Inklings Murder Mystery ("The Sinister Student", ) SPOILERS

So, I've now finished the fourth of Kel Richards' C. S. Lewis mysteries. This one I think reads better than the rest, simply so far as readability goes. But like the previous books in the series, it does have what was for me an absolute jump-the-shark moment. I think in general if you liked any of those previous books, you'll probably like this one too. And if you didn't like them, there's not much hope for this time round.


First, there's the murder mystery -- which need not be taken too seriously, given that the murder victim is revealed on the back cover of the book. Richards tends to favor wildly improbable methods of murder he pulls out of the hat; in this case the murder weapon and hence murderer are obvious from very early on.

Second, there's the P. G. Wodehouse sections. Whenever Richards' point-of-view character runs into the girl he's sweet on, they lapse into faux-Bertie Woosterisms (what ho, what ho). They even mention by name several times a Wodehouse character (Florence Cray, one of Bertie's onetime ill-matched fiancees). I'm a great admirer of Wodehouse myself, so I'm glad to see that Richards is too, but his imitation shows that it's harder than it looks. In short, Richards is not just not another P. G. Wodehouse: he's not even another P. H.  Cannon.


Two things that are very much to the good in this book, that makes it stand out and made it a more enjoyable read, for me at least, than its predecessors, is the Oxford setting and the inclusion of J. R. R. Tolkien as a character. I'm obviously a soft touch when it comes to books set in Oxford, and much more so when it comes to Tolkien. And for all this faults, Richards does produce a character named 'Tolkien' who actually plausibly resembles the real person of that name -- something many who have written JRRT into their stories as a character have utterly failed at. It's also nice to see a reconstructed Inklings meet (one Thursday night in Lewis's rooms, the other on a Tuesday at the Eagle & Child), with a plausible roster of Inklings in attendance: Lewis himself, Warnie,* Tolkien (who reads them his just-finished last chapter of THE HOBBIT), Nevill Coghill, Adam Fox, and latecomer Hugo Dyson. I'm sorry to see Dr. Havard doesn't make an appearance at either meeting, but then they were an informal group and it wasn't at all odd that one or another of them cdn't turn up at their gatherings, so I just told myself Humphrey was busy at the clinic that week. And while in his previous books Tolkien was just mentioned a time or two, he's a fairly major minor character this time around: after the point-of-view character (Young Morris) and CSL, I'd say Warnie and Tolkien probably show up the most often, often to comment on the ongoing events.


As for the jump-the-shark moment, for me this came when the rather odd visiting researcher who kept trying to meet Tolkien and Lewis, and seemed strangely informed about their works (including ones not-yet-published), turned out to be a time-traveller from the future who'd come back to Oxford 1936  in his tardis specifically to meet those two great writers. His tardis has a functioning chameleon circuit, so it takes the form of a wardrobe, thus giving Lewis the idea of travelling to another world by entering a wardrobe. And while it's clear the traveller isn't Doctor Who himself, he might as well be; he even uses a sonic screwdriver at one point to uncover a clue for Lewis et al. And if I'm reading Richards rightly, it's the time-traveller who's responsible for the famous bargain between Lewis and Tolkien: he certainly accidentally gives JRRT the idea of writing a story about Atlantis.


So, not a turn of events that I saw coming, and not one that I thought improved his book. If it had worked for me, I suppose I'd be calling it jump-the-genre instead of jump-the-shark. I suppose I shd give him points for originality, but is it originality to be the first person to have a really bad idea?

--John R.




*in one rather nice touch, Richards admits in an endnote that he calls Warnie 'the Major', even though he now knows Warnie was still Captain Lewis at the time, simply because it sounds right: Warnie is widely known as 'the Major' among fans of the Inklings.

Abandoned or in Abeyance? (Another Tolkien/Lewis project)

So, while trying to find out more about the Tolkien/Lewis film that I saw at the Milw. Film Festival, I came across mention online of a play about the two men's friendship. Most of what I could find out about it dated to two years back, and I've not been able to find out if the project is still in the works or has drifted off into the last of might-have-beens; I'll give an update if I do find out more.



