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Episode image is a detail from the cover of The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkein, published in 1956 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Charles Adrian shares his love for Fantasy literature this week and reads from some properly brilliant books. He also uses this as an excuse to pontificate on the function of art.
The episode on sci fi that Charles Adrian mentions is Page One 68.
Another book by Lewis Carroll, The Hunting Of The Snark, is discussed in Page One 49.
Other books by Terry Pratchett are discussed in Page One 140 (Good Omens, which is co-authored with Neil Gaiman) and Page One 181 (Small Gods).
The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is discussed in Page One 60 and Page One 120.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin is also discussed in Page One 108 and another book by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, is discussed in Page One 38.
Another book by Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye, is discussed in Page One 34 and Page One 165.
The Fellowship Of The Ring by J. R. R. Tolkein is also discussed in Page One 5.
Correction: When Charles Adrian talks about the “fourth” book in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, he means the third, which is Titus Alone.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 18th March, 2014.
Book listing:
The Adventures of Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Fellowship Of The Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
Links:
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hi guys, welcome to the 73rd Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and I'm all on my own again this week. I'm going to be reading you some first pages and just generally boring you on the subject of fantasy.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Fantasy literature. Now, obviously, anybody who's been paying attention will immediately have realised that this is a kind of companion piece to the episode on sci fi that I put out a couple of weeks ago. You only need to go into a bookshop or a library to realise that sci fi and fantasy are the inseparables of the literary world. And it's true that they share some of the same qualities. A lack of realism, I suppose, is the first thing that springs to mind. But, as I argued, when I was talking about sci fi, I think that the best fantasy fiction is actually about reality in all its aspects. And I'm going to come back to this several times.
Now, a few weeks ago I stole a quotation from Wikipedia to define science fiction and I've done exactly the same this week for fantasy. And I quite like this definition. It starts:
Fantasy has been distinguished from other forms of literature by its style and its freedom of expression wherein the author has the ability to use any story-telling element to strengthen the narrative; whether it be dragons, magic and castles or the lack thereof.
And I'll just break in here to say that I acknowledge that the end of this sentence is definitely the weak point of the quotation. Whoever the writer is seems to be saying that fantasy is defined either by dragons or by the lack of dragons. And I'm not exactly sure what he or she means by that. But I suppose my first point is that if I'm going to separate sci fi and fantasy, the thing that seems to... the point of separation, as it were, I think, is... is this freedom: the freedom to do whatever it is that you want to do. Nothing here needs to be scientifically or historically plausible. Absolutely anything is allowed, as long as the reader will buy it – and I suppose that's the point. But when you stop to think about it, it's amazing what the reader will buy.
I'm going to start today with a pretty famous first page. It might be the most famous first page that I've ever read on this podcast. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say that I think it's one of the best-known first pages in the whole of English literature. And while I'm reading it I'm going to imagine some of my listeners saying to themselves, “What? That's not a fantasy book. It's just a... a book.” It is a fantasy book, though. It follows all of the rules.
I
Down the Rabbit-hole
ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waist-coat pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet [...]
That's the first page of Alice in Wonderland [sic], of course, by Lewis Carroll. And I'm feeling very smug because I have a lovely hardback Heirloom Library edition of this from 1954 with drawings by Philip Gough, some of which are in colour. Oh, and you should see the Jabberwock with eyes of Flame! And as if that weren't enough, it's a double edition and contains both Alice in Wonderland [sic] and Alice Through the Looking Glass [sic], which I always prefered as it happens.
And well, okay, before I go on, here are a couple of sentences from Alice Through the Looking Glass [sic], just to kind of, I think, bolster my thesis for today:
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
So that's also a very well known bit of writing, I think. And why is it so well known? Well, because while it looks totally ridiculous it feels absolutely true. Doesn't it? How many people have said to themselves on reading that, “Ah yes, I know that feeling”? Hmm? Lots, is the answer.
Now, to go on – with apologies for becoming a little intellectual here – what I want to say is that all art presents a model of human experience. In my opinion, it's always an attempt to present the world or a facet of the world in such a way as to communicate – or to share, if you like – one's experience with others. Or to show how something works. Or to try something out. And I think fantasy literature does exactly the same thing but it does it by tapping into something that so many of us do anyway. I mean, it has a reputation of being a particularly childish genre and I think it's fair because the models it uses tend to be playful. It's about daydreaming, fantasising. At the grand old age of thirty-four I'm not embarrassed to say that I haven't grown out of that yet. And I don't think that's such a bad thing.
