No Kings in Ankh-Morpork

A cabal of small-minded reactionaries summon a creature of pure destruction – a dragon – to overthrow the current political order of their city and contrive a return to a puppet monarchy. But the dragon, a creature of pure ego and willful destructiveness, has nothing but contempt for those that summoned it, and destroys them, and large swathes of the city, in turn.

That's the premise of Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett's clever and hilarious fantasy thriller, a parody of the police procedural, the hard-boiled crime novel, The Return of the King, and a meditation on authority, politics, and civil society. If it also seems uncomfortably apt to the idiocy and disruption of the disastrous second Trump administration, it's a testament to Pratchett's insight and humanism, tempered by distinctly modern skepticism.

In Guards! Guards!, an ambitious technocrat sets out to overturn the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and even he is boggled by the small-mindedness and selective reasoning of the secret society that collectively summons the dragon. Pratchett's startlingly accurate satire shows that these are not evil men, on the whole, only individuals whose petty resentments and willingness to swallow absurd lies as long as they prop up their own sense of privilege are practically self-sustaining.

It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don't need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they're progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they'll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.

But the dragon doesn't consider violence and greed to be means to a political ends: it is destruction and greed embodied, and the results, as they are with Trumpism, are predictable. The city burns, but the disruption is merely the pretext for a more authoritarian regime to claim primacy.

The resolution is less of an analogy to the current moment, mainly because Pratchett is a writer of comedy, but the healthy cynicism towards the matter of human nature still stands. The scruffy, neglected officers of the Night Watch are not exactly heroes but they are decent and try to do the right thing in their way, and they understand (mostly) that there is no absolute justice, only the endless flexibility and compromise required to navigate the competing interests and diversity of the emergent metropolis.

In this sense, there's no scope for the return of the king, given that kings are at worst brutal despots and at best practiced wielders of violence and rough justice. The unacknowledged king becomes a literal man of the people, a city cop, the watch officer, who enforces the imperfect rules of civil society and tolerance. And through this reflects back on and parodies the familiar fantasy trope (and Tolkien), it's not actually that far from Tolkien's own thoughts on kingship. Compassion, justice, healing, and restraint are the marks of the true king, not political power for it's own sake. Aragorn is the exception and the ideal who earns his kingdom through decades of unseen toil – few kings, in Tolkien or the Discworld, reach the ideal.

On the other hand, because he's a typically compelling Pratchett character, Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, might seem an almost idealized projection of another ideal, the benign despot. Yet in this case, the Patrician is the least bad of all the bad options, who governs a complex of pluralistic interest groups by balancing one against another, with a direct kind of utilitarianism ("The Patrician didn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.* While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.") – a proto-democrat, as such.

The long journey: Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

When I posted on the doorstopper fantasy over two years ago, the book I had before me was Tad Williams's The Dragonbone Chair, the first book of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. Now, I've just finished To Green Angel Tower, the last book of the trilogy. The reading experience says something about the fantasy series, as a genre and a form, and also how reading is itself an undertaking that changes over time.

For the sake of accuracy, I've read plenty of other books since starting MST, and part of the pleasure of a long series is setting each volume aside, then beginning again, reprising the synopsis, leaving and then returning to the fictional world, observing the changes in characters, speculating on the long threads of plot that are held over. But as MST progresses, the pace slackens, and reading TGAT in particular was a plodding business, sometimes only a few pages a night. When I was younger, I was bolder about skimming long books, but as a consequence my recollection of first reading TGAT was somewhat sketchy and incomplete. This time, I took the time—but the time, as it were, also took something out of me. There was more to learn reading at a measured pace, but it was also obvious how much of the text was filler, spacing, incidents that replicated previous incidents, not to mention the sheer spatial requirement of journeying out and back across the map of Osten Ard.

