The problem of the Telmarines: book-Telmarines are Puritan colonisers, Early Americans if you will, pirates-turned-moralisers out of sync with the nature they’ve invaded. They had excellent pointy helmets and nifty mini-skirts. Film-Telmarines are Spanish Conquistadors extpriating the Aztecs, proud and treachorous all, except for tyrant-usurper Miraz, who is Hitler obv, and therefore Iranian. Their military knowhow is negligeable — they don’t even know that footsoldiers should break stride on a nearly built bridge — but luckily they are up against the cluelessl of Old Narnia.

The problem of Narnians: Centaurs and Satyrs and Furries oh my! Mr Tumnus (as channelled by Mallarmé, one afternoon): “I adore you, wrath of virgins–fierce delight/Of the sacred burden’s writhing naked flight/From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash/With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh:/From the cruel one’s feet to the heart of the shy,/Whom innocence abandons suddenly,/Watered in frenzied or less woeful tears.” <— This is what kosher fauns get up to when it isn’t winter. In the film, the massed ranks of centaurs are all nips up top, all pubes everywhere else. Old Narnians are REALLY REALLY none too bright, at least outside the ranks of Dwarf Nikabrik’s sadly thwarted Campaign for REAL Old Narnians (CAMRON) (Carmody to thread!)

The problem of war: is the problem of the story. War is, like, horrible: and to be remotely exciting on film today it has to be amped UP not tamped down. In the book it’s a romp where nearly no one gets killed; the film has to stand against LotR and Troy and 300 and whatevs. It’s a tough call guess which side adopts the more incompetently insane strategy: the Narnians who stand in FRONT and then undermine their own fortifications, or the Telamarines, who set their cavalry off at charge then fire massive trebuchet boulders at them from behind. “We detest and fear the trees! Let’s do battle right in the middle of them!” Etc. Perversely, I rather liked the added-in castle-attack: the book sees General Caspian, on his own and untrained, lead a failed foray — Giant Wimbleweather broke out “at the wrong time and from the wrong place”, and a centaur is “terribly wounded” — and its glum aftermath (poor dim Wimbleweather crying all over everyone). The film turns this into a Robin Hood-type escapade, which goes wrong bcz Caspian and Peter are squabbling inexperienced rivals, bcz plans are not stuck to, and bcz castles are kinda built to withstand Robin Hood-type escapades, 90 years of cinema cliche notwithstanding. So hurrah for PC’s plot-departing genre-busting daring here, even if it does mean a bunch of lovely Furries dying in horrible agony, a downer even Lucy’s winsome freckles and snub nose can’t entirely dilute. Lots of Narnians die because Peter and Caspian are idiots — not to mention KIDS d00d! — and the grown-ups, viz Aslan, are prancing about in the woods playing test-yr-faith hide-and-seek. Did I mention Aslan is a kn0b?

The problem of the children: why does Narnia need Kings and Queens who are Sons of Adam? It is of course because you are NOT ALLOWED TEH SECHS IN unless you already fell off the wagon, eden-apple wise. CSL gets himself in SUCH a silly mess about this — Aslan has set up an RPG with ad hoc rules that make a happening FantasyWorld totally impossible. (Old Father Time, last to leave, will put out the light before three of these Earthlets even lose their virginity; and the lion will be carpeted by the Emperor-Overseas: “With all due respect, Aslan, youre fired”))

The problem of Susan: beestung lippie-tastic stunna from the off, fending off mere mortal mingers, I will happily defend that Susan can’t keep her eyes or hands off Suave Latino Caspian, and vice versa — horn’n'faun jokes are the Rampaging Oliphaunt in the Narnian Spare Oom already, and TORCHWOOD AGENDA GET OVER IT ppl. Susan is a super-boring character without this dimension; I prefer the Pevensies flailing around getting stuff wrong and bickering convincingly.