I think that fantasy literature is an excellent way of presenting grown up ideas and problems in manageable ways because I think that play is one of the most powerful tools that human beings have for solving problems. And, obviously, these books are beguiling. They feel safe. What happens in a fantasy book is so far removed from anything that's happening in the world that when I read one of these I'm also giving myself a break from any anxiety I might be feeling about global warming or sectarian violence or whatever. But – and here's where listeners of the sci fi podcast will see that I'm not afraid to bang on about the same old tired ideas regardless of any encouragement or lack of that I might be getting from outside – but I think they provide a safe space to try out ideas about, for example, ethics and morality, and to find solutions for things. I think that that's what's really at the root of this. I think that fantasy books are almost always at some level about the acquisition or loss of power of one kind or another. I think Alice is no exception. And I think that any story about power is a story about how power should be used.
Now, somebody whose books I first picked up in my school library and who I still read today is Terry Pratchett, and he's somebody who is super interested in the idea of power and what power is. I have the whole of his Discworld series on the bookshelf in my living room and I've read through it several times from start to finish, including the Tiffany Aching books. I just love him. Yes, he's patronising. Yes, he can be a little bit too cosy. Yes, it's frustrating that desire, for him, is always so relentlessly heteronormative. But the world he creates is so inviting. And it's funny. It's... It's familiar. And I think most of all I find it interesting to see the development in his thinking. As you go through the series you see that he abandons some of the more obviously fantastical elements of the earlier books and he starts to become more explicitly focused on this question of power: what it is, how it's used, how it should be used.
One of his preoccupations is with stories. And I think that today more than ever what he's saying is worth hearing. Because more and more he seems to be saying: beware the power of stories, look at what is really there, trust your instincts but question your assumptions. And I think... I mean, it sounds obvious, but I think these things are really useful reminders for us especially as we deal with diversity and difference in the world around us and the kind of things that people write about other people and other ways of being.
Now – lecture over – the only second hand copy that I have of any of his books is a copy of The Colour of Magic, which is the first Discworld novel. It's a pretty classic Corgi paperback from 1993 with a Josh Kirby cover illustration. It features Rincewind the wizard, Twoflower the tourist... It features the Luggage. And, of course, the World Turtle Great A'Tuin.
Perhaps I should just say, quickly, a word about beginnings before I read it because fantasy writers do have the peculiar challenge of having to present us very quickly with the rules of the worlds that they've created. Because these worlds do have rules. If they didn't, we wouldn't... we wouldn't, I think, get so much enjoyment out of them. They have to be structured somehow. And very quickly we want to know: Is magical allowed? How much are things like they are in our universe? What are the parameters here? Because I think it's easy to forget when you're reading something that's not fantasy how much you take for granted. Gravity is taken for granted, for example; the solidity of walls; the inability to be more than one place at a time. And these things are not necessarily true in the world of fantasy.
Here's the beginning of The Colour of Magic:
THE COLOUR OF MAGIC
Prologue
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
See..
Great A'Tuin the Turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.
In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.
Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.
The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartz-windowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.
The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the [...]
Okay, I've talked too much for the whole first half of this. I'm sorry. It must be time for some music. Here's Fantasy by The xx.
Music
[Fantasy by The xx]
Fantasy by The xx.
My next book is one that I discovered only a few months ago but I think its title had been in my head for much longer. It's Dune by Frank Herbert and I'm just going to kick off by reading you the first page. Keep in mind what I said about beginnings.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Muad'Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. And take the most special care that you locate Muad'Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not be deceived by the fact that he was born on Caladan and lived his first fifteen years there. Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place.
– from ‘Manual of Muad'Dib’ by the Princess Irulan
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.
The old woman was let in by the side door down the vaulted passage by Paul's room and she was allowed a moment to peer in at him where he lay in his bed.
By the half-light of a suspensor lamp, dimmed and hanging near the floor, the awakened boy could see a bulky female shape at his door, standing one step ahead of his mother. The old woman was a witch shadow – hair like matted spiderwebs, hodded 'round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels.
‘Is he not small for his age, Jessica?’ the old woman asked. Her voice wheezed and twanged like an untuned baliset.
Paul's mother answered in her soft contralto: ‘The Atreides [...]’
Ah, this book is so rich. There's so much stuff here. There's backstory galore, there's a map, there are cartographic notes for the map. And as a reader we're taken everywhere and we've shown everything that we might be interested in. It's a messiah story, essentially – there's something of the rise of Islam in it – but it's about empires and dynasties and economies and power. Power again, you see? We have questions like: What is power? Where does it come from? How does it manifest itself? Can it come in gentleness as well as in strength? These are all super relevant things.
Now... Yeah, and the other thing... So I've... Now we've tilted across into the second half of this podcast I think I have to start talking about endings. I was about three quarters of the way through Dune when I realised that it's only the first in a series of books and that Frank Herbert never completed the series – some of the books were written by his children. So I started to think, “Oh no! What have I got myself in for? Is this going to end up being an anticlimax?” Because it was looking as though there was just too much story to get through for the number of pages that were left. And, frankly, I didn't want to start reading books written by offspring. Although I might have been wrong about that. As it turns out, the book ends perfectly satisfactorily and everything's fine – I can decide whether or not to read the other books later on without any unresolved narrative pressure.