The slower read gives us more time to reflect on the themes as well as the action—and though Williams is a fine writer of action, there is too much of it. First time round, MST can be read as a classic bildungsroman, tracing the journey of its younger characters from late childhood through to adulthood, and indeed challenging some of the conventions, since sex as well as romance arise, as well as the usual responsibilities and the adult need to confront and overcome grief and anger. But the other theme that becomes evident, woven into and reprised throughout the long journey outwards and back to the beginning, the Green Angel Tower overlooking the very castle that Simon and Miriamele set out from, is the theme of recurrence and nostalgia, of the longing for and critical loss of the past.

[mild spoilers to follow]

This, of course, has informed fantasy fiction since the Old English elegy, and is defines the distinct mood of the elvish exodus from Middle-earth. Williams centers MST on the cycle of invasion and dispossession, and the deep and exceptional resonance of this theme is that while Simon and his companions strive to correct a world that is severely and devastatingly out of balance, trapped in a supernatural winter, restoring the elder world of Sithi domination, before the violent arrival of the human conquerers, is the mission of the tragic and evil Storm King. To some degree, they are both on the same quest, but from very different points. 

This recognition makes Simon's choice at the very moment the Storm King's return is near complete an act of maturity and compassion. Choosing to perhaps to fear but not to hate, he seems to rob Ineluki of the last quantum of rage and spite he needs to complete his ritual. But outside the moment, this is also problematic. For if we accept that the Sithi are in a real sense the indigenous peoples of Osten Ard, brutally displaced, then admitting that fear of the other is only a first step towards justice and reconciliation.

MST gains great traction and interest in playing with many of the tropes of earlier fantasies, particularly The Lord of the Rings. But where the wisdom of Frodo Baggins lies not simply in his destruction of the ring but his pity and compassion—a weapon that the fallen Saruman acknowledges is formidable indeed—Simon here seems to gain the power to acknowledge fear and even look past hatred, but not to overcome it. 

Perhaps this is a necessary change, a more realistic balancing of the fears and compromises, as well as insight and regret, that the hero accumulates, and the cost of the return of the king. But one can't but feel that the moment is not quite satisfying, after so much effort is expended reaching it. Perhaps this is even the trap of the doorstopper, which always suggests more text, more sequels, another novel just in development.

On the other hand, investment in the characters and their world, the very sense of challenge and effort, would be lesser if it were not for their weight and detail of the trilogy. The danger for the doorstopper is that the nostalgia for the world, the desire to deepen immersion and multiply characters into sprawling stories, eventually became its own end. The problem with Game of Thrones is that the player can no longer see the end. But I do believe there are ways back into the form, that the formal structure of the trilogy and can nourish engagement, but also find ways to shift expectations, compress, adapt. The wonderment of fantasy is that the world is whole but also deep, and somewhere always remains beyond reach.

The Saruman trap — or Tolkien on politics

The Lord of the Rings is not overtly a political work, being more concerned, broadly, with the problem of power, but where we can say that questions of politics are also questions of power, then this recent piece on the "Saruman Trap" has particular resonance.

Saruman is, of course, the greatest of all the wizards of Middle Earth, who chooses, nevertheless, to side with Sauron, his justification being that Sauron's victory is inevitable, but with the even more insidious rationale that his wisdom, his persuasion and knowledge, can direct and control the brute strength of Mordor, guiding evil to high ends while deploring its methods.

This, as Gandalf knows, is nonsense, but it is persuasive nonsense, just as the "voice of Saruman", subtle, insinuating, lying, is a metaphor for the worst forms of political persuasion, the reasoned tones that cloak abhorrent policy.

This year, in the mid-term elections, many of us may consider the Saruman trap, particularly those conservatives whose Republican Party has been captured by extremism and naked bigotry under the cloak of populism, but also, perhaps, those progressives who are berated for their lack of civility in debates with figures who have no concern themselves for civil liberties or reasoned positions.

