There is I think a formative period in the life of a young reader when certain ideas about what fiction 'should' do, or what good fiction looks like, become relatively fixed. I would locate this around the age of 9-11. This is the period at which one is beginning to develop taste. Prior to that, one basically has no discernment - just a vague sense that some things look boring and some things look appealing. Gradually, as one approaches adolescence, one gets a sense that one likes certain things, and these tend to crystallise into habits of mind. One begins to get an idea that X is good and Y is bad, as opposed to simply being attracted to whatever one is attracted to.
Alternatively, you could think of books read during that phase as being a little bit like heroin. They give you a high and you spend the rest of your life chasing it.
I would like to present myself as being much more interesting than I am, but I confess that I (and, I suspect, you) am an exceptionally conventional nerd and read The Lord of the Rings around that age and was indelibly affected by the experience. No work of fiction I have read since has been quite as important to me. But it is important to me in a slightly unconventional way.
The first reason for this is that I read The Two Towers first. This was for the simply reason that another boy in school (whose name I can still recall, though I won't publicly out the swine) had already got The Fellowship of the Ring out from the local library. I was eaten up with envy and decided to plough on ahead with The Two Towers, with the idea in mind I would come back to The Fellowship at a later date.
My experience of encountering The Lord of the Rings was therefore pretty unusual - it began for me in exactly the opposite to the way Tolkien intended it, in media res, with Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli charging around looking for orcs to kill and also trying to find Boromir. It was sink or swim for a 10 year old and it turned out I could swim. I pieced together what was going on and, although a huge amount remained a mystery (for a very long time I thought that the hobbits were old men, for some reason), knew that I loved what I was reading. It was a hundred times more grown-up and weighty than anything I had read before.
The result of this is that I developed a taste, which I still have, for stories which do not take the time to explain things. I like to be confused and to struggle a little to figure out what is going on. I like a narrative which doesn't take prisoners. And I despise exposition of any kind; I would rather not know what is going on than to be told. The funny thing about this is that it is most certainly not Tolkien's doing - if anything he spends an inordinate amount of time on setup at the start of The Lord of the Rings - and is purely an artefact of having read the books in the wrong order.
The second reason is that, having read The Two Towers, I then went back and read The Fellowship of the Ring. And I was completely enchanted by the smallness and innocence of its opening chapters. It is easy to overlook The Two Towers, but I would go out on a limb and call it the most exciting of the three books. It is full of grandeur and derring-do, and has the best (I think) battle sequences. To go from that to The Fellowship is to take a huge shift down to a much lower gear. But that, perhaps counter-intuitively, gave it great appeal. It felt warm and comfortable.
More importantly, it had an enchanting air of discovery about it. It was like encountering forgotten lore that explained what had come afterwards, allowing me to unlock many of the mysteries that had puzzled me in making my way through The Two Towers. This gave it a much more intoxicating atmosphere than I think it would if I had encountered it 'cold'. The feeling was presumably close to what it would have been like if the Star Wars prequels had been good films.
This instilled in me an abiding love for that mood of discovery, and it remains the case that the section of The Fellowship of the Ring before the arrival at Rivendell is not only my favourite portion of the books, but probably my favourite 200 pages or so of fiction in general. It is by no means perfect. But whenever I read it, I feel the same sense that I did more than thirty years ago, encountering it for the first time, and feeling though I was gaining access to privileged information that would make everything that I had previously read clear.
The sum of this is that I have a very strongly developed taste for books that do not explain themselves, and which one has to figure out as one goes along with minimal exposition, and also for beginnings which take their time building up to the 'plot' proper. Many of my other favourite fantasy series (The Book of the New Sun, Stone Dance of the Chameleon, and even A Song of Ice and Fire) have this kind of quality to them. No doubt it is partly Tolkien's influence on the genre that has resulted in these types of stories proliferating, and no doubt if you are reading this you have drunk from the same well. But I am curious as to whether readers of the blog have had other experiences in their 'formative fiction reading' years and what kind of tastes this endowed them with.
Not sure if it was a bug or a feature of the 70s and 80s, but between second hand book shops, stalls and fairs, school libraries, local libraries, and other peoples' books, as well as the ones in your house, and the houses of other family members such as grandparents, uncles, and aunts, all who valued books and reading, as well as a childhood spent in both Hong Kong and Australia, meant that I rarely started series in the right place, let alone finished them, some not until years later. There were just too many cool books to read and I just found them, I rarely sought them out. This complete jumble of books of all genres is probably why I never properly emerged from the mire of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I like jumbled paragraphs and not knowing what is going on, while also treasuring lore-dumps as well. Regarding Tolkien, I read or skimmed LOTR as a kid, but preferred the Bakshi film version. I read the Hobbit a few years later, and really liked it, it's up there with my child/teenhood fave fantasy novels along with the first three Earthsea books by Ursula le Guin, The Cats of Seroster by Robert Westall, Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, and The Talking Parcel by Gerald Durrell. Reread LOTR in pre-internet Vientiane in '96 and found it a bit grim and a bit of a slog. Forced myself through the Silmarillion as well (big trade between volunteers, NGOs and backpackers in second hand books in Vientiane), but then went on a James Ellroy bender and felt more human again. :-)
ReplyDeleteEncountering James Ellroy as a 9 year old would definitely give you a particular view about what makes good fiction....
DeleteLearning how to use a library in the first place was much like the same path of discovery I found within the LotR. I remember the librarian on more than one occasion asking if I was sure I could read the book I was checking out. So my experience is maddingly similar to the rest of you nerds!
DeleteIn my local area I remember it being a big event to graduate to the 'big library', housed in a separate building from the 'children's library'.
DeleteThat's funny, I started with the Two Towers first as well. IIRC it was the only LotR book available in the school library.
ReplyDelete(funny tangent, a younger friend of mine loved the Two Towers movie to death when it came out, so she looked for a copy on Napster...but it was a man, his dog, and some peanut butter. Ahhhh the dangers of the early internet)
The Heretic
Haha... well, yeah, that's what you get for pirating films, I suppose. For what it's worth I thought the Peter Jackson The Two Towers was dreadful.
DeleteI agree with you about the movie. It was great to see the books on film but the whole thing was a bit of a chore. I also hated how they radically changed Aragorn's character. I can understand their desire for a 'conflicted hero' but it was too much of a change for me.
Delete(On the other hand, I didn't mind the changes to Arwen's character, but ymmv)
The Heretic
Yes, they humanised the characters too much, which is to be expected but not the point.
DeleteI also read Two Towers first! FotR wasn't available at the library, so I read TT, then went back weeks later, borrowed the three books and read them. Of course, including Two Towers again.
ReplyDeleteI was probably 13th years old. At ten, I read Treasure Island, Jules Verne, Dumas, Salgari and many, many gamebooks.
We should start a club: the International Association of People Who Read The Two Towers First (IAPWRTTF).
DeleteHmmmm, on this subject as a little kid I read D&D stuff voraciously but I didn't have many chances to play (combination of all the nerds playing M:tG instead at the time, being an area that had never had much D&D and not having the best social skills as a little kid) so a lot of this reading influence came from 2e D&D material.
ReplyDeleteWhat really sunk into my head from that was the attraction of the Failed Novelist/Railroady kind of DMing that I read a lot about when I was a kid. I know it generally does WORK in actual play, and that "let's all be Cugel the Clever having Dying Earth adventures" meshes so, So, SO much better with D&D rules...but even after all of these rules I still want to GM a campaign that feels like an epic quest played straight.
A campaign that feels like an epic quest played straight sounds great, I agree. The problem is the implementation. The OSR critique is accurate.
DeleteExactly. The critique is spot on, I just wish it wasn't at times.
DeleteInterestingly, the game I've had the most success with making players play their characters straight and take things seriously is probably Delta Green (significantly more so than Call of Cthulhu despite the almost identical rule sets for whatever reason). I'm not quite sure why that is, but perhaps:
-The way that your character eventually hitting a downward spiral is built into the rules makes your character self-sacrificing feel like a victory in that you go out on your own terms rather than as a burnt out husk.
-The default PC being an FBI agent helps nudge the PCs into being more serous.
-Usually there's enough dark humor in the horrible scenarios you get thrust into that there's relatively little need to inject more by acting goofy.
-The game provides a really clear and tight explanation for why a bunch of randos are working together so it doesn't feel forced to have a bunch of random PCs all working together.
-There's a good balance of the PCs having status (as federal agents etc.) that they don't want to give up while also being given a long leash by their bosses (so there's no real incentive to rebel against them).
Of course it's RELATIVELY easy to get players to play Delta Green seriously, there's still a good bit of goofiness, just less than other RPGs I've played. Which makes me wonder how to apply some of that to other games.