The problem of High King Peter (the Magnificent): worst general evah (but then he is 13 AT MOST and quite properly expecting Aslan to arrive soon and sort stuff out). I liked the way Peter lurched from decency to flustered petulance — the oldest brother character is a classic dud in KidLit anyway (tone set by Swallows and Amazons, John Walker the utterly wooden-be-good stand-in for real-life tomboy Taqui Altounyan, who sounds like the Pirate Queen of the Calormenes). So yeah. “We would have got away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids FANNYDANGLING DEITIES WHO MADE THIS WORLD AND EVERYTHING IN IT” <— fixed

The problem of Aslan: is that like all monotheistic supreme being he was a preening self-absorbed tw@t, and being voiced by Liam Neeson makes it worse. I enjoyed this film immensely: TASH-SLASH NOW!

ii: i have probbly not reread it since i was in my teens (= the 70s what were we thinkin) and largely recall it as bein about a secretive community rooted in hallucinogenic CHEESE hurrah

iii: the cheese is called JASPERS cheese

iv: the hero is called called gilbert DASEIN and his lovely g/f is called jenny SORGE

v: the hero is named in sentence ONE, by which time i had already said “yikes hang on!” to myself: “this is a bit of a massive clunky steer surely, nameswise — when did f.herbert go so bunyan on us?”

vi: anyway the steer (as i know know but back then didn’t) is towards THIS and THIS, and therefore HIM, and also (cheese-wise) HIM

(vii: sez wiki, “The novel was loosely based on Martin Heidegger’s ideas, noticeably on his book Sein und Zeit” — bearing in mind it is, in my memory, about HALLUCINOGENIC CHEESE , i am currently enjoyin how hard the word “loosely” seems required to work; i will update all interested sluggards when i have got past page 12)

The novel is described thusly: “A pulse-pounding mix of horror, private-eye story and science-fiction adventure. John Doe, who’s been dead for 10 years, will kill, steal, save a life - he’ll do anything if the price is right. He can solve any mystery until he stumbles on this one: the hollow-eyed boxer, Morse, and strange, strange Mr Smith with his head full of the future. They uncovered John Doe’s secret and now John’s the only person who can stop the end of all life on this planet.”**

Anyone who knows Al, will only be hearing that read in one deep voice. So go along and support your local pulp writer, and hey why not print off, and bind your own copy of the Ultimate Future Shock for him to sign too. Or read his upcoming Judge Dredd story in 2000AD. Is there no stopping that which is unstoppable?

*If you want a life sized anime version of Princess Leia, its the place to go!

**You can buy it on Amazon here, but I wouldn’t because it won’t be signed and they seem to think it is written by two authors Ewing and Al!

in the meanwhile we may just allow a blitheness to unsettle our hearts and carry us away to someplace Else. for a space. but before THAT there’s the concluding episode of the slug of time radioshow, airing this tuesday on resonance FM at 10pm but quite possibly available as a sneak peek here first, as a thank you to our listener(s).

bon voyage, bon vivants!

Next - “Build Up Logically” by Howard Schoenfeld

Next - “The Tactful Saboteur” by Frank Herbert

Next - “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

i mean, aside from the fact that dashiell hammett never wrote a story called “the red brain”. a little misleading, that! anyhow, tonight’s episode of slugs and stars features the 1927 title story - which was already WELL retro by the time this book came out (1965)

via this excellent, high quality collection of old paperback covers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/calenture/

So don’t think that being armed with one of the signature covers, and a time machine, you can go back and diddle the Queen Of Crime out of her royalties.

This is also the first clearly branded Marple novel in this series, though the cover image is really quite subdued, perhaps as befits a book called Nemesis. This was snaffled fromt he Amazon French website so it could well be a French edition, though the A MISS MARPLE MYSTERY at the top suggests not.

Next - “The Red Brain” by Donald Wandrei

Next week - “Beyond the Reach of Storms” by Donald Malcolm

More in depth discussion of this short story collection can be found here at the Mystery File website, also where I nicked the cover from.

Next week: Isaac Asimov - “Segregationist”

Dull in colours perhaps, but not dull in composition. One of the scariest things I ever came across as a cosseted suburban child was the wild flaring nostrils of a horse in a local farm. Horses on TV seem so tame, even the wild stallions* who starred in Black Beauty and Champion the Wonder Horse. Ambulatory devices at best, even when they were stars they seemed like just modes of transport, cowboy cars. So when I ended up in the farm field with some fearless bigger boys, I was shocked to see the true madness in a horses eyes, and these flaming, flaring nostrils.

Shetland Ponies eh?

I believe this might be a Marple, correspondents will I am sure correct me. But the key question is, does this cover make you want to buy this book. Initially no, would be my gut reaction, it looks old, it looks a bit scary but it also is muted and grey. But the details reveal themselves (the repeated magnified little girl / doll in the background). I’m guessing seventies by the minor hyperbole on the strap line, but again willing to be enlightened.

*WYLD STALLYNS!