Tolkien had first-hand experience of totalitarianism in its most dreadful forms, and Donald Trump is neither Sauron nor Hitler, which is not to diminish the grave danger his posturing, lying, self-aggrandizing incompetence and cruelty pose to American democracy. But Tolkien understood the  risks of opposing totalitarianism on its own terms, of confronting brutality with brutality, and lies with lies, or tacit acceptance that ends up as complicity. Gandalf chooses the path that is neither, knowing the dangers, but knowing also that it is better to answer a lie with a simple truth, no matter how dangerous to the truth-teller.

When Saruman makes his last, most formidable appeal from the balcony of his ruined tower, Gandalf can only laugh, and the spell is broken.

The Sword in the Stone - T. H. White

Tolkien, I recall, had reservations about Lewis's blending of inconsistent sources and traditions in the Narnia stories: Roman fauns and Greek centaurs against Nordic wolves and a White Witch, for instance. But I wonder what he made of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, an extraordinary melange of elements: sentimental medievalism blended with precise historical detail and conscious anachronism, children's story and searching political allegory, legend and fantasy, and comedy with a looming thread of adult tragedy.

Among those concerned with writing modern fantasy, much is made of world-building, which means the coherence and integration of the world, and the application of a realist logic to unreal categories. But as M. John Harrison has observed, fantasies are extended metaphors, idealogical and not physical landscapes, and they serve to generate interpretations, not factual consistency. In this respect, The Sword in the Stone is a novel of education, but its lessons are about encountering and integrating, without necessarily reconciling, a multitude of viewpoints.

Merlin, living backwards in time, has already seen the tragic future and the even more baffling modernity which occasionally intervenes in the text, but he can only prepare Wart for what he will discover and ultimately do as the Once and Future King. He can guide but not resolve. Wart's lessons, through Merlin's magical transformations, are often about the burden of power, and his encounters, such as with the mordant pike or the mad, militaristic hawks, highlight the dangers of tyranny and the moral price of authority. If the fantasy England of the narrative is but a nostalgic rendering, this serves to highlight that it is also lost in the past as the whole golden age of Arthurian legend is lost, that these soft edges are just a comforting illusion, but one we can't give up quite yet. This is what Merlin sees and Wart cannot, and the discrepency lends the comedy unusual poignancy and insight.

Slow reading The Lord of the Rings: The End (and Back)

Well, I finished slow reading The Lord of the Rings, which means that part of me, like Samwise, goes home, and part of me also continues, sailing out of exile and loss to the Everlasting West. For Tolkien did not mean our visit to faerie to be settling and cosy; it was also meant to be a glimpse of something wild and fair and far, that would change us and remain out of our reach.

But for this last post, I want to talk about the whole work and the structure of reading and writing the extended process of its creation reveals. The impression of depth The Lord of the Rings creates is not located simply in the expanse of Tolkien's world-making and languages, or in the quest narrative, but also in the process of writing and reading itself. By this I mean that The Lord of the Rings changed as it was made.

The Lord of the Rings begins as a sequel to The Hobbit, in tone and content, close to the fairy-tale and the children's book, in the pastoral, pre-industrial Shire. It rapidly becomes something graver and more compelling, as glimpses of the past appear, but one of the passages that always captures my attention is the strange fox in the woods that notices the hobbits, early in the first book. The curious, anthropomorphic fox is to my mind an artefact, almost an archeological fragment, of the earlier children's book narrative.

The passage through Moria changes the book again: here there are depths beneath the earth, shadows and terrors shrouded in ages and darkness. History begins to loom more heavily over the timeless world of the fairy-tale, and the language of action as well as introspection begins to dominate.

By the time of The Return of the King, we have encountered realms and cultures far older than those of the Shire, and the archaic language and rolling, epic diction of the battle scenes pull us even further back in time. We are, in effect, reprising the narrative forms of epic and chronicle, the language of Anglo-saxon battle, as we travel into the deep time of Middle-earth.

Finally, the return to the Shire is a return to modernity, as Saruman's brutal totalitarianism (is there any other kind?) is a reflection of Sauron's absolutist spiritual tyranny. The scouring of the Shire is a necessary return but also a sort of resetting of the clock. The problem is that immersed now in a greater world, the Shire cannot remain an unchanging childhood idyll. Through Sam and Frodo, we can both come home and move on.

