Fantasy

Gary Gygax: An Appreciation

You may have heard that E. Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, lost his final saving throw with the great dungeon master in the sky this morning.

Perhaps I should have called this post “Dungeons & Dragons: An Appreciation,” since I really didn’t know Gary Gygax from Elric of Melniboné. I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak or saw his picture until this afternoon. I may have read an interview or two with him over the years, but they certainly didn’t make any lasting impression.

But to me, Gary Gygax was not primarily the inventor of a popular role-playing game; he was an unparalleled author of fantasy. Gary Gygax wrote three volumes that were highly influential to me as a kid. I speak of the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. I present them below in the editions that will forever be branded in my memory:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual

My experiences as a player of Dungeons & Dragons have generally been pretty miserable. I played my first game at perhaps the age of eight, with my brother as dungeon master and my older sister serving as co-adventurer. I’m guessing this was 1979, because the module we were playing, In Search of the Unknown, was published that year. I believe we were playing the Basic rules, using the set pictured below. (Gawd, do these pictures bring back memories…)

Basic Dungeons & Dragons set

We made an awful team. My sister and I spent a couple of hours building our characters — I was a dwarf, if I remember correctly — and got into a horrific argument about how we should order our party for the inevitable foray into the dungeon. Tears and screaming ensued. (Hey, I was eight.) Finally, we decided to just put aside our differences in the interest of pursuing adventure, but the adventure proved to be short-lived. We found ourselves shooting arrows at a band of ravenous giant centipedes, which we pictured as these enormous Dune-sized worms with enormous jaws and enormous sharp teeth. Then my brother cheerfully informed us that these giant centipedes were only about a foot long, at which point the game dissolved into a fit of giggles and never resumed.

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My Introduction to the Reissue of Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Alone”

Late last year, I was asked to write the introduction to Overlook Press’ new edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, last novel of the so-called Gormenghast Trilogy. Considering that the first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, had introductions written by Anthony Burgess and Tad Williams, respectively, I felt pretty honored to get the invitation.

Today I’ve received word that the books have actually come off the press and should appear in bookstores all across the U.S. soon. So, with the permission of Overlook Press, I’ve posted the introduction in its entirety below. After you’re done, go visit the Overlook Press web page for the book, and pick up a copy from Amazon. (Update 5/29/08: And also visit the Mervyn Peake blog, run by his son Sebastian. Sebastian was nice enough to write about this introduction there.)

Cover of the Overlook Press edition of 'Titus Alone'Now here’s the introduction. You may notice that I’ve borrowed liberally from my blog entry about Titus Alone posted over a year ago. Page numbers refer to my Vintage Press UK edition of Titus Alone (because I don’t actually have the Overlook Press edition in my hands yet).

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Did Mervyn Peake go mad writing Titus Alone, or does Titus Alone merely predict his madness? Is it a work of dystopian science fiction, or a work of psychological symbolism? Is the book a terse masterpiece, or is it just the half-formed ravings of a crumbling mind?

What the heck is this book you’re holding?

Let’s start with the facts. Mervyn Peake was a noted artist and illustrator of children’s books who spent his formative years in China. He published the novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) to excellent reviews, though not resounding commercial success. After the failure of his play The Wit to Woo (1957), Peake suffered a nervous breakdown. Parkinson’s disease, electroshock therapy, and brain surgery would follow over the next decade. Peake spent his last years in institutions, finally passing away in November of 1968. His works would dip briefly into obscurity and academic disfavor — Kingsley Amis once famously dismissed him as “a bad fantasy writer of maverick status” — before enjoying a critical and commercial renaissance that continues to this day.

Eyre & Spottiswoode originally published Titus Alone in 1959, and the book has been the target of critical dissatisfaction ever since. It’s barely half the size of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, leading some to conclude that Peake was only half-done with it. Given Peake’s mental state at the time of publication, others have assumed that the author was in no condition to write a novel. Regardless of the reason, Titus Alone is generally considered the least of the three Gormenghast books.

Why the fuss? Well, there’s no delicate way to put it: this book is bizarre. Even by the standards of the previous Gormenghast novels (which aren’t exactly models of straightforward narrative), Titus Alone stands — well, it stands alone. Titus spends the entire book wandering through a sparsely described dream world pursued by two silent, faceless policemen. He journeys through an underground realm filled with derelicts and runaways. There’s a beggar who eats money, and a remote-controlled glass spy globe. One of the main characters spends a good deal of the book with an ape on his shoulder.

