PhilPaine.com

14673. (Antho­ny Bouch­er) The Case of the Sev­en Sneezes
14674. (Mar­shall McLuhan) The Guten­burg Galaxy
14675. (Ger­ald Pos­ner) Secrets of the King­dom ― The Inside Sto­ry of the Saudi‑U.S. Con­nec­tion
14676. (Evan­ge­line Wal­ton) The Chil­dren of Llyr
14677. (Nan­cy Phe­lan & Michael Volin) Sex and Yoga
14678. (Jared Dia­mond) Guns, Germs and Steel
Read more »

I’ve been remark­ing that some of the best writ­ten books, in recent times, have been pub­lished in the “juve­nile” mar­ket. This book proves my point. It’s a beau­ti­fully writ­ten, emo­tion­ally pow­er­ful, and high­ly imag­i­na­tive demon­stra­tion of what it means to be a slave. No top­ic is clos­er to my heart, and, frankly, I wish that I had writ­ten this book. “47” is a plan­ta­tion slave, who, in the 1830’s, encoun­ters an alien being who is strand­ed on earth. He tells his tale from the view­point of now, since he has become effec­tively immor­tal, and still retains the 14-year-old body. But the sci­ence fic­tion ele­ment of the sto­ry is under­played. Mosley con­cen­trates on mak­ing the read­er hear, taste, smell, and feel the real­ity of slav­ery. It’s a fine piece of work.

The first item, the essay “On Fairy Sto­ries”, is essen­tial read­ing for any­one with a seri­ous inter­est in Tolkien. It makes clear exact­ly what he was doing, and why. It was writ­ten dur­ing the height of the dom­i­nant posi­tion of “real­ism” in lit­er­a­ture, when any­thing even remote­ly imag­i­na­tive was con­sid­ered trash by lit­er­ary peo­ple. Tolkien was par­tic­u­larly annoyed by those who saw fan­tasy, espe­cially the par­tic­u­lar kind of fan­tasy that he called “fairy-sto­ry”, as exclu­sively for chil­dren. He writes:

Among those who still have enough wis­dom not to think fairy sto­ries per­ni­cious, the com­mon opin­ion seems to be that there is a nat­ural con­nex­ion between the minds of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries, of the same order as the con­nex­ion between children’s bod­ies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sen­ti­ment, and one that is there­fore most often made by those who, for what­ever pri­vate rea­sons (such as child­less­ness), tend to think of chil­dren as a spe­cial kind of crea­ture, almost a dif­fer­ent race, rather than as nor­mal, if imma­ture, mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar fam­ily, and of the human fam­ily at large. Actu­ally, the asso­ci­a­tion of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries is an acci­dent of our domes­tic his­tory. Fairy sto­ries have in the mod­ern world been rel­e­gated to the ‘nurs­ery’, as shab­by or old-fash­ioned fur­ni­ture is rel­e­gated to the play-room, pri­mar­ily because adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.

Touché. I can still remem­ber when that atti­tude was gospel, when a good sci­ence fic­tion writer like Kurt Von­negut had to vocif­er­ously deny that he wrote SFso he could be tak­en seri­ously, and the ency­clo­pe­dias described H. G. Wells as the author of Tono Bun­gay, Mr. Brit­tling Sees It Through, and, embarrass­ingly, “some sci­en­tific romances”.

con­tents:

14691. [2] (J. R. R. Tolkien) On Fairy Sto­ries
14692. [3] (J. R. R. Tolkien) Leaf by Niggle

I’ve enthused before about the work of Tim Wynne-Jones. This is an ear­ly nov­el of his. His writ­ing was not quite as sharp as it has since become, but this nov­el still held my atten­tion. In part, it’s because the sto­ry (a sort of fusion of Charles Dick­ens and Ray­mond Chan­dler) focus­es on my own neig­bour­hood in Toron­to, and con­cerns the under­side of that neigh­bour­hood at the very time when I was myself part of that under­side. I rec­og­nize and remem­ber almost every phys­i­cal fea­ture in the book. Some of the places, build­ings, and social con­fig­u­ra­tions no longer exist, but read­ing this nov­el brought them back to me with the inten­sity of the smell of piss in a dark city alley.