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Megen, for Father's Day -- and today's her birthday, so Happy Birthday, Megs! -- gifted me with a copy of JRR Tolkien's THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN," a release of various source material from the Tolkien files put together by Christopher Tolkien into one narrative, and illustrated by Alan Lee, who did some of the best landscapes of Middle Earth, in my estimation. Lee's artwork is gorgeous once again...
When I read LOTR, many decades ago now, I was captured and enthralled. Tolkien may not be the world greatest prose stylist, and (with the possible exception of Eowyn) he couldn't write a female character to save his life, but the LOTR narrative was redolent with the feel of a whole world, weighted with long history and the intertwined lives of several races. The world pulled me in and absorbed me as a reader. It was truly a magical read.
Then came, far too long after, THE SILMARILLION. Unlike LOTR, it wasn't a narrative but more an expanded appendix. Mind you, I loved the appendices in LOTR, but what I wanted from THE SILMARILLION was another LOTR, another close narrative populated with characters. I wanted a story, not a history text. There were a hundred stories in THE SILMARILLION that could have become that, had Tolkien written them that way... but he hadn't. These were notes and mythologies and histories: these were the texts of an obsessive worldbuilder, but not a story.
Then eventually there came UNFINISHED TALES, and that was a taunting from the ghost of Tolkien -- nascent stories that started and failed and drifted away in wisps...
The reviews I'd seen of THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN indicated that this might be different -- that it was a narrative closer to that of LOTR, focusing on the life of Túrin, mentioned in the SILMARILLION and LOTR. And, to some extent, it is that... except that Túrin is a louse and a fool, a character who I found utterly devoid of any sympathetic traits. I hated Türin by a third of the way through the text, hated him because he was stupid and emotionally blind and dead, and inevitably made the wrong choice. Yes, some of that is the essence of tragedy, but in well-written tragedy, we also come to understand the character and believe in him. We feel despair at their fate, because it's not what we would wish on them. A good tragic character finds himself hemmed in by fate and circumstance and unable to extract himself from his doom despite all his efforts. He is deceived by those he trusts (as Othello is) or he find his passions undo him (as in Hamlet).
Türin is just a one-dimensional lout who deserves to die far sooner than he does -- a flat character because Tolkien never burrows into his mind or his point of view. A few of the 'plot twists' caused me to laugh out loud at their inanity and their unbelievability. I trudged through the last half of the book feeling cheated -- because this book, too, has some of the feel of a 'deep' rich world, but it fails. That is the real 'tragedy' -- perhaps this could have been a decent and interesting tale, in the hands of someone else. I don't know if the fault is JRR's or Christopher's. I wonder if Christopher Tolkien wouldn't be better advised to find a good writer who could take the fragments of tales that JRR has left behind and finish them properly: as a story. As a close narrative. As a piece of good fiction.
But sadly, this doesn't work. Not as a novel, not as a narrative, not as false mythology. Not for me. LOTR is still (and always will be) a special gift to the imagination. This... I read THE CHILDREN OF HÜRIN because it was Tolkien. Not because it was good.
When I read LOTR, many decades ago now, I was captured and enthralled. Tolkien may not be the world greatest prose stylist, and (with the possible exception of Eowyn) he couldn't write a female character to save his life, but the LOTR narrative was redolent with the feel of a whole world, weighted with long history and the intertwined lives of several races. The world pulled me in and absorbed me as a reader. It was truly a magical read.
Then came, far too long after, THE SILMARILLION. Unlike LOTR, it wasn't a narrative but more an expanded appendix. Mind you, I loved the appendices in LOTR, but what I wanted from THE SILMARILLION was another LOTR, another close narrative populated with characters. I wanted a story, not a history text. There were a hundred stories in THE SILMARILLION that could have become that, had Tolkien written them that way... but he hadn't. These were notes and mythologies and histories: these were the texts of an obsessive worldbuilder, but not a story.
Then eventually there came UNFINISHED TALES, and that was a taunting from the ghost of Tolkien -- nascent stories that started and failed and drifted away in wisps...
The reviews I'd seen of THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN indicated that this might be different -- that it was a narrative closer to that of LOTR, focusing on the life of Túrin, mentioned in the SILMARILLION and LOTR. And, to some extent, it is that... except that Túrin is a louse and a fool, a character who I found utterly devoid of any sympathetic traits. I hated Türin by a third of the way through the text, hated him because he was stupid and emotionally blind and dead, and inevitably made the wrong choice. Yes, some of that is the essence of tragedy, but in well-written tragedy, we also come to understand the character and believe in him. We feel despair at their fate, because it's not what we would wish on them. A good tragic character finds himself hemmed in by fate and circumstance and unable to extract himself from his doom despite all his efforts. He is deceived by those he trusts (as Othello is) or he find his passions undo him (as in Hamlet).
Türin is just a one-dimensional lout who deserves to die far sooner than he does -- a flat character because Tolkien never burrows into his mind or his point of view. A few of the 'plot twists' caused me to laugh out loud at their inanity and their unbelievability. I trudged through the last half of the book feeling cheated -- because this book, too, has some of the feel of a 'deep' rich world, but it fails. That is the real 'tragedy' -- perhaps this could have been a decent and interesting tale, in the hands of someone else. I don't know if the fault is JRR's or Christopher's. I wonder if Christopher Tolkien wouldn't be better advised to find a good writer who could take the fragments of tales that JRR has left behind and finish them properly: as a story. As a close narrative. As a piece of good fiction.
But sadly, this doesn't work. Not as a novel, not as a narrative, not as false mythology. Not for me. LOTR is still (and always will be) a special gift to the imagination. This... I read THE CHILDREN OF HÜRIN because it was Tolkien. Not because it was good.