Nice 3D name logo which contrasts nicely with the deliberately 2D artwork on the cover. You get the feel of the artwork and the mysterious house aspect of one of Agatha’s most (in) famous mysteries. I have been looking for some foreign Agatha covers after a trip to Geneva presented me with a flea market stall full of French, German and Italian Agatha’s. An entire table of foreign language mysteries. I didn’t buy any of them as a fool and his money in a flea market are easily parted, but online searches for some of them have proved harder than I had thought. Rest assured foreign covers are just as diverse!

This is one of a series of fifteen published by Emmanuel Proust, all of whom can be seen here, including Death On The Nile and The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. The art on this edition is done by Frank Leclercq and as a bonus, here is one of the pages.The various editions are illustrated by different people, but in a similar flat style (not dissimilar to Kevin O’Neill style in the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen - though with less detail), and here is a page for you to look at.

I have a feeling some of our Agatha fans would be appalled by this version. Me, not so sure. It also gives me an excuse to perhaps look at covers for Agatha DVD’s and even the video games which have been made of her work. And also meant I didn’t have to write the English title of this book!

These kind of seventies book jackets relied on my better printing for covers, good phot representation. But just because your jacket can be photo-realistic should it be? Here we have a truly baffling still life, possibly knocked together by the art departments kids. Not that I have read the book, there may be massive clues in this cover such as the murderer being a wonky eyed blonde bloke whose face you would like to throw balls at, and has a voice like a handbell. So I’m guessing Thom Yorke did it.

(there are 31 titles listed on amazon in this subsection: i left out all the asterixes as they don’t count) (most of the above are fairly easily guessable — one requires actual real latin vocab and a bit of gumption)

This image is from the 1942 Australian Collins Crime Club edition, as sold in a Tokyo Book auction here for 64,000 Yen (unclear if that was asking price or guide price). That’s about three hundred quid, cos there is a bit of a collecters market in Christie. As for the plot, well the comments crew I am sure will be able to tell you more but its safe to say that cosy English mystery + library = classic. It may actually be one of the few Marples I have seen done on TV - possible in the recent Geraldine James permutation (aka The Biddy in The Library). Note the current UK Harper cover uses a similar idea to the one above, but is much more content in suggesting that library shelves are also places you find lamps and letter shaped nik-naks*. Also that Amazon thinks the book would be prefectly paired with Germaine Greer’s Zastrozzi!

*Not as nice as Scampi and Lemon Nik-Naks.

Which you have to admit is pretty scary (click thru for abject terror).

This doom by giant wasp illustration was done by Tom Adams (website here) and would have been on a Collins edition in the late sixties (this version might be a slight reworking). I can’t find it in situ, but would be happy to see it.

If you have read this one, is the picture an accurate representation of the plot, I know we have a lot of Christie readers round here. And for the future let me know if you have any great other Christie covers. Or want to contribute yourself. Via the medium of the Christie Cover I think we can get a good insight into the literary, art and even political world of the 20th Century. Or just shits and giggles. Or in this case NIGHTMARES!!!

I had the first two, and never finished it as an actual adventure (even with the indestructible character cheating), and much like Sorcery it seemed that if you hadn’t picked up certain items in a previous book you would be unable to proceed*. It used slightly different stats to Fighting Fantasy and combat was harder (if you didn’t cheat - which everyone did). But the real complexity came down to the patronage system, where you were favoured by one of the gods. The problem this threw in was which ever god you picked, ALL THE OTHERS HATED YOU, so you were constantly being sucked into traps by Hera or having sex with Zeus disguised as a swan. I had heard, though I find this unlikely, that if you picked Poseidon as you patron the entire third book would be over in about ten minutes.

This makes sense because all of the books were loose appropriations of some actual Greek myths. So the first one has a bit of Troy, a bit of Marathon and then a Jason and the Argonauts subtext. The second riffs on Theseus heavily, and then you get stuck in that bloody maze forever (mazes in gamebooks = very cheap way of padding out the adventure). The final one rips off the Odyssey mercilessly, with you being bounced from island to island and having sex with Circe (like I say, apparently because I never played this one). I had given up on the third one after being stuck in the damn maze in the second. (Someone else’s frustrations here). I can’t say they were great, but they were diverting in the way most of the Fighting Fantasy books were, and they piqued a small amount of interest in Greek mythology in them. To the extent that later Hercules and Xena seemed a touch derivative of the BLOODFEUD OF ALTHEUS (top marks for that title anyway). But if I saw one in a second hand shop now, maybe, just maybe I’d have to make the choice between : if you steer towards the Scylla Go To 452, If you prefer to aim for the Charybdis go to 23.

