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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Publishing Classic Authors. Or Not.

11/18/2019

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In the Elder Days, lo, there lived a young British soldier --- an officer --- fighting on the Western Front in the First World War. He had a passionate interest in myths and legends, especially northern European ones, and a gift for languages, and he had no particular interest in being a soldier, but he had heard the call of King and Country and so he went. He was gifted with an extraordinary imagination and talent for creating his own legends, and he was also gifted (or cursed) with a lengthy and rather improbable name (with Germanic roots which one imagines could have created problems for a British officer… but then again, there’s no evidence it did so. for him or another British writer who would one day be famous in his own right, a writer named Siegfried Sassoon). After the war, he went on to resume his scholarly career which had been interrupted by the conflict, and he became a university professor. He probably never dreamed his name would become famous around the world one day, as creator of a vast imaginary history spanning millennia, but, much to his bemusement and occasional chagrin, it did. He was apparently known to his friends and family as Ronald --- and to at least one of his friends as “Tollers.”
 
Psst. Wanna hear a secret? It’s this: I don’t think Tollers would get published if he was submitting his manuscript (MS) today, for the first time. Nor would Jack. At least with his children’s fantasy fiction. And that’s rather a sad thing, don’t you think?  Not to mention shameful.
 
‘Tollers’ is, of course, Professor John Ronald Reul Tolkien, although most of us simply know him as J.R.R. Tolkien, the man who, I think, can credibly be called the Father of the fantasy genre as it exists today. He is the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) (and a host of other works, many published after his death by his son Christopher, who can credibly but less creditably be called the father of the literary cottage industry).
 
And ‘Jack’ is (again), of course, Clive Staples Lewis, Tolkien’s friend (he must take credit --- or blame --- for the Tollers nickname), author of many works of Christian apologetics but most well-known for his seven book series Chronicles of Narnia.
 
I raise this issue today because, at the conclusion of my last post, which was grousing about how I really didn’t care for T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, I made an offhand comment about Tolkien and Lewis and their dismal chances of publication today… and I got some questions about that. So, here we are.
 
Now, fantasy existed as a literary genre long before Tolkien came along, of course, but he single-handedly re-invented it, particularly following LOTR’s release in the early 1950s. The books exploded in popularity over the next 50 years. And then a strange thing happened: at the turn of this century, a New Zealand filmmaker named Peter Jackson came along and made the trilogy into films. BIG films. Gorgeously cinematic films… which happened to be, really, dramatically different from the books. (I always used to tell my students that Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Jackson’s Middle Earth are two quite different places.) The films made a potful of money and won a slew of awards, which, in Hollywood (i.e. the film industry) translates into sequels. In this case, it meant a trilogy of films made from The Hobbit. Films which, again, were big, gorgeously cinematic… and quite different from the book.
 
I’m going to go out on a ledge and speculate that nowadays, a good chunk of the story’s popularity rests on the films. Quite a few of the filmic audiences for LOTR and Hobbit have never even read the books. (Which extends as a societal curse to quite a lot of literature, come to that.) And if/when they do, quite a few are disappointed and rapidly give up, especially with LOTR. (The Hobbit is a much simpler work, despite what the films might like you to believe --- it’s only 18 chapters long, and was definitely written for children. Unlike LOTR. In fact, many moons ago, The Hobbit was rated as a grade six novel by the education ministry where I live… which is further evidence of the decline of literary standards, because I’m not aware of many grade six students today who could wade their way through it. Oh, the humanity.) The Hobbit excepted, Tolkien does not tend to be what most of society today would classify as an easy read.
 
Now, don’t get me wrong: I LOVE the book of The Lord of the Rings, love it with all the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. I first read it when I was 12. Its literary impact on me has been immense. (Which is not to say it’s flawless, because it darned well isn’t. I’m not that starry-eyed about it.) I just don’t think that much of society shares my love of the written word anymore. Especially the written word which is written in an erudite, fairly archaic style which, as film critic Roger Ebert said in his LOTR review, ‘tests our capacity for the declarative voice.’
 
It took me a while to make my peace with the films, because I tend to be a bit of a purist --- well, okay, a lot of a purist --- and the LOTR/Hobbit films, frankly, take a large number of liberties with the text. I’ve finally reached the point where I can enjoy them for what they are, but boy, as I say, it wasn’t always that way.
 
But I do assert that Tolkien would find it difficult to impossible to be published for the first time today. I’m not sure that many of today’s readers possess the tenacity to wade through a story which proceeds at a far more leisurely pace than what most are used to. (And Tolkien’s female characters are painfully wooden.) Like pretty much every author who ever put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), he was writing for and of his times. Likewise, the films are for and of our times.
 
And the gap between them, lo, ‘tis wide.
 

