Review: Gossip from the Forest

Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I have not seen a good idea done so much injustice since Juliet Nicolson's equally self-congratulatory The Perfect Summer.

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Review: The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1 by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's taken me quite a while to read this wonderful book, since I have been reading it pretty much every night once I get into bed. Generally, nowadays, that means a page or two followed by a plunge into sleep. But it's been fascinating to learn about the brilliant man's early years, from his own letters and without any of the rethinking and shaping that went into a book like Surprised by Joy. Here Lewis is not telling a story, but talking to his friends, his brother, and his father, from the age of 7 to the age of 32. Boarding school, the Great Knock, the War, Oxford after the War, Barfield, Tolkien -- they're all there -- and all the comments on all the books he's reading, which is for me in some ways the most interesting part.

The book has a good biographical appendix at the end, to detail the cast of Lewis' relatives and friends and teachers. The notes are much less good, often so useless that they made me scratch my head. Why, for example, would anyone interested and motivated enough to read Lewis' letters need to be told that Herman Melville is the author of Moby Dick?

Don't let that deter you. The pleasure is in getting to spend all that time with Lewis.

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Review: Nothing On Earth

Nothing On Earth by Conor O'Callaghan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Written with a sure touch, it never gives much away, or spells anything out for you. It leaves you wanting to know more, but feeling that there is no more that can be known. Spooky, creepy, lovely.

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Review: Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits

Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits by Dimitra Fimi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dimitra Fimi's work here is excellent. What she has written reads much like a cultural history of the creation of Middle-earth. She not only explains Tolkien's fascination with mythology and language and how they came together in the (sub-)creation of his legendarium, but explores the ways in which, across his long life, the world Tolkien lived in affected the shaping of the world he wrote about. At no time is Fimi's work heavy-handed. Her touch is always as light as it is far-reaching. Her writing is clear, concise, and persuasive. Her handling of evidence is fair and honest. Her knowledge of Tolkien and of the scholarship on his inner and outer worlds is hard to match. The expert and the newcomer to the study of Tolkien will each find much to learn and much to reflect upon in this essential work.

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Review: Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden

Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jack Vance's work has many charms. His prose is smooth and, for the most part, stealthily beautiful. Then all of a sudden it isn't stealthy at all, and it lifts you up. His wit is quick, surefooted, and dry. And he will surprise you by turning the story on a dime in an unexpected direction, but what he does follows, and you can't believe he just did that. So he is quite sly, and entirely persuasive. Even when he introduces fairies that seem to be just like those annoying, cloying toy pixies of the Victorians, they're not. Oh, no.

Review: Tolkien

Tolkien by Raymond Edwards
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This biography is much better on Tolkien's scholarship than Carpenter's. Edwards is perceptive, often witty, and definitely not shy about sharing his opinions. On Charles Williams, for example, he is quite scathing (p. 186):

"Williams was given to ... overuse of abstract nouns and to prolonged flirtations with impressionable young women. Williams clothed these flirtations, which in a couple of cases were prolonged over years and involved hundreds of letters, with a pseudo-mystical flummery borrowed from Dante, Swinburne and the whole overripe Blavatskian-Hermeticist tradition; but to all but dedicated fans, this stuff reads like transparent special pleading for what has aptly been called 'moral adultery'."

Now, really, who does not know that the young and impressionable must avoid the overripeness of the Blavatskian-Hermetecist tradition? I should think it goes without saying, but what does not go without saying is the source of borrowed judgements. By whom these 'prolonged flirtations' -- as Edwards calls them twice in so many words in two sentences -- were called 'moral adultery', we are never told. Not that I necessarily dispute the aptness of the opinion.

Nor is his lack of a citation here an isolated incident. For example, at one point Edwards cites Tom Shippey but gives no source (p. 303 n. 23 -- the nearest previous reference to Shippey is 15 footnotes earlier). At another (p. 83) he says that Robert Graves made a statement 'somewhere', and leaves it at that, but Google was able to locate that 'somewhere' in well under a second. Playing fast and loose like this with details undermines my confidence in the author. God and the Devil both lie in the details.

