Take it from Frodo

The arrival of Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" series of movies translates into two ... no, make it three ... kinds of related books this season:

1) Reissues of Tolkien's best books, including "The Hobbit" (no surprise there)

2) Scholarly works for the deeply obsessed fan of Tolkien's work (like Verlyn Flieger's "Green Suns and Faerie," which I wrote about not long ago)

3) A mixed bag of books, ranging from interesting movie tie-ins to silly, slight works hoping to sell a few units while the movie is in theaters

When I received my advance galley of Noble Smith's "The Wisdom of the Shire: A Short Guide to A Long And Happy Life" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's), I groaned. "Here's one of the silly, superficial examples of category 3!" I thought. "Ugh. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins on leadership!"

The closer I looked, the more I realized I was wrong. The conceit of this book does seem a bit silly, a bit shameless in its packaging -- to see our lives in terms of the values of Tolkien's little fellows -- but is it?  Hobbits love the simple things in life: food and beer, friends, a good night's sleep. Isn't that like most of us?

If you've read Tom Shippey on the matter, you know Tolkien intended them to reflect us in his mythic cycle of tales -- so Noble Smith's book makes sense. And it's worth a look.

I especially appreciate his chapter on "bearing the burden of your ring." Sauron's awful ring can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom, and Frodo nearly dies in the effort. It slowly taints and corrupts him but he never surrenders it even though he has so many chances.  Plenty of people will gladly take it from his finger. Not just Gollum. Give it to Aragorn. Let Gondor take it. Give it to Gandalf. Let the elves deal with it, Frodo. Head for the Shire. Drink a beer and have a warm, long night's sleep.

Frodo refuses, knowing that the ring is poisoning him.

Noble Smith praises Frodo for his focus and dedication. I'd add that Frodo displays a quality most of us lack today. He acts on behalf of a larger community of living beings who are counting on him -- not simply in terms of what is best only for him. Frodo knows there will be terrible consequences for Middle-earth if he surrenders the ring just to save his own skin. So he doesn't. He makes the hard choice that most people wouldn't make today.

I wonder what he'd think of us if the Supreme Ring had somehow teleported him into our world.

(More Hobbity posts to come as Peter Jackson's movie get nearer.)

Into the mystic ... with Merton

Years ago I met spirituality author Matthew Fox after the publication of his book "One River, Many Wells," and the title of that book has stuck with me ever since.

One river, many wells: a great description of the reality of God.

Another metaphor is: Imagine that God is the sun, shining on an apartment building. One window belongs to the Catholic tenant, another to the Jewish one, the Muslim, the scientist (he sits in the sunlight thinking about String Theory), the Buddhist, Hindu, even the atheist (his blinds are drawn shut). The only problem with this image or Fox's is that it enrages dogmatic believers. It's blasphemy to them. They start shaking a finger at you and citing canon law, and any hope of common ground is lost.

That wasn't true of Thomas Merton, thank God. That Trappist monk embodied the mid-20th century ideal of American Catholicism, but he was also a questing, spiritually hungry thinker who looked east for insights into faith.  He didn't rebuff dialogue: He welcomed it. A few months ago, the publisher New Directions released two small collections of Merton's reflections, "On Eastern Meditation" edited by Bonnie Thurston and "On Christian Contemplation" edited by Paul Pearson, that capture his vibrant inquiry into the reality of God.

Merton was a man of Christ, and the Pearson volume demonstrates that on every page. But he also struggled with the Christian practices of his time, complaining that people clung to a "crabbed, rigid piety" or else were trapped "in a straitjacket." He called for a renewal of approach that amounted, he writes in "Contemplation and Action," to a "new depth and simplicity of love, and ... a new understanding."

Perhaps that's why he looked East. For inspiration.

When I think of those fierce believers who wag a finger at anything outside their comfort zone, I like to recall this reassuring line from Thurston's volume: "Merton was convinced," she writes, "there was a 'real possibility of contact on a deep level between ... contemplative and monastic tradition in the West and the various contemplative traditions in the East...' "

"On a deep level": the words make me think of Matthew Fox's river. Or an apartment building in the sunlight.

These two books are small -- a selective, engaging sample of Merton's thought, poetry, private questions.

Ideal to tuck in a coat pocket and pull out during your next coffee break.

 

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New in bookstores: bite-sized epics

The curse of contemporary life: Not enough time.

It is a real challenge to find a few moments for yourself just to be still, to meditate, to inhale deeply.  But what if you're a reader of epic fantasy? How do you fit a thousand-pager into your week? (I remember managing to do it with George R.R. Martin's "Storm of Swords," but it nearly killed me.)

You can't simply give them up, can you?  They're a necessity to life: The worlds constructed by Martin, or Patrick Rothfuss, or Jay Lake, or Neil Gaiman, or Carrie Vaughn, or Kelly Link are wonderfully interesting when our own lives aren't. But they also require big, fat commitments of time. So what do you do?

Editor John Joseph Adams has hit on the solution in his latest anthology, "Epic: Legends of Fantasy," published by Bay Area-based Tachyon Publications. If you haven't heard of Tachyon, you need to check them out. They're a great publishing unit doing an invaluable service -- like Link and husband Gavin Grant's Small Beer Press -- to keep the work of some very fine writers in circulation.

In "Epic," Adams gives us tales from contemporary practitioners of epic fantasy. Some of the names mentioned above are included -- like Martin (his contribution, "The Mystery Knight," is a story of Westeros that's a good supporting piece to "A Song of Ice and Fire"); and Rothfuss ("The Road to Levinshir" plunges its narrator down in an uneasy, murky landscape).  But there are others here are well -- like Robin Hobb (whose dragon series is worth picking up) and Ursula Le Guin and Vaughn and Brian Sanderson (who took on the project of finishing the late Robert Jordan's "Wheels" saga).

It's an excellent selection that gets us back to the point mentioned at the top of this post. How do you manage to squeeze in epic tales when you don't have enough time in your life?  The answer is, you do the best that you can when you can. Or else you can turn to this anthology by Adams which, in a phrase I've used before, gives readers evocative stories delivering the full caloric load of a novel in half the time. You'll come away from this fine edition feeling very satisfied.

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New this month: John Banville's "Ancient Light" and the fantasies of young men

In his new novel, "Ancient Light" (Alfred A. Knopf), John Banville does what he's always done best: Gives us a brooding narrator with an evocative, meaning-laden name and a past in need of unraveling. And don't forget the lyricism. Always there's lyricism. There must be lyricism. We meet Alexander Cleave (there's the name, suggesting some inner turmoil, division), his troubled daughter, and his memories of his youth. Those memories include his teen affair with an older woman, and that's all I want to center on now. When you're caught in the middle of countless distractions, when your mind is cluttered, a little dose of Banville clears the mind. Restores focus. Reminds you of the possibilities of language again.

As in the following lyrical reflection about Cleave's desires as a young man, and his youthful inexperience:

I knew precious little about girls--and consequently the little I knew was precious indeed--and next to nothing about grown women. At the seaside for a summer when I was ten or eleven there had been an auburn beauty of my own age whom I had adored at a distance--but then, who in the honeyed haze of childhood has not adored an auburn beauty by the seaside?--and a redhead in town one winter, called Hettie Hickey, who despite her less than lovely name was as delicate as a Meissen figurine, who wore multiple layers of lace petticoats and showed off her legs when she danced the jive, and who on three consecutive and never to be forgotten Saturday nights consented to sit with me in the back row of the Alhambra cinema and let me put a hand down the front of her dress and cup in my palm one of her surprisingly chilly but excitingly pliable, soft little breasts.

Banville captures an entire kind of experience in a single paragraph: an incredibly difficult feat he makes seem effortless. A memory of youth that acquires a mythic aura in the adult narrator's mind. And for me it was that phrase "honeyed haze of childhood" that refreshed me, just when I needed it.

Waiting for the hump

So, skeletal remains found under a parking lot in Leicester may belong to crookback Richard III, darker and more sinister-looking in Shakespeare's play than Darth Vader was the first time you saw him stalking down  the blockade runner corridor in "A New Hope."

But a bit of personal interaction with Philippa Gregory in my previous newspaper career (see About Call of the Siren for more on that), and with Desmond Seward's book "Richard III," changed all that for me. I still love Shakespeare's lines, and love reciting them, from his play --  "cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,/Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world..." That's what Richard declares about himself. But I can't be sure the words are entirely true.

The last Plantagenet was a ruthless ruler, undeniably so, but so were many rulers of the eras before, during and after -- a fact Seward includes not to defend Richard, but to keep things in balance. Gregory is a passionate Yorkist, arguing that Richard and his clan were the victims of a Tudor smear campaign. Check out her "Cousins' War" series of novels and you'll see for yourself.

Which gets me back to the parking lot discovery of last month.  If the skeleton can be assembled, what will we see? Evidence of a dramatic hump or just an uneven shoulder blade, transformed by Elizabeth I's playwright into something monstrous?