Women walkers?

Just a small thought today, as I’ve been doing some intense sleeping to get over a cold.

I’ve just finished reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, which is thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is going to be with me for a long, long time, I think. But all the way through I was struck by something.

Take this extract from the book’s acknowledgements: 

I have, inevitably, followed in the footsteps of many predecessors in terms of writing as well as of walking, and to that end wish to acknowledge the earlier print-trails that have both shown me the way and provoked ‘deviations and differences’. The atmospheres, moods and textures of this book arise out of the places through which I have been fortunate to move, but also out of the prose of J.A. Baker, Robert Byron, M.R. James, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman MacLean, Cormac McCarthy, John McPhee, Vladimir Nabokov, Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Raban, Tim Robinson, W.G. Sebald, Nan Shepherd, Rebecca Solnit, Gary Snyder and Colin Thubron […]. 

Macfarlane mentions more writers in the text, including Edward Thomas, Gilbert White, Coleridge, de Quincy, and Dorothy Wordsworth. I wish now I’d made a list. All these writers who have dealt with the business of walking, and so few of them seem to be female.

And that’s what struck me all the way through the book (and obliquely, in reading Smith of Wootton Major): in literary terms, walking seems to be such a male activity. And yet, every day women walk as much as men. (In Smith Smith’s wife, Nell, travels to visit her daughter to mark her grandson’s birthday, but it’s a firmly domestic visit.)

It may be, I thought, that women haven’t historically been as free to walk as men but nowadays … ? And Nan Shepherd, it should be remembered, devoted herself to walking a specific area, over and over, rather than undertaking a long-distance journey.

Early in the book, Macfarlane describes working at his desk late one evening and then deciding to go out and walk for a while. I tried to picture myself just getting up from my desk and wandering out into a snow-covered Folkestone to walk. And I couldn’t.

In part, perhaps, it’s because Macfarlane makes the artistic choice of stripping his perambulations of any domestic baggage; he has a partner and children who figure in the acknowledgements, and occasionally in the text, but we don’t see the negotiations that presumably went on about accommodating his travels alongside family time. That this is occluded is in itself revealing, rather as Thoreau’s Walden elides his social commerce with Concord.

So, perhaps we can skip the bit where I get up, wander into P’s study, say ‘I’m just going for a walk’, and the bit where he says ‘in this weather? At this time of night? Are you mad?’ and the bit where my favoured daily walk is badly lit at night and it’s not unknown for both women and men to be attacked there, in daylight as well as after dark, and imagine I have gone for a walk … Except that walking in suburbia, and that’s small-town, edge of town, suburbia rather than Metroland, is very different to rural walking, or grand walking. I could go on …

So, I suppose I’m wondering where the women walkers and diarists are … and here I specifically mean walkers rather than riders or any other form of traveller. The Wife of Bath and the Prioress had their ponies, Dervla Murphy travelled by horse and by bicycle, Christina Dodwell travelled by canoe, Robyn Davidson by camel … I could go on and on and on … but I cannot think of a single example of a woman who walks as much to meditate as to explore; or do they not write it down? Or do publishers prefer them to be engaged in an epic struggle with an external mode of transport?

Clearly, there are also certain tropes and rhetorical devices of travel writing at play here. Equally clearly, something is missing …

Addendum: I tried to illustrate this post but when I googled 'woman walking', the images were almost invariably sexualised images of women in landscapes, the emphasis on clothes and skin rather than walking. To portray a woman 'walking', one opts either for an old woman hobbling along, a woman in a non-European country preferably leading a cow or goat, or a 'businesswoman' striding along in heels that would cripple me if I tried to stride in them. 

Happy second birthday to Paper Knife!

Two years ago, I sat down to write a post about the BBC’s new adaptation of M.R. James’ ‘Oh Whistle And I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, or rather, the non-adaptation. Two years on, my Christmas presents included the BFI boxed set of M.R. James adaptations, with the 2010 version as an extra. Somehow, this blog never strays too far from James.

But along the way I’ve managed posts on a number of other topics, including a mammoth reading of the shortlisted books for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award, all rolled together in The Shortlist Project, which now finds itself in turn on the nomination longlist for the BSFA Award for Non-fiction. I’m now waiting to see if it gathers enough nominations to make the shortlist. My fingernails are somewhat nibbled.

And so Paper Knife begins its third year of activity. I’ve no idea where it will be by 28th December 2013 but I’m looking forward to finding out.