*It was easy to tell what these items were, because if you bought At The Court Of The Crimson King Minos it had a section that told you what your equipment would be if you had bought it as a stand-alone adventure. Notably unusual in that equipment was a ball of wool which when you think about it makes perfect sense!

The outing got exactly the right result, since smaller godson chattered very earnestly about it all the way home (including clearing up an important plot point which bears on intra-sibling jealousy, a big issue in his relationship with his older brother*), and then declared to his mum and dad on arrival home: “i think [very long pause to choose words exactly] that it was the GREATEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT EVER!” [in what follows there BE spoilers, subtext spoilers especially, though i'm keeping narrative ones to a minimum]

the book will be 50 years old this year; as becky and i grew up we didn’t know other kids who knew it, so it’s a lot more of a family pleasure than many kids’ books, where you encounter the different responses and attitudes of non-family as a shock you have to adapt to; the remakes as film (the interesting but imperfect PAPER HOUSE) and TV came too late (for us) to have this effect, and as a result we were probably both quite territorial about this book… on the one hand nervously checking what was going on in his little head (”is this too hard for him?”; “is this too frightening for him?”) and memories of our own little heads (”is it getting this RIGHT?”)

despite being very deliberately anti-realistic in approach, i don’t think at all it was too hard for smaller godson — it was fun to watch his total concentration and absorption, as the story skips ahead through time pretty quickly, the borderline between waking and dreaming much more blurred than the book makes it — both worlds often on-stage at the same time, placed within the terrain of each other; i think its scariness was exactly right for him — he peeked a bit through his fingers in the most threatening reaches (at this same moment there was a small moaned “oh no!” from elsewhere in the audience)

things it got right:
– geography and activity are decidedly closer to child’s makey-uppy dynamics than any kind of literalism; by which i mean (for example), to knock on a door visible on one part of the stage, it’s perfectly OK (this is a dream!) to knock in mime at the air on another part of the stage — with a mix of real props, drawn props and imagined props, i think it dramatised both the fluidity and the logic within a dreamscape very well
– drawing: the backdrop was blank and a bit prison-like (like marianne’s sickroom and the room she at first traps her drawn companion in), but over could be projection-scribbled very effectively landscapes (as an adult artist might hatch them in); meanwhile the actress playing marianne real-time drew houses, bicycles, stairs, clocks, in her drawing book, so that we could glimpse them — boldly childish of line, in lovely thick black pencil
– period: paperhouse updated the story, maybe at the last possible moment… today, like dr who, marianne’s dreams would have to incorporate mobiles rather than radios; but this version took it back, to a quite fusty 50s (actually more like the late 40s: where IS marianne’s absent dad?), but made no great deal of this except to help amplify the absence of STUFF in this world (however the pocket in her bedstead, where she stowed The Pencil when sleeping, seemed very up-to-date and IKEA) (and WANT)
– relationships: the bond between the children-in-peril went from enthusiastic to tantrumish and back very effectively, their two solipsisms (imaginative solitary children more used to their own minds and company, and getting their own way) mutually fascinated without quite meshing, except in action — his pride and swiftness to unjustified scorn was especially good (it’s in the book but i’d never read it like that); her rage that he refuses to believe in her powers a bit more muffled (actually muffled by the intra-sibling jealousy plot-point noted above) but to be fair it’s like this in the book also –> i’m being territorial about what i refer to read into it here (which is a buffy-theory-of-everything exploration of the great power and great responsibility of magic er i mean art…); better yet is the slightly mysterious half-cloaked world of the grown-ups as THEY interact, on the edges of the story, thinking things about the children and each other that aren’t evident to the children — hinted-at stuff present for the diversion of grown-up watchers, which — grown-up real-world mundane as it largely is — is nevertheless left nicely open and unresolved and unexplained
– motion: marianne is required to STAY IN BED FOR WEEKS to get better, and she’s an ordinary active 10-year-old who wants a lovely pony and to be a ballet dancer and to be in school but without maths lessons and is VERY VERY BORED of sitting still — the first time she started ballet dancing round her dream i thought it was a bit too twee, but this entire element was actually very well thought-through, moving towards the really very complex frenetic wordless choreographies of later scenes (adult waking worlds and childish dream-worlds intersecting, different characters moving with and against one another accordingly…), and i came really to like it, as an anti-realist trope that combines child’s make-up dynamics as a freedom with child’s make-up dynamics as a limitation (it would have worked less well if her dancing had been pure “free expression”)
– the monsters: a VERY neat solution, in keeping with their less-is-more approach throughout (i was slightly dreading animatronic clumsiness here, the inert non-menace of the star-trek style plastic boulder…)

