What Makes This Book So Great (47 page)

SEPTEMBER 21, 2010

122.
A merrier world: J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit

The Hobbit
isn’t as good a book as
The Lord of the Rings
. It’s a children’s book, for one thing, and it talks down to the reader. It’s not quite set in Middle Earth—or if it is, then it isn’t quite set in the Third Age. It isn’t pegged down to history and geography the way
The Lord of the Rings
is. Most of all, it’s a first work by an immature writer; journeyman work and not the masterpiece he would later produce. But it’s still an excellent book. After all, it’s not much of a complaint to say that something isn’t as good as the best book in the world.

If you are fortunate enough to share a house with a bright six-year-old, or a seven- or eight-year-old who still likes bedtime stories, I strongly recommend reading them a chapter of
The Hobbit
aloud every night before bed. It reads aloud brilliantly, and when you do this it’s quite clear that Tolkien intended it that way. I’ve read not only
The Hobbit
but
The Lord of the Rings
aloud twice as well, and had it read to me once. The sentences form the rhythms of speech, the pauses are in the right place, they fall well on the ear. This isn’t the case with a lot of books, even books I like. Many books were made to be read silently and fast. The other advantage of reading it aloud is that it allows you to read it even after you have it memorised and normal reading is difficult. It will also have the advantage that the child will encounter this early, so they won’t get the pap first and think that’s normal.

I first read
The Hobbit
when I was eight. I went on to read
The Lord of the Rings
immediately afterwards, with the words, “Isn’t there another one of those around here?” What I liked about
The Hobbit
that first time through was the roster of adventures. It seemed to me a very good example of a kind of children’s book with which I was familiar—Narnia, of course, but also the whole set of children’s books in which children have magical adventures and come home safely. It didn’t occur to me that it had been written before a lot of them—I had no concept as a child that things were written in order and could influence each other.
The Hobbit
fit into a category with
At the Back of the North Wind
and
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and half of E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton.

The unusual thing about
The Hobbit
for me was that Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit and a grown-up. He had his own charming and unusual house and he indulged in grown-up pleasures like smoking and drinking. He didn’t have to evade his parents to go off on an adventure. He lived in a world where there were not only dwarves and elves and wizards but also signs that said “Expert treasure hunter wants a good job, plenty of excitement and reasonable reward.” He lived a life a child could see as independent, with people coming to tea unexpectedly and with dishes to be done afterwards (this happened in our house all the time), but without any of the complicated adult disadvantages of jobs and romance. Bilbo didn’t want an adventure, but an adventure came and took him anyway. And it is “There and Back Again,” at the end he returns home with treasure and the gift of poetry.

Of course,
The Lord of the Rings
isn’t “another one of those.” Reading
The Lord of the Rings
immediately afterwards was like being thrown into deep magical water which I fortunately learned to breathe, but from which I have never truly emerged.

Reading
The Hobbit
now is odd. I can see all the patronizing asides, which were the sort of thing I found so familiar in children’s books that I’m sure they were quite invisible to me. I’ve read it many times between now and then, of course, including twice aloud, but while I know it extremely well I’ve never read it quite so obsessively that the words are carved in my DNA. I can find a paragraph I’d forgotten was there and think new thoughts when I’m reading it. That’s why I picked it up, though it wasn’t what I really wanted—but what I really wanted, I can’t read anymore.

I notice all the differences between this world and the
LOTR
version of Middle Earth. I noticed how reluctant Tolkien is to name anything here—the Hill, the Water, the Great River, the Forest River, Lake Town, Dale—and this from the master namer. His names creep in around the edges—Gondolin, Moria, Esgaroth—but it’s as if he’s making a real effort to keep it linguistically simple. I find his using Anglo-Saxon runes instead of his own runes on the map unutterably sweet—he thought they’d be easier for children to read. (At eight, I couldn’t read either. At forty-five, I can read both.) Now, my favourite part is the end, when things become morally complex. Then I don’t think I understood that properly. I understood Thorin’s greed for dragon gold—I’d read
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
and I knew how that worked. What puzzled me was Bilbo’s use of the Arkenstone, which seemed treacherous, especially as it didn’t even work. Bilbo didn’t kill the dragon, and the introduction of Bard at that point in the story seemed unprecedentedly abrupt—I wonder why Tolkien didn’t introduce him earlier, in the Long Lake chapter? But it’s Bilbo’s information that allows the dragon to be killed, and that’s good enough for me, then or now.