First, here's the link to the Indiegogo pitch, during which they raised just over $3500, which had been their goal to fund the drafting and development of the play. I'm curious if anyone who backed this project got a copy of the play (the reward for the $75 donation) or the Tolkien/Lewis timeline he compiled (what he called his 'eReseach' and was offering to share at the $250 level).

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-tolkien-lewis-new-play-project#/


Next, there's this piece from the Tolkien Library site, which includes an interview with Reed about the project.

http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/1165-play-about-friendship-between-jrr-tolkien-and-cs-lewis.php



Finally, there's this piece from a local (Vancouver-area) source

http://churchforvancouver.ca/ron-reed-and-upcoming-movies-take-on-the-tolkien-lewis-project/

Putting all three of these together, we learn that the playwright is Ron Reed, who's associated with the Pacific Theatre in Vancouver and has performed in their production of FREUD'S LAST SESSION (he played Freud) as well as elsewhere playing CSL in SHADOWLANDS; he's also in the past written a play about Geo. MacDonald (A BRIGHT PARTICULAR STAR)

Reed was attracted to the idea of telling the story of Tolkien's friendship with Lewis by the idea that by day Tolkien was the most boring lecturer in the most boring subject at Oxford,*  while by night he was creating what became a a seminal work of great modern literature.

The idea, at least at one point, was for the play to focus on Tolkien & Lewis's friendship: starting when they first met, Tolkien's role in Lewis's conversion (or more properly I suppose re-conversion), Lewis's encouragement of Tolkien's works,** and their drifting apart over differing opinions of each other's works and CSL's marriage with Joy Gresham.

Reed is to be the playwright, while someone named Shauna Johannesen was to be the project's 'dramaturg', which as described by them seems to be roughly what at TSR we called "editing" and which in other contexts I've seen called "development": taking a complete draft and turning it into a polished publishable piece.

The only other interesting detail I could glean was that David Downing was apparently involved in the project in some way, since an autographed copy of his book was being offered as the reward for one of the higher levels of donation in its Indiegogo pitch.

My main questions, after reading what these various websites had to say, are
(1) how far did this project get? Is the a finished play (polished or unpolished)?
(2) if a script does exist, is there any way to get a copy, now that the Ingiegogo pitch has expired?
(3) also, did any of the backers of that pitch see the T/L Chronology? It sounds like a really useful research tool in and of itself?
(4) finally, is this project still in the works, or has it expired and quietly been put aside? I suspect the latter, given that the most recent mention I cd find of it dated back about a year and a half -- but you never know, so if anyone with more information out there is willing to share, I'd be interested in learning more about the current status of this project.

--John R.
current reading: THE GOLD VOLCANO by Jules Verne (posthumous publ.)

*I suspect some, such as Tom Shippey, would object strongly and eloquently to that characterization.

**by which I suppose they mean Lewis being hurt over Tolkien's dislike of Narnia.

a second Tolkien film (TOLKIEN'S ROAD)

So, while on the subject of Tolkien films, and picking up where I left off a month or so ago, there's another Tolkien film I've seen recently, this one on-line.

TOLKIEN'S ROAD is a short student film, made in 2014. About half an hour long, it's available free on You Tube (apparently there's no way to get it in more permanent form, e.g. on dvd) -- at any rate, not that I've found so far anyway.

To be fair, it's important not to hold this little film to too high a standard: it's not a professional release, it's been made available for free, and the whole thing is pretty much an ambitious student project.

That said, there's nothing in this film to warm the cockles of a Tolkien scholar's heart. This film is terrible. It takes the approach to Tolkien that appears in Humphrey Carpenter's radio play  IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED A TOLKIEN, in which JRRT wanders about muttering smaggabaggins at neighbors while burning breakfast, and J. I. M. Stewart's fictionalized Tolkien analogue Prof. J. B. Timbermill, who winds up sitting on the green chatting with hippies and motorcycle gang members, completely cut off from reality.