Despite faults like these, I enjoyed this book. I will consult it and find it useful. It does represent an advance beyond the hagiographic biography of Carpenter, and has profited by the research of the last 40 years. What we really need, however, is a new authorized biography based on much fuller access to Tolkien's letters, diaries, and papers.

Review: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A shallow young man lives in a thoughtless daydream of a world that is about to vanish. His older, more worldly self, tells the story, but allows his past actions to speak for themselves.

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Review: Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien

Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien by Janet Brennan Croft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an excellent contribution to the scholarly study of the role and importance of women in the works of Tolkien. The writing is clear and level-headed, and the editing is thorough and professional. Every article is good, and several are exceptional. There's a lot of fine work here, which will repay the scrutiny of fan, student, and scholar.

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Review: Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North

Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North by G. Ronald Murphy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

scholarly, persuasive, fascinating. The only drawback is the publisher's failure to reproduce the photographs in way that is anything but embarrassing.

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Review: Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien

Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien by Patrick Curry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A good and thoughtful book, knowledgeable and perceptive, though inclined to give much closer attention to the opinions of secondary sources than the evidence of primary.

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Review: J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology by Simon J. Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In an imaginary world like Middle-Earth, which is 'at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws' (C.S. Lewis), nothing could be easier than for fans and scholars to find some parts of this world far more fascinating than others. Many, for example, devote long study to Tolkien's languages, which are of great importance for his world and are indeed fundamental to its very creation. Others find questions of the adaptation of the books to film, and of the impact of the books on popular culture (and the reverse), to be irresistible. Still others investigate the spiritual lessons and spiritual foundations of Tolkien's work. The list could go on to cover many more areas, all worthy of detailed study.

Now my own interest generally resides in a very old-fashioned, very detailed literary analysis of the texts themselves as they unfold their tale, and so I have never really paid much heed to Tolkien's famous statement that he felt the lack of a 'mythology for England' and wished to remedy it. But every now and then a work comes along that changes your perspective, that changes your mind about what is interesting. Simon Cook's J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology is just such a work.

At 49 pages, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology is more of a monograph than a book. Yet its brevity makes it only more impressive. With admirable force and economy, Cook analyzes Middle-Earth as 'an exploration of the ancient imagination of the North, forged from profound scholarship as well as literary genius, and situated on the threshold of actual history.' Through investigation of Tolkien's earliest tales, his work on Beowulf, and his response to Hector Munro Chadwick's The Origin of the English Nation, Cook has put together a compelling argument for the origins of Tolkien's 'mythology for England' and for its larger relevance to understanding how Tolkien came in the end to write The Lord of the Rings he wrote.

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Review: A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18 by Joseph Loconte

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Great War shattered the complacency of the West. Flanders’ Fields exploded the myth of Progress, that strange concatenation of Technological and Social Darwinism, of Social Gospel and Hard Science. Dissolution, disillusionment, irony, absurdity, and even worse, ideologies followed. It needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this. But what has long been noteworthy, if noted little and explored less, is that Tolkien and Lewis are very much WWI writers, too. They fought and feared, suffered illness and wounds, saw horrors, lost a generation of friends, just as Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Graves, and so many others did; and just as those others did, they, too, went off to war thinking of their homeland, not in terms of factories and swollen cities, but of the shires and the countryside. Yet they, as the title of this book suggests, did not suffer the same despair and disillusionment; instead they found the stuff of hope and recovery. I regret to say, however, that Professor Loconte’s book does not succeed as well as it might have done in explaining how this came to be so.

The first difficulty we encounter is that the author is quite often simply wrong. On page 9, the Ents are said to be marching off to attack, not Saruman, but Sauron. A slip of the pen perhaps, as might easily occur in haste, but usually caught in proof. On page 22 we have more serious errors. The author mistakes Frodo’s vision of Bilbo as “a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands” (FR 2.i.232) for reality, as if Bilbo were actually “momentarily distorted by his lust for the Ring.” That’s Peter Jackson’s scene, not Tolkien’s. Bilbo no more turns into Gollum here than Sam becomes an orc under similar circumstances in The Tower of Cirith Ungol (RK 6.i.911-12). Both of these scenes show what the Ring is doing to Frodo, making him see those he loves as monsters after his Ring.