And so The Lord of The Rings expands and draws us through its narrative not only in terms of imagined geography or imagined history, but in the very ways of telling that it employs. To read slowly is to see these modes and how wonderfully and deftly they are woven together book by book.

You can read all the Slow Reading The Lord of the Rings posts here.

Slow reading The Lord of the Rings, part 4

A change of scene for reading. A long vacation in New Zealand has given me the chance to advance through Book Five and the battle for Gondor and Minas Tirith. Landscape has a powerful influence of reading: no one who has lived in sight of or visited the Southern Alps of New Zealand can help but see them as the Misty Mountains. Every turn of the road presents a vista of Eriador or The Shire. The vineyards of Malborough are surely those of the Pelennor Fields. All these sights and memories rise in the imagination as I read in New Zealand.

But today I'm thinking about a particular incident: the journey of Aragorn and the Grey Company through the Paths of the Dead. I've thought and read before that Aragorn's journey in the Paths is similar to Gandalf's battle in the deeps of the world against the Balrog, a struggle through death towards rebirth. And so, to some extent, it is. But the Paths of the Dead are not Moria, and this is a journey that Aragorn chooses. To me, the Paths represent the accumulated weight of the past, the legacy and the debts that Aragorn must accept if he is to give up the freedom of Strider to become the King, returned. But just as all forests in Middle-earth are not idyllic but dark and threatening, so the past is sometimes fraught with memory, failure and fear. This is what Aragorn, alone, must bargain with and resolve.

But there is a price to pay, and the character of Aragorn seems to me to become flatter and more remote as the book proceeds. While acting as warrior-king and healer, we glimpse less of his inner life. He becomes less the character and more the symbol.

This is partly in contrast to Theoden, whose death is all the more shocking and moving because we understand the human complexity and vulnerability within the king.

But one thing is clear: although he drew on heroic modes of expression, Tolkien had no illusions about the battlefield. For all that his characters accomplish in war, the instances of blindness, disorientation and sheer terror are what stand out in this reading.

Slow reading The Lord of the Rings, Part 3

It's been more than a year since I began my project of slowly rereading The Lord of the Rings. These have been some of my most-read posts; though why, I'm not sure (comments are welcome). Slow-reading, closer to the pace at which Tolkien wrote and rewrote, produces some interesting effects of perspective. Passages I hadn't remember stand out, others I had once raced through drag (Fangorn forest, fine; but on this read through, the business of the Ents simply took too long. I felt my patience fraying like Merry and Pippin's).

So here is an update for my entry into the last part of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King.

Picking up The Return of the King (after a break to plough through The Night Land), I'm interested in how Tolkien seems to take a pause, to slow the action before the great final battles. Normally, one reads rapidly through this part of the epic, anticipating the battle for Minas Tirith and the final journey of the Ring, but this time the preparation for war is invested with an ominous calm and a subtle humanity.

Pippin arrives in Minas Tirith, is presented at the citadel to a proud and brooding Denethor, but he takes meals, looks at the view, walks in the streets, talks with soldiers and boys, watches more companies of armed men arrive. There is a sense of fragility about Minas Tirith, of a culture that is strong but has also atrophied, clinging to its history while losing territory to the Shadow. These early scenes, particularly with Beregond and his son, show us ordinary people preparing for war and disaster. They cheer for reinforcements, although the numbers are too few. They watch the gates and wonder where Faramir is. They touchingly mistake a common Hobbit for a Halfling prince; in other words, they are ordinary as well as heroic. Little happens, but then in war nothing ever really happens until the enemy arrives and the arrows, or the bombs, start falling.

The language of the narrative also changes, shifting from the brisk, sometimes idiomatic language of adventure in The Fellowship of the Ring to the archaic grammar and anachronistic phrasing that suggests Anglo-Saxon and Medieval sources. To my mind, this models the shift from the peripheral, near-eighteenth century Shire to the fulcrum of the conflict, a world remote from us in language and time. More on this as I draw closer to the end.