Walking with Tolkien and Macfarlane

This will be almost the last Tolkien-related post for a while, for which I am sure we are all grateful. However, in amidst all the hoo-ha about The Hobbit, I wanted to say a little something about Smith of Wootton Major, my favourite story by Tolkien. It was originally published as a tiny hardback, almost a board book, which turned up in my classroom library when I was ten or eleven, and which fascinated me, for its size and for the Pauline Diana Baynes illustrations, I think, rather than for the story, which I did not especially remember. It was only some years later, when my interest in Tolkien was already well alight, that I rediscovered the story, made the connection, and finally got my own copy of the little hardback. I reread it over Christmas, in the midst of the new Tolkienfest, and though it has perhaps lost some of the charm it had when I was younger, or more accurately, I am older, more critical and probably more cynical too, I still rather like it.

 

The setting is quasi-medieval, with a dash of Norse saga. The village of Wootton Major (which is, of course, bigger than Wootton Minor) is famous for its craft workers, in particular, its cooking. There is a Kitchen which belongs to the Village Council, and the Master Cook is an important personage within the village. His House and the Kitchen are adjacent to the Great Hall, used by the village for its meetings and celebrations, for which the Master Cook caters.

Doubtless, William Morris would have approved of Wootton Major. Quite apart from its seeming to be driven by an annual round of festivals, it is in every way the perfect medieval fantasy. With a Village Council to keep it running smoothly and no visible feudal lord, Wootton Major’s workers are able to get on with being good at what they do. There is commerce, clearly; Smith, who is at the heart of this story, travels regularly to buy raw materials, and the finished goods go somewhere other than the village, but the ugly details of capitalism are not foregrounded. Instead, everyone is happy and well-fed, warm and well-clothed, not least because this is an allegory rather than an attempt at fantasy realism. The emphasis on artisanship and creativity are clear indicators that we are in familiar Tolkien territory, theorising about the nature, significance and formation of fairy stories. As ever, art and good workmanship go hand in hand.

We first meet the Smith of the title when he is a child, an attendee at the  Twenty-Four Feast, a festival which comes about only once every twenty-four years, to which twenty-four children are invited, and which is marked by the creation of a Great Cake, the production of which is considered to be the Master Cook’s finest moment. At the story’s opening, the village is in turmoil, first because the Master Cook had gone off for a holiday, something that had never happened before, and then because he had brought home an apprentice from outside the village. Not of course that there is anything wrong with the Cook having an apprentice, or with his coming from outside the village, but one immediately scents village disapproval. When, a few years later, the Master Cook suddenly retires and leaves, it does not occur to the village to appoint Alf, the apprentice, to the post of Master Cook. Instead, they appoint a mediocre local man, whom Alf assists, and indeed does most of the work for.

Nokes’ lack of imagination is specifically reflected in his Great Cake: ‘Fairies and sweets were two of the very few notions he had about the tastes of children. Fairies he thought one grew out of; but of sweets he remained very fond’. And so, Alf makes a cake with delicate mountain peaks, and a delicate fairy queen  on a pinnacle, and Nokes takes the credit. In the cake are twenty-four little trinkets, but also a mysterious silver star that Nokes found in an old box. Alf identifies it as a ‘fay-star’ and disapproves strongly of Nokes’s dismissal of fairy things but approves putting the star into the cake.

The star is swallowed by a small boy, unaware of what has happened, but on his tenth birthday something happens:

He looked out of the window, and the world seemed quiet and expectant. A little breeze, cool and fragrant, stirred the waking trees. Then the dawn came, and far away he heard the dawn-song of the birds beginning, growing as it came towards him, until it rushed over him, filling all the land round the house, and passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world.

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with how this sort of thing works that Smithson, later Smith, becomes a famous worker of metal. The goods he makes, although primarily ‘plain and useful’, are ‘strong and lasting, but they also had a grace about them, being shapely in their kinds, good to handle and to look at’. Pure William Morris, though unlike Morris, Smith doesn’t have a factory behind him.

But Smith is not simply a skilled and inspired worker of metal. ‘For Smith became acquainted with Faery, and some regions of it he knew as well as any mortal can: though since too many had become like Nokes, he spoke of this to few people, except his wife and his children.’

And thus we reach the section of the story that currently interests me most, not for what now seems like rather heavy-handed allegorising of the creative process (although Tolkien suggested that this was not intended to be an allegory) but for the fact of the journeys themselves, the explorations of this mysterious country of Faery to which Smith has access.

For Christmas, I received a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s much-acclaimed The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Macfarlane’s intention is to explore the ancient tracks that cross the British landscape and the surrounding seas, and establish a connection with the world beyond Britain. It’s a fascinating enterprise and Macfarlane writes well. One might, I suppose, seek to invoke the word ‘psychogeography’ but if one does, one needs to reach for a meaning other than Iain Sinclair inscribing increasingly frivolous lines across London and south-east England. One might think of Alfred Watkins’ work on ley lines, and his perception of them as marked tracks across the landscape rather than their subsequent reinvention as lines of mystical energy. One might think of Watkins as an artisanal mapper of trackways and it’s possible to think of Macfarlane in the same way, although he does also have a taste for the mystical, which is more pronounced in this book, perhaps, than The Wild Places, to which it forms a loose, a very loose, sequel. But having said that, Macfarlane seems to know when to pull back from the absurd while maintaining a sense of wonder about the world.