Now even if this error were merely a matter of interpretation, the other mistake on page 22 is not. The author quotes from The Magician’s Nephew, as anyone even modestly familiar with The Chronicles of Narnia will recognize – I’ve read them only once – but he claims it’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Using the single volume edition of Narnia, which arranges the novels by internal chronology rather than in order of publication, Loconte fails to note the title of the novel written plainly at the top of the page. To this we may compare pages 147-48 where, quoting the same passage from The Magician’s Nephew, the author confuses Digory and Polly, the children of this novel, with the Pevensie children of the other Narnia tales.

On page 29 both Tolkien and Lewis are said to have been drafted, but they enlisted (as is later noted for Lewis on page 31). On page 30 Loconte states that Lewis attended Cherbourg School in Malvern, arriving in 1914, but Lewis went there for only one year (hated it) and 1914 was the year he left. On 82 Lewis is said to have been reading E.R. Eddison in or around 1916, but Eddison’s first work to be publicly circulated appeared in 1922. On page 143 we learn that The Fellowship of the Ring first appeared in 1955, not 1954. On page 135 we learn, further, that Bilbo is “a small half-elf creature.” And page 65 informs us that The Lord of the Rings is a “war trilogy,” which joins the dubious to the incorrect.

On page 118 the author seems unaware of the difference between The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion. He speaks of “The Fall of Gondolin,” written by Tolkien during the war and incorporated into The Book of Lost Tales, but he quotes the much later and briefer version from The Silmarillion. On page 121 he removes all doubt about his confusion: “By 1923, [Tolkien] had nearly completed The Book of Lost Tales (what he would later call The Silmarillion)....” I can only question whether the author has read The Book of Lost Tales.

On page 135 Loconte quotes Tolkien’s account of Lewis’ statement that “[i]f they won’t write the kind of books we want to read…we shall have to write them ourselves.” But in the very next line he makes it sound as if this statement predates the writing of The Hobbit by quite some time (“Eventually. they made good on the pledge. Tolkien began…The Hobbit….” [emphasis mine]). In fact Tolkien had finished writing The Hobbit by early 1933, and the evidence suggests that Lewis made his statement closer to 1936. Moreover, Tolkien and Lewis were talking about novels of time-travel and space-travel, and the books they decided to write became The Lost Road and Out of the Silent Planet (Tolkien, Letters, nos. 257 and 294; The Lost Road, 7-8; Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit [2011] p. xxii). The Hobbit has nothing to do with this statement.

What is more regrettable is that by confusing The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales Loconte deprives us of the primary texts most necessary for studying Tolkien’s immediate response to the war. As he himself points out (118-119), Tolkien later saw the writing of The Book of Lost Tales as therapeutic. In 1944 in a letter to his son, Christopher, then in the RAF, he encouraged him to write about what he was going through: “I sense among all your pains…a desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it from festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes" (Letters, no. 66, emphasis original).

What better place could there have been to begin an exploration of Tolkien’s reaction to the war, and what lessons could we have derived from a study of these writings side by side with those of his contemporaries, like Sassoon and Owen, who saw and felt the same horror but fell instead into bitterness and despair? Here is the beginning of the road that leads to The Lord of the Rings, but we do not get to walk it. And, from this perspective, would not Graves’ Good-Bye to All That (1929), and Claudius novels (1934-35) have made for interesting points of comparison on the way to The Lord of the Rings? Yet we jump straight to the end of this road, and a Tolkien who had had twenty to thirty years to reflect upon and come to understand his youthful experiences. As for what comes in between, The Book of Lost Tales is lost indeed, the World War One poets are scanted, and we receive background and generalizations about Tolkien’s generation drawn from secondary sources.