But ending is something that fantasy writers do seem to find difficult. The Discworld series that I was talking about has no real end. Many of the other works of fantasy fiction that I've read spill into trilogies or longer series. Think of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I talked about with George Lewkowicz during the 60th Page One: originally a radio series that became three books and then four and then five and then, even after Douglas Adams died, a sixth book has been written and published. And sometimes I think the authors themselves don't know when to leave well enough alone. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series is superb for the first three books... and then there's a fourth one. Gormenghast never needed the fourth volume either. But... But I think we should accept some of that responsibility, dear readers. I think a lot of it is our fault. Because it seems to me it's something to do with our willing addiction to these worlds. And it may be that there's no satisfactory way to wean us off the better creations. In the grander sagas there's often some kind of quest or task that has to be accomplished – that's how the things are structured - and usually this world that's been created for us will be destroyed if the thing is not pulled off. And amid much collateral damage this happens: the world is saved, everyone goes home. So now what tends to happen is that the urgency is gone but the world remains – and we love the world. So what to do?
Now, as I say, I haven't read any of the rest of the Dune saga yet so I don't know how Frank Herbert and his children combat the frequently diminishing returns that go with prolonging a story beyond the point at which it should be laid to rest but my next book is what might be called the daddy of modern fantasy fiction. It's The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. And here is a trilogy that really doesn't know what to do with itself as it ends. The crisis comes, the ring is destroyed, a new king is crowned, those who are still alive return home, and trees are planted, and people grow older, and we carry on reading. And it's fine but... but somehow... Oh, sorry, wait, I should have said “Spoiler alert!” Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert!
Anyway, I think... Well, anyway, in the end none of that's really important. I'm being churlish. This is a superb piece of work and it's... and it's chock full of important stuff. I haven't given up on this reality thing: there's religion in here, there's mythology, superstition, childhood fears, adult preoccupations, politics, nostalgia. It's not to everybody's taste, perhaps, but this is another set of books that I've read several times. I first read them when I was twelve, I read them again as a teenager, I read them again before each of the films came out – so I must have read them at least five times all the way through. And here too is this amazing backstory. And maps! Oh, such maps! My copies of these books each have a paper map glued into the back that you can fold out to follow where the characters are at any given moment. I should probably say that they are hardbacks from 1956 and 1956 and 1955 respectively, published by George Allen and Unwin limited. And... oh, I'm running out of time but I...
There are so many things I love about these books but I think I wanted to say: what I love most of all about them is the gradual opening up of this world as we read it. We're hobbits and we start off locked into this little world of Hobbiton and the Shire for chapter after chapter and gradually we make our way out into the wide world but so gently, so gently, and it becomes a little more dangerous with each step and we can hardly believe that it could become any more dangerous but it does and it becomes more frightening and we're... we're left more vulnerable and... oh, it's just delicious. Oh, I think I might have to start reading these again tonight. But before I do run out of time, I want to read the first page of The Fellowship of the Ring. I've skipped the prologue, which is all about what happens in The Hobbit. You can read that yourself.
Chapter I
A LONG-EXPECTED PARTY
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure. And if that was not enough for fame, there was also his prolonged vigour to marvel at. Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins. At ninety he was much the same as at fifty. At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved; but unchanged would have been nearer the mark. There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth.
‘It will have to be paid for,’ they said. ‘It isn't natural, and trouble will come of it!’
But so far trouble had not come; and as Mr. Baggins was generous with his money, most people were willing to forgive him his oddities and his good fortune. He remained on visiting terms with his relatives (except, of course, the Sackville-Bagginses), and he had many devoted admirers among the hobbits of poor and unimportant families. But he had no close friends, until some of his younger cousins began to grow up.
The eldest of these, and Bilbo's favourite, was young Frodo Baggins. When Bilbo was ninety-nine he adopted Frodo as his heir, and brought him to live at Bag End; and the hopes of the Sackville-Bagginses were finally dashed. Bilbo and Frodo happened to have the same birthday, September 22nd. ‘You had better come and live here, Frodo my lad,’ said Bilbo one day, ‘and then we can celebrate our birthday-parties comfortably together.’ At that time Frodo was still in his tweens, as the hobbits called the irresponsible twenties between childhood and coming of age at thirty-three.
Twelve more years passed. Each year the Bagginses had given [....]
Oh, and I should also have said... well, the reason I particularly like that first page, I think, is the idea that we become adults for the first time at thirty-three. And, yeah, at the age of thirty-four I feel as though that's... that's a comforting thought. And perhaps in another eleven years something exciting will happen and I will discover the point of my life. But that's it for now. I should finish. Thank you so much for listening to this. This has been the 73rd Page One, I've been Charles Adrian, and for anyone else who remembers the 80s I'm going to play us out with Fantastic Day by Haircut 100.
Music
[Fantastic Day by Haircut 100]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]