Essays – Ramblings on my bookshelves

Michael Moorcock is a highly respected fantasy author, probably best known for his epic ‘Tales of the Eternal Champion’ which comprises 6,583 pages in the consolidated fourteen volume UK collection shown below from my own collection. Oddly due to copyright issues the UK set is missing two volumes which were only available in the USA whilst the fifteen volume USA set is missing one volume that was only available in the UK. As the design of the sets is very different I’ve elected not to seek out the two USA volumes and to stick with the UK set.

This book however is not part of one of his fantasy series but rather consists of six essays exploring the origins and development of epic fantasy, praising authors he likes and denigrating those that he doesn’t. A warning to fans of JRR Tolkien he doesn’t regard the Lord of the Rings as a serious piece of adult fantasy, the main clue is that the essay largely concentrating on this work is called Epic Pooh, but let’s get to that later on..

In the introduction Moorcock attempts to define his subject, tracing it’s sources back to Icelandic sagas, the Arthurian legends, Gilgamesh etc and the influences these had on the Romantic poets and Victorian novel writers such as Walter Scott and then leaping forward to HP Lovecraft. Personally I find both Scott and Lovecraft largely impenetrable, Moorcock also doesn’t rate Lovecraft describing him as “that somewhat inadequate describer of the indescribable”. The first essay is called Origins and as the title implies looks at the early days of epic fantasy. For me this was the least successful of the pieces in the book, largely because the authors and works he picks to illustrate his study are either ones I have never heard of let alone read, and from the descriptions they aren’t likely to be going on my reading list either. So whilst it added to my knowledge of the very early days of fantasy, we are talking the 1500’s to 1700’s here it largely felt as an exercise telling me what to avoid although the development of the Gothic novel was quite interesting.

However after this rather flat start the book improved dramatically as it started to deal with fantasy as I would more normally regard it. This is split into separate sections, looking first at fantasy landscapes and making the very reasonable point that if you don’t believe the lands that the characters inhabit you are far less likely to believe the stories they are involved in. Badly described geography can be a serious impediment to a readers enjoyment. Moorcock quotes extensively throughout the book picking good and bad examples of prose to illustrate his points. Having established the importance of somewhere for the heroes and villains to exist in he then moves onto character development looking at heroes and heroines in particular. The fourth essay deals with wit and humour, this is not just comedic fantasy or parodies but also introducing wit in the characters dialogue, an eternally dour character is probably going to be unlikable. It was at this point that I realised just how old this book is (1987) as he praises Terry Pratchett and says that Mort, the fourth Discworld novel had recently come out. This means that a lot of the ‘comic’ fantasy that has appeared in the last four decades are all after Moorcock wrote this work.

Now we get to ‘Epic Pooh’, Moorcock’s dissection not only of the works of Tolkien but also the Narnia books of CS Lewis and others of their ilk. I think I should start with a quote:

The sort of prose most often identified with “high” fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby, it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles, it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft {here in the book is a quote from Winnie the Pooh} It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful… The humour is often unconscious because, as with Tolkien, the authors take words seriously but without pleasure.

To be fair Moorcock does accept that at times Tolkien rises above his usual standard but quickly falls back in his failure to really explore the emotional background of his characters and almost completely ignores the character of Sauron seeing him simply as a force for evil with little explanation. But at least he is better then Lewis and here I have to totally agree with Moorcock. I find the Narnia books completely unreadable, and always have, mainly due to the ramming of the Christian message down the throats of its readers at every opportunity Lewis can find. It was only when I read this essay that I realised that I last read Lord of the Rings in my late teens so probably at the age that would most appreciate the work and before I read anything much better. I won’t go on, I do however suggest reading this book if you can find it as its been out of print for years.

A comprehensive, but witty survey… the perfect gift for any Tolkien fan you want to annoy
review in Time Out magazine

One fun bit to the book is the apparent source of the title, which is given at the start of the book as a line of poetry by a poet called Wheldrake in his poem The Elvish Rune from 1877.

And you love take my right hand,
Come from the faerie folks’ last dance:
And we’ll sleep and dream of Elfland,
Her wizardry and wild romance.

