The Lord of the Rings: A masterpiece of myth-making

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Houghton Mifflin, 1994

I first received The Lord of the Rings as part of a boxed set, complete with The Hobbit, for Christmas in 1985. I also received a boxed set of the first four Dune books. I was 13 and in 8th grade.

Like many 13-year olds, I loved The Hobbit but I thought The Lord of the Rings was simply awful. For one thing, the plot was not immediately obvious to me. (Keep in mind that at the time my enjoyment reading primarily comprised Doctor Who novelizations and Choose Your Own Adventure books.) Instead of the short chapters of plot and dialogue to which I was accustomed, Tolkien provided page after page of exposition, describing the local color and history with any "action" provided almost as an afterthought. And then there is what may have been the biggest problem of all with The Lord of the Rings, the scores of strangely named characters and places, some of whom are central to the story and others of whom are purely peripheral and which is which is unclear. I mean, sheesh, who names their two main villains Sauron and Saruman, names that differ by only one syllable?

It should be here noted that while I loved reading at age 13, I was also not the best reader. Memories of reading what I managed to of the trilogy consist mainly of reading a single page over and over and over again just to follow the main thread of the story. Somehow I managed to finish The Fellowship of the Ring and made it a few dozen pages into The Two Towers before I threw up my hands and abandoned Tolkien to the realm of "authors I think are overrated." I still have a vague recollection of giving a a pretty worthless presentation on the first book in front of Mrs. Fox's English class, the same class I was in when the Challenger exploded. (I also have an even vaguer memory of reviewing some disposable piece of genre SF called Dushau, but that's another story.) In short, I never thought I would ever read this book again, and considered all those folks who worshiped Tolkien to be little short of fools.

Fast-forward sixteen years. It's Christmas time in Champaign, and I'm attending The Two Towers with my coworkers, mainly because the bosses gave us cinema tickets for the holidays. As the movie begins to unfold, I remember those few dozen pages that I read at 13, and I slowly begin the journey of reappraising Tolkien. While I agree with those who urge reading the book as well as simply seeing the movie, I think that in this case I could not have done the former if I had not done the latter. Peter Jackson's trilogy allowed me to familiarize myself with the overall story arch (something that was hard for me to do from within the perspective of the novel, at least at first) and also helped me to handle the enormous cast of strangely named characters. (Finally Saruman and Sauron were decidedly distinct characters in my mind's eye, and the logic behind their naming, based as it is on Tolkien's invented languages, became more apparent.) So in fall of 2007 I finally decided to give the damned book another chance, mooched the one-volume "trilogy" (apparently Tolkien always considered it one big novel) through BookMooch, chose it over the New Testament for 2008's "big book" (sorry Mom), and devoured it in January, 2008.

In short, I loved it, particularly the exposition and the bizarre names for characters and places. Strange, huh, how the passage of time will do that to one's sensibilities? The very features of the novel that I found off-putting in 1985, I found absolutely ingenious in 2008. The names and locations in The Lord of the Rings all figure into a much-vaster cosmology and narrative history, and this becomes more apparent when the reader peruses the voluminous appendices. All the details that seemed arbitrary and distracting from "the action" were in fact anything but arbitrary, deriving as they did from a comprehensive mythology (of a world that did not exist until Tolkien wrote it into existence!). Take for example the appendix on the "translation" of the text explaining why Tolkien chose English words like "elf" and "dwarf" and "halfling" to "translate" the "original" Elvish words. Apart from the implication that there is really an original manuscript written in Elvish, this appendix also implies that the "elves" in this story aren't really elves, the "dwarves" aren't really dwarves, etc., but that these are the closest analogs that the translator could find in fantastic literature.

That these 1,000+ pages, with all their hyper-detailed exposition, are merely the tip of the iceberg of Tolkien's invented world, makes the novel all the more amazing. This really is a masterpiece of storytelling and myth-making. I can understand now why so many people love this book. I think I'm now one of them.

Breathtaking work of literary genius and theological inquiry

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Jose Saramago
Harvest Books, 1994

In this novel Saramago has created a masterpiece, both in terms of style and content.

The prose is musical, poetically evocative of the streams of consciousness and conversation that fill our lives. While Saramago's paragraphs often run several pages in length, and his idiosyncratic use of punctuation (e.g., his refusal to use quotation marks to delimit speech and his insistence on ending all sentences--including questions--with a period) can seem daunting, the fluid, melodic language makes reading the story a true pleasure.

In terms of content, Saramago has mastered the art of faithfully retelling a story while simultaneously subverting the text through interesting asides, editorial comments, notes to the reader, etc. He also subverts the normal relationship between humanity and God in Christian tradition, wherein humanity is in need of God's forgiveness. In Saramago's retelling, it is the inhumanity of God that is need of humanity's forgiveness. I have often wondered at the needless brutality that lies at the core of mainstream Christian theology (i.e., God needing to have his only child brutally murdered in order to forgive me for being the imperfect being I was created to be), and finally, in Saramago, I have found an author willing to take God to task while not dismissing the sorrowful beauty of the life of Jesus.

(This review was originally written on June 19, 2006.)

Generous and much needed "experiment in literary investigation"

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 : An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Harper Collins, 1974

Gulag--a Russian acronym for the network of camps where prisoners languish without recourse to law or justice, where women are gang-raped by thieves, and where innocent people are starved, beaten, tortured, killed, disappeared. Though Solzhenitsyn's experience of the Gulag took place under Soviet rule, the phenomenon does not seem to be uniquely Communist but is symptomatic of totalitarianism in general. This is why this "experiment in literary investigation" is so relevant right here, right now. The potential for something like Gulag in the age of the eternal "war on terror" is terrifying. (And as the author notes, many of the evils committed in Gulag depended upon the perpetrator believing that what he did was not only necessary, but actually moral.)

Yet Solzhenitsyn's indefatigable sense of humor and generosity of spirit keep this book (at 615 pages, the first volume of three) from being a work of torture in itself. Instead, he mocks the pretensions of the Soviet penal code and revels in the small joys (i.e., sleep, reading, comradery) he experienced in Gulag. In fact, at times, Solzhenitsyn conveys the sense that Gulag was a potentially redemptive experienced for those who made it through, since it winnowed away the chaff of life from the wheat and revealed the nobility we may find in our darkest, deepest hour.

(This review was originally written April 26, 2006 and it refers to the first of the three volume series. Subsequent volumes await my attention.)

An hellish banquet of control and addiction, seen clearly, vividly, nakedly

Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs
Grove Press, 1992

A difficult work (I finished the second-half of the novel after a three-year hiatus) that definitely demands re-reading. My difficulty in reading this novel stemmed both from the disturbing starkness of the subject matter and from the experimental prose through which this subject matter is presented. In other words, don't expect a plot, character development, or any other standard literary convention in this exploration of JUNK.

According to the author, the title refers to experiencing life without any blinders, preconceptions, etc., i.e., a "naked lunch" in which everyone is aware of what precisely is on the end of every fork. From what I gleaned in the front matter, portions of the novel--probably the sections that most disturbed me (e.g., those involving hangings, necks snapping, and strings of "rancid jissom")--were written as a Swiftian satire against the brutality of capital punishment. Although it is the barbarism of capital punishment, akin to the religious sacrifice of human beings, that Burroughs specifically wants us to see nakedly, this "banquet of naked awareness" applies equally well to all areas of human endeavor in which we blind ourselves to our true motives, feelings, etc.

Being a clear perception of the Hells created by the blind pursuit of technoscientific domination and the addiction to power and control makes this novel utterly important and incredibly difficult.

(This review was originally written March 21, 2006.)