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.
CULT CLASSIC
From Meditations on Middle-earth, ed. Karen Haber, November 2001
Hmm. When this was first published, U.S. critics said I was being too populist in complaining about the critics’ (other critics, that is) attitude to The Lord of the Rings.
Well, they were wrong. Tolkien had many fans in academia, it’s true, but in the U.K. at least it was, up until a couple of years ago, quite normal for the London media-rocracy to be dismissive of Tolkien and the “sad people” who read him. Then the movies happened, were very popular, and the carping got very muted indeed.
This was written pre-movie.
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.