things it got wrong:
– marianne’s relationship with her home-tutor jumped to worship too quickly without any emotional pay-off (she’s there for a plot-reason a bit too entirely)
– the closing stages of the dream can rather easily be taken to signify WARE SPOILERS easeful passing into death and “moving towards the light” as waking up hale and hearty after serious illness; this was where the anti-literalist mode worked against the story they were presumably trying to tell, i think because they had so effectively realise liminality that it became VERY hard to step away from it; sheerly as a matter of what form can do and what it can’t, a book can maybe achieve “waking from a dream into the liberation of everyday reality” very much more effectively than a play, which can’t easily make cluttered realism — let alone uncluttered late 40s realism — anything of a desirable relief or release: this play did so MUCH with such minimalist resources that it affirmed the loveliness of the not-this-world, and ended up a bit more like THE LAST BATTLE, termtime is over and now it’s the holidays FOREVER, than it maybe meant to…. on the other hand, i’m not sure if this was a MISTAKE exactly — it occurs to me the reading of the book’s ending is also there to be read, just that i’d never have read it this way

*(his older brother’s godparent present had been a trip to the national’s ww1 puppet-based epic WARHORSE, which 7 is certainly too young for… but there had been very public sulkage) (and while WARHORSE has totally awesome life-size puppets and prize-winning stage-design from my very good friend r4e, i think it was a LOT less successful than this little play at dramatising a children’s classic…)

Niven and Bakker are clearly clever sorts but even for them superhuman intelligence is pretty difficult to write. Incredibly intelligent characters crop up a lot in superhero comics, but there the superhumanly clever individual is just cleverer than all the other characters in the comic, which tends not to be difficult. Niven and Bakker take a different route, which is to assume that superhuman intelligence would also imply the suspension of conventional morality - what are individual lives in the incredible calculus of blah blah. Niven handles this a lot better in Protector by giving his super-brain a coherent decision structure, a set of imperatives that makes some sense on its own (and actually suggests that human morality is a mutated version of this created by our lack of the proper alien druqks). For Bakker’s lead character, though, the amorality feels more like an indulgence. Why is there a temptation to yoke immense intelligence and amorality together? From a plotting point-of-view it’s obvious - it makes Bakker’s anti/hero more unpredictable and mysterious. But I guess there’s also a chain which sets intelligence against emotion and links morality to the latter.

In Bakker’s book another duality seems to lurk below this surface - his female characters, even by fantasy standards, are much abused. Well, OK, this is an exploration of a quasi-medieval culture and so a raw deal for women can’t be called unrealistic but when, of your three main female characters, one is a prostitute, one a concubine and the third can’t go a paragraph without being described as “whorish” you sense a pattern emerge. Their perspectives are the clumsiest and their stories the most unpleasant to read though, by the time the heroine has sex with a Nazgul-equivalent and noes his cum is black!!! you’ll either have put the book down or started to laugh.

For all this The Darkness etc. was a good read - more so than Protector, which in typically Nivenish style drops big wodges of made-up science on you every few pages. Bakker is equally in love with his ideas (not a bad thing in an author, obviously!) but also knows how to keep an intricate plot moving quickly. I have to say I enjoyed it, but I don’t know if I want to read more. His protagonist has a superpower - zen mastery of body language - which gives him quasi-authorial admin access to every other character’s motivations, so he can manipulate them at will. This struck me as shameless audience service - it makes concrete a nerd’s sense of angry superiority to a social world that seems as basely predictable as it is alien. As an adult reader though I found him a lot less interesting than the other flawed or decadent characters who get a share of centre-stage. There’s a further danger of him becoming a bit of a Mary-Sue character and since Book 2 appears to be him manipulating 600 pages worth of swots and jocks I may well pass - on the other hand there’s a line just about maintained between ‘protagonist’ and ‘hero’: I can handle being expected to regard the big-brain with awe as long as I’m not asked to like him.

“Because … we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.”