To be fair Loconte is better on Lewis, making more, but not always better, use of his letters, his diaries, and his early poetry. One of those letters, which he quotes (p. 116), reveals another missed opportunity for discussing Lewis alongside the World War One writers. Commenting in 1923 on a tormented fellow veteran who had just died, Lewis wrote: “[i]sn’t it a damned world – and we once thought we could be happy with books and music!” Now here is a sentiment with which to begin an examination of the despair and lost illusions of this world after 1918. It would likely be far easier to make the connections between his early poems, letters, and so on, and those of the World War One writers, since the gap in genre isn’t as great as it is with The Book of Lost Tales. The analysis of Lewis would have facilitated that of Tolkien in this regard.

All good interpretations of literature, all good reconstructions of history, rest ultimately on the details that support the arguments advanced by the author. In any work that seeks to combine the literary and the historical an even greater care with the details is essential. More variables require more rigor and more restraint. In this book so many errors present themselves -- ranging from simple, easily verifiable dates gotten wrong, to simple facts of the stories gotten wrong (half-elf?), to the confusion of different works of the very authors who are the subjects of this study – that faith in what Professor Loconte has to say requires a very willing suspension of disbelief. Yet the questions he raises here about Lewis and Tolkien in the context of World War One and its literary and spiritual aftermath are valid, important questions. From them we can learn much not only about Lewis and Tolkien, but by reflection about their contemporaries, about the times in which they all lived, as well as about the times of those of us who still within the Great War’s shadow.

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Review: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many years ago I came to the conclusion that if we ever made it to another planet outside our solar system we would find the Jesuits already there waiting for us. Recently I mentioned this idea in conversation and discovered, to my delight, that someone had written just such a book. Naturally, I had to read it. And it is a very good read.

This is one of those rare books in which there are, intentionally, few surprises of external plot and action. As in Frank Herbert's Dune, the reader quite soon knows how the story will end. Indeed the first page tells the reader that the Jesuit mission to this new world will end disastrously, and a parallel is quickly suggested between the sufferings of the Jesuit Isaac Jogues among Mohawks in the Seventeenth Century and the Jesuit Emilio Sandoz on the planet Rakhat four hundred years later. Then there's the title, whose point is at last made explicitly:

"There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."

"So God just leaves," John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. "Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!"

"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

"Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. " 'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.' "

"But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.

They sat for a while, wrapped in their private musings.

We could do worse than to describe this book as just such a private musing, on that intensely private ground, between anger and desolation, where a sparrow such as Father Emilio might fall. And that makes it particularly interesting that no one in the room -- Jesuits all -- responds to Felipe's statement by quoting the next two verses of Matthew: "But the very hairs on your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore. Ye are of more value than many sparrows." And indeed the verse before the one quoted in The Sparrow makes clear that it is not physical but spiritual destruction that we should fear. From that God will save us, but still the sparrow will fall.

Perhaps another text is relevant here, too, since the whole point of the sparrow of Matthew is that it is not a human, but far less valuable, while the sparrow of this novel's title clearly seems to be a human, namely Father Emilio. For Hamlet likens himself to the sparrow of Matthew (5.2.165-170). In response to Horatio's intuition that he is in danger, Hamlet responds:

"...We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be."

(5.2.165-170)

And that may be the truest answer to this private musing. That the readiness is all. Let be.

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Review: Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew by Max Egremont

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a good book, but not a great one. Much of that goodness, moreover, comes from the poets whose work is the heart of this volume.

Max Egremont has divided his chapters -- one for each year of the war and one for the aftermath -- into two parts. In the first he provides information on the experiences of each poet that year; in the second he lets the poets speak for themselves, with a selection of poems from the same year. Egremont does not stint on the poetry, with over 100 pages of poetry in 294 pages of text. This arrangement has the virtue of allowing the reader to see the changing attitudes of the poets as the war ground on.

And that's a good idea and quite interesting as far as it goes, but it seems that Egremont might have written a far better book if he had done more than simply provide information that supplied a narrative framework for the poetry. There is very little critical analysis or vision of any kind, and the two halves of each chapter, which in reality are linked by threads of experience, passion, and reflection, are little more than adjacent. Which is especially disappointing given the richness of the material and the possibilities it affords, as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory shows. This book regrettably does not rise so high.



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Review: The Chapel of the Thorn: A Dramatic Poem

The Chapel of the Thorn: A Dramatic Poem by Charles Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Reading Charles Williams has always made me feel as if I stood on a threshold between two worlds, or, rather, in a shadow dappled wood where those worlds exist together; and though I am aware of the distinction between the two, just as I am of the difference between the sunlight and the shadow, I know equally well that both are integral to a larger realm. It is the same feeling I get when I read Sir Launfal, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Pearl, because it is the same world, though (perhaps) at a different time, a world of testing and possibility, a world of spirit and love, a world of restraint and license. The Chapel of the Thorn also seems to take place in just such a world.

Written in 1912 and never before published, The Chapel of the Thorn dramatizes the conflict between two churchmen over a relic or ‘hallow’ of the crown of thorns worn by Christ during the Passion. On the one side is old Joachim, a mystic and teacher, longtime guardian of the relic and keeper of its chapel; on the other is Innocent, abbot of the newly built monastery, emissary of the pope, who both advises and dominates Constantine, king of the land. Joachim believes in only a direct personal relationship with God as the path to salvation; Innocent believes that we humans are not up to the challenge of such a path, and advocates for the power and laws of the Church as necessary guides.

This conflict is further complicated by the recent ‘conversion’ of this land to Christianity after the expulsion of the old religion’s priest-bards, one of whom, Amael, returns to woo the people and challenge both Joachim and Innocent with his religion of gods and heroes. The common folk of the village, moreover, are mostly outward adherents of Christianity, remaining dedicated in their hearts to the old faith and its customs. They know better than any the difficulty of belief in a world where the will of the divine is often inscrutable. Their opposition to the abbot springs from the presence beneath the Chapel of the tomb of one of the heroes of the old religion (a hero prophesied to return again), and from their fear that the abbot will force them to abandon their most cherished customs. Then, too, there is Michael, the young assistant of Joachim, who longs for the epic life that Amael represents; and a mysterious, nameless woman who repeatedly appears to pray to the Virgin Mary for the life of her sick child. And in the end there is no clear victor among the contending parties, and no clear notion of where the poet’s sympathies lie. That may finally be the point, to leave the reader thoughtful and alone in a dappled wood where worlds coexist.

With the various issues and parties involved Sørina Higgins deals thoroughly and deftly, not only exploring Williams’s life and writings for clues to understanding what he was about in The Chapel of the Thorn, but also showing how it may serve as an introduction to Williams’s later, more mature works. Sørina Higgins is also judicious in accomplishing these ends, not allowing some theoretical approach to dictate her understanding of the text, but rather embracing the text as the prerequisite to both understanding and theory. There is also a final section in the introduction in which Higgins nicely summarizes Williams’s growth as a poet between this play and Taliessin through Logres a quarter of a century later. She has done a service to the study of Williams’s works and thought.

For the reader the difficulty in this text lies beyond the editor’s control. Williams was often expressing theological ideas with which many of us are unfamiliar in a convoluted and archaic poetical language. But rereading repays our efforts, as it almost always does, and with the improved grasp that a second reading brings, the beauty of the poetry and the beauty of Williams’s handling of his subject become even clearer. I look forward to a third reading.





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Review: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I believe there are two types of people in the world: those for whom the past is like a well remembered movie and the present is all that is real; and those, like me, for whom the past is all that is real and the present is a loosely worn garment soon to be changed for another. That is a perspective I seem to share with Berie, the protagonist of this book. And perhaps that is part of why I like it so much. But that is not all.

Lorrie Moore's prose is fluid, poignant, and funny. More than once she made me laugh out loud, or pause to relish some marvelous description. She will at times suddenly disarm you, leading you somewhere soft and lyrical, only to stop you in your tracks with a surprising turn of phrase.

Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.

Wait. What? Everything was going, dare I say, swimmingly there. At first perhaps I thought the man's momentary gaze was going to be subverted because he would be distracted from his love, have his head turned by a pretty face -- how like a man, eh? -- but to her credit Moore did not shoot for the easy target. And with that menace safely past I was settling in to this rather nice description. For an instant "rainbow" made me cock an eyebrow, which lowered again with "that old trick of the light," but then before I could fully relax again I encountered the pee in the pool.

That stopped me dead. It seemed so out of harmony with everything that went before. But it was no mere gaffe, no sudden loss of touch. The current of love she swims through is a love felt for someone else by someone else. Her own husband does not love her and she knows it. So the love she feels for an instant is false, not for her, a trick of the light, a warmth that can only remind her of all that is rotten in her own life.

But Lorrie Moore's prose is also economical. The amount of story she packs into 125 pages without ever once seeming to rush or cram is astonishing. And after my remarks critical of first person narration in my review of The Goldfinch I feel it is only fair to say that here the choice of the first person is entirely successful.

Nicely done all around. A very good read.





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Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



To be honest right off, first person narration is something I find problematic and difficult, something too susceptible to the hothouse cleverness of writing school. That's not to say that a first person narrator cannot succeed. David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, and Lolita are only a few examples of where it succeeds quite well.

First person narration adds an extra layer of difficulty to the author's already difficult task: with a first person narrator not only does the story have to be interesting, but so does the narrator. An uninteresting narrator -- which is not at all the same as an unlikable or an unreliable one -- has great difficulty carrying the story. And The Goldfinch is a long and difficult story, not without flaws of its own, for a narrator like Theo Decker who is not very interesting to have to carry alone.

The pity is, that Theo is at his most intriguing as a child whose mother has been killed in a terrorist bombing, and whose runaway alcoholic wastrel of a father looms offstage like the bad plot device that he is. Once his father (predictably) returns to claim him and take him to (where else?) Las Vegas, Theo devolves into just another teenager with a bad plot device for a father. He drinks, he drugs, he steals. He's just like his father, and only he doesn't know it yet.

When Theo's father dies in -- yes -- a drunk driving accident, and Theo flees back to New York City, he does become somewhat more interesting again, but not that much. Even at the end of the book, once the plot has resolved itself and Theo has revelations about life and beauty, he simply must blather on about them like someone who has read The Brothers Karamazov too many times in the middle of the night in his dorm room. It's not that what he says is not worth saying or pondering. He just takes so long to say it.

I would have found Theo a frustrating character if someone else had been telling his story -- almost very interesting, but not quite; almost very likable, but not quite. But in the narrator, those qualities work against the book. He reminds me of Pip from Great Expectations, interesting and likable as a child, but dull and vexing as an adult. Because his excesses start so early, by the time he is an adult they are merely tiresome.

Now some, like Stephen King, have used "Dickensian" to describe The Goldfinch. There certainly are a lot of orphans, and characters like Hobie and Pippa and (in a strange way) even Boris could slip into Dickens' world. So far so good. But that's about as far as I think the comparison goes. The wealthy Barbour family are a case in point. They take Theo in after his mother's death, and seem about to adopt him when his father shows up to take him away. Some years after Theo returns to New York, he becomes involved with them again.

Now if Dickens had brought them back into the story, as he would have done, he would have done something with them that would not have been better left out. There would have been some astonishing, unexpected moment where you learned something heartbreaking that you'd never guessed. For example, in Bleak House, Lady Dedlock flees her home and dies because she fears her husband's reaction to discovering the indiscretions of her youth, but he is shattered by her leaving. He doesn't care what she did long ago; he just loves her and wants her back. You don't see that coming. But in The Goldfinch the Barbours return for no reason that justifies all the time the story spends on them. They're just there, rich and blandly dysfunctional.

The story does end better than I had begun to fear it would. I was never really expecting a happy ending, but by page five hundred I was dreading that the denial of the happy ending might be delivered in a needless act of authorial tyranny. I am glad to say that did not happen.

Despite all this the novel does have its good points. Hobie and Boris in particular are excellent characters, and Tartt does a good job of portraying Theo and Pippa and Boris at different ages. In many ways the most interesting thing about Theo is the way his style changes over time, to reflect that the character was supposed to have begun writing this story as a teenager and continued as he grew older. That's nicely done. The story works overall. It has some nice twists and turns, two of which made me laugh out loud.

And there are moments when the prose possesses rhythm and beauty:

"Down narrow streets we wandered, damp alleys too narrow for cars, foggy little ochreous shops filled with old prints and dusty porcelains. Canal footbridge: brown water, lonely brown duck."

So I would give this book a tough three stars, because I cannot give it two and a half or three and a half. There is much in here that is very good, but could have been great.












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Review: Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have sometimes heard people remark on the sense of loss that is so prominent in Tolkien's fiction, and wonder where it comes from. It is convenient and probably not incorrect to point to his experiences in World War One and the deaths of all but one of his closest friends by 1918. John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War is a worthwhile read on this score, as is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (though he never mentions Tolkien). But if you're familiar with The Lord of the Rings, you can't help but see how Tolkien fits in with the other writers Fussell discusses, who are far more famous as World War One writers.

But all of these men, whether Sassoon or Owen, Blunden or Tolkien, "walked eye deep in hell, believing in old men's lies," all lost friends, and together they all saw the world they shared pass away before their eyes. Much of modern literature first springs from the way this war shattered Western Civilization. The absurdity and alienation and uncertainties begin here. Tolkien's literary response to the War is quite different, but it is no less a response because of that. These connections deserve further scrutiny. But not here.

Yet before that for Tolkien there was already Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon literature, so much of which has a mournful tone. It runs through Beowulf like a cold stream. Right near the end of his commentary Tolkien coins the apt phrase "elegiac retrospect" (p. 351) to describe the poet's remarks on lines 1876-1908 of the translation (Klaeber 2231-71), which tell of the forgotten original owners of the dragon's hoard.  

This phrase so eloquently suits so much of what we read throughout the poem and in Tolkien generally that it is worth quoting the passage at length. One could do worse than to use this passage as a key to understanding how Tolkien evoked the sense of history and loss and high beauty that frets our hearts when we read his works. 

It is also characteristic of our poet (and of Old English as we know it as a whole) that the scene in the barrow passes at once into an elegiac retrospect on the forgotten lords who placed their gold in the hoard, and then died one by one until it was left masterless, an open prey to the dragon, 

But this is not inartistic. For one thing it occupies the 'emotional space' between the plundering of the hoard, and the curiously vivid and perceptive lines on the dragon snuffling in baffled rage and injured greed when he discovers the theft: lines which gain greatly from the concluding words of the interjected 'elegy': ne byð him wihte ðý sél *2277 ('no whit doth it profit him' 1918) -- the last word on the dragonhood. Also, of course, the feeling for the treasure itself, and the sense of sad history, is just what raises the whole thing above 'a mere treasure story, just another dragon-tale'.  The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real.  The 'treasure' is not just some lucky wealth that will enable the finder to have a good time, or marry the princess.  It is laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of imagination.  Not till its part in the actual plot is revealed -- to draw the invincible Beowulf to his death - -do we learn that it is actually enchanted, iúmonna gold galdre bewunden *3052 ('the gold of bygone men was wound about with spells' 2564), in which the quintessence of 'buried treasure' is distilled in four words, and accursed (*3069-73, 2579-84). 

So this passage rivals the exordium on ship-burial (*32-52, 25-40) as that very rare thing, an actual poetic expression of feeling and imagination about 'archaeological' material from an archaeological or sub-archaeological period.  Many such existed in Scandinavia, and even in England in the eighth century, already ancient enough for their puprose to be shrouded in mist.  Here we learn what men of the twilight time thought of them.  And. of course, the writing and the elegy are good in themselves, and not misspent -- since the ashes of Beowulf himself are now to be laid in a barrow with much of this same gold (though much also is to melt in the fire, *3010-15, 2530-4), and pass down into the oblivion of the ages -- but for the poet, and the chance relenting of time: to spare this one poem out of so many.  For this, too, almost fate decreed: þӕt sceal brond fretan, ӕled þeccean: that shall the blazing wood devour, the fire enfold. Of the others we know not. 