Smith, we are told, travels under the aegis of the fay-star, and ‘was as safe as a mortal can be in that perilous country’. He is favoured, if you like, but after several strange encounters, ‘he understood that the marvels of Faery cannot be approached without danger’. Nonetheless, ‘his desire was still stronger to go deep into the land’. On the surface, this seems quite reasonable and yet I confess to a sense of unease when confronted with this deliberate attempt to penetrate all the mysteries of Faery. Of course, one might argue that it is the work of the artist to keep going despite obstacles and obstructions but I can’t help thinking there is an art, too, in knowing when not to go on, and this is something that Smith, for all his gentle and unassuming ways, does not grasp. He is rebuked by the young maiden with whom he dances – we already know her to be the Faery Queen but he will recognise her only years later when summoned to the Queen’s presence.

She wore no crown and had no throne. She stood there in her majesty and her glory, and all about her was a great host shimmering and glittering like the stars above; but she was taller than the points of their great spears, and upon her head there burned a white flame.

She is as far as can possibly be from the doll on the Great Cake, but dismisses this as being better than ‘no memory of Faery at all’. Though in truth, I see Tolkien’s Faery Queen as being closer to the Catholic perception of Mary as Queen of Heaven. After this final meeting, having achieved his heart’s desire, ‘he knew that his way now led back to bereavement’. In fact, although Smith will travel no more to Faery, we are led to understand that his desire to create will continue to be satisfied with hammer and tongs, the understanding being that he has seen his fill and can now distil the life of experience.

And yet, this seems to me to contradict the philosophy at work in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In LOTR Frodo recalls how Bilbo used to say ‘that there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”’ These are journeys fashioned by chance and happenstance but Smith, for all that he is a learner and explorer, is driven by a goal, to penetrate as far into the land of Faery as he can, and he assumes this as by right.

Macfarlane also has a goal of sorts, as expressed in his Author’s Note, ‘ of walking a thousand miles or more along old ways in search of a route into the past, only to find myself delivered again and again to the contemporary’. ‘Delivered’, passive, rather like a parcel, subject to the whims of others. Macfarlane goes on to describe his book as being ‘about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move’. There is in turn a subtle distinction, I think, between ‘reconnoitre’ and ‘explore’, a hesitancy that Smith’s perambulations through Faery seem to lack. Macfarlane’s landscapes are real rather than allegorical but it occurred to me as I read on that his landscapes are as inaccessible to me as are the landscapes of Smith’s Faery. I can trace his perambulations much as Macfarlane himself is inspired by the journeys made by the poet, Edward Thomas, but does this bring me any closer to what Macfarlane himself is doing?

And the answer is ‘no’, but it is a complicated no. I can follow Macfarlane’s walks in the belief that this somehow enriches and transforms me by proxy, but it would be a mistaken belief and a foolish enterprise. Alternatively, I can be inspired to walk in my own way, shaped by what I encounter, but to do that I must needs put down Macfarlane’s book and walk away from it, finding my own path. I can follow hints to an extent, maybe sampling some of the texts he’s read over the years (and it turns out that I have been familiar with a number of them over many years) but my discovery must be mine. And it is a surprisingly vague and unmappable enterprise.

But the distinction between Smith and Macfarlane is, I think, an assumption on Smith’s part, or Tolkien’s, that walking is a mapping, a marking out of territory, whereas Macfarlane sees it as a rediscovery of the mappings of others.

Which is where I pause for now, but I anticipate returning to Macfarlane in 2013.

The Hobbit, or Madly in All Directions

The trouble with the internet is that it’s all too easy to feel you’ve been to see a film even before you set foot in the cinema. Having spent the last week or so bombarded with information and opinions about The Hobbit pt. 1, it was almost an anti-climax to be settled in a seat at the local cinema, waiting for the film to begin.

And before you ask, there will be no discussions of cinematic technicalities. I saw the film in 2D on the poky second screen at my local cinema, because that was what was available. The cinema was less than half-full and the proprietors presumably thought that The Life of Pi would be more popular (tigers, oh my!). I am not as upset about this as you might suppose. I wear glasses because, among other things, I suffer from a marked lack of depth perception, and I find that my prescription glasses and 3D specs don’t play nicely together. Perhaps Erebor or the goblins’ stronghold would have been more exciting in 3D but I was quite happy to sacrifice the full experience if it meant I didn’t feel queasy and vertiginous throughout the film. (The Mines of Moria in 2D were quite bad enough, thank you.) On the other hand, I’d have liked to have seen it on a bigger screen.

