Re-reading 'The Lord of the Rings'

If you were a nerdy kid, you know The Lord of the Rings. Even if you haven’t read the books or seen the films, the characters and the most basic elements of the plot have entered our common consciousness. After being swept up in the excitement of Peter Jackson’s films, I read the books when I was around fifteen or sixteen, and I remembered them fondly, but I never returned to them – I read promiscuously, and three heavy volumes of ‘stuff I’d read before’ always felt like too much of a time investment. There are always more books to read and, increasingly, not enough time to read them. In the decade since I last read them, I have studied English Literature at A-level (initially just as a fun extra subject), developed a love for Literature with a capital ‘L’, become a not-very-good writer, completed a degree in English and Creative Writing, had a short but intense career teaching English, and become an older, wiser, hopefully slightly better writer.

It is in my role as an older, wiser, hopefully slightly better reader that I decided to return to The Lord of the Rings. In many ways it is the Ur-text of modern fantasy. Because of The Lord of the Rings, we know that if we choose an Elf in a video game, we will be a tall, somewhat aloof archer from an ancient, mystical culture, and not a midnight shoemaker or a pointy-hatted friend of Father Christmas. We now that if we open a fantasy novel, we are likely to find a world which very much resembles Europe in the Middle-Ages, but populated by wizards and dragons and filled with magical artefacts. We also know that it likely to have maps in the front page, and be part of a longer sequence. I’m not going to enter the debate about Epic Fantasy vs. Sword and Sorcery, or whether Tolkien’s pulp-magazine contemporaries have shaped the genre more than he has – these discussions are best left to people who know the genre much better than I do. Instead, I’d like to look at how The Lord of the Rings fits into the literary traditions that I do know about.

I’d like to start, as Tolkien does, in The Shire. The link above reveals that many dislike Hobbits for their tweeness, but the role they serve is clear. It is well established that The Shire represents an idealised version of England, and that the Hobbits, with their anachronistically domestic sensibilities, are audience stand-ins through whose nearly-modern eyes we first see the grandeur of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But they also serve a more fundamental function in the story. More than Aragorn or Gandalf, Frodo is the protagonist of the novel – demonstrating how heroism and strength can be found in an age where such things seem to have been left in the ancient past. In this reading of the novel, the Scouring of The Shire, left out of Jackson’s adaptations, is a crucial final act, where the four hobbits, returned from their travels, are able to draw on their newfound strength to challenge the sort of fascist state that Tolkien has been accused of advocating. I wrote yesterday about how Orcs represent a love of war and destruction; it is perhaps the Hobbits, not the Elves from whom Tolkien’s mythos says they are distorted, who represent the Orcs’ true opposites. While the Orcs love only chaos, the Hobbits are lovers of comfort and community. The pastoral Shire, with its fields, gardens and hills, is both geographically and thematically a counterpoint to the barren, craggy wastes of Mordor, but the Scouring of the Shire also serves to show how easily such things can be lost. Yes, Sam manages to repair most of the damage (with his and Rosie’s baby symbolising a new beginning, as babies at the ends of novels often do), but the novel’s strongly anti-industrial tones, and the sense of a lost past which pervades so many other aspects of the novel, make The Shire into a very English elegy for an idyllic past to which we, like Frodo, can never return.

As I read the novel, I often found myself wondering how much Tolkien could be said to be writing in the Romantic tradition. His stated aim – to create an English mythology – parallels the early nineteenth-century interest in national epics, his wildernesses and mountains approach the sublime, and his sense of a lost mystical past would not seem out of place alongside Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ or Coleridge’s ‘Kublai Khan’. Tolkien borrows from Romanticism’s successors: the Gothic, in his description of Shelob’s lair, and the Pre-Raphaelites in his magical medievalism. These are the more recent filters through which his more obvious influences – his deep study of ancient Germanic stories – are brought to us.

Although his form – a novel made up of a multi-stranded narrative with several protagonists – is modern, Tolkien’s writing is rooted in heroic myths. His essay on ‘Beowulf’, ‘The Monster and the Critics’, gives some insight on how Tolkien saw the tradition from which he was writing. While Greek heroes often have a tragic flaw which brings about their undoing, Tolkien sees a more general sense of doom as being central to the Northern heroes who inspired his own writing. Doom is used to mean fate generally, rather than in the more negative modern sense, but even when that doom brings good things, ulitmately ‘all glory ends in night’. For the creator of heroic narratives, this means ensuring that the hero’s death is equal to his life. For Beowulf, Tolkien says, this death has to come at the hands of the dragon – a monster equal to those he slew at the dawn of his heroism. This model has a number of implications for The Lord of the Rings. The heroic characters all accept the possibility of their own deaths against impossible odds: Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad Dhûm, Theoden on the field outside Gondor, Aragorn and his host at the gates of Mordor, and Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom – all are determined to continue fighting, even when their mission seems impossible to complete. This take on heroism might not stand out as particularly unusual in literature, but it is brought into sharper focus throughout by weaker characters who give up hope and either collude with the enemy directly or choose to stop resisting and passively accept Sauron’s victory.

