The Lord of The Rings By JRR Tolkien – with extended eagles digression.

Look if you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings then The Lord of the Rings probably isn’t for you. So I am not going to waste my time discussing the merits of this genre defining fantasy masterpiece. Instead I’d like to talk about the Eagles.

It’s a common and annoying argument, why didn’t they just fly to Mount Doom?

Say annoying people with no sense of joy.

Well for one thing that would be a very boring book. The point of The Lord of the Rings is not to save Middle Earth it’s to be a damn good book. That is how fiction works.

However this is not an argument that works with fantasy nerds or terrible literal minded people.

If you like here is one theory about how Gandalf meant to use the Eagles all along. !gasp! Insane but convincing fan theories

Personally I do not care for that theory. For one there has got to be a better way to say ‘take an eagle’. And for another I don’t actually think taking an eagle is a good plan. Elrond says that ‘your hope lies in speed and secrecy’. Or in other words ‘flying on a fleet of giant eagles into Mordor is stupid.’ I mean what deadly winged weapon does Sauron have? Anyone?

Of course, you might be thinking, if they had taken Eagles direct from Rivendell when the Nazgul were unhorsed they could have been in Mordor before second breakfast. Ok, Sauron is a wizard with dark and terrible powers but let’s assume his only chance against aerial assault is the Nazgul. How are the Eagles supposed to know to meet them at Rivendell? Gandalf met Gwaihir at Isengard, yes. But what did Gandalf know at that point? He had no idea what had happened to Frodo and the Ring. He they might already have been in Mordor for all he knew. Hence why he went to the Shire first to find out what was happening. And he went on horseback. Why?

Eagles do not make good beasts of burden. Quote,

‘”How far can you bear me?” I said to Gwaihir.
“Many leagues,” said he, “but not to the ends of the earth. I was sent to bear tidings not burdens.”
“The I must have a steed on land,” I said, “and a steed surpassingly swift, for I have never had such need of haste before.”‘

So Gandalf in his utmost need of speed can’t use eagles because they are not great at carrying people. Gwaihir is the Lord, and therefore presumably the biggest and strongest, of the Eagles and he still managed to carry Gandalf:

1. From Isengard to Edoras i.e. not very far

2. From the Misty Mountains to Lorien i.e. also not very far.

In short Eagles /= winged ponies.

Even if they did decide to use Eagles they would still have to get over the Misty Mountains to find the eagles and the eagles would still have to rest which would presumably not go well assuming that Sauron notices the dirty great birds headed in his direction with his all seeing eye. You couldn’t send Frodo on his own because the moment he touches down an orc will murder him and you can’t send a group because that will draw even more attention, warriors will tire the Eagles faster, you’re limited as to how many Eagles there actually are that would be up for a death mission etc.

Now that’s dealt with.

A note on reading The Lord of The Rings. A lot of people complain that the beginning is boring. It’s a little slow to get going ok, fine.

Watch the first film. Read the Two Towers, read the Return of the King. Now go back and read the Fellowship of the Ring.

This is how I read LOTR for the first time when I was 10 (because I could only afford 2 books and I’d seen the first film). If a 10 year old can do it so can you.

Barry Lyndon – William Makepeace Thackeray

Last night when I was writing about Vanity Fair and was so tired that what I was mostly interested in was whether or not ‘Makepeace’ was a middle name (Yes) I had some vague idea of writing about Barry Lyndon.

Or more correctly ‘The Luck of Barry Lyndon’. Lyndon is a tour de force in the unreliable narrator.

I don’t know if the snide notes from the editor are overdoing it. It has a lot in common with Vanity Fair, it deals with an ambitious, barely genteel, morally unsound not-really-a-hero. A person on the up and not over-encumbered with morals. Barry Lyndon is a bit more of a straightforward braggart that Becky Sharp. Maybe it’s just because you’re stuck with him (first person narrator) but the man has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. You can’t imagine him fooling anyone for long. The ending is also somewhat lacking in subtlety. Vanity Fair gets kind of dark but Barry Lyndon goes down the well worn, spending all your ill gotten gains and winding up in jail, path.

Barry Lyndon manages to climb his way up to one of the foremost ‘gentlemen’ in the country only to lose it all by having the impulse control of a drunk toddler. And so the wheel turns and the wicked shall be punished etc. etc. Barry Lyndon is definitely interesting as precursor to Vanity Fair but I’m not sure how interesting it is in it’s own right. It feels like heavy going at times.

As an autobiographical note, did you know Thackeray was born in Calcutta? I suppose you did but it makes me think of Joseph Sedley on an elephant.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

This is the tenth longest book in the English Language (Clarissa is the second and one by L. Ron Hubbard the Scientology guy is first).

It feels like it.

Additionally, for a very, very, long book it lacks a lot in the way of resolution. I had to Google the ending to make sure I hadn’t missed a few hundred pages somewhere.

One of the advantages of a novel that takes you more than a week to read is that you can form an acquaintance with a pretty impressive cast of characters and get familiar with a pretty complex fictional world. I think a really good science fiction/fantasy novel benefits from a bit of length. I mean Lord of the Rings is only 60,000 words shorter than this. That’s only, like, another short novels worth.

If you’re not familiar with the plot I would like to explain it using the funniest joke in the world sketch from Monty Python.

Imagine that sketch is a 543,709 word novel and *tah dah* there you have Infinite Jest.

It is by turns funny, tragic and everything else you would expect to find in a novel of substance and complexity.

One small issue I wish to address which might require a little spoiler alert. Joelle van Dyne is a reasonably prominent character and for a good bit of the novel there is speculation as to whether or not she is deformed or absurdly beautiful. It’s hard to say because she always wears a veil. About half way through I Googled for a definitive answer and didn’t really find one. However I feel like it’s pretty clear by the end of the novel that she is indeed deformed. Here’s the quote:

‘I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid my hiddenness in denial about the deformity itself.’

You might think differently but that resolved it for me. I’d have preferred her to be unscarred though. I think people argue it from similar wishful thinking.