However, because it is, as we know, a long film, my local cinema thoughtfully provided a short intermission part way through. It felt like going back fifty years in time though they mercifully no longer play the National Anthem at the end of the film and expect everyone to stand (and you think I’m joking, don’t you? I’m not).

So, full water bottle – check; iron rations – check. Are we sitting comfortably? We should be for we will be undeniably sitting here for some time. Cue music, roll credits, and it’s time for Back to Middle Earth I The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

1.      The Film of the Book

The question, I suppose, is what should I expect of a film that is an adaptation of the first third of an average-sized book for children, and that clocks in at ten minutes shy of three hours. I was less bored in the first hour than a lot of people seem to have been but the film undeniably picked up once Bilbo finally raced out of his front door, waving the dwarves’ contract in his hand. Not quite how it happened in the novel, as I recall, when Bilbo had to be chivvied away from the breakfast table by Gandalf, hence his hatless and pocket-hankerchiefless condition, but then, this is certainly not the film of the book. In fact, having rewatched Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring last night, I was struck by how similar in many ways the two films are in their construction.

In each case, a settled and affluent hobbit is suddenly propelled out of a comfortable existence by external forces, in both cases orchestrated by Gandalf the Grey. In Lord of the Rings, of course, the Ring itself is another external factor, but in The Hobbit, at any rate in the film, Gandalf’s twin motives in involving Bilbo appear to be a conviction that Bilbo is too settled (great emphasis is laid on his being the son of Belladonna Took, a most redoubtable hobbit, coupled with Gandalf’s distaste for Bilbo’s concern for doilies and crockery), and the need to find a species with which Smaug is unfamiliar, thus  further emphasising the idea of hobbits as creatures out of myth and legend, who’ve effectively vanished out of history. That was not, I think, present in the book, but Jackson, as many commentators have noted, is busy doing infill for Lord of the Rings.

In each case, too, there is a sense of the ‘hero’ being ineffectual when it comes to surviving beyond the borders of the Shire. In the novel of Lord of the Rings, Frodo seems incapable of commanding his group of hobbits on the journey to Buckland and then on to the Prancing Pony at Bree, although he is at least able to keep moving; in the film he seems to be remarkably passive, inclined to put on the ring at every available opportunity and place himself in harm’s way. Bilbo, by comparison, is cheerfully open about his incompetence throughout Hobbit 1, and redeems himself in the eyes of Thorin through an act of physical bravery, whereas in the novel, although he was aware of his physical shortcomings, he was able to counter this through his cunning and a facility with words. That ability is only intermittently on show in Hobbit 1, most notably in Riddles in the Dark, the famous encounter with Gollum, and first, in the encounter with the trolls, except that it is left to Gandalf to split the rock and send in light rather than Bilbo’s words keeping the trolls busy until daybreak, as though Bilbo can’t quite be trusted to perform this feat alone. And of course, he can’t be. The film’s arc demands that he gradually redeem himself in the eyes of the dwarves; to do too much too soon would be to topple the story’s tower of tropes before its time. Instead, Bilbo has to go to Thorin’s aid and kill a goblin before he is worthy of notice. There is a not-fully-articulated argument going on here about the value of brains over brawn.

2.     Rereading The Hobbit

I thought, given I couldn’t remember when I last read it, that I should refresh my memory of The Hobbit before seeing the film. And that in itself is suggestive. As a teenager I read and reread Lord of the Rings to the point where I can no longer read it at all because I still remember most of it too clearly. I probably haven’t read it in its entirety for something like thirty years. I was never particularly enamoured of the geneaologies when I was young and now, even if I were to reread The Silmarillion I could never recapture the intense concentration of the teenage reader, who could have absorbed and retained all this material if she’d so desired. And yet, although I was delighted to discover that Lord of the Rings was about hobbits, I rarely reread The Hobbit. It remained vague in my mind– a dark place, filled with woods, trolls, heavily bearded men, dwarves and, best of all, a dragon.

Coming back to it, I enjoyed it a lot more than I’d expected to, though this reading is fuelled by academic interest rather than simple pleasure. In particular, many of Tolkien’s sources are clear to me in a way they were not to my younger self. Beorn, the bear-man, the shape-shifter, is familiar to me now as a figure in Norse sagas. The dwarves are more problematic, part Nibelungen, part Disney, but I can understand more clearly why I find them so difficult. Other sources are more elusive. I knew George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin when I was a child, thanks to readings on tv, but if I made a connection between it and The Hobbit at the time, I must have forgotten it over the years. Yet, the connection is quite clear – in MacDonald’s story, the goblins live under the mountain. They hate humans, from whom they are descended, and are planning a war on them. Curdie, a miner’s son, rescues Princess Irene when she is captured by goblins, and the two of them set out to thwart the goblins’ plan, assisted by Irene’s great-great-grandmother, an ethereal presence in the novel.