Unlike the ‘Beowulf’ poet, Tolkien allows his heroes to grow old without it diminishing their glory. Aragorn need not die at the hands of a final dragon, but is allowed to live into the appendices before dying peacefully in his home; Frodo and Gandalf are allowed to sail west. In part, this may be a question of practicality – after the existential threat of Sauron is defeated, any foe of equal power would necessarily undermine the entire novel, but it also reflects a change in taste in the millennium between ‘Beowulf’ and The Lord of the Rings. We now prefer peace to war, and when Aragorn dies of old age, when Frodo and Gandalf leave the world, it is both a testament to the peace they have forged, and a reward for their efforts in creating it.

This sense of a slow fading is presented in a less positive light in other elements of the novel. The Elves sail for the west, knowing they can no longer live in Middle Earth. Naturally immortal, they had already seemed mythical to people like Sam, whose day to day lives are far removed from them. We see this loss from the point of view of those left behind with the sense that some fundamental wonder has been taken from the world. If Middle Earth is supposed to be our world, this represents an early stage in the gradual stripping away of the world’s natural wonders and mysteries, culminating in the post-industrial, post-war age from where Tolkien is writing. He may be deeply mournful of this loss, but he must also understand his own conviction – that all things, no matter how wonderful, must one day end. When applied to mortal lives, Tolkien shows how the ring bearers begin to feel ‘stretched’, with the risk of finding themselves in Gollum’s pitiful state of existence.

Structurally, Tolkien has often been accused of unnecessary length. We who spend our lives thinking about stories, whether they be Greek Tragedies or Hollywood blockbusters, often praise ‘tightness’ of plot. We like to feel as though all the elements fit together like a jigsaw. This is a quality which seems of little interest to Tolkien, or many of the fantasy authors who have followed in his footsteps. However, the length of the story, its frequent digressions, are usually seen as being crucial to what has come to be known as ‘word building’. At first glance, this seems self-evident: more words, more story, must mean more space to create the world. I do not think this entirely true. By way of contrast, I’d like to offer the example of Mad Max: Fury Road, which I watched recently. It is not entirely fair to compare a visual medium with a written one, and the stories are very different, but the film does demonstrate how audiences are able to accept and understand the complexity of a world that is put in front of them with sparse dialogue and very little need to explain it. This does not mean that Tolkien is wrong to write at such length – he is not merely explaining his world. To return to the ‘The Monster and the Critics’, he is creating a ‘many storied antiquity’, a larger web of narratives to which The Lord of the Rings is merely a part. Tolkien is using myth as his model, and real myths constantly refer to each other – each character, each location, has the potential to stretch off into myriad other stories. All that walking also serves a purpose – you always know exactly where you are in the world and how it relates to other places. Tolkien’s myth is ‘present[ed] incarnate in [a] world of history and geography.’ In fact, the weirder diversions (Tom Bombadil, for example), are some of the most interesting, and are where Tolkien most approaches the unplanned strangeness of real myth. That is not to say that there is no sense of structure in the novel – eventually a sense emerges that all paths, no matter how meandering, lead inevitably to the plains between Gondor and Mordor. This includes the paths of the Fellowship, but also those of the armies on both sides whose journeys we only see at their ends. The resulting siege successfully conveys the tension of war, the shifts between waiting and acting. It is here where the structural differences between Tolkien’s novel and Jackson’s adaptation are most pronounced – Jackson cuts between narratives to show how they connect to each other – a very cinematic way to build suspense. Tolkien divides his narratives in two so that the reader, like the characters, are unaware of what is happening to the other part of the fellowship, and underlining their bravery in the face of perceived hopelessness. Both artists make the right choice for the format they are working in.

And now I have meandered for long enough. Rereading is important; age and experience bring new life into old books. I’m sure there is plenty more to say about The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps in another ten years, I’ll let you know.

Some thoughts on race and politics in The Lord of the Rings

Recently, I re-read The Lord of the Rings. Tomorrow I will publish a fairly in-depth exploration of what I found there, but first I’d like to address the charges that Tolkien was a fascist (this link is mostly about Michael Moorcock – you’ll have to scroll down for the relevant part), and that the Lord of the Rings contains elements that are racist. Although the two suggestions could easily be conflated, I find it easier to address them separately.

I do not think Tolkien was a fascist, but he (or at least his work) is deeply conservative. The idea of a nobility that is naturally suited to rule permeates the novel, but Tolkien is highly critical of those who misuse their power. The closest we get to a description of a fascist society is in the Scouring of the Shire, where a military police force brutalises the countryside, reduces the population to a barely subsisting serfdom, and any dissenting voice is locked up without trial or hope of release. This section of the books can feel like an afterthought when compared to the grand scale of the main narrative, but in its description of how ordinary hobbits get drawn into working as Saruman’s sheriffs (some because of ‘badness’, but some out of a desire for status and some just for the offer of steady employment) is perhaps Tolkien’s most nuanced look at power and its misuses, and one of the few clear links between the plot of the novel and the geo-political context of its writing (after the Second World War, during the Cold War). In contrast, the ‘good’ characters are noted for their mercy, and Aragorn – the novel’s archetypical king – shows, through his reluctance to enter Minas Tirith before being invited by the stewards of the city, and through his refusal to force unwilling men to follow him to a last stand at the gates of Mordor, an understanding of the legal and moral limits of even monarchical power. It would be difficult to say from this book alone whether Tolkien supported the idea of absolute monarchy in real life – he only supplies us with three types of government: the essentially self-governing pastoral feudalism of the shire, monarchs (good unless corrupted by outside influences like Denathor or Theoden), and tyrants. What can be said undeniably, is that he admires the idealised version of feudal monarchy that he presents. This is not the place to look for criticisms of feudal power structure, but Tolkien is at least critical of the sort of impersonal, oppressive and militarised power found in fascism and other forms of totalitarian regime.

