It has been, by choice, a quiet family Christmas. I have spent a lot of it reading. I have a draft of my next book out with readers at present and am letting the shape of the next one form in my mind. Raymond Chandler said that stories distil and right now distilling is where the next book is at.
I think the only thing I watched on TV was the Dr Who Christmas Special which passed the time agreeably so long as you didn’t think about it too hard. There is other stuff I’ll catch up on later on iPlayer, notably Wallace and Gromit. I prefer to watch on a laptop with noise-cancelling headphones because it saves messing around with my hearing aids and TV sound.
My reading has partly been non-fiction relating to the next book but mostly fiction, all of which I’ve enjoyed. I read,
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. This has fallen by the wayside somewhat since her children made allegations against her after her death. That shouldn’t detract from the book which is a remarkable retelling of the Arthurian saga from the perspective of the women involved. It is often described as a feminist retelling but I don’t think it is, or it least not in an ideological sense. What struck me was the depth of her commitment to the underlying mythology and the emotional truth of the character perspectives. I thought it was a little over-plotted towards the end, but I read it with a lot of pleasure. I found out about the allegations after I bought the book in a charity shop and have no expectation of reading anything else by her.
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. An old favourite of mine both of the Culture novels and of his novels in general. My old paperback copy is getting a bit decrepit now from multiple rereads. Lurking beneath this story is a burning anger and disgust that does not diminish over time.
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. This was the only one of Pynchon’s novels I had not read, and it took me a while as I kept putting it down to come back to later (often months would pass.) However, the final 400 pages passed quickly and enjoyably even though I don’t fully understand what was going on. It is a great sprawling thing, exploring lives of the protagonists in real and imagined worlds leading up to WW1. The prose shifts (deliberately I think) from the gloriously sublime to the basest nonsense, keeping the reader wrong-footed. For all its difficulty, I think I’ll revisit it relatively soon, though I may look out for a paperback version since my first edition hardback is something of a brick.
The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, of course. I hadn’t read this in 30 years and it was interesting to revisit. Rather like the films, it’s better if you fast forward through the Frodo and Sam stuff. It is often held up as the progenitor of modern Fantasy and yet it is not Fantasy at all, at least as we would now understand Fantasy. JRRT’s prose varies between the excellent and the prolix and the tendency towards elevated language in the latter sections (all yay, nay, verily and raiments and odd syntax) quickly gets tiresome. Even so, there’s a lot to like and especially the techniques he uses to ground the story in a long mythological history. Just don’t think about trying The Silmarillion next, it is dull beyond belief.
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As I wrote this, the news of Jimmy Carter’s death arrived. RIP.
In about 1973 the Observer named Lord of the Rings as top of a ‘best book’ poll. I had never heard of it, but I found three brand new volumes in the Claremont High School Library in East Kilbride (same school as Ian), and read them one by one. The librarian must have been a fan, because she asked if I had enjoyed them. ‘Yeah, they were good’, was my piercing critical analysis.
I was given a single volume of the book with a distinctive yellow Pauline Baynes illustrated cover for Christmas, and read it to destruction. A few years later I worked summer jobs on the industrial estate in Hemel Hempstead, and the George Allen and Unwin plant did nothing but print copies of that book. I saw a copy in the rare books cabinet in Blackwell’s in Oxford a few weeks ago, going for £400.
Last month I took some long flights and watched the Peter Jackson films, the first time I have seen them since the cinema. The New Zealand landscapes seemed an extraordinarily close match to the Middle Earth I imagined and, like the book, I thought the Mines of Moria and Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog (‘You shall not pass!) was the highlight of the whole thing.
Happy New Year!
Peter L
£400? I think I have my old Pauline Baynes edition in the attic, though it may be in ‘well-read’ condition.
Happy New Year when it comes !
Yes, second-hand Tolkien is big business, and Blackwell’s have shelves by the old boy (and CS Lewis, and Philip Pullman). The exhibit that made me blink was a Pauline Baynes illustrated map of Middle Earth which used to decorate my teenage bedroom wall, yours for £200.
The Eagle and Child, the dingy old Oxford pub where Tolkien and his Inkling mates used to hang out, has been derelict for years, but is now being renovated by the Ellison Institute. Larry Ellison, the Oracle billionaire, is the third richest person in the world. The architect is Norman Foster, better known fur designing the Gherkin and the Reichstag. I don’t think he’s done a pub before.