He then let’s the reader know what counts as contravening his/her rights regarding the possibilities in solving a locked-room mystery:

“the low … trick of having a secret passage … so puts a story beyond the pale that a self-respecting author scarcely needs even to mention that there is no such thing. We don’t need to discuss minor variations of this outrage: the panel which is only large enough to admit a hand; or the plugged hole in the ceiling through which a knife is dropped, the plug replaced undetectably, and the floor of the attic above sprayed with dust so that no one seems to have walked there.”

Then proposes a taxonomy of locked-room solutions. First where there was no murderer in the room:
1. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder. eg a crack on the head from a piece of furniture. “the most popular object is an iron fender”
2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself. Gas, poison, induced hysteria.
3. It is murder, by a mechanical device. Mechanical trap, concealed guns, hidden poisoned needles, “Even” says Fell ” a glove is electrified”. Er, ok.
4. It is suicide made to look like murder. Often the suicide weapon is made to vanish – as with stabbing with icicle or a gun whipped out of sight mechanically
5. It is murder, but the victim is already dead. Illusion and impersonation are used. eg, the murderer impersonates the victim going into the room, and comes back out again as himself, etc
6. It is murder, committed outside the room that appears to have been committed inside via remote, ‘long distance’, or constricted access (thin blade through a hole).

(He then includes leaving poisonous snakes and scorpions in the room as part of #6, though I would class that under an expanded point 3 of ‘living devices’, where the vanishing is caused by scuttling off.)

7. It is murder, but, as the converse of 5, the victim is not yet dead. Usually incapacitated, or apparently dead, the murder is committed by subterfuge and/or misdirection after the room is breached by the witnesses.

He then moves on to cases where the murderer was in the room, and the means of making the room seem locked from the inside, which i won’t recount. I am not going to spoil the book, which is superb in every way you may want and a MUST READ, but the mysteries at hand in the book are NOT COVERED in the ontology. Which is sort of unfair I thought given the context of the chapter.

Even though there is this sleight of hand, the great thing about these sort of mysteries, as anyone watching Jonathan Creek will atest, is that you can sometimes intuit the ‘trick’ and whodunnit, because it has to be the least likely of all suspects — it is like when you start to understand how the mind of a particular crossword setter works. My own guess turned out to be well within the purlieus of truth, though i was nowhere near working out the ‘how’, which was ingenious to say the least. And I didn’t quite follow all the shenanigans with the main illusion involved. When the FT book club have all read it, someone plz expln.

1. It’s a terrific book for reading aloud - much better, I guess, than Lord of the Rings. It has a lot of nice “author-to-audience” asides, which older kid-lit often does (”O best beloved”) - but Tolkien has a particularly deft way with them, using his little asides to poke gentle fun at the characters but never at the expense of the story, and making the child reader feel quite grown up and taken into confidence.

2. Reading it aloud the one part I couldn’t get a grip on were the songs - it’s all downhill from “Far Over The Misty Mountains Old”, which was anthologised in I Like This Poem. The elvish songs in particular don’t translate to spoken word, or at least not to my spoken word.

3. I’d forgotten how well-plotted the book is - this is where having your kids’ book fit into some enormous fake-mythological world-history is a big asset: Tolk knows exactly how far apart everything is, and how long everything’s taking, and what characters are up to when even when far offstage. This makes his pacing much more effective (and helps the book earn its two-chapter wind-down).

4. It also adds to the sense of Bilbo - and indeed all the characters bar Gandalf - as somewhat tide-tossed by the forces they’ve set in motion. One of the hallmarks of good modern fantasy, it seems to me, is that it pays attention to the consequences of character deeds as much as the deeds themselves, and The Hobbit is excellent on this.

5. The structure of the book amplifies this theme. Bilbo is the hero, but only really an active one in the middle section of the book, bookended by two conversations - with Gollum and with Smaug. The first encounter is the first time he’s had to fend for himself, and brings him the means to control his destiny with increasing confidence until the second conversation, with Smaug, that sets the story’s endgame in motion. This conversation ends with a lesson from Tolkien on the folly of overconfidence, which Bilbo goes on to demonstrate with his one remaining significant action in the book nearly being personally and politically disasterous.

6. In fact it’s very difficult to think of any other book with a hero so ineffectual at the story’s climax - certainly in fantasy lit the Frodo model (insignificant character carries world’s destiny in hands) became the norm more than the Bilbo one (insignificant character sinks back into happy insignificance): possibly this is the difference between desired teen outcome and desired kid outcome.

7. IT’S GREBT READ IT AGAIN.