Some American flacks go to an African country on the eve of independence to run an election campaign. It's all fun and games, until suddenly it isn't.

I tried to read, this, I really did, back when I first finished The Lord Of The Rings and wanted more more MORE. The opening chapters defeated me, however, which really is a pity. I wasn't sure how to deal with a brand new creation myth, for one thing. As a Catholic teen, it seemed to close to blasphemy. As a Catholic teen who wasn't all that enamoured of being a Catholic, it was too much like religion. Then again the archaic language was also off-putting, and though the chapters were short, the reading was long, so it seemed to take forever to get to the point. So I gave up. Still, I must have dipped in and out of it, flicked through, read passages here and there, because this time I did read it, and quite a bit of it was oddly familiar.

I think the creation myth is interesting, because it isn't 'let there be light' or anything like it. Everything here starts with song, then comes the world. Getting light to the world is a long and fraught process, and, indeed, that's where a lot of the trouble comes from. First you have the lamps, which mean old Melkor knocks down, then you have the trees, which Ungoliant eats, then at last you have the sun and the moon, put up in the sky as a last resort where mean old Melkor can't get them. 

Once you get past the creation myth and the descriptions of the Valar and the lands of the West, the story really kicks off, and keeps kicking all the way. We already know from the appendices that The Lord Of The Rings is only the tail end of a story that begins when Iluvatar starts the singing, a tale packed with the epic and the extraordinary, any one page of which could be spun into a trilogy of its own. The silmarils are created, Melkor steals them, Feanor, the first great elvish asshole, swears his vow, murders his kin, heads back to Middle Earth and the fun starts. So we have sieges and chases and betrayals and cruel fates and massive destruction and triumph in adversity and the whole damn thing. It gets especially Wagnerian around poor old Turin, a veritable Siegfried, and the whole shebang ends, appropriately, with a literal deus ex machina.

Marvelous stuff. Mythic grandeur, evocative with magic, drenched with evil, tragic with nobility and rife with unbearable sadness. I would have loved it. 

There's also a bit about that fecker Sauron and the fall of Numenor, more detailed than the account from the appendices, and another chapter about the lead-up to the War of the Ring, more detailed in some ways and less in others, so they both make good additions if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am.

2021 - listened to this on audio, the recording by Martin Shaw is justifiably legendary in its own right.

So, a book I used to reread quite a lot, not because I was obsessive about it, but because it was one of a small group of books that so far as I could tell were better than anything else I could get my hands on, but which I haven't opened in, God, how long? Twenty years? I always figured that at the most I had one more good read of it in me, and that read would be at best an exercise in nostalgia, at worst an awful let down, and then I would never read it again. But you know what? It's a classic for a reason, and that reason is: it's just so damn good.
From the warm cosy opening to the arrival of thirteen dwarves and a wizard, to the long, often uncomfortable journey during which they are frequently captured, wet, hungry and sometimes all three, and during which they rarely if ever, display much in the way of competence or even heroism, Gandalf excepted, naturally. For all that, they're a lovable bunch, and Bilbo himself is a character of rare and sensible charm, profoundly lovable, in fact, and no better a person through which to experience all the joys and terrors of the unexpected journey.
So I think I shall be revisiting The Hobbit more frequently in the future, and cracking open the old volumes of The Lord Of The Rings, battered and torn and stained and sellotaped together in the next week or two. I'm already looking forward to it.

Anyway, I just reread it again, because we're going to the film tomorrow. The film will be the film, for better or worse, but the book will always be the book, and I'll be grateful to the film for prompting me to revisit the book and rediscovering it. I reckon I'm Bilbo-aged now, plump and middle-aged and settled. I can't deny the appeal of something that suggests there might still be adventures in store and a chance for me to prove my worth, and perhaps that's the appeal of this, one of the best of all children's books, for adults.

December 2021 - after another wretch of a year, listened to the Rob Inglis audio book for the pure comfort of it. Somehow Thorin's last words to Bilbo carried an extraordinary, almost wrenching weight this time.

December 2023 - y'know, this is riddled with little bits of worldbuilding that relate to the deeper histories of the Silmarillion, I can't believe I never noticed them properly. Also Chekov's Mines Of Moria.

Ultimately rather grim tale about the human folly, greed and stupidity that leads to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Religious fanatcism, political backstabbing, a profound misunderstanding of the dynamics of the conflict, a lot of wasted lives. Marvelous battle scenes. Two doomed love stories. A figure of towering nobility brought low by a terrible disease. Secret rites. Toxic masculinity by the ton. Not uplifting, but savagely effective. 

The Fairway Players are back, with another production, a Christmas Panto, and another mystery, pieced together through messages and correspondences. It's lively, funny, and clever, perhaps not quite as fiendish as her longer books, but still a delghtful and engaging puzzle

Philip Pullman homages MR James with this story set in the Dark Materials universe about two art collectors, in a fusty old Oxford college naturally, discussing the curious histories of a painting and a bronze. With the illustrations it makes for a very quick read, but it's atmospheric and pleasingly off kilter.

Genuinely affecting book that manages family grief, school bullying, and ghostly visitations all in one deft, moving and exciting narrative. 

I haven't read Lord Of The Rings since, oooh, College at least, long dim days lost in the mist of times, but once upon a time it was a veritable pillar of my life. I certainly wouldn't have survived my teenage years without it. When the films came out, of course, I thought about rereading them but somehow never got around to it. Here I am then, middle aged and pudgy as a hobbit with a family of my own, convinced that such adventures as I have had are all well behind me. My weary feet don't pursue the road very far and when my eyes turn to far-off hills, I wonder if I can get there by the motorway, and whether there's a cafe nearby. 
So why would I crack open those old worn and torn and sellotaped paperbacks Mum got for me when I was in hospital that year having my appendix out? (I distinctly remember the soldier with the helmet full of water washing Wormtongue's spit from the steps while I sat in the waiting room. Pardon me, but could you put the book down while we perform abdominal surgery on you? Thanks.) Why would you revisit that and remind yourself of all the things you lost and left behind, all the things you did wrong? 
Because in the end, that's what The Lord Of The Rings is about. Things lost and gone away and barely remembered. Suffused with the sadness of beautiful things passing; yet there is joy in the remembering, if you can bear it. Well, I can, and that's no bad thing.

Dec 2021 - Listened to the Rob Ingles audio version. Enchanting.

Dec 2023 - listened again

Mad fun altogether, completely daft thriller about two police snowbound in a remote Scottish villlage where people too horrible to live in the real world go to hide under supervsion and people are being murdered and disappeared and houses are bursting into flames and the snow keeps coming down. Twists and turns and surprises abound, it's funny, fast and exciting.

The amazing thing, I guess, is that the writing does, in fact, hold up. I can see myself coming back to this again. A fire has rekindled in my heart, as JRR himself might have it. The Two Towers, of course, is where the narrative splits, and splits again. On average, the point of view is more Hobbit than not, and the language remains true to their down-to-earth common-sense mode, while the more formal, old-fashioned epic style is used for the adventures of Aragorn and company, with, of course, the odd bit of mingling, and anyone who tried such a thing today would get laughed out of the bookshop. There are some advantages to been a distinguished professor of linguistics.

Furthermore a LOT happens in a relatively short space without feeling terrible rushed. Pippin and Merry captured! Aragorn's Gang race after! Battle! Forest! Saruman? No! Gandalf! Ents! Edoras! Helm's Flipping Deep! The first full-scale battle of the series! WE'RE BARELY HALFWAY THROUGH THE FIRST PART! 

But through it all the one thing that never relents is Tolkien's endless detailing of the landscape. Moreso that language or history or customs, Tolkein builds his world from the ground up. The sreams, the fields, the trees, the hills: take out the action and you have a vivid, thoughtful, highly observant travelogue. You always know where you are, be it Rohan or Gondor or Mordor. The Fellowship never travels over a blank canvas.

One of the best part of Two Towers, though, is Merry and Pippin's aplomb at the gates of Isengard, greeting the King and his retinue. They've been through a lot, and they're soon to be parted and changed, but right then, they're the most hobbity of hobbits.

Jan 2022 - listened to the audio - really brings it to life, and there's a quaintness about the reader that suits it entirely.

Dec 2023 - listened again. Still not tired of it.