In the last words of Gormenghast, Peake writes that “Titus rode out of his world.” Who would have imagined that Peake meant it literally? Titus Groan and Gormenghast take place in some undefined location in what seems to be a pre-Industrial setting. But in Titus Alone, there are flying mechanical needles, death rays, and a factory filled with mysterious bad smells. Muzzlehatch drives a car, Cheeta rides in a helicopter, and Cheeta’s scientist father talks to his subordinates through a videoconferencing system. Crabcalf informs us that someone or something named “Molusk” has recently circled the moon. (A successor to Sputnik?) All this technology implies that the novel takes place in the near future, yet nobody Titus encounters has heard of Gormenghast. Gormenghast, a castle so enormous that you can wander its rooftops for days without seeing the end of it.

But the setting isn’t the only incongruity between Titus Alone and its predecessors. The books have vast differences in style and tone as well. Peake ambles through Titus Groan and Gormenghast with page after page of (glorious, lyrical) exposition; but in Titus Alone, he takes the linguistic express route, zipping through descriptions of even central characters like Cheeta and Muzzlehatch in a mere sentence or two. The first two books make only the vaguest mentions of a higher power; this book brims over with Biblical allusions. Titus Groan is entirely sexless, and Gormenghast approaches the subject with the utmost discretion; Titus Alone is bursting with sexuality, both expressed and repressed. (Can you imagine anyone in those first two novels saying, as Titus says to Cheeta, “let me suck your breasts, like little apples, and play upon your nipples with my tongue”?) (p. 166)

So the first question to ask is this: how much of Titus Alone is Mervyn Peake switching gears, and how much is Mervyn Peake losing his marbles?

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“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”

Before I start, yes, there will be spoilers here. Don’t read on unless you’ve either finished, aren’t planning to read the book, or are a reasonable human being who understands that plot is only one element to a novel, and not the most important one either.

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So the Harry Potter series is over, and I was pretty much right. (Read my entry What Will Happen in the Final Harry Potter?)

'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' coverI predicted that Harry, Ron, and Hermione would all live to the end of the series, though J.K. would keep us in suspense until the last minute. Bing! I predicted that Snape would reveal that he had killed Dumbledore and turned Death Eater on Dumbledore’s orders. Bing! I predicted that Harry would triumph over Voldemort at the expense of lots of secondary characters. Bing! I predicted that Harry would find some way to contact Sirius Black again from beyond the grave. Well, no bing! there, but I’d suggest that I deserve a partial bing! since Harry does manage to contact another dead mentor (Dumbledore) from beyond the grave.

Of course, you can chalk this up less to my amazing powers of prognostication than to the fact that J.K. Rowling made a lot of this fairly obvious. I think many of us knew that Dumbledore was going to die from the second or third book in. I mean, didn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi die on Luke Skywalker? Didn’t Gandalf die on Frodo? That’s simply the way these stories go: Our Hero receives instruction from a Wise Mentor, who later dies and leaves the hero to confront the Big Bad Villain alone.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the Harry Potter novels are “too derivative.” To which I say, Yes! J.K. Rowling is derivative! And that’s the entire point. One of the things that makes these books so terrific is the fact that the author is very consciously following traditional patterns. She’s taken something old and familiar, dusted it off, and made it seem fresh and new again. It’s harder to do than you think.

So how does Deathly Hallows rank? How good was the book? I’d say Deathly Hallows is the third best in the series, behind Order of the Phoenix and Prisoner of Azkaban.

I admit I was very worried about this book. L. Frank Baum got lazy a few books in to his Oz series and wrote a real stinker called The Road to Oz, which basically consists of Dorothy meeting up with all her pals and going to the Emerald City for a big party. (Baum even pulls in characters from his other books in a crass effort to draw attention to them and boost lagging sales.) Then in the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to wrap the whole thing up by making Oz invisible. C.S. Lewis had similar issues drawing Narnia to a close in The Last Battle. I dreaded the prospect of Deathly Hallows becoming a Road to Oz-type wrap-up with endless cameos by secondary characters.

So imagine my surprise that Rowling didn’t fall into this trap at all. There’s very little of that last-time-around nostalgia kick going on in Deathly Hallows. No last ride on the Hogwarts Express, no last trip to Hagrid’s shack, no last game of Quidditch. Hell, they don’t even make it to Hogwarts until the last hundred pages or so. About three-quarters of the book is focused exclusively on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and there are quite a number of new characters here to sink your teeth into. Characters like Dobby, Neville, and Hagrid (the last of whom seemed in danger of staging a Fonzie-like takeover of the series two or three books in) only show up for short bits here and there.