Tolkien is wonderful at writing that hardest of all things to write well, the journey. It really feels as if he understands time and distance and landscape. Adventures come at just the right moments. Mirkwood remains atmospheric and marvellous. The geography comes in order that’s useful for the story, but it feels like real geography. Noticing world differences, I’m appalled at how casually Bilbo uses the Ring, and surprised how little notice everyone else pays to it—as if such things are normal. Then it was just a magic ring, like the one in
The Enchanted Castle
. The stone giants—were they ents? They don’t seem quite ent-ish to me. What’s up with that? And Beorn doesn’t quite seem to fit anywhere either, with his performing animals and were-bearness.

The oddest thing about reading
The Hobbit
now is how (much more than
The Lord of the Rings
) it seems to be set in the fantasyland of role-playing games. It’s a little quest, and the dwarves would have taken a hero if they could have found one, they make do with a burglar. There’s that sign. The encounters come just as they’re needed. Weapons and armour and magic items get picked up along the way. Kill the trolls, find a sword. Kill the dragon, find armour. Finish the adventure, get chests of gold and silver.

One more odd thing I noticed this time for the first time. Bilbo does his own washing up. He doesn’t have servants. Frodo has Sam, and Gaffer Gamgee, too. But while Bilbo is clearly comfortably off, he does his own cooking and baking and cleaning. This would have been unprecedentedly eccentric for someone of his class in 1938. It’s also against gender stereotypes—Bilbo had made his own seedcakes, as why shouldn’t he, but in 1938 it was very unusual indeed for a man to bake. Bilbo isn’t a man, of course, he isn’t a middle-class Englishman who would have had a housekeeper, he is a respectable hobbit. But I think because the world has changed to make not having servants and men cooking seem relatively normal we don’t notice that these choices must have been deliberate.

People often talk about how few women there are in
LOTR
.
The Hobbit
has none, absolutely none. I think the only mentions of women are Belladonna Took, Bilbo’s mother (dead before the story starts), Thorin’s sister, mother of Fili and Kili, and then Bilbo’s eventual nieces. We see no women on the page, elf, dwarf, human, or hobbit. But I didn’t miss them when I was eight and I don’t miss them now. I had no trouble identifying with Bilbo. This is a world without sex, except for misty reproductive purposes, and entirely without romance. Bilbo is such a bachelor that it doesn’t even need mentioning that he is—because Bilbo is in many ways a nominally adult child.

I think Bilbo is ambiguously gendered. He’s always referred to as “he,” but he keeps house and cooks, he isn’t brave except at a pinch—he’s brave without being at all macho, nor is his lack of machismo deprecated by the text, even when contrasted with the martial dwarves. Bilbo’s allowed to be afraid. He has whole rooms full of clothes. There’s a lot of the conventionally feminine in Bilbo, and there’s a reading here in which Bilbo is a timid house-proud cooking hostess who discovers more facets on an adventure. (I’m sure I could do something with the buttons popping off too if I tried hard enough.) Unlike most heroes, it really wouldn’t change Bilbo at all if you changed his pronoun. Now, isn’t that an interesting thought to go rushing off behind without even a pocket handkerchief?

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

123.
Monuments from the future: Robert Charles Wilson’s
The Chronoliths

Robert Charles Wilson has the best “what if” ideas of anybody writing today—well, maybe he’s equal first with Schroeder and Egan. When people complain about science fiction these days lacking originality, he’s one of the first people I mention as a counterexample. He thinks of wonderful “what if” questions and then tells stories about realistic characters living in the futures those questions lead them to. Sometimes he makes this work, and other times he asks a terrific question and gives it a less satisfying answer. (I’m looking at you,
Darwinia
.) He’s never less than really really interesting, and when he pulls it off he’s quite astoundingly good.
The Chronoliths
(2001) is one of my favourites. It was my very favourite until
Spin
overtook it.