(pp. 351-353)

And maddeningly, beautifully, somehow fittingly, that is where the commentary ends.  Pale, enchanted gold indeed that summons us to follow it we know not whither.  But the way is shut.

Now none of the material in this book, whether translation, commentary, Sellic Spell, or the two lays that come at the end were ever prepared or meant for publication. So we cannot fairly judge them as if they were. What we have in this book is more like all the material that Christopher Tolkien published in his History of Middle-Earth than it is like the translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Christopher Tolkien does his customary, outstanding job of sorting out the layers of texts and revisions.

The translation is thus far more of a scholarly exercise, making little or no attempt to rearrange the words into a word order more easily understood in Modern English, or to make the language and ways of thought more accessible. Old English is an inflected language in which word order is far more flexible than in Modern English; and in which idioms and modes of expression are entirely different than now. These are facts which anyone translating for publication must take into account, and changes must be made to transform the original into something intelligible for readers who are not experts in the original. So comparing it to the translation of Heaney (or anyone else) doesn't get us very far.

Now my Old English is not proficient or recent enough to allow me a worthwhile opinion on the accuracy of the translation. But I think it's safe to say I am in good hands with Tolkien. Reading it, for the reasons I mentioned above, is more of a challenge, but I often found that reading it aloud helped me find the proper phrasing for understanding what was being said.

The commentary I found fascinating and illuminating. I have read enough scholarly commentaries on texts in ancient languages with which I am familiar, and which have similar problems owing to the texts being preserved for centuries only in handwritten form by scribes whose understanding of the texts they were copying was imperfect at best, to be able to think that the commentary he offers is of a high quality. This probably surprises no one who knows what Tolkien did for a living, but I think it bears saying anyway. As I noted above, it is a great disappointment that the commentary ends well before the end of the poem, but I loved every syllable of what was there.

Another element in this book is Sellic Spell (meaning "strange tale"), which is a very interesting attempt to imagine both in Modern and Old English the story that lay behind Beowulf itself. It would be an intriguing exercise to set the two texts side by side and compare them in detail. Lastly there are two versions of a brief lay or song of Beowulf, one of which Christopher Tolkien remembers his father singing to him in the early 1930s.

On the whole this is a very good edition of Beowulf to have and use for study. The translation is, as I noted, a scholarly exercise, not as polished and finished as it would have been had Tolkien meant to publish it. I will say, however, that the more I read the translation, especially aloud, the more I like it. 

Review: The Book of Lost Tales: Part I

The Book of Lost Tales: Part I by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



People who have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings often stumble when they turn to The Silmarillion, since the two works are so different in tone and perspective. The books in The History of Middle-Earth series are different again. They contain sixty years of stories we've never seen before because Tolkien abandoned them completely, as well as abandoned, early versions of the stories we have met elsewhere. These books are the archaeology of Tolkien's subcreation of Middle-Earth. Through alternating passages of text, notes, and commentary, Christopher Tolkien lays out how his father developed this world, tale by tale and word by word.

If that sounds interesting to you, then you may well find great pleasure in The Book of Lost Tales and the other books in this series. I know I have. That's not just because I have always been a big fan of Tolkien, but because I have also always been someone who studies books as much as I read them. I found it fascinating to discover how his conceptions of this world and these tales changed over time.

If you do decide to give this book a try, I'd suggest you also lend an ear to the Mythgard Academy's free online course on this book, which is available from Mythgard's website and iTunes, and is terrific. Even for the knowledgeable fan, it's nice to have an expert guide along.

Mythgard Academy



View all my reviews

Review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



odd, fluffy, mildly amusing, could have been better



View all my reviews