That’s not to say that the book is perfect. Rowling does still indulge a number of her less-than-admirable habits in this book too. She makes too much of the plot revolve around obscure details and marginalia from several books back that we can’t be expected to keep track of. Remember how frustrating it was when Sherlock Holmes would bend to the ground at the scene of a crime, take notice of something that our narrator Watson couldn’t see, and then produce this insignificant thing at the conclusion as the final damning piece of evidence against the villain? Rowling’s got that affliction too.

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What Will Happen in the Final Harry Potter?

Vizzini: So. It has come down to the final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Tolkien, Le Guin, Moorcock? Morons!

Man in Black: Really! In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.

The battle of wits from 'The Princess Bride'Vizzini: I accept!

Man in Black: All right. Will Harry Potter die or will Voldemort die? The battle of wits has begun! It ends when J.K. Rowling decides, and we all read, and find out who is right — and who is dead.

Vizzini: But it’s so simple! All we need to do is divine from what we know of J.K. Rowling: is she the sort of woman who would kill off her protagonist, or her villain? Now, a clever author would kill off her protagonist, because she would know that only a great fool would assume that the beloved protagonist of a popular series of novels is safe. We are not great fools, so we can clearly not bet on Harry Potter to die. But J.K. Rowling must have known we were not great fools; she would have counted on it! So we can clearly not bet on Voldemort to die.

Man in Black: You’ve made your decision then?

Vizzini: Not remotely! Because while J.K. Rowling pretends to be a novelist with a dark and sinister side, she’s really a sentimental crowd pleaser at heart. And she knows that killing off her protagonist would be very distressing to much of her young audience. So clearly, though she’s going to string us along, she won’t do something so dark as to have Harry Potter die in the end. She’ll go for the cheery, crowd-pleasing ending of having Voldemort die and Harry Potter triumph.

Man in Black: But she’s already killed off beloved characters before, like Sirius Black and Dumbledore.

Vizzini: And I think there’s a good chance she’s going to bring Sirius back before the end of Deathly Hallows too. Either that or she’s going to hint somehow that he’s still alive, or Harry can still communicate with him through the grave, or something like that.

Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Vizzini: Wait ’til I get going! Where was I?

Man in Black: Dumbledore.

Vizzini: Yes! Dumbledore! As for Dumbledore — you realize that he expected to die, and even planned for it? In fact, if you carefully re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you realize that all the time Dumbledore is begging Snape to keep his vow and do what he promised, he’s actually begging Snape to kill him when the time comes. Snape has been acting so mopey throughout the series because he doesn’t want to go through with it and pretend to join Voldemort’s side, even though he promised Dumbledore he would.

Man in Black: So who will die then? Rowling’s already claimed several characters will die.

Vizzini: Not Ron or Hermione, that’s for sure. They’re going to get together by the end of the book, Rowling’s been hinting at that for ages. I doubt Ginny Weasley will die either, because Rowling’s set Ginny up to be Harry’s love interest — though I wouldn’t rule out Ginny being another tragic loss Harry has to endure before the end. I’m guessing that Snape will die in the act of saving Harry and thus become your classic tragically misunderstood martyr character. I would have bet on Neville too if I hadn’t heard that they cut out the parts about Neville and the prophecy from the Order of the Phoenix movie. Now I’m convinced that all along he was just a red herring. Draco Malfoy might bite it too, although Malfoy strikes me as a likely candidate for either sudden repentance at a last, crucial moment, or as the bad guy who’s going to stick around and endure the punishment at the end of the book.

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Revisiting Middle Earth: “Unfinished Tales”

There’s something both satisfying and frustrating about “Unfinished Tales,” a posthumous collection of J.R.R. Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father’s stories in lots of dry footnotes.

Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Children of Húrin”

“A darkness lies behind us, and out of it few tales have come,” says one character early in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin. “…It may be that we fled from the fear of the Dark, only to find it here before us, and nowhere else to fly to but the Sea.”

'Children of Hurin' book coverSador is speaking here about the race of Men, and his statement may sum up Tolkien’s recently published novel as good as any. Children of Húrin is a tale about fear and Man’s futile attempts to wrest honor and courage from the jaws of certain doom. It’s a major new work, though incomplete, and one of the clearest distillations of Tolkien’s thought since the publication of The Silmarillion in the late ’70s.