On the other charge, that of racism, I must unfortunately find Tolkien guilty by modern standards, even if his racial views were relatively progressive among his contemporaries (according to his Wikipedia page, Tolkien was critical of the British Empire’s treatment of its colonial subjects, and he was critical of pre-war Germany’s anti-Semitism – let us not forget that until the outbreak of war, Hitler had many supporters in the Anglophone world). Even as a younger, less aware reader in a less PC world, I found some of Tolkien’s portrayals of non-white people uncomfortable. At the time, I thought that his one humanising description of a dead Southron soldier in Ithilien made up for the rest, but it does little to counter-balance all of the times that the Easterlings and the Haradrim are described as being cruel or barbaric, even if he does go out of his way to point out that they have been fooled by Sauron. The non-white humans of Middle Earth may not be naturally inclined to evil, but they are exotic and gullible worshipers of a false god, an ignoble ‘other’ to the fair skinned, noble people of the West. The best that can be said in Tolkien’s defence here is that he is perhaps no worse than other writers who grew up under the paternalistic vision of the British Empire, but where someone like Agatha Christie, for example, whose novels are set in roughly the time they were written, says something which seems backwards, it can more easily be recognised as part of the attitudes of her time. In Tolkien, whose setting is distant from his context, it is harder to see these attitudes as being ‘of their time’. Worse, Tolkien magnifies this problem through setting his story in an idealised past society where attitudes could have easily been different, and by emphasising the idea of racial superiority in his use of the Elven and Numenorean bloodlines. And it has to be said that while Christie might have her supporting cast of rakes and cads tell the occasional racist joke, at least she never penned a novel in which hordes of dark-skinned barbarians from a continent to the south ally with goblins and demons to invade Europe.

We should take a moment to discuss those goblins. A determined critic could argue that Tolkien’s orcs, while not as directly offensive as his Southrons and his Easterlings because they do not map onto a real world ethnicity, create an argument that evil is something which can be inherent in a culture – that evil can be so deep in a people that it passes through their DNA. When placed alongside his portray of non-European (and there is no denying that the North West of Middle Earth is a stand in for Europe) human characters, they draw attention to attitudes about race and moral strength that were prevalent at the time of writing. However, I think this is to put the wrong sort of emphasis on what is essentially a common storytelling technique. Tolkien uses orcs in the same way that George Lucas uses his masked Stormtroopers, or so many video games use zombies – as a faceless evil that can be killed without diminishing the innocence of our protagonists. Beyond this, they provide a counterpoint to the Early-Medieval societies that inspired Tolkien. Tolkien dedicated his professional life to studying the literature of warlike people, and his fictional cultures draw inspiration from them. While he makes a point of not having his characters love war, it is still a source of honour and glory for them. Weapons are treasured artefacts, and the great war-leaders are remembered in song. The nature of the weapons might have changed, but man’s warlike nature was just as evident as ever by the time Tolkien was writing. He fought in the First World War himself, and lived through the second. The orcs are a distorted mirror to Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves and Men, and to mankind throughout real history. They are a society in which all but war has been stripped away – they write no songs and have no love of beautiful things, either crafted or natural, despoiling the Earth in order to create more means to kill. Fighting orcs neither allows for, nor requires much moral complexity, but that is not the type of story Tolkien is trying to tell.

So, Tolkien is not a fascist, and his portrayal of Orcs is not racist, but his portrayal of non-European people probably is. While this made me a little uncomfortable in places, it did not ruin the book for me. Again, I do not believe that Tolkien hated people of colour, he may not even have had the same sort of ‘White Man’s Burden’ paternalistic views of his contemporaries, but in this book he does present a dangerous non-European other which is out of step with our times. However, this is far from being a central element in the books, and I think it should be treated the same way we would treat the racism of his contemporaries  – acknowledge it for what it is, then, so long as it is not the core argument, move on to looking at other elements of the work. This post is my acknowledgement – tomorrow I will begin a proper investigation of the novel.

Book Review: 'Waverley' by Walter Scott

I chose Waverley after rolling an eighteen – ‘a book I never finished’ – in my D20 reading challenge, and it is perhaps telling that there has been such a significant gap between this post and my last.

I first attempted Waverley during my second year at university, as part of a module on the Romantics, and it was this novel which caused me to break my vow to finish reading all of the required course material. This book begins a generation before the protagonist has even been born, then proceeds to explain his childhood and education in great depth, and in a style which even Scott himself admits is ‘what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus’. This sustained barrage of exposition was too much for me; I surrendered, and opted to simply write my assignments about a different text.