This film's Tolkien wanders around Oxford, occasionally meeting up with C. S. Lewis (we know it's Lewis because Tolkien calls him 'Jack' and he smokes a pipe) as well as running into characters from his mythology all the time. He's haunted by recurring nightmares in which he relives his experiences on the Western Front, seeing his friend G. B. Smith and the rest of the TCBS being bayonetted by orc-faced German officers. This ongoing trauma has prevented him from finishing THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, whereupon a quaint little man with furry feet steals Tolkien's only copy of the (unconvincingly neat and tidy) BOOK OF LOST TALES; the rest of the story is Tolkien's attempt to get it back while distracted by elf-maidens, confronted by what is either a balrog or a black rider, rescued by a Strider-analogue* and a Gandalf look-alike, &c, &c, &c. Like I said, it's quite short (only thirty-five minutes long) but seems a lot longer; it took me three tries to get all the way through it.

In the end, it's not the amateur nature of this production that puts me off, it's their conception of Tolkien. The idea of Tolkien as someone who wandered around with flowers in his hair, blowing off lectures, and generally hallucinating his way through life is so far from my conception of the man that I can't enjoy its presentation here. The character called 'Tolkien' here is closer to the protagonist of "The Sea Bell" than anything like the real JRRT. And  I've found I really care when I see a fictional portrayal of a real person that doesn't in any way correspond to what that person was really like, whether it's the many recent distorted portrayals of H. P. Lovecraft, the longer tradition of thinking that Conan Doyle in real life was anything like Sherlock Holmes (Holmes was far less gullible), and now the depiction of Tolkien as some kind of out-of-it loon. The real person was far more interesting; why not try portraying him as he was, or something at least approximating him.

Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTCc6Z3dAZI



--JDR

*bizarrely, in the 'Prancing Pony' scene the locals sing a song lifted from the LotR Musical (one of the better numbers, luckily)

Another Tolkien BioPic Project

So, thanks to a posting on the MythSoc list  (thanks Douglas), we now know about yet another Tolkien-related film project in the works-- if by 'in the works' we mean is a hopeful spark afloat on the vast sea of films-that-never-get-made.  I've maintained for a while now that we're not likely to see any SILMARILLION movies for a long, long time to come, if ever, and that the likeliest Next Big Thing in the way of Tolkien films would be a biopic. Here's the link:

http://deadline.com/2016/11/james-strong-j-r-r-tolkien-middle-earth-the-lord-and-the-rings-unique-features-bob-shaye-michael-lynne-1201849947/


This announcement is mostly about the writer/director/producers and doesn't provide much in the way of information about the film itself. The following snippet seems to be about all we know at this point about the plot:

"Story follows Tolkien’s early life and love affair with Edith Bratt, whom he later married. The couple lived happily in Oxford, surrounded by friends, but when war broke out in 1914 Tolkien embarked on four years of battle and hardship, an experience that influenced his Middle Earth stories."

This of course bears only a passing similarity to reality, and while we shdn't judge too strictly from an offhand account like this, it suggests that this will be a work of fiction. If we're lucky some historical and biographical fact will find its way into the film, but I wdn't count on it. It'll probably be very pretty, though, given the BBC-style talent involved: I suspect it aspires to be a 'Merchant Ivory' type film.


Fletcher, the author, seems to be full of projects currently in the works but little that's actually come out yet. The piece mentions his having devoted six years to researching the film and interviewing people: presumably this would be Tolkien biographers such as John Garth (given that Tolkien's main biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, has been dead for over a decade now).

Strong, the director, has worked on a number of well-regarded British shows, from DOWNTON ABBEY to DOCTOR WHO.

Shaye and Lynne famously committed New Line to supporting Peter Jackson's LotR films. Though with a projected budget of twenty million dollars we shd see much less here in the way of special effects. And just in case anyone was wondering, no Sir Peter in sight.