Those who have already read The Silmarillion will find a lot that’s familiar here. (For those who haven’t, be warned that there will be spoilers here.) The Children of Húrin is just an expanded version of the tale of Túrin Turambar, the longest (and best) chapter from that book. Having just recently read The Silmarillion myself, honestly this tale doesn’t seem all that different from the previously published version; fragments of the story also appeared in Unfinished Tales.

Technically, The Children of Húrin can be read as a stand-alone tale. It has a beginning and an ending, for the most part. But I imagine that readers who had trouble getting through The Silmarillion will have a difficult time understanding the context of what’s happening here. Who is this Morgoth, exactly? What’s all this about Fëanor and his sons? Christopher Tolkien does a rather poor job in the Introduction at summarizing the larger context of the story. We’re left with passages like this:

The second son of Finwë was Fingolfin (the half brother of Fëanor), who was held the overlord of all the Noldor; and he with his son Fingon ruled Hithlum, which lay to the north and west of the great chain of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. Fingolfin dwelt in Mithrim, by the great lake of that name, while Fingon held Dor-lómin in the south of Hithlum. Their chief fortress was Barad Eithel (the Tower of the Well)….

Or, more concisely stated, Yawwwwwwwwwwn.

So here’s basically what you need to know. Once upon a time the Valar (the gods) invited the immortal Elves to the land of Valinor in the West. There Fëanor, the smartest Elf in the pack, made three one-of-a-kind jewels called the Silmarils. But the evil god Morgoth stole them and took off to the land of Beleriand. Fëanor and many of his people went after him, rebelling against the Valar and taking an oath never to rest until the Silmarils had been recovered. The Elves established a bunch of kingdoms in Beleriand and have been fighting Morgoth for a few hundred years now (with the help of the Edain, the good Men).

But the tale of the Elves is really not as crucial in The Children of Húrin as that of Men. The main character of the book, Túrin son of Húrin, is a Man, after all. And the book revolves around this character’s noble, yet futile, attempts to rise to greatness.

It’s said in The Silmarillion that Elves are bound to the Earth. The Elves are immortal, and even when they die their souls sit in the halls of Mandos (a Hades of sorts) until they’re eventually resurrected. But Men have been granted the gift of death by Eru the One, their Creator. This means that Men’s souls leave the circles of the world when they die and go someplace that nobody, not even the Valar, know where.

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Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Return of the King”

The Return of the King is probably the volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy that I remembered the least.

It’s also the book that differs the most from Peter Jackson’s film treatment. But Return of the King has always been my least favorite of the three movies, and many of the wonderful moments in that film — the lighting of the beacons, Faramir’s charge on Osgiliath, the catapult battle, Pippin and Gandalf’s discussion about the afterlife — are scenes that Jackson either invented or wildly embellished. (Unfortunately, PJ also invented Sam and Frodo’s falling out over some missing lembas wafers. Ugh.)

'Return of the King' coverSo there were all kinds of gems awaiting me on my re-reading of ROTK. I had completely forgotten about Beregond, Guard of the Citadel, and the heroic role he plays in saving Faramir from death at the hands of Denethor. I had only a faint recollection of Ghân-buri-Ghân and the Wild Men. I didn’t recall that our heroes have a run-in with Saruman before the Hobbits return to the Shire. I had forgotten that the only reason Merry was able to wound the Lord of the Nazgûl was because of his sword, picked up at the Barrow-downs in the early chapters of Fellowship.

The first half of the book (book 5 of the Lord of the Rings proper) has simply masterful pacing. The way the tension builds throughout the siege of Gondor… and then Gandalf confronts the Lord of the Nazgûl… and then suddenly the horns of the Rohirrim blow… and then we backtrack to see the ride of the Rohirrim… oh man, is that good. It’s the big build-up that was sorely lacking before the battle of Helm’s Deep in Two Towers.

A single theme kept running through my head as I read Return of the King. It’s the way evil acts continually redound to the greater good in the end. Think of how Merry found his sword. The Hobbits’ capture by the wights in the Barrow-downs certainly seemed like a bad turn when it happened; but this serendipitous encounter enables Merry to critically wound the Nazgûl at just the right time, thus possibly saving the entire battle from going sour and changing the fate of all Middle Earth.

But nothing’s that cut and dried in Return of the King. There’s an unsettling kind of moral determinism lurking behind the scenes here, and indeed throughout the entire trilogy. Perhaps “moral determinism” is the wrong thing to call it, but I can’t think of a better phrase to use. It’s this pervasive sense that not only does the darkness exist, but it’s actually necessary and an integral component to the light.

Why do I think that? Because it seems like Tolkien is constantly giving us matched pairs of characters, one of whom turns to the path of light and one of whom follows the path of darkness.

