U-Turning on Tolkien

I'm writing this from a roadside internet cafe somewhere in the depths of Iwate prefecture - I wouldn't normally have bothered spending the extra 200 yen, but I just spotted something in my google reader feed that I had to link to: China Mieville saying nice things about Tolkien. (Regular readers will know why this is of extra special interest.) It seems China has had a change of heart, and it's a welcome one. Three quotes I picked out on a cursory reading:

Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming.

...

[S]ay what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog...in their astounding names, the fearful verve of their descriptions, their various undomesticated malevolence, these creatures are utterly embedded in our world-view. No one can write giant spiders except through Shelob: all dragons are sidekicks now.

...

In his abjuring of allegory, Tolkien refuses the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really 'about' something else, narrowly and precisely. That the work of the reader is one of code-breaking, that if we find the right key we can perform a hermeneutic algorithm and 'solve' the book. Tolkien knows that that makes for both clumsy fiction and clunky code. His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape. A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all. [Emphasis added.]

I find China's comments about 'Oedipal Resentment' on the part of young writers towards Tolkien pretty funny, because he's obviously speaking from experience but isn't honest enough to say so. I also think his own fiction has strayed into the territory he rejects in the third quoted section above. But this is the best piece I've read on Tolkien in some time, and it's nice to see that China's grown up quite a bit. I was going to buy his latest book anyway, but I think I might get it even sooner than I was going to.