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When Classics Disappoint

11/11/2019

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The Arthurian saga is one of my favourites. There are so many aspects to it: a story over a thousand years in the making; a classic tale of good and evil encapsulating so much of our human existence; characters who are varied and many-layered and completely believable; and most importantly, its longevity has got to be due in part to the fact it was, for much of its existence, a dynamic story, continuously being added to by numerous authors, which means the rich complexity of the entire tapestry makes it one of the most compelling tales in Western literature. At least in my humble correct opinion.
 
So, recently, I decided to rectify a glaring omission in my own reading of the field. I was on holiday when I saw a copy (in one volume! Don’t you just love BIG books? My nerd confession for the day is: I do!) of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (TOFK) sitting on a bookstore shelf. (What? Stop looking at me like that. Of course, I’ll pop in to any bookstore that chances along, even when I’m on holiday. Doesn’t everyone? Even if it didn’t exactly chance along… I knew it was there and kinda suggested we drop in. Oh, never mind.) And this copy actually had the fifth part included! So… all five books in one. (White’s book was originally published as a tetralogy, with the fifth coming out quite a number of years later.) So this looked like a winning proposition whichever way you looked at it.
 
(If I love the Arthurian thing specifically and epic fantasy in general so much, how is it I’ve never read TOFK, you ask? Dunno. Just one of those glaring omissions, I guess. One of those I’ll-get-‘round-to-it-eventually things we all have floating around in the detritus of our lives. Now I have. Stop pestering me.)
 
So I sat down and read it over a period of a couple of months or so. And there was a slight problem with it (the length of time it took me to read the thing should be your first clue).
 
I didn’t like White’s story. At all. Had to force myself not to abandon it, to read right ‘til the bitter end. As I wrote in my Goodreads review (right next to all the glowing ones talking about seminal works and all that), I thought it was facile and simplistic. Hugely disappointing. Felt like Dorothy must have when she discovered The Great And Powerful Oz was just a very small, ordinary man using a lot of smoke and mirrors.
 
Why did I dislike it? Well, that’s not really the today’s point, but aye, it’s a fair question to ask, so I’ll answer. Throughout the first book (titled The Sword in the Stone), I recall thinking with amusement the Disney film of the same name stuck very close to the book’s plotline. Which should have been my first clue, because, yes, Constant Reader, I confess I loved the film. When I was eight years old. In fact, I dressed up as Merlin that long-ago Halloween as a result, if memory serves. And actually (as Lucy Pevensey superciliously intones to Mr. Tumnus in the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), I still like Disney’s animated feature today, more decades later than I care to confess. But I do not look to it expecting a deep, rich cinematic experience. It, too, is facile and simplistic, if in Disney’s usual rather charming way.
 
Quite a lot of TOFK reads like a children’s story, although at nearly nine hundred pages, it obviously isn’t meant to be. But White breaks the fourth wall like it is, which I didn’t mind in The Hobbit, but certainly didn’t expect in The Lord of the Rings (and didn’t see, so Tolkien obviously understood the difference.) I don’t like White’s habit of making modern historical and cultural references to the tale, of having characters call each other Lance and Jenny (for Lancelot and Guinevere), of going on, in tediously pedantic detail, about his own political theories (especially in The Book of Merlin). That’s enough to be going on with. It just didn’t grab me, anyway.
 
I’m very much aware, in voicing my dislike/disappointment of TOFK, I’m swimming against the tide of public opinion over the last sixty years or so. You may have loved TOFK, Constant Reader, and be aghast at the temerity of my sacrilegious criticisms. That’s fine. You’re entitled to your opinion. And so am I. (One thing we desperately need to do in current society is become waaaaay better at being able to express differences of opinion in a calm and rational manner without abusing or attacking the person differing with us, because our inability to do so is, quite frankly, one of the things tearing society apart.)
 
By the way, if you want my recommendation of at least two modern writers who have done much better at writing about the Arthurian saga, may I present Mary Stewart and Jack Whyte for your inspection? Their tales --- Stewart’s is four books long, Whyte’s is seven --- are richly detailed, superbly written, sophisticated, posing all sorts of interesting questions… in short, everything I did not find with T.H. White.
 
If the reasons why I didn’t like TOFK aren’t the point of today’s epistle, you ask, what is? Once again, a fair question. It’s really a thought I’ve voiced before, including with authors I’ve mentioned right here in today’s post (namely, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien), and now I find it applicable to T.H. White: looking thoughtfully at these authors, these giants of the epic fantasy genre, who, ironically, were all publishing the works for which they’re most famous today around the same time frame i.e. about 65 years ago… I’m really not sure they would find publishers today if they were seeking publication for the first time, as unknowns.
 
We can talk more about that some other time, but for now… well, ‘tis food for thought.
 
Sic transit gloria mundi. 

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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