Take for example the characters of Denethor and Théoden, the Steward of Gondor and the King of Rohan. Clearly Tolkien means to draw very strong parallels between the two. Notice the similarities:

  • Both are rulers of their respective lands (Gondor and Rohan)
  • Both have recently lost firstborn sons in battle (Boromir and Théodred)
  • Both have ambivalent feelings about their remaining heirs (Faramir and Éomer)
  • Both are confronted with a devastating siege (Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep)
  • Both have been striving against an insidious higher power (Sauron and Saruman)
  • Both take on a Hobbit squire (Pippin and Merry)
  • Both men had fathers for whom Aragorn fought in his youth (Ecthelion and Thengel)
  • Both are initially mistrustful of Gandalf
  • Both eventually grant Gandalf favors early in the saga (access to the Gondorian archives and the loan of Shadowfax)
  • Both die in The Return of the King

But obviously there’s a crucial difference between the two; one selflessly redeems himself and dies in battle, while the other stews in his bitterness until he finally commits suicide.

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Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Two Towers”

Many people who read The Lord of the Rings falter somewhere in The Two Towers, and that’s perfectly understandable. According to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Foreword to the Second Edition of LOTR, he actually faltered in the writing of it, putting the book down for two years before picking up again in book 4. (“Foresight had failed and I had no time for thought,” says J.R.R.)

'The Two Towers' book coverIt’s a difficult book. Frodo and Sam, the characters we’re most invested in, disappear for a couple hundred pages; Gandalf is presumably dead in the book’s opening chapters; Boromir’s definitely dead; and Aragorn is still something of a distant figure. Gimli is interesting enough but hardly crucial to the plot, and it’s difficult to give two figs about Legolas.

Then we have the problem of the Rohirrim. As far as I’m concerned, Tolkien doesn’t do a very good job getting the audience to buy in to the kingdom of Rohan. I was shocked to discover that Éowyn is given less than a page in Two Towers, barely enough time for her to show up and cast eyes lovingly at Aragorn. Erkenbrand, Háma, and Gamling are just tertiary characters, nobody we particularly care about. The only person who really grabs your attention in these opening chapters about the Riddermark is Éomer. Before we’ve formed any emotional attachment to Rohan, Théoden’s off to Helm’s Deep.

As for Théoden? Théoden becomes more likable as the book goes on, and he really comes into his own when he rejects Saruman’s offer of peace at Orthanc. But when we first see him, the king of Rohan is just a cranky old man under the sway of bad counsel. Then Gandalf shows up, speaks a few strong words, casts Wormtongue down on his belly — and Théoden has a baffling change of heart. In my LOTR omnibus edition, we first meet Théoden on page 501; Gandalf casts Wormtongue down on page 503; on page 507, the king’s already mustering the troops. Too quick.

Now Gandalf is supposed to be a Maiar of old, and it’s said somewhere that his “magic” is to inspire the people of Middle Earth. To restore them to their youth and vigor, to rekindle the divine spark within. So that could certainly explain Théoden’s sudden shift. But then why didn’t Gandalf accomplish the same thing the last time he saw the king? Okay, there’s a convenient excuse — Gandalf was in a big hurry. But Gandalf’s obviously been in and out of this place many times, and Saruman’s poisoning took years.

So Théoden’s conversion is somewhat puzzling and the Rohirrim are still strangers. Therefore I wasn’t particularly invested in the battle of Helm’s Deep. The battle itself is the first extended battle sequence Tolkien had written since the Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit, and it’s considerably better done than that. But Peter Jackson’s instincts were correct in trying to build up this battle with every scrap of back story he could find. I struggled hard to care about anyone here but Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli.

But I want to come back to Théoden’s choice to cast aside Gríma Wormtongue and follow the advice of Gandalf, because such choices are what this book is made of. Everyone gets their moment of choice in Two Towers.

Sam and Frodo stand on the brink of Mordor and decide to press on, even if nobody is left alive to know about it. Saruman is given a clear choice by Gandalf to come down from Orthanc and walk the long, hard road towards forgiveness, or to rot in his tower. Treebeard and the ents must decide whether to confront Saruman or to sit back and await “the withering of all woods.” Even Gollum has a moment standing over the sleeping bodies of Sam and Frodo on the stairs of Cirith Ungol where he briefly reconsiders his evil plot to lead the hobbits to Shelob.

So what are our characters choosing between? For Tolkien, the choice is not complex: there’s light, and then there’s darkness.

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