Returning to it six years later, the long trudge through the first volume still failed to enthral me, and it is not until the twenty-fourth chapter that the main thrust of the narrative begins. After this point, I quite enjoyed the novel, but there was part of me which begrudged the amount of time it took to get to there.  Part of my impatience with the earlier half of the novel stems from a sort of conscientious discomfort around the way that the aristocratic protagonist seems to see no problem with taking off on a months-long jolly around Scotland within weeks of beginning his military career.

Sense of entitlement aside, Edward Waverley makes a fairly likeable hero, in the Romantic bildungsroman tradition. He has a strong sense of honour, but is naïve, and has allowed Romantic novels and tales of chivalrous derring-do to shape his understanding of how the world works. Despite this, the character sometimes seems a little flat – particularly in comparison to others in the novel who are much more memorable. In particular, Scott draws warm, believable comic characters in much the same way that Dickens would a few decades later.

One useful aspect of Waverley’s ‘flatness’ is that he becomes a sort of blank space for the reader to project themselves upon, and it is through his English eyes that we are first introduced to exotic world of Jacobite-era Scotland. This journey takes place in stages, from the comfortable, pastoral England of his uncle’s estate, to the military encampment in Edinburgh, then on to the almost feudal Barony of Bradwardine, and ultimately into a highlands inhabited by outlaws and by tribal chiefs. This gradual march into the unknown has some sense of thematic importance, but unfortunately lacks a real sense of purpose until its final stage.

As a modern reader, it is tempting to see Waverley as a story of radicalisation, and the charismatic Fergus Mac-Ivor could be interpreted as a manipulator, guiding the inexperienced Edward Waverley into rebellion. However, we should be careful in drawing parallels with the radicalisation of young men into extremist causes in today’s society. Scott is ambiguous in his portrayal of the Jacobite rebellions, and while he is sure to show that his protagonist is, to some extent, tricked into pledging himself to the highlanders’ cause, he is also careful to include honourable and dishonourable characters on both sides.

Although some of Scott’s best writing comes in his description of the Battle of Prestonpans, his depiction of Waverley’s rebellion is strangely toothless. Despite volunteering with the Jacobites, Waverley seems to spend the majority of his time on the battlefield trying to prevent government soldiers from being killed. This is understandable, as contemporary readers may have found it difficult to sympathise with a hero who commits fully fledged acts of treachery, but it does soften the impact of the protagonist’s eventual disavowal of the Jacobite cause. Similarly, while Scott does offer some brief comments on the effects of war on the landscape, his most emotionally charged description is saved for Tully-Veolan, the great house of the Baron of Bradwardine. Scott is pre-occupied with ideas about inheritance and property, and on some level the novel can be seen as tracing Waverley’s growth into a suitable lord, complete with a suitable wife.

It is not just the rebellion which is toothless: the government’s response seems unbelievably lenient. While Mac-Ivor and his foster brother are put on trial and executed for their crimes (another of Scott’s finest scenes), Waverley and the Baron of Bradwardine receive convenient pardons with very little trouble, and the last chapter seems particularly contrived.

Despite its flaws though, I found Waverley to be an interesting read. While the first-volume is dry and overly-long, Scott does make good use of seemingly incidental details later in the novel. Scott’s self-aware authorial interjections seem to pre-empt Forster’s ‘One may as well start with the letters’ – one of my all-time favourite opening sentences – and serve as a reminder that novels have been experimenting with narrative voice since the very beginning. There are things about the novel’s structure which work very well, and it can be enjoyed as an early example of a historical novel, or as a straightforward adventure story, even if it fails to fully address the moral complexities of civil war.

The D20 Reading Challenge, or 'How I plan to read more widely in 2016'.

I love bookshops, but they also stir a feeling in me which (to my knowledge) there is no word for: a sadness that however many books I read, there will always be good ones which I miss. I’m not much given to biblical quotation, but I’m inclined to agree with Solomon’s observation that ‘of the making of many books there is no end’, and there doesn’t seem to have been any let up in the intervening 3 millennia. And if I’m determined to add to their number, I know that I should be reading as widely as possible.

This is where the problem lies. The modern bookshop presents such tyranny of choice that it’s too easy to give up and stick to familiar names (meaning that you never discover anything new – less established authors are deprived of new readers and you end up with a narrow experience of the literary world). Worse, sometimes I am so overwhelmed that I give up, and leave empty handed.

With this in mind, I decided it was time for a solution – something to push me out of my comfortable reading nook. Turning to the twenty sided die, that universal symbol of geekdom, I devised the D20 reading challenge. It’s simple, just roll the dice and pick a book in that category. Roll, Read, Review and Repeat. The categories are not mutually exclusive, but nor are they meant to be. My version is below, but if you want to try it, feel free to substitute any of the categories with ones better suit you.

1. The canonical novel.

Probably not a controversial choice this, but despite my three years (*embarrassed cough*) of literature A-level, three year English degree, and my current role as an English teacher, feel that I’ve still only scratched the surface of the great corpus of English novels. More controversial is the concept of the canon itself. Not wishing to fall into that debate, for my purposed the canon is defined simply as ‘the novels any serious reader is ‘supposed to’ have read’.

2. 21^st Century novel

In pursuing the classics, it is easy to neglect the many novels that are being published here and now. Serious reader (particularly those who want to be writers) should be aware of what is going on around them. ‘Nuff said.

3. A novel which is an old favourite

One of the great pleasures of reading is in re-reading. It is always interesting to return to a favourite book after a number of years to see how your attitude to it has changed. As you reach new stages in your life, different aspects of the novel can seem more important – you may find that you interpret the ideas in the novel differently, or find yourself relating more to characters who didn’t interest you in the past. In the clamour for new and exciting reading experiences, it is important not to forget where you have come from. However, I would have been disappointed if this had come up first.

4. A new novel by a familiar author

‘New’ here meaning ‘one I haven’t read before’. Like anybody, I have my favourites, but there are not many writers who have more than one or two books on my bookshelf. This is a chance to further explore those authors who are under-represented, or to expand my collection of those writers I like the most.

5. A small press, local, or self-published novel

Because I know enough writers and publishers that deserve support, particularly in the Birmingham area. And because easy self-publishing is probably one of the most important developments in modern literature – it would be silly to ignore it.

6. Poetry – A new book by a familiar poet

My reasoning here is, unsurprisingly, similar to number four. This seems like a good place to mention that I am more interested in individual collections rather than anthologies or ‘selected works’ – a stance which probably goes back to being introduced to bands like Pink Floyd at a young age. Poetry collections, like albums, should be seen as one coherent unit.

7. A small press, local, or self-published poetry collection

This is perhaps more important here than it is with novels; independent publisher are the life-blood of poetry, seeming to make up the vast bulk of poetry publishing in the UK.

8. A poetry collection which is an old favourite.

All the things I said about ‘old favourite’ novels apply doubly here. The complexity of how language is used in poetry make changing interpretations even more likely, and its roots in the oral tradition mean poetry is designed to be repeated.

9. Poetry in translation

I used to avoid translated literature out of an immature snobbishness about it not being in its ‘original form’. I only read in English though, so if I kept up this attitude I would be missing out on entire cultures worth of literature. The issues surrounding the translation of poetry are interesting, and it could be argued that translated poems are more like new works which are intrinsically connected to their sources.

10. Poetry by ‘important’ poets

The idea here is similar to the ‘canonical novel’, but I have substituted ‘canon’ with ‘big name’ as many of the poets I am interested in for this category worked in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. This is the category for bigger publishers and the more famous poets, alive or dead.

11. A ‘genre’ novel

My relationship with genre novels could probably make up a blog post in their own right. For a long time they were all I read, and then there was a (thankfully brief) period of snobbishness around the beginning of my degree. Later, I came to my senses and realised that good writing is good writing whatever it is about, and that science fiction or fantasy writers take their craft as seriously as ‘lit. fic.’ writers. I still don’t read many genre novels though, purely because there are so many books of all different types that I want to read (which is one of the reasons I’m making this list). Genre in the sense that I am using it includes fantasy, science fiction, horror and crime. I accept the argument that ‘literary fiction’ is really another genre, but as that makes up most of my reading, I feel I should include a category to move me into other areas.

12. Non-fiction – History, legend and myth

As great as fiction and poetry are, I feel that it is important to also be well read and well informed about the real world. This is where my reading habits really let me down. Faced by so many exciting novels, I rarely browse in non-fiction for long. This is strange, because I do love learning interesting things, and I’ve always been interested in history in particular. The ‘legend and myth’ part of this category is designed to allow for older texts which include things which people once believed to be true and are there for written as non-fiction (for example, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which was written after Iceland had already been Christianised, but which was intended to keep record of the older beliefs which had shaped that nation’s culture). It should be noted that in all of the non-fiction categories, I’ll be looking primarily at books which are ‘writerly’ as well as informative.

13. Non-fiction – Memoir and travel writing

Around the same time that I had snobbishness about genre fiction, I also misguidedly thought that non-fiction is not really literature. This category is dedicated to Ian Marchant, whose ‘life writing’ module in the second year of my degree taught me that I was wrong.

14. Non-fiction – Philosophy, science and the social sciences

If the ‘history’ category is designed to keep me well informed on what has happened, this one is designed to keep me thinking about how things work, or at least how we think they do. That’s the logic behind putting philosophy and science together. Again though, I’ll be looking for books which are writerly as well as informative, so expect more pop-science and less text books.

15. A graphic novel

This is a means of storytelling which I have long thought of as interesting art form in its own right, with a format which is similar to prose, but has an entirely different set of tools to use. However, as there are so many books I want to read, it’s a format which I am still yet to really discover for myself.

16. A short-story collection

I love short stories. I love the brevity and the craft of them. Unfortunately for them, I love novels a little more, so this is an area of my bookshelf that has been a little neglected.

17. A novel in translation

Language and culture are intertwined, and as with poetry, I’m currently missing out on some of the best prose that other cultures have to offer. This category is designed to remedy that.

18. A book I never finished

I’m a fairly diligent reader, so there aren’t too many of these. But there some hangovers from university (The Monk and Waverley, for example) to polish off, and there are also books that have suffered from my habit of having two or three books on the go at once and my tendency to get distracted. It’s time to give them the attention they deserve.

19. Literary criticism, language and writing

These are the ‘how stuff works’ books that I would gravitate towards most naturally. I’ve given them their own category to push me into wider and more far-ranging topics for category fourteen. Their inclusion also reflects the importance of staying up-to-date and well informed in one’s own field.

20. Wild Card

I love the idea behind this category, and it could become the basis of a future reading challenge all on its own. The idea is that when I roll a twenty I will ask somebody whose opinion I trust (a friend or family member, a co-worker, a bookseller) what they think my next book should be, and read that.

Additional Information

I’m calling this a reading challenge because this year I intend to select all of my books like this (with the exception of books I need to read for work or books that I want to read as research for my own writing projects). To ensure breadth of coverage, the first time round I will eliminate categories as they have been selected, meaning that I will cover every category at some point this year. After that all the categories will be restored and repetitions will be allowed. The challenge will last for this year, or until I’ve covered every category. After that it will just be a way of selecting new books if I don’t have a specific one in mind. I haven’t included any drama categories because plays should be seen rather than read.

I’ve started already, throwing a 12 and selecting The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World by Philip Parker as my first book. If you’d like to join me, with my categories or with your own, leave a comment below. If you don’t own a twenty sided dice (doesn’t everybody?) you can use this website to generate your rolls.

Book Review: 'The Wake' by Paul Kingsnorth

Hastings, 1066. For many of us this is where English history begins. Before this, we are taught, a few barbarian warlords wrestled the land away from the equally barbaric Celts in the power-vacuum left by the Romans, then squabbled over it for the next 500 years or so until William the Conqueror and his knights chased away the dark ages, restoring civilization, establishing Chivalry, and setting England on her path to the glorious empire of the 19^th Century.

The cliché tells us that history is written by the winners, and this particular propaganda has been persistent. It is pretty much the story I learned in primary school, and seems to have echoes in the ‘Our Island Story’ curriculum Gove was pushing a couple of years ago. This book, though, is concerned with the losers. For Buccmaster of Holland, 1066 marks the death blow for England, but it is not a clean wound. The Wake follows Buccmaster into the forests of Lincolnshire, where he becomes a ‘green man’, fighting a guerrilla war against the French invaders.

One of the challenges of historical fiction, even if it deals with primarily fictional characters, is how to engage readers in a story with a foregone conclusion. Kingsnorth approaches this by focussing on Buccmaster’s personal journey against the backdrop of a hostile foreign occupation. When telling a tale like this, there is a temptation to write about a heroic underdog, leading his noble but ultimately tragic people in a final stand against tyranny, but here the big historical players, William, Harold, and even Hereward the Wake, whose epithet gives the novel its name, exist only as distant rumours[i]. The Norman invaders are inarguably oppressive, but the inequalities in English society are accepted as natural by the characters, and Buccmaster does not see the irony in his adoration of the Anglo-saxon raiders who had crushed the existing Romano-British culture in the same way he fears the Normans will destroy the English way of life.

Buccmaster himself is decidedly unheroic. He is petty, arrogant, probably delusional and ultimately pathetic, but it is through his voice that the story is told. While he is sometimes a difficult character to like, it seems right that we should see these events from the point of view of somebody who is ordinary and flawed; most of us will only ever play bit-parts in the grand narrative of human history, and in Buccmaster, Kingsnorth gives us protagonist who struggles to see this, both as an individual, and as a representative of a culture in terminal decline.

One of the novel’s great successes is the way that it brings Buccmaster’s voice and his world vividly to life. This is achieved through Kingsnorth’s great experiment: in recognition of the fact that ‘our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes’ are reflected in the language we speak, the novel is written in a ‘ghost tongue’ – an approximation of Old English designed to be accessible to modern readers. What could easily have become a gimmick is in fact one of the strongest aspects of the novel, and while the language takes a little perseverance at first (and perhaps more so if you aren’t already involved in word-geekery), it soon becomes natural. Other than a few of the more unusual words (most of which are covered by a glossary), I found that within a few pages, I was able to read and comprehend the language as it is, rather than needing to mentally translate. In fact, Kingsnorth’s ‘ghost tongue’ lives up to its name, as I found its vocabulary sticking with me after I had put the book down. In attempting to write in a language which has not been moulded by a thousand years of loan-words, and political, economic and philosophical change, Kingsnorth gives his narrator a speech which is rooted in agriculture, the natural world, and a pre-feudal view on human society, avoiding the trap of giving his 11^th Century characters 21^st Century minds. This ghost-tongue also has a lyrical beauty of its own: ‘it is early in the mergen mist is risan from the waters and on top of the waters is mos grene lic the grenest daeg and deop below deop in the blaec water can be seen great leafs what is suncan almost from sight. all is flat all this land is flat naht stands abuf the reods. low we is and we gan slow through the green and naht is to be seen but the water…’

This 11^th Century mind-set does not mean that the novel has no relevance today. Kingsnorth has written non-fiction about the loss of English cultural identity, and it is interesting to read the novel in a society where this is increasingly dominated by nationalists. The book offers no answers, but it did make me wonder if the paranoia about immigrants eroding the English way of life might stem from deep cultural memories. Whether you start English history at 1066 or in the 5^th Century with the first Germanic settlers, the national origin story is one of conquest and displacement. I do not wish to draw comparisons between the Norman conquest and the migration patterns of the last century – a top-down, military subjugation of the native population is clearly entirely different from a steady influx of families and individuals looking for greater economic or social stability – but I suspect these deep-seated invasion narratives from our early history have coloured some aspects of the debate on migration.

For the English of The Wake, there can be no period of gradual adjustment. When William the Bastard seizes the thrown, it marks a catastrophic end to the Anglo-Saxon way of life. The language may be unfamiliar, the protagonist unsympathetic at times, but this book offers an intimate exploration of the way people might react to such a complete destruction of their way of life while offering some insight to an often overlooked period of English history from the perspective of those who are not destined to be remembered.

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[i] It is interesting, as a modern reader, to experience a society where news cannot travel faster than a man can walk. The world seems bigger – more isolated. Important events are one step removed from the characters’ lives.

Five Books That Made Me.

When I first started this blog, I chose the name ‘Under the Influence’ as a way to acknowledge that as a writer, I have inevitably been affected by everything I have read. In fact though, it goes deeper than that – books have actually been some of the building blocks of my identity. A few months ago, there was a brief fad on Facebook for people listing the books which had had the biggest impact on their lives. I didn’t bother with it at the time because I felt a list without any explanation would not really be interesting. I’m hoping these will spark some sort of discussion - chip in with your own thoughts in the comments below. It would be good to know what books other people have found formative. Keep in mind that these are the books which have had the biggest influence on me, not necessarily my favourite books, or the best books I have ever read (although there is of course some cross-over).

Roughly in the order I came across them:

The Bible – various authors.

Nothing like starting with a controversy. Those of you who know me, know that I am not religious; those of you who know me best know that this has not always been the case. I was raised (on one side, at least) as a Jehovah’s Witness, meaning that the Bible actually played a pretty big part in my life growing up. I categorically do not think that religion is the only reason that humans have developed a sense of morality, and I believe that moral systems based on the Bible have a long history of being flawed, but it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it didn’t play a part in my own development: principles like ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’ are probably fairly universal in human culture, but this was where I heard it first.

Perhaps more importantly, stepping out from under its shadow when I was on the threshold of adulthood gave me the chance to reassess my understanding of the way the world worked, and revaluate my moral code. What it left behind was an interest in the stories we tell ourselves to explain who we are – I still find the Bible fascinating as a cultural artefact.

The Slimy Stuarts – Terry Deary

This is the only book on the list that I have never owned. Let me tell you a story: I am eight years old. It is the school holidays, and my mother has taken my brother and me to the local library. I am not enthused – I have somehow picked up the notion that reading is boring. This is the only time I ever remember thinking this. I can only assume I picked the idea up at school. Luckily, my mom talked me into borrowing The Slimy Stuarts. Deary has a knack for fishing out the bits of history most likely to appeal to young boys. I was hooked on books again, and had a newly discovered passion for history. I’ve never looked back.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

I think I arrived at this book at just the right time. At fourteen, my reading diet consisted largely of Star Wars tie-in novels, and I was primed for something that would take my sci-fi fandom in a different direction. The ‘lived-in’ state of my copy is probably evidence of how much I enjoyed this book, but to justify its inclusion on this list, it also needs to have changed me in some way. My sense of humour seems like the obvious place to look. Adams was not afraid to follow a digression to see where it went, and he managed a careful blend of old fashioned silliness with astute observations on human nature which has almost definitely influenced what I find funny (although arguably I must have been in the same ballpark to ‘get it’ in the first place), but I think this book probably affected me in other ways too. I related to Arthur Dent, although in many ways he is an unusual protagonist – he doesn't want some big thing that will conclude his plot-arc – he wants a quiet life and a nice cup of tea. More importantly, the big events he stumbles into aren't part of some over-arching scheme. Coincidences are rife, as are random events. Things happen because people are trying to get by, and this has unpredictable consequences in other places. When they do try to answer the big questions of what the universe is about, the conclusions are always unsatisfying or mundane. This is how I suspect it is in the real world – there are no ‘big answers’, we just have to do the best we can in the circumstances we have.

Crow – Ted Hughes

This was the first poetry collection I ever bought, and I include it here knowing that in some circles, wading in on this side of the Plath/Hughes divide will be as controversial as my ideas about the Bible will be in others. Crow was very hugely influential for me as I began to figure out the sort of writer I wanted to be. Firstly, although the poems have no connecting narrative, they are all centred around one figure, and are packed full of repeated ideas and images. My musical tastes had already prepared me to look for this sort of consistency in the CDs I bought, and it is the album, not the song, which forms my base unit of consumption for music. This book taught me to look for the same thing in poetry, and gave me something to aim for in my own writing. The collection also has a mythic quality which (perhaps as a result of early exposure to the Old Testament) I have often tried to imitate.

Howards End – E.M. Forster

If the Bible started my moral education, this is the book that helped me to develop it into adulthood as I dealt with the implications of no longer believing in a god who could provide some external measure of right and wrong. It also gets to the heart of some of the big ideological questions which still affect our politics today, without ever being too overtly political. Forster tells the story of the relationship between two families – the culturally aware and socially progressive Schlegels and the more practical, traditional Wilcoxes. If this all sounds heavily allegorical, it doesn’t feel that way in reading, and I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, the main protagonist is herself grappling with how to reconcile these two positions – giving the novel a means to explore the issue without needing to resort to allegory. Secondly, it does not offer an easy solution; neither side is presented as being entirely wrong or right, rather the author suggest the importance of finding a balance and of making connections on a human level. I read this book as part of my A-level course, and it forms part of the foundation of my political and moral identity.

Incidentally, in researching this blog post, I found out that Zadie Smith wrote a sort of updated homage to Howards End. I might have to have a look…

In Defence of Teaching English Literature (or, 'Why should you pay me to talk to kids about poems?')

It’s been quite a while since I last posted. In the intervening time, I have been part of a collaborative novel writing project and qualified as a teacher of English. Although I have never intended this to be an education blog, there are many things happening in education which are worth discussing and may be of interest to the general public. Over the summer, I will post on one or two of these things, starting with why we teach should English at all.

I won’t discuss here why we teach kids to read and write. We are fortunate enough to live in a society where the value of functional literacy is so universally accepted that it is taken for granted. Rather, I want to write about why we teach English Literature.  That our children are taught literature is a less secure assumption – it is not uncommon for schools to teach GCSE English Literature only to the higher sets, and in a climate where a school’s percentage of students achieving a ‘C’ or above in English can make or break a reputation, it’s easy to see why. Literature must be studied alongside Language to count in the league tables, and this is often seen as a more difficult option than the straight English GCSE.

At its worst, English Literature can be a tired process of straining novels and poems through endless PEE (point, evidence, explanation) paragraphs to produce useless and disjointed analysis. It becomes an exercise in ticking boxes:  Yes I have spoken about the effect of specific words. Yes I have talked about the historical context, yes I can find alliteration. But I have no ideas what it’s about. These are issues produced by the current system of assessment, and they do need to be addressed, but I did not come here to talk about my subject at its worst.

What then, can the subject do at its best? As someone who has spent the past nine years voluntarily studying novels, stories, poems and plays (and as somebody who attempts to write some of these things), I’d like to say that it is because of the transporting power of literature – because of the enjoyment that can be had in exploring a good book. Some of you might think that this alone is not enough to justify the percentage of your taxes that goes to paying for me and my colleagues. Why then should English Literature be a core subject, taught to all children? Clearly, I have a vested interest in the answer to this question.

Firstly, a system where literature is taught only to the higher achieving students has a number of unpleasant consequences. It denies a diet of stimulating books to those students most likely not to have them at home. Worse, it reinforces divisions in our society by taking a large portion of our school-aged population and telling them ‘literature is not for the likes of you’.

But my argument for English Literature being taught to all students is not built purely on a sense of fair play. I really believe that literature, taught well, can do things which PSHE cannot. I do not mean this in the prescriptive Liberal Humanist  sense that a canon of Great Books can build moral character (although a fairly recent study does suggest that reading fiction can foster empathy), rather I mean that it can be used to foster a sort of ‘cultural literacy’ which equips us with the skills to engage fully with the society we live in.

The first time I heard the term ‘institutional racism’ was in an English lesson. More recently, I have seen teachers introduce the basics of feminism to GCSE English Literature classes. I witnessed one brave teacher who, when confronted with Curley’s infamous ‘glove full of Vaseline’ in Of Mice and Men (‘he’s keeping his hand soft for his wife’) confront it head on as a way of discussing the same attitude that leads to today’s Curleys passing on nude selfies, or uploading revenge porn (don’t worry, the link is to a Guardian article!).  In my experience, I would have been tempted to rush through the passage and hope the students didn’t notice.

By training students to analyse the way people and situations are presented in novels and plays, they become more able to analyse how they are presented in other media.  Of course, when students are taught ‘purpose’ and ‘audience’ well they should be able to spot authorial bias in newspaper articles and editorials, but the study of literature supports the ability to analyse the more deep-rooted cultural prejudices which still exist below the surface.

I am not claiming that this role can only be filled by English Literature. I have observed a Media Studies on comic books where students were introduced to the concept of ‘moral panic’, and been in another media room where wall displays explained the meanings of ‘representation’ and ‘male gaze’. In fact, I sometimes wonder if Media’s place on the margins of the curriculum has given it greater freedom to explore these issues. Shame on those who denigrate it as a Micky Mouse subject, and shame one those who decided to cut all reference to new media in a GCSE English curriculum which serves children growing up in an increasingly media rich world. However, English Literature has the advantage of being a component of a core subject – it has the potential to reach a far greater number of students than an optional subject like Media Studies.

While there are numerous other reasons that students should study English Literature, it is this which I feel most justifies it position as a core subject: it encourages students to ask questions about our culture, and gives them the tools to do so.  It does not (or should not) engage in polemics, but enables our students to develop their own standpoint on the issues facing our society, and it does all of this while widening students’ horizons and engaging their empathy with people in a wide range of situations. Surely we should strive to make this opportunity available to all students, regardless of their predicted grades.

P.S. I wrote on this topic in greater academic detail as one of the first assignments on my training year. If you are interested in reading a more academic argument with references, you can find it here.