Fantasy &c

Here's something I wrote long ago, but didn't complete. It makes for fair reading.


Fantasy novels have never been far from me. I started out with Tolkien, reading The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and, of course, The Lord of the Rings in quick succession over a period of a few weeks during which I didn't step out of the house or use more than three-word sentences to communicate with anyone. Near the end of Rings, I remember being confronted with the bleak certainty that the book would be over, and being overcome with emotion at the thought; I also remember the subtle dread that I felt the next day, the dread of facing a world now shorn of whatever wonder it possessed previously. I declared to my mother that day, with all the zeal of the convert, that I didn't care about Hinduism anymore, and that my religion was the religion of Tolkien.

These feelings were always close to the surface. Although I read indiscriminately, I kept returning to fantasy novels with the sort of regularity that indicated that I was hooked . First it was the Robert Jordan series, which seemed like the next logical step after Tolkien -- books one and two intrigued me, but I realized after book three that it was not going to be anywhere close to Tolkien, and put it down. (I suppose people will tell you that Tolkien is the best introduction to fantasy that you can ever get, but I disagree; I think one must start modestly, with such pedestrian fare as The Wheel of Time series, and progress, by degrees, to epics like The Silmarillion or Rings. Doing it the other way around is bound to lead to an anti-climactic experience).

After Robert Jordan, I picked up Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. This with some reluctance,because I didn't want to have the same opinion of King as I did of Jordan, being a long time fan. I knew what it felt like to be let down by an author's works -- in 2002 (or so) I remember actively loathing Michael Crichton's shameless attempt to further his views on global warming in his novel, A State of Fear. Was this the same person who had written such redoubtable science fiction as Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain? Was this the same guy whose books I had read over and over again as a science-fiction crazed teenager? It was like losing an old friend.

But King did not disappoint at all. Quite the contrary: Dark Tower was a complete departure from anything I had ever read before, in fantasy or otherwise. The protagonists were as real as you or I, and as fragile; you always got the feeling that it wouldn't take much to kill them. Enemies were many, and in many different forms, and apparently a lot more resilient than our heroes. There were strangers introduced arbitrarily, strangers whose function was not clear. And the world itself was more than sufficiently fantastic to provide a dynamic all its own. The combination led to the development of an almost unbearable tension, a tension, that, if I was a movie reviewer, would call "edge-of-the-seat", and "exhilarating". At the risk of blaspheming, I would say that Dark Tower was more interesting and more nuanced than Rings, and (to me, at least) more entertaining.

Of course, most fantasy aficionados would chuckle mildly at this, and pat me indulgently on the back. Indeed, one of my good friends, who is an F.A if I ever knew one, told me that he and his online friends get together and have little fantasy appreciation sessions where they bash (among others) Stephen King and his fantastic creations.

I can't sympathize with this point of view, but (to an extent) I empathize. When you become a connoisseur of a genre like fantasy, nothing but the very best will do, and sometimes not even that. I react in much the same way when I watch an bad movie, or read a badly written book. There is always a tendency to be as exclusive as your tastes will provide, and once you have elevated yourself, there is no coming back down.

Or is there? A fantasy writer called Scott Bakker, in this interview, provides a fresh viewpoint on criticism. He holds that there are as many readers eager for new material as there are ones who find comfort in familiarity. Expounding, he also says that the solution is not to provide two different kinds of fiction for each of these groups (which, according to him, defeats the point), but to try and incorporate both familiarity and originality in the same work.

A little background on Mr. Bakker - he's actually Dr. Bakker, having obtained his doctoral degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and after twenty years of tooling around with his fantastic characters, has now built a house (three houses, to be precise) of words around them. His "high" fantasy trilogy is entitled The Prince of Nothing, and consists of the books The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought.

When I found out about this guy about two days ago, I was struck by an impulse to purchase his books. Here, I thought, was a person who knew what he was doing. A PhD in philosophy meant that he could probably contextualize, and very well at that, and the articulation of his thoughts (in the interview) convinced me that I would do well to put money in his pocket. Two days later (today),I bought The Darkness That Comes Before.

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And so ended that particular train of thought. I thought publishing this would be vaguely relevant because it is now some five months later, and in that time I've tried reading Darkness three times, and failed thrice -- the writing is uncompromisingly underwhelming. I guess the interview promised too much.