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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews