Sherry has a long list of reading lists from various sites, plenty of material to inspire, ignore, or distain. If I was anywhere near a decent blogger, I would pick out titles I knew nothing about and mock whoever it is recommending them. But, no. I must move on.
If you’ve been following this blog for the last few days, you probably noticed the considerable interest raised by my post on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, just a few inches below this on your screen. I wrote the post in response to reading Prof. Bruce Charlton’s e-book about Tolkien and The Notion Club Papers.
Today Prof. Charlton posted a piece responding directly to my suggestions. What surprises me most is that he places most of the blame for the rift between Lewis and Tolkien on Tolkien.
The critical rift in JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis’s friendship can probably be dated to early 1949, when Tolkien heard Lewis read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
This fact was forcefully brought home to me by Lars Walker’s blog posting at Brandywine Books.
Lewis later remarked that Tolkien disliked the book intensely, and Roger Lancelyn Green confirmed this from a meeting with Tolkien about the end of March 1949.
But if early 1949 was the critical incident, then we need to understand the background to the incident (and why it caused a rift) and also understand why the rift was not repaired.
Full disclosure: I received a free copy of The Cross and the Cosmos Anthology: Year One, from Frank Luke, a friend of this blog who is also an editor and contributor to the volume.
The Cross and the Cosmos: Year One is a collection of Christian science fiction and fantasy stories from the Cross and the Cosmos e-zine. As you would expect from such a publication, the quality of the stories varies considerably.
I was most impressed by a couple time travel stories by Kersley Fitzgerald. The stories, both about a single family, deal in very fresh ways with the old problems of temporal transport. The first story, “Saving Grase,” in particular, combined time travel conundrums with the kinds of mundane frustrations any mother who has tried to manage small children on an airline flight must be familiar with.
I also liked a couple supernatural westerns by Cathrine Bonham, “Souls Are Wild” and “Black Hat Magic.” They were pretty effective evangelical takes, I thought, on the old “he sold his soul to the devil” theme.
Frank Luke contributed three very good fantasies, set in a universe that seems part Norse and part Tolkien, but in which the Christian religion is practiced pretty much as it is in our world (how that works isn’t explained). Frank needs to tighten up his stories a little and watch for neologisms like “quite the woman,” but I got caught up in the narrative and wanted to know what else happened to the characters.
The bulk of the stories, I have to say, aren’t quite as good. Some of them were frankly preachy and simplistic, and most were weak on wordsmithing. One story seems to have been published before the author was done with it, because she inserted “[RUSSIAN PHRASE]” in the dialogue a couple time, apparently planning to look the phrases up but never getting around to it (unless that was a glitch in my electronic version).
I must confess I found it irritating that every single fantasy that involved warriors included female warriors as a given, as if ours is the only world in the universe where men’s greater strength leads societies, in general, to reserve the role of fighter for them. I suppose egalitarianism is so ingrained in our younger generation of Christians that they can’t conceive of anything else.
There’s some good stuff in The Cross and the Cosmos: One, and some disappointing stuff. Suitable for teens and up.
Over at PJ Media, Bruce Bawer discusses the “big three” postwar American novelists, Vidal, Capote, and Mailer, and the reasons why somehow none of them ever managed to write the Great American Novel:
This fondness for murderers suggests that, for all their differences and their mutual hostility, Mailer, Capote, and Vidal had something in common that separated them from most of the rest of us. Even as all of them adored the limelight, they were drawn to the dark side. If they weren’t, in the final analysis, great, or even particularly good, American novelists, perhaps it was, in large part, not because of a lack of raw talent but because they all felt, to some degree and for various reasons, alienated from ordinary Americans to a degree that made it impossible for any of them to write with sufficient empathy and understanding about their countrymen – except, perhaps, those who had killed in cold blood. To be capable of a perverse sympathy for psychopaths but incapable of contemplating ordinary American life without feeling contempt and condescension (and this last applies less to Capote than to the other two) is not the formula for producing enduring literature.
Have a great weekend!
The Inklings Corner at the Eagle and Child Pub (the “Bird and Baby”), Oxford. It was here that the Inklings met for many years. Photo credit: Tom Murphy VII.
I posted some comments a few days ago about Prof. Bruce Charlton’s writings on Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers. I learned quite a bit reading what he wrote, and it even sparked a thought of my own, somewhere in that dank cauliflower of cholesterol that I call my brain.
It’s well known that Lewis’s and Tolkien’s friendship cooled in their later years. Tolkien was disappointed in the Chronicles of Narnia, complaining that Lewis had sunk to mere allegory. And when Lewis married Joy Davidman, Tolkien considered her rude, abrasive, and just another in a long string of parasites who took advantage of his friend’s generous nature.
About Joy Davidman I’ve got nothing to say at this time. But I think I understand now why Tolkien was so upset about the Narnia books. Continue reading Frodo without Sam
Years ago, I discovered a few mystery novels set in the yacht sailing world, written by Bernard Cornwell. Kind of like Dick Francis books with salt water. I scarfed them up, because I love a good sailing tale for some reason (maybe it’s genetic; heaven knows I haven’t had much experience in the field). Cornwell stopped writing them and turned to a more lucrative career in historical novels, and I’ve found very few books of the sort since.
So I was intrigued to discover Timothy Frost’s Final Passage, which turns out to be a well-written, well-plotted story of danger and deception, which pleased me much and only irritated me here and there.
Martin Lancaster, the hero and narrator, is the hard driving, upwardly mobile owner of an advertising agency in London. He’s also a bit of an idiot, or so it appears at the beginning. Because it turns out he’s badly overextended, and the loss of his major client sends him to the verge of bankruptcy. He also has a rash habit of making heavy bets on his own races, and losing them. A timely acquisition by an American firm saves his bacon, and also permits him and his brother to continue their plans to participate in a transatlantic yacht race they’ve been planning on. Continue reading Final Passage, by Timothy Frost
And since we’re on the subject of Patrick Henry College, Marvin Olasky at the World Magazine blog quotes from a recent interview with Dr. Ben Carson, who answered the question of a Patrick Henry student about whether any teacher had especially helped him to attain success.
He tells a story that resonates with me, because I had a similar experience. He thought he was the dumbest guy in the class until one day when a teacher asked a question and an amazing thing happened:
Everybody was staring at me. They could not believe all this geological information spewing forth from the mouth of a dummy. But I was probably the most amazed person because it dawned on me at that moment that I wasn’t stupid.
I realized the reason I know all that information is because I was reading books. I said to myself, “Aren’t you tired of being called a dummy?” I said, “What if you read books about all your subjects? Can you imagine what the effect would be?” And from that point on, no book was safe from my grasp.
A while back I was contacted by a young man named Colin Cutler, a student at Patrick Henry College. It had been suggested to him that I might be willing to serve as his mentor in a student writing project. He wanted to write a mythic treatment of the Christian gospel, in Anglo-Saxon/Viking style.
I agreed to help, and gave him some pointers as he produced a very worthwhile story, The Ward of Heaven and The Wyrm in the Sea.
Recently he has published the story in book form, and he asked me to write an Introduction. You can read my Introduction below the fold. Continue reading Myth-making
Puzzle, puzzle. What to say about The Ale Boy’s Feast, the final book in Jeffrey Overstreet’s remarkable fantasy tetralogy, The Auralia Thread?
I have highly praised the author’s writing skill and creative imagination, and I stand by those evaluations. Overstreet is a writer of rare ability, and he has created an unforgettable world, familiar enough to be recognizable but different enough to be exotic and evocative.
Yet the whole thing works out to a resolution that leaves me… troubled.
Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get the point.
Or maybe leaving me troubled was the point. Continue reading The Ale Boy’s Feast, by Jeffrey Overstreet
Paul Tripp writes about handling our fears: “Own your fear and run to the only one who can defeat it. Confess that you don’t always remember his presence and glory. Confess those places where you assess situations as if he didn’t exist. Own the fact that you often love your comfort more than you love his glory. Confess that you are sometimes more in awe of people than of him.”