Slow Reading The Lord of the Rings, part II

The Two Towers remains the volume of The Lord of the Rings I relish most, perhaps because in the context of my 'slow-reading' project it is not just a bridge between beginning and end but a wonderfully developed story on its own (though, when reading time is short, I start to question the length of the Treebeard passages).

The Two Towers is really two books, or two stories. One, a heroic epic, a tale of battles and strange encounters with magic and myths; the other, a more personal quest, a journey built around character and the subtle triangulation between Frodo, Sam and Gollum, and the delicate moral and practical choices imposed on them.

To my mind, the battle sequence around Helm's Deep is particularly fine, since Tolkien's epic view allows him to balance the movement of armies and great forces with personal struggle, and the action is expansive but never unclear. But what sticks for me in the slow reading is rather the brilliant confrontation with the defeated Saruman, for the voice of Saruman in the modern context represents the peril and corrupting power of political language, the elegant and insidious lie that worms its way into thought and cannot be stilled even in the midst of the destruction it has brought. Saruman is defeated, of course, but how many political Sarumans remain, still persuading us from the ruins of their towers?

The mountains of New Zealand and the paths, steps and ravines around Ithaca, NY are now permanently fused in my imagination when I think of the climb towards Cirith Ungol.

Character and Choice in The Two Towers

Slow reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings can expose surprising nuances in the text. One of the criticisms of Tolkien I've come across is that his characters are uninteresting, flat, reflexively good or heroic, yet their heroism lacks depth because ultimately it is easy, all achievement and no sacrifice.

Yet in the first chapter of The Two Towers we see Aragorn at his lowest: confused, grieving, doubting himself and all his actions. He has no clear path, and rather than confidence and assertion he is trapped in uncertainty. The choice (pursue Frodo and the Ring, or rescue Merry and Pippin) is by no means clear, for the one requires the sacrifice of innocents, the other a terrific risk to the world. In truth, Tolkien has derailed the quest narrative precisely to bring his characters to this point of testing.

One of the odd pieces of received wisdom of modernism in literature is that 'good' characters are inherently dull, whereas 'flawed' characters are automatically interesting. But making the right moral choice is often a complex problem for the good character but irrelevant to the selfish. The interesting choices, then, confront the good and not the bad, and reveal depth in these characters.

Tolkien does not show us Aragorn's bravery or skill in combat in this chapter, but rather his compassion and forbearance for Boromir (the failed hero, lost on the quest). This is what restores Aragorn's sense of direction and sets him on the uncertain path to his inheritance.

Slow reading The Lord of the Rings

I'm reading The Lord of the Rings again -- slowly. As a teen, and afterward, there was always time to read LotR at speed, to devour each page, chapter and volume, there and back again.

But I was always struck (as an author) by Tolkien's remark about the long period of time he took to write the novel and plodding on until stopping by Balin's tomb in 1940. Does that slow process of development, stops and starts and deep thought, reward slow readng? So I am reading LotR slowly, at a different pace, taking a page or a passages here and there, and months later the breaking of the Fellowship looms.

I've learned that it is worthwhile re-imagining Middle-earth, for its depth and strangeness, as well its familiarity. The movie trilogy is so strongly realised that there is a danger of its imagery effacing the books, and so rereading slowly is a way of restoring details, incidents and scenes and even the faces of characters from one's own inner vision. The long trek out of The Shire, the barrow-wight, even the wolves of Hollin are all encounters worth recovering.

The landscape of Middle-earth is still New Zealand for me, but I find it tinged now with the woods of the northeastern United States. After many shifts in landscape and setting, I find Galadriel's decision, 'I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel,' very moving.

It's sometimes the details, a camp, a song, a glimpse of the Brown Hills, that make the story. Slow reading is one way to get back to these details.