Familiar too, and I’d genuinely not noticed this before, is the set-up of Lake-town, which reminds me so much of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, published in 1926. I’m thinking here not of the strange interweavings of human and faery life but of the venality of the men who run Lake-town.[1] Indeed, the novel of The Hobbit is suffused with commercial calculation, some of which surfaces in the film. If Smaug is dead, who does his hoard belong to? There are many groups interested in it, and this much is made plain in the film. Peter Jackson makes rather more play of the irony in the fact that the dwarves, the group best known for their interest in gold, are the ones who seek a home as well, and we are prompted to believe their motives are, mostly, pure. Whether this will change in Hobbits 2 and 3 remains to be seen. The novel is, I think, more ambiguous about this matter. There is a greater sense of confusion about motives, but also, the traffic between different groups is more confused. The relationship between elves and men is built on commerce, the purchase of alcohol and, we guess, other things as well. The elves of Mirkwood are rather more hard-headed than many of those we will later encounter in Lord of the Rings. Yes, they love singing and song-making, and Bilbo responds to this, but they seem more robust, more tangible, than the ethereal beauties of Lothlorien and Rivendell.

At the same time, there is a strong sense of The Wind in the Willows about this story. Bilbo’s snugly appointed hobbit hole is reminiscent of Rat’s riverside abode while the dwarves’ perception of their home underground reminds me strongly of Badger’s home, reaching back into the hillside, down through history. A certain element of the obsession with food and feasting can, I think, be traced back to this book as well.

3.     Trouble with Dwarves

One of the mildly amusing running jokes throughout Hobbit 1 was Gandalf counting up the number of dwarves every time they got themselves out of trouble, making him not so much a wizard as a slightly harassed schoolteacher trying to keep track of his pupils on a school trip. Add that to the recent internet ‘hobbit dwarves flowchart’ and it’s clear there are too many dwarves.

If anything, the film is easier than the novel, given that most of the dwarves have distinctive visual quirks, generally in the department of facial hair. In the novel few of the dwarves, other than Thorin, Balin and, because of his size and the eating jokes, Bombur, emerged as distinctive personalities. As a child I never did sort them out. To judge from the rhyming pairs of names (many of them pulled from Norse saga), but the odd number of dwarves, with Bombur almost invariably the last name, my guess is that Tolkien supposed that children would enjoy chanting the lists: ‘… and Bombur!’. Possibly I was not the child for whom this was intended.

And yet this points to a deeper problem with the dwarves, one that neither Jackson nor Tolkien himself seems able to properly address. Are the dwarves to be taken seriously, or are they intended simply to be comical? Clearly, the back story is entirely serious. The dwarves are a displaced people who want their ancestral home back. In part their love of gold, the attendant greed and desire for more, have proved their downfall in that the presence of too much gold attracted Smaug in the first place. But the dwarves are dispersed in a way that no other group is, in either novel or Hobbit 1. The Men of Dale move down to Lake-Town, the elves always retreat to the forest, and hobbits live quietly, unobserved, in the idyll of the Shire. But always they are in groups. It is the dwarves who seem to lose contact with one another all too easily.

And yet Tolkien frequently portrays the dwarves simply as a troupe of Disney characters, concerned with eating, drinking and generally messing about; this is a group that apparently doesn’t know how to conduct itself in the wilderness whereas Bilbo, used to being unobtrusive, knows how to avoid attracting too much attention to himself.

Jackson takes his cue from Tolkien with both hands, so we have extended sequences of bad table manners, jokes involving flatulence and belching and, dare one say it, a general sense of reluctance to engage with threats if they can send in the burglar first. It might almost be cowardice, but dwarves are brave, etc. It is a far cry from Lord of the Rings where, although Jackson had (lack of) height jokes, dwarf-tossing jokes and so on, Gimli was also the embodiment of courage, bravery, ferocity and, finally, loyalty to his friends. Perhaps the trajectory that Jackson plans to follow is one of a people finding self-respect again (though it must be noted that Gimli’s drinking manners remain a little messy; it must be all that facial hair).