The premise of
The Chronoliths
is that one day in 2021 a huge glassy monument commemorating a victory in 2041 comes crashing down in Thailand. Other monuments follow in other cities across Asia, many of them doing huge damage to life and property when they appear out of the future. They are made by a new kind of physics, and are definitely being sent back in time. Their monumental existence starts to shape the future they celebrate. Meanwhile people get caught up in their fields of weird probability, and their lives get even more distorted than the rest of history. This is the first-person close-up story of Scott and his family and what happened in the twenty years between the first message from the future arriving and being sent.

Our first-person narrator Scott is the typical modern everyman—he’s a divorced father with problems with his own parents. He’s divorced because he wasn’t there for his wife and child when the first chronolith touched down and his daughter had an ear infection. The story covers twenty years—the daughter grows up and has agency, representing the next generation, the generation shaped by the inevitablity of the coming victories. The heart of the book is about being there for your family as opposed to finding out what the heck is going on with the huge mysterious world-changing thing that’s happening—and Wilson does remarkably well with focusing on a dilemma that most SF doesn’t even spend time blinking at.

There are enough cool ideas here for anyone. The speculation about time and probability and the implications of the technology that’s sending the chronoliths back through time are fascinating. Then there’s the human level—the motivation for doing it. They say they celebrate the victory of a mysterious Kuin—and before very long there are a lot of people claiming to be Kuin, everywhere. Kuin doesn’t state positions, so Kuin stands for anything people want him to. Kuin’s victory is inevitable. Everybody’s responding to Kuin in some way, whether to welcome him or oppose him—but he isn’t here yet.

There’s also a mad scientist—she’s called Sulamith Chopra, a Tamil who immigrated to the US when she was three. She’s gay, too. (She’s one of the good guys. But she is definitely a little mad.) There’s a whole planet, though the hero and his family are American and most of the actual book takes place in the US. But really I think Wilson gets points for starting in Thailand and having excursions to Jerusalem and Mexico—so many books set in the near future barely footnote the rest of the world. There’s a fanatic and a love interest and a whole set of complicated people in the kind of complicated shapes of relationships people get into. There’s a really good story—a really good human story and a really good science fiction story.

There’s a particularly odd issue with reading a book that’s ten years old and set ten years in the future—it seems simultaneously ahead and behind where it ought to be. There’s a comment in the very beginning about the wats of Thailand, and the character says you can see pictures of them in any encyclopaedia—and that seems so old-fashioned! Google image search will show you pictures of them without getting out of your chair! Something weird seems to have happened to the Internet, because it’s sort of there and sort of isn’t—there’s something more like satellite TV, and people print things out all the time and have printouts lying around. Maybe that’s what people did in 1999, which is probably when this was written? It feels weird, it feels retro, and I didn’t notice this when I first read it in 2002. There are also people going to airports and catching planes with only the most farcical levels of security—pre-9/11 U.S. norms, but how odd they seem! This doesn’t make the book less enjoyable, and it certainly isn’t the kind of problem Wilson could have done anything about, it’s just odd. Twenty years ahead is one of the most difficult times to write.

The Chronoliths
is a character story that also gives us a lot to think about—exactly what science fiction ought to do.

I read this in one gulp, barely setting it down at all, and I think I remember doing the same the first time I read it. So you might want to clear some time in your schedule for this one.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

124.
The Suck Fairy

I believe I’ve mentioned the Suck Fairy a few times here but without ever discussing her in depth. I first heard of her in a panel on re-reading at Anticipation, when Naomi Libicki explained her to the rest of us. Naomi has since said she heard of her from her friend Camwyn. Wherever she came from she’s a very useful concept. This post is directly related to that panel, and also one at Boskone this year.