracefully.  Many questions are left unanswered, but in a fulfilling way.  That is to say, in a way that preserves and furthers the mystery.  But The Ship of Theseus isn't all that comprises S.

   

    Enter Eric and Jen, the two students who are trying to answer the question: Who is V. M. Straka (the fictional author of Ship of Theseus).  Through the margin notes we learn more about the 'author' and the work we're reading.  While the students themselves change, they also discover clues and codes within the novel.  I previously mentioned House of Leaves as a point of comparison with S.  It's also like Pale Fire, insofar as the margin notes go.  But Dorst did something neither Danielewski nor Nabokov did.  Inserts.

These are just a few of the many inserts within the novel.  Pictured above are a fancy business card, a puzzle wheel, and a map drawn on a napkin (yes, that's an actual napkin).  There are also numerous letters, postcards, photographs, and newspaper clippings contained within the pages of S.

Lest we forget, this is also a J.J. Abrams production, so there's a considerable web component to the book, including multiple websites that contain supplementary information not included in the text.  (This blog seems to give a good overview.)

Overall, S. is a fun puzzle and contains a good novel.  A question a lot of people ask is 'how do I read it,' because there are four sets of margin notes, each from a different read/reread of the novel by Jen and Eric.  If you want a (mostly) chronological read, here's what I suggest: First, read the novel and ignore any margin notes.  Then, read the blue/black notes (N.B. Jen writes in cursive, Eric in print).  Then read the orange/green footnotes.  Then the red/purple footnotes.  Then the black/black footnotes (i.e. the ones with black cursive as well as black print).  Read the inserts as they are referenced in the margins.


Overall review:

S.  3.5/5 
The Ship of Theseus 4/5

Public TV Interview with Ray Bradbury