4.     For Children or Adults?

To go back to Tolkien’s dwarves, his uncertainty as to what to do with them seems to me to suggest a deeper unease as to what The Hobbit is supposed to be: children’s story or something else. The tone veers from rather patronising Victorian children’s story to medieval romance to Norse saga and back again. Given that Tolkien was already an inveterate scribbler of stories for his children (see, for example, The Father Christmas Letters) and one has the sense that his first intention was to write something else for his children. But clearly, Tolkien got sidetracked somewhere along the way. We move from an opening assuring us that the hobbit hole was not a nasty hole (foreshadowing the abode of Gollum, perhaps) to a point where Bilbo stands at the deathbed of Thorin Oakenshield, a sequence that seems to come from a completely different story, although soon enough Tolkien pulls us back, with a ‘whether you believe it or not’.

This uncertainty seems to persist in Jackson’s film. Plate-juggling and snot jokes are interspersed with wargs, fight scenes with goblins, wargs, attack bunnies and more wargs, oh, and elves. It’s all very decorative but too often it feels like fan service for those who loved the original franchise. The battle scenes in the goblin stronghold are preposterous and at times horribly jokey considering they’re mostly about slaughter. They may be bad guys but this film frequently holds life very cheap, especially if you’re a goblin. One detects a distinct whiff of that nineteenth-century fear of the teeming masses, faceless, endlessly replaceable, running out of control at the drop of a hat, needing to be cut down to size..

But whereas Tolkien intermittently finds a sense of grandeur, mostly at the points when the story reaches back to the Norse stories, whenever the action flags for Jackson he gleefully reaches for the CGI and we have another battle.

However, there is one point where Tolkien and Jackson come together.

5.     Riddles in the Dark

In narrative terms, the encounter between Bilbo and Gollum is a disgression from the main action, namely finding the dwarves. Bilbo has managed to conceal himself in the tunnels of the underground fortress, and is sneaking around, trying to figure out how to rescue the dwarves, when he finds the ring and meets Gollum. When he discovers the ring’s ability to render him invisible, he will use it to rescue the dwarves, but at this point no one knows of the ring’s deeper significance. Viewers of the film cannot escape the significance of Bilbo’s finding the ring; Jackson’s challenge then is to make the encounter seem as fresh and new as it would have been for a first reader of The Hobbit. Rather as I felt the first sight of the Black Riders in LOTR 1 and the encounter at the ford were test pieces for Jackson’s ability to get LOTR onto the screen in a form I recognised (though this was balanced by the embarrassing failures of the Nazgul and the Ents), Riddles in the Dark would provide some sort of measure of the quality of The Hobbit.

Riddles are an intrinsic part of Anglo-Saxon literature. The asking and solving of riddles is akin to sacred ritual, and the riddle-telling process is taken very seriously by both Bilbo and Gollum. You note how familiar they both are with the process, the ease with which they solve the first riddles, and how even when Bilbo wonders aloud, ‘what have I got in my pocket’, which is not a riddle at all, Gollum is nonetheless bound by the rules of riddle-telling to honour the question.

In the novel, it’s a beautifully constructed sequence —the dank setting, the two riddlers manoeuvring in the darkness, physically and verbally, Bilbo not sure where Gollum is, the play with words as intensely anxious as the need to know where the creature is. Thankfully Jackson stays very close to the original, and very close to the actors. No huge vistas here, just two incredibly skilful actors doing their jobs as well as possible. While the rest of the film is undoubtedly entertaining, this sequence is the moment at which the adaptation is most faithful to the book while simultaneously bringing out the drama of the story without fiddling around with it unnecessarily.

  

6.     You Want Back Story With That?

Hobbit 1 (and I must stop thinking of it as Lord of the Rings: The Phantom Menace) covers the first 121 pages of a 317-page novel, and draws to a close with Thorin acknowledging that Bilbo the Burglar might be a decent sort of chap after all, something he will not do for another 200 pages in the novel. As noted, it’s a three-hour film, more or less, and there are three of them. While smearing the story of The Hobbit across three films, like butter spread too thinly on bread, Jackson is also attempting to bring together the Lord of the Rings back story and show how the situation as it pertains at the beginning of the novel came into being. It’s an interesting idea but oh, I don’t know … . It seems to me more as though Jackson can’t quite bear to let go of Middle Earth and came up with this merry wheeze to keep things going. In fairness, I doubt that this was Jackson’s intention but there is an element of fan service about the whole thing, fan service to Jackson himself. Whereas in the three Lord of the Rings films, the cutting between storylines revealed the simultaneity of the different stories in a way that is often hard to distinguish in the novels, in Hobbit 1, the drawing together of such very disparate threads seems to generate more confusion than it dispels. Perhaps it will make more sense in subsequent films but too often I felt Hobbit 1 was struggling to keep those elements in play.

7.     An Ending of Sorts

So, I enjoyed seeing the film, and I’m looking forward to the next one when it eventually shows up, but whether it is The Hobbit is another issue altogether. Not that I think it particularly matters, to be honest. Jackson’s Hobbit was always going to be different from Tolkien’s Hobbit; the interest lies in how different.

