At 12:06 pm 03/12/97 EST, you wrote:
>Corene McKay wrote (about Tolkien in reference to Kay and _The Fionavar
>Tapestry_):
>
> ----------
>... the writing is more pedestrian.
> ----------
>
>Pedestrian? Pedestrian?? Ah, well, this is certainly not the time or
>place for me to have a fit about how great Tolkien is, but such a facile
>critique of such a fantastic writer seemed to me too wrong not to
>comment.
>
>... I agree, though, that a few more women would have been nice....
>
>Rhian Merris
>rhian.m.merris@cpmx.saic.com
I knew I should have qualified that. What I said was me trying to explain
my subjective (based entirely on my emotional response and not in any way
on an examination of the text itself) reaction. Which was heavily
influenced by the fact that most of my friends are so utterly in love with
Tolkein that I think I was expecting something above God. It was bizarre:
I'd carry the book around with me, and people I was barely aquainted with
would sigh, get all misty eyed, and say "Ohhh, you're losing your Tolkein
virginity."
And I didn't mean pedestrian as in unimaginative, I meant it as in more
down-to-earth, less over-the-top poetic. Er, less "Hallmarkish," shall we
say.
Not to say I dislike Tolkein, the only writer I dislike is Dickens (please
no yelling from Dickens fans, I've heard it all). I fully agree that
Tolkein's a great writer, and he definitely has a richness that Kay lacks.
I'm sitting here with both texts trying to figure out if they support
anything I'm saying, but I've written three genre analysis essays in the
last 24 hours (which coincidentally is how long I've been awake), and my
brain is too fried to analyze something as straightforward as text. So
anything I said here I may not agree with in the morning, but I felt
compelled to say it anyway.
Speaking of which
Kirsten Corby wrote:
I am going to have to stand up and agree with Lesley here. I've never
thought that much of GGK, and this is one of the reasons why --his
perfunctory attempts at worldbuilding. Speaking as a writer of fantasy with
a degree in history, his work is a copout in this regard. (The later books
anyway.) THE LIONS OF AL-RASSAN was quite the most egregious in this respect.
It would be cool to create a fantasy world based on Moorish Spain. But to
set it on a peninsula of land shaped *exactly like* the Iberian peninsula,
and to change the religions of the land from transcendent monotheism to a
facile paganism, just to make it seem more "fantasy-like" (the Jews,
Christians and Moslems are made to worship the moons, the sun, and the stars,
respectively) while keeping everything else about the culture and the
politics the same as in real-life medieval Spain -- well, it bugs me.
And I write:
I think what he seems to be doing is working under the notion that Fionavar
is the "Main World" and other worlds are further and further away from it,
so that's what he's doing with the worlds in his books, getting closer and
closer to Earth with each one. I also think this is terribly gimmicky, and
I agree that his use of setting is way too simplistic to pull it off.
Corene McKay
ed_res@op.douglas.bc.ca
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:39 PDT