from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous, and back again

[calimac]

Our MythSoc group discussed yesterday the novel which I persist in calling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Normal. My own experience with it had been limited to the extracts or spin-offs (I'm not sure which) contained in the Starlight anthologies, which I found were that astonishingly rare case of historical fantasy fiction that actually carries the air of the period in which it's set, but which otherwise seemed somewhat oblique. Our most experienced reader, E., passionately argued the case for JS&MN as a book which slowly sidles from the mundane into the numinous and mythopoeic, and which, moreover, presents a pungent theory of art. E. sees Clarke depicting magic as a creative art requiring both talent and practice to create, which the story's titular magicians think they can wrestle down into a predictable formula. The more she talked, the more I kept thinking of post-Tolkien fantasists trying to wrestle fantasy down into a formula. That was, of course, E.'s point, and according to her it's also Clarke's.

Having spent many years pondering the question of why so much fantasy just doesn't carry the air of Elfland, and what's special about those stories that do, and why Ursula K. Le Guin's classic essay - though written almost before the problem had even arisen - hasn't been more than a small rock in the stream, I see I've been given much more to chew on.

After the discussion, our very own Dr. Smith brought out from under his cloak a DVD special: a film of The Call of Cthulhu. All my friends who love cheesy low-budget horror flicks - this means you, fr_john and sturgeonslawyer, and in this case you too, nellorat - should see it if they haven't already. It's about 3/4 hour long, it's black-and-white, and it's silent - with the title cards, the over-acting, the cinematography (to some extent), and the cheap cardboard sfx of the silent era. Which makes it the perfect medium to convey the style and ethos of a Lovecraft story, in a way that more up-to-date forms of film-making fail at. I was amazed, and impressed.

My show-and-tell item was The Lord of the Rings Reader's Companion, of which I got a pre-publication US copy for review. This is by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, so you know it's going to be accurate and meticulous down to the Nth. It's an annotated LOTR without the text, because that would make it just too big. It's big enough as it is, 900 pages and nearly as long as the work it annotates. It covers the kind of textual, sub-creational, source-referential, onomastic, and plot-related points that you'd expect, briskly and blessedly dismiss the speculations and second-guessings favored by a certain breed of Tolkien fan (that Bombadil is God, that an Eagle should have dropped the Ring into the fire, that Balrogs have wings, that sort of thing), and just all-around do a bang-up job. Now I have to write two reviews of it.

Comments

[fr-john.livejournal.com]

Crap. And Netflix doesn't seem to have it...

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

oooh, I *want* the LotR Reader's Companion (puts it on the Amazon wishlist)!

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Not extracts, although the first of the three stories ("The Ladies of Grace Adieu") features both Strange and Norrell. All three can be taken as happening in the same world, if you like. Or at least in the novel's footnotes.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I've seen the trailer for _Call_ -- it looks quite fun.