In fact Ernest Wheldrake was a creation of Moorcock’s and is regularly quoted by one of the characters in the novel ‘The End of all Songs’ which is the third part of ‘The Dancers at the Edge of Time’ the seventh compendium volume of The Eternal Champion series shown above. So the ‘inspiration’ for the title was a piece of poetry written for the book. This by the way is the only appearance of Moorcock’s own work in this volume, he deliberately avoids self reference.

I picked this up from my local bookshop the other week and have been thoroughly entertained by this selection from modern Dutch writing and amazingly it’s free. This is volume 9 and was launched on the 17th March 2021 via an online event from the British Library. I’d never heard of The Riveter until Megan, the bookshop owner, suggested I might like to read it as she had had some copies dropped off at the shop a few days ago.

The Riveter is a free magazine devoted to riveting European literature in English. The idea is to make international writing popular and accessible to readers everywhere and to celebrate excellent translation and great books from the rest of Europe.
The Riveter was launched in 2017 by the European Literature Network. Professionally edited and published by a small dedicated team, it attracts support from a wide range of publishers, authors, translators, critics, academics – and readers. It has achieved acclaim with its special issues on Polish, Russian, Nordic, Baltic, Swiss, Queer, German, Romanian and Dutch literature in English.
From the website of the publisher https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/the-riveter/

It is mainly available online, follow the link in the citation above, but apparently print copies of the Dutch and Romanian versions are readily available in the UK and as I have greatly enjoyed this very professionally produced little volume, 120 pages, I will definitely be looking out for more as I prefer to read an actual book rather than on a screen. I’ll just pick out a few highlights for me:

Someone Who Means It, by Maartje Wortel. Translated by Sarah Welling and Margie Franzen. This short story, which was first printed in 2015, is appearing for the first time in English translation. It’s eleven pages long so represents almost ten percent of the total book but it’s worth the dominance of space it takes up. It’s a story of love and loss, jealousy and passion beautifully told and definitely makes me want to read more by Maartje.

Herman Kock gets one of the subsections, with an extract from his latest book Finse Dagen (Finnish Days) and a review of the most recent one to be fully translated into English, The Ditch. I quite enjoyed the three page extract from Finnish Days and was pretty convinced I wanted to get a copy of The Ditch whilst reading Max Easterman’s largely positive two page review right up until the excoriating final paragraph

Sadly, as the story progresses, Herman Koch doesn’t manage to meld these various strands into a convincing whole: they just don’t hang together. The analytical insight he brings to Robert Walter’s jealousy is dissipated in the final third of the book. The old prejudices about Sylvia’s unnamed country are laid bare, but in the end, the resolution of the story, in which the significance of the ‘ditch’ becomes clear, doesn’t work for me: it is a dying fall, a whimper, which left me wondering: why?

Well that’s one book that needn’t make it to my to be read pile then.

On the other hand Dutch poetry has a huge amount going for it and is well represented here with a two page introduction, twelve pages of poems and a two page review of a poetry collection. Poetry has to be the hardest style of literature to translate for not only does the translator have to manage the words but the flow of the words has to be right. The choice of poems is well done with a good mix of serious and lighthearted works with for me two stand outs from each of those categories. The excellent ‘My Skin’ by Dean Bowen is crying out to be read aloud, this is performance poetry written down and you can’t help reading it out loud to appreciate the rhythm of the words. on the other hand ‘Pitying the Reader’ by Menno Wigman will make any dedicated reader chuckle as we have all been there. I’ll just include the start of the poem here so you can see what I mean.

A book? From cover to cover? I lack the strength.
Even poetry – just thinking about it –
exhausts me now. I’ve overdosed on poems,
stare blindly at the pages of my books.
For many months I’ve had a reader’s block,
I’ve grown allergic to the alphabet.

The articles by translators on their job and the problems and joys of translating were fascinating, there is so much crammed into this slim volume but now I need more, I will have to see if can get other volumes in the series.

The one criticism I have of this otherwise excellent publication is the choice of a grey font on a grey background for the majority of the pages, this is clearly done for aesthetic reasons rather than for the practical as it makes reading more than a few pages at a time very tiring.

The Flemish section which has a salmon pink background is not much better either.

I’m astigmatic so have enough problems distinguishing between letters without the heavily reduced contrast that this choice by an unthinking design team has come up with. It’s not enough to put me off reading but it is a problem and they really should drop the background shades to improve readability.