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[1] Mirrlees and Tolkien lived for a number of years within a brisk fifteen-minute walk of one another’s houses in Oxford; I have never been able to find out if they knew one another, though I’ve always suspected they didn’t. On the other hand, I would be astonished if Tolkien did not know Lud-in-the-Mist. I in turn frequently passed Tolkien’s house when I was a child, without realising it. And I only found that Hope Mirrlees lived in Oxford when I read her death notice in the local paper. It was years later that I found she too lived fairly close to my family’s house.

The Weird – Mimic – Donald A Wollheim

“It is a curious fact of nature that that which is in plain view is oft best hidden.”

Edgar Allan Poe knew this well, as “The Purloined Letter” demonstrates. The thief hides his stolen letter in the most obvious place – the letter rack – but he does something else which is often overlooked in recalling the story– he camouflages the letter. However, the thief’s attempt at misdirection is, like the Prefect’s search, a little too thorough, and this is what enables C. Auguste Dupin to identify and recover the letter.

There is a certain flavour of the overly-thorough-attention to detail in the recounting of Donald A. Wollheim’s ‘Mimic’ (1942). The story’s narrator works as an assistant to a museum curator, specialising in insects and much of his narrative is devoted to describing the many ways in which insects disguise themselves. ‘There is a moth […] that looks like a wasp. […] It knows somehow that it is helpless and that it can survive only by pretending to be as deadly to other insects as wasps are” (281).

In particular, the narrator is keen to talk about army ants, those ferocious predators who travel “in huge columns of thousands and hundreds and thousands” (281). Everything is afraid of army ants because of their sheer relentlessness but, the narrator tells us, other things travel in those columns, in disguise, relying on mimicry to bring them the illicit protection of the ants’ superior strength.

It would be a poor reader who didn’t realise that they were being directed to make a connection between the narrator’s interest in insects and his description of the man in black he remembers from childhood, “always dressed in a long, black cloak that came down to his ankles, and […] a wide-brimmed hat down far over his face” (280). Like a beetle, one might think. There is that same sense of sheathed uniformity, of being swathed in shiny chitin. It may also be, as the narrator suggests, sheer luck that he happens to be in the street as the story proper finally begins to unfold, as the janitor rushes into the street, calling for help, but it’s difficult not to think of it as an authorial convenience. To my mind, Wollheim is working hard to ensure that the reader sees a certain picture. And yet, if we are thinking about mimicry, isn’t this what any accomplished mimic would be doing – firmly misdirecting the gaze.

In the story, the man in black has been found dead, but as becomes apparent he is not entirely what he seems to be. “For several instants we saw nothing amiss and then gradually – horribly – we became aware of some things that were wrong” (282). The man in black is, it would seem, some sort of enormous insect that has learned how to co-exist alongside humans in the city, mimicking human appearance and, to some extent, human behaviour too. Even then, it is still not quite what it seems, being female rather than the male it presents itself as being.

The story has a number of weaknesses, not the least of which is the narrative psychology that accounts for the ‘man in black’s reaction to women: the narrator speculates that the creature was afraid of women because they notice men, and look more closely. I had assumed, once I had realised what was happening, that the ‘male’ is afraid of the female because of some behavioural quirk – maybe she eats him after mating? – but Wollheim goes with “feminine jealousy”. Not that this accounts, either, for the “sharp, round hole newly pierced in his chest just above the arms, still oozing a watery liquid” (282). Perhaps one should look to events at the end of the story for a clue to the perpetrator’s identity, but no proper answers are offered, even then.

Something that does work, and works well, is something the story leaves unsaid. As the offspring of the mysterious man-beetle, released from their confinement in a metal box, escape from the room, the narrator looks out of the window to follow their flight, and sees something else lurking in disguise on a nearby rooftop. His observation transforms the urban scene into a landscape of terrifying potential. Nothing can be relied on to actually be what it appears to be. As the narrator puts it, “Nature practices deceptions in every angle. Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely” (283). At a stroke, the city, a civilised place, the antithesis of the wild countryside, becomes a place in which the natural world is once again a threat to humanity.

If, as has been suggested at various times, the Weird is a product of modernism, something most at home in the urban landscape, then this story fits right in. It is difficult not to be haunted by the last few paragraphs of the story. In particular, no journey through the back streets of a big city can ever be the same again. In common with Leiber’s “The Smoke Ghost”, no train journey can be entirely free of fear.

And yet, let us back up and think about this story again, starting with the title. I fear my postcolonial training got the better of me when the title immediately made me think of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and also Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Of Mimicry and Men”. Naipaul and Bhabha are talking in their various ways about cultural displacement and a discourse of emigration, settlement, adjustment, fitting in – but fitting in in such a way as to be only a little different; in Naipaul’s case, his narrator actively exploits the way in which women find him exotically different while striving at the same time to fit in as much as possible. Bhabha talks in terms of “colonial mimicry” as the “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”.

