I’m guessing his target audience isn’t the die-hard Tolkien
fan because none of them would think much of this book (though, as a
semi-professional fan, I do commend its collection of Tolkien, Hobbit, and
LOTR-related illustrations and photographs up until Peter Jackson’s movies are
mentioned, though I’m curious to know why much of the art and photographs go
unannotated, offering no clues to their origin or significance). Of particular
uselessness to Tolkien die-hards are Raymond’s plot summaries of The Hobbit as
well as The Lord of the Rings.
So the audience is the Tolkien virgin, those looking for a
compendium of Tolkiengalia in order to form the basest of understandings of
what the hell their obsessed friends are talking about. But even at that, this
book fails – Tolkein’s Wikipedia article has more breadth and depth as an
autobiography as this collection possesses.
Even John Howe’s introduction to the book is patently
useless, as he drones on about how myths are central to our being as humans
except that we don’t tell myths any more, blah blah blah which is, of course,
the Big Lie in Tolkien fandom – there is plenty of myth-making and myth-telling
in literature, movie-making, and general story-telling beyond the Time of
Tolkien, they just choose to turn their toffee noses up at it in order to hold
their lord of the rings up on that highest rung. (I will concede Tolkien has no
equal in creating his mythological backstory, but to claim modern myth-making
as Tolkien’s sovereign territory is unquestionably false.)
Raymond seems to think presenting this basic information in
a way in which it is digestible and cross-linked and easily ponderable is more
important than the information presented. In his own introduction 9under the
heading “Instant Expert,” he writes:
The structure of the book means that each of the three
chapters will take about an hour to digest and that the whole book will furnish
you with a solid understanding of the life history, literary highlights, and
important of JRR Tolkien in about three hours. In addition to all that, each
chapter concludes with a timeline and glossary to help you keep your thoughts
in order. You’ll have to read Tolkien’s own works to fully appreciate and enjoy
his genius, but this is the quickest way to discover the man behind the magic
and the real-world experiences that helped shape the most fully realized
fantasy landscape in literature.
In other words, go read the books. But buy this one,
because, well, it’ll give you all that. It’ll look good on the shelf. And won’t
impress your Tolkien-soaked friends one bit, since they’ve watched the DVD
extras on Peter Jackson’s films, which offer a lot more information than this
book does, and know the related Wikipedia entries by heart. (Side note: The
book’s British publisher, Ivy Press, seems to make a go at producing such
3-minute biographies (they’ve done Stephen Hawking, for example). A tell-tale tell of the weight of these
books: “Each topic divided into 3-minute bites that you can absorb almost
without pausing for thought” in the description of the Hawking book. NOT a good
sign, folks. (Neither is the appellation of “instant expert.” I learned time
and again as a journalist that the line between instant expert and instant
asshole is razor thin.)
But is this a book? It’s odd in that in some ways this
biography resembles an HTML page, with odd snatches of text bolded as if they
were meant to be hyperlinks. I keep wanting to click on them, for example, to
see what the author’s own worries
had to do with crafting of The Hobbit. But, alas, the page is dead. Raymond
does cross reference this biography lightly, on each page offering us related
thoughts if we want to pursue banal previous or future sections of the book as
we read the banal page we’re on now.
This book is likely doomed to the same fate of fellow
Inkling C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” of which Lewis himself said is the
kind of book that gravitates to guest bedrooms or ends up being read because of
the three or so “scholarly” works offered to reading circles, it’s the
shortest. It reads, frankly, like one of the papers offered in Gopher Prairie,
Minnesota’s Thanatopsis Club in Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (more on this
particular Lewis later). Lewis mocked the intellectual shallowness of GP’s
leading citizens in seeking out the birth and death dates of famous writers,
covering all of English poetry, say, in one day, and leaving feeling educated
about them.
I do concede I have learned one new thing by reading this
book – that Tolkien found some inspiration in Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt in naming
the Hobbits, and that many professional English-language babblers have made
much hay of that connection since. But otherwise this book as a biography and
as a collection of Tolkien tokens is a disappointment.
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