A Slip of the Keyboard (16 page)

Well, it’s in the air … almost literally. The early Christian Church helped things along by deliberately refraining from stamping on the pagan religions of the time. Instead, some of their festivals and customs were given a Christian veneer. No doubt this saved a lot of trouble at the time. It also preserved them, which wasn’t the intention. Since then we have been great accumulators of invaders’ gods, creating a magpie mythology that grabbed hold of anything that shone nicely. Some of the pieces came together to form the Matter of Britain, the Arthurian legend spun out of other legends to become the great British story. It’s built into the landscape, from one end of the country to the other. Every hill is Arthur’s Throne, every cavern is Merlin’s Cave.

Stories beget stories. I’ve always suspected that Robin Hood was just another robber, but he did have the advantage of a very powerful weapon. It was not the longbow. It was the voice of Alan a Dale, the minstrel. Weaponry will only keep you alive, but a good ballad can make you immortal.

Then this rich rural tradition was locked up in the mills of the early Industrial Revolution, which pressure-cooked it.

Of course there had always been fantasy. It’s the Ur-literature from which all the others sprang, and it developed in the cave right alongside religion. They grew from the same root: if we draw the right pictures and find the right words, we can steer the world, ensure the success of the hunt, keep ourselves safe from the thunder, negotiate with Death. A phrase sometimes linked with fantasy is “tales of gods and heroes,” and the two go together. The first heroes were the ones who defied or tricked or robbed the gods, for the good of the tribe, and came back to tell the story.

But it was in the last century that fantasy took on an additional role as a means of escape, a way out of the perceived grimness of the industrializing world. Out of the same pot, I’ve always felt, came the English obsession with gardens, with the making of little private plots that could become, for an hour or so, the whole world.

Some vitriol was printed a couple of years ago when
The Lord of the Rings
was voted the best book of the century in a poll of Waterstones’ readers. Certain critics felt that the public were being jolly ungrateful after all they had done for them, the beasts. It didn’t matter. The book is beyond their control. They might as well have been throwing bricks at a mountain; it doesn’t cause any damage and it makes the mountain slightly higher. The book is now a classic, and real classics aren’t created by diktat.

J. R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

Fantasy worlds have a huge attraction. There are rules built
in. The appeal is simple and beguiling in the complex world of the twentieth century. Evil has a map reference and a remedy—the finding of a sword, the returning of a Grail, the destruction of a ring. The way will be tough but at least it has a signpost. If the Good exhibit enough goodness, moral fibre, and bravery, they will win through, although at some cost. And for a span they’ll live happily ever after … until they have to do it again.

And yet … 
The Lord of the Rings
, while English to the bone, was not a typical British fantasy book. It was not part of the mainstream, even though it is now a river in its own right and has spawned numerous tributaries and has come to define “fantasy” for many people.

It was unusual because it started and finished in a world which is like ours but which isn’t ours, a world with different rules and created with meticulous attention to detail, and, above all, a world that you cannot get to from here. There is no magic door to Middle-earth apart from the covers of the book. There is no entry by magic carpet, wardrobe, dream, or swan-drawn chariot. It is a separate creation.

Since and because of Tolkien there have been more fantasy universes than you can shake a curiously engraved sword at, but the British have traditionally desired their fantasy worlds to be a lot closer to home. We like them to be about as close as the other side of a door or the back of a mirror or even to be in here with us, numinous, unseen until you learn the gift. And this has been accompanied by an urge towards a sort of domesticity, an attempt to make gardens in the goblin-haunted wilderness, to make fantasy do something … to, in fact, bring it down to earth.

In the
Poetics
, Aristotle said that poetical metaphor and language involve the careful admixture of the ordinary and the strange. G. K. Chesterton said that far more grotesque and wonderful than any wild fantastical thing was anything that was everyday and unregarded,
if seen unexpectedly from a new direction. That is our tradition, and it has largely been kept alive by people writing for children.

Tolkien’s great achievement was to reclaim fantasy as a genre that could be published for and read by adults. Traditionally, we had left the journey to the kids, who rather enjoyed it and found it easy. Adults got involved only to the extent that some teachers carefully picked up any “escapist rubbish” the child was currently reading and dropped it in the bin. There are still, even now, some of those around—I believe a special circle of hell is reserved for them. Of course fantasy is escapist. Most stories are. So what? Teachers are not meant to be jailers.

Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested. The fantasy books led me on to mythology, the mythology led painlessly to ancient history … and I quietly got an education, courtesy of the public library.

For me, E. Nesbit’s young heroes flew magic carpets, travelled in time, and talked to magical creatures, but they were still Edwardian children. C. S. Lewis’s children certainly lived Here but went through a magical door to get There. Magic doors are a huge part of the tradition. An enduring image, that symbolizes real fantasy far more than any amount of dragons and witches, is an early scene in Terry Gilliam’s movie
Time Bandits
, where a mounted knight in full armour gallops out of the wardrobe in the ordinary room of an ordinary boy.

John Masefield’s Kay Harker, in
The Midnight Folk
and
The Box of Delights
, did not even need a door, just the vision to see the magical world intersecting with this one and the characters that lived with one foot in each. Writers like Diana Wynne Jones and Alan Garner let their characters wander in and out of a similar
magical world—this world, seen from Chesterton’s different viewpoint.

The best fantasy writers don’t write fantasy in the fluffy, hocus-pocus sense, they change the rules by which the world works and then write very carefully and logically by those rules. And it’s no longer enough that there should be wizards and goblins and magic. We know about that stuff. Now we want to know how the wizards are dealing with the challenge of genetically modified dragons, and what the dwarfs are doing to stamp out racial harassment of gnomes. We’re back to Chesterton again. Maybe a good way of understanding this world is to view it from another one.

Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter is firmly in this tradition. In truth, the stories do not contain a lot of elements new to anyone keeping up with modern fantasy writing for children. Young wizards and witches have been to school before. But that really does not matter. Genres work like that; if they didn’t, there would only ever be one book with a Time Machine in it. Most crime novels are full of policemen, crimes, and criminals, and most cakes contain pretty much the same sort of ingredients. It’s the cookery that counts. Cook it right, with imagination and flair and a good pinch of luck, and you have that rare and valuable thing—a genre book that’s risen above the genre. And Harry Potter is beautifully cooked.

From
Meditations on Middle-earth
,
ed. Karen Haber, November 2001

The Lord of the Rings
is a cult classic. I know that’s true, because I read it in the newspapers, saw it on TV, heard it on the radio.

We know what
cult
means. It’s a put-down word. It means “inexplicably popular but unworthy.” It’s a word used by the guardians of the one true flame to dismiss anything that is liked by the
wrong kind of people. It also means “small, hermetic, impenetrable to outsiders.” It has associations with cool drinks in Jonestown.

The Lord of the Rings
has well over one hundred million readers. How big will it have to be to emerge from cult status? Or, once having been a cult—that is to say, once having borne the mark of Cain—is it actually possible that anything can ever be allowed to become a full-fledged classic?

But democracy has been in action over the past few years. A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favourite book. It was
The Lord of the Rings
. Another one not long afterwards, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J. R. R. Tolkien.

The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word
favourite
. That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for
best
. But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment of the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: “Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!”

And, once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called “narrative fiction” among the top fifty “masterworks” of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was
The Lord of the Rings
again.

The
Mona Lisa
was also in the top fifty masterworks. And I admit to suspecting that she was included by many of the voters
out of a sheer cultural knee-jerk reaction, mildly dishonest but well meant. Quick, quick, name one of the greatest works of art of the last thousand years! Er … er … well, the
Mona Lisa
, obviously. Fine, fine, and have you seen the Mona Lisa? Did you stand in front of her? Did the smile entrance you, did the eyes follow you around the room and back to your hotel? Er … no, not as such … but, uh, well, it’s the
Mona Lisa
, okay? You’ve got to include the
Mona Lisa
. And that guy with the fig leaf, yeah. And that woman with no arms.

That’s honesty, of a sort. It’s a vote for the good taste of your fellow citizens and your ancestors as well. Joe Average knows that a vote for a picture of dogs playing poker is probably not, when considered against the background of one thousand years, a very sensible thing to cast.

But
The Lord of the Rings
, I suspect, got included when people stopped voting on behalf of their culture and quietly voted for what they liked. We can’t all stand in front of one picture and feel it open up new pathways in our brain, but we can—most of us—read a mass-market book.

I can’t remember where I was when JFK was shot, but I can remember exactly where and when I was when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien. It was New Year’s Eve, 1961. I was babysitting for friends of my parents while they all went out to a party. I didn’t mind. I’d got this three-volume yacht-anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.

I’d waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.