It’s a long way from a Wollheim short story, perhaps, but I was also struck by a line early in the story, when the narrator describes the man in the black cloak: “He was a sight from some weird story out of the old lands” (280). What old lands? “Mimic” is set in New York, gateway to the USA for emigrants from Europe, risking all in the hope of passing inspection at Ellis Island and settling down to make a new life in the Land of the Free. Returning to the narrator’s comment that “Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely”, one is obliged to wonder what is in fact happening here, for surely, the point is that the man-beetle no longer fits in, is no longer just sufficiently different to fit in. We might recall that as a child the narrator jeered at him because of his fear of women but we might always note that the man-beetle has never quite fitted in. He is already a little too old-fashioned; he belongs elsewhere but not in a way that’s entirely comfortable.

It’s tempting to speculate as to what is going on. Did the need to remain camouflaged require the man-beetle to travel with the other emigrants as they left Europe rather than stay behind and become conspicuous. But what about the rate of evolutionary change? How long does it take for the man-beetle to adapt? Longer, apparently, than the people. They have become assimilated, changed their appearance at least, become recognisably Other, whereas the man-beetle has not been able to keep up with the pace of change and is increasingly unable to conceal itself among humans. Or rather, it can no longer mimic the people amongst whom it once lived and is now classified by others as a creature that lives at the margins of society rather than being part of society. Its mimicry no longer properly works and thus it is increasingly vulnerable to other predators. There is, of course, also a hint that America’s modernity is more than it can cope with. It has become what Bhabha would call a ‘partial presence’, transformed almost inadvertently by the fact that natural adaptation doesn’t seem to move as fast as cultural adaptation. Its presence is revealed by its failure to respond to changes.

Bhabha quoted a passage from Lacan as an epigraph to his essay: “The effect of mimicry is camouflage … It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly lie the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare”. And this, perhaps, is at the heart of the man-beetle’s situation. Its camouflage is so perfect it can work only for a brief moment of time before it is detected. In its perfection is its downfall.

Wollheim clearly presents his story as a narrative about successful mimicry, but the point is that this success is now and must inevitably be historic. The mimicry has been detected, by what we can never be sure, because it is insufficiently mottled. The horror and the weirdness remain in that the reader is still left not knowing what else might be lurking in the city, but there is an implicit reassurance that, given time, each instance of mimicry will be identified because of its perfection. At the heart of this story is not success but failure. 

On the first day of Christmas …

No, I’m not actually sitting at my computer on Christmas Day; I am downstairs, reading. I’ve no idea what I’m reading as I don’t yet know what books I’ve been given for Christmas. But yes, I’m pretty sure I’ll be given books, and you’ll probably hear about them in due course.

However, because I’m old-fashioned, I like the idea of twelve blog posts for the Twelve Days of Christmas, so I’ve scheduled a few posts for while I’m mostly away from my desk.

Today’s post consists of links to things I’ve found interesting lately, some of which may suit the festive season.

·        Writ Small – Naomi Stead (architecture and children’s literature)

“Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams.” Three imaginings of the architecture of fairy stories:

·        Fairy Tale Architecture: Snowflake

·        Fairy Tale Architecture: The Little Match Girl

·        Fairy Tale Architecture: Monkey King

And a fairy-tale landscape of a different sort. A remnant of primeval forest, Białowieża Forest, on the borders of Poland and Belarus, complete with European bison (or wisent, which is your word for today).

I used to be one of those people who read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising every Christmas. The habit lapsed after a while but when I tried to revive it a couple of years ago, I found I could no longer find the same pleasure in the story. I had finally moved on to other things. However, Cooper is still an interesting writer and Susan Cooper: A Life In Writing is worth reading.

The Dark is Rising is notable for snow, lots of it. As I write this, the aprés-apocalypse seems to consist of rain, lots and lots of rain, and flooding. To redress the balance, snow drawings (via P.D. Smith, whose latest book, City,is brilliant).

Also, from Letterology, Yule type and Edward Bawden’s Christmas catalogues for Fortnum and Mason.

And that’s probably enough Crimble goodness for one day. 

The Shortlist Project is on the BSFA Awards longlist

I’m very excited to see that The Shortlist Project, in which I discussed the Arthur C Clarke Award and BSFA Award shortlists, book by book, with a few extras thrown in, is on the longlist for the 2012 BSFA Award for non-fiction.

Now to wait a nervous month to see if it makes the shortlist, and if it does, a much longer wait until Easter.

(Note: you do need to be a member of the BSFA in order to nominate for the awards.)