As for the second piece, it reveals a lot more of the mindset with which Fletcher intends to approach the project: Tolkien with PTSD (post-traumatic stress) -- or, as they used to call it in Tolkien's time, shell-shock (which, by the way, Tolkien never had: the record is pretty  clear about that). Note that while the first article concentrates on the John Ronald/Edith love story against a background of war, the second (earlier) piece doesn't even mention her.

It'll be interesting to see what becomes of this project, if anything, and who winds up starring in it

Here's the link:

http://oncampus.osu.edu/telling-tolkiens-story/


--John R.
current reading: THE GOLD VOLCANO by Jules Verne

The Inklings Discuss . . . Horror Comics?

So, as part of my work on the festschrift, which is ongoing, I had to confirm some quotes and page references today. And you know how it is: you pick up a book to try to locate one specific passage you need and in the process various odds and bits you've never paid proper attention to before catch your eye. And it was that way with me today.

I was looking up something relating to THE HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH and came across a mention of an Inklings meeting that was held at the Eagle & Child in Oxford on November 9th, 1954: exactly sixty-two years ago yesterday. Present were CSL and Warnie, McCallum, Mathews, JRRT, and semi-Inkling Roger Lancelyn Green (to whose diary entry we're indebted for this account). They discussed Tolkien's just-released LotR, and horror comics, and who was the greatest man to come from each country in the British Isles, deciding on Edmund Burke for Ireland, Sir Walter Scott for Scotland, and Shakespeare for England, although there were dissident votes for Pitt or Wellington for the latter spot (apparently the Welsh need not apply).

The first and third topics here sound pretty much in line with the sort of things I'd expect to read that the Inklings were talking about, but the middle topic brought me up short, and I was surprised not to have noticed it before on any previous reading of this passage. We know that Warnie, Lewis, and Tolkien were quite open in admitting that they read and enjoyed works in the then rather disreputable field of science fiction. But that they would be conversant in comic books came as a bit of a surprise, and horror comics at that. I tried to come up with a mental image of Professor Tolkien, or CSL, reading, say, EC Comics, and I admit the image wdn't come. Curious.

Of course it's possible that they were discussing horror comics without having actually read any of them; the topic was a hot one at the time, that being the same year that the notorious book SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT came out, which I gather more or less argued that reading comics lead to a life of crime.

So, one of those occasional bits of evidence that challenges our preconceptions. They're good for you, if occasionally disconcerting.

--John R.
most recent viewing: MISS HOKUSAI and THE MARTIAN.
current reading: THE GOLD VOLCANO by Verne.

P. S.
I forgot to include the important detail of what book I was looking things up in when I found this: it was the invaluable Scull & Hammond CHRONOLOGY, page 444.  --JDR

The New Arrival: THE LAY OF AOTROU & ITROUN

So, the newest book by J. R. R. Tolkien was published this past week, on Thursday.

Waiting is hard: my copy is currently on its way to me but the time between the 3rd, when it came out, and the 17th, when it's due to arrive, seems long.

And this even though I've had a copy of the poem itself for years that I've read many times since

getting a photocopy of the original magazine publication back around 1978, when I was in college (thanks Jessica) and making a concerted effort to find and copy all Tolkien's misc. pieces (and all the pieces about him I cd locate with the aid of Richard West's TOLKIEN CHECKLIST). And I like this poem quite a bit: I've written about it (in my contribution to the Shippey festschrift) and even helped organize a dramatic reading of the whole piece (at Kalamazoo, several years back). 

So why am I so glad to soon have the same poem in book form? For one thing, it'll be easier to shelve and keep track of than the photocopy has been (though I mostly solved that problem a few years back by putting the now somewhat battered copy in its own binder, as I also did with other pieces such as "Imram" and "For W. H. A.").* And for another I've been curious to learn whether the volume would contain any other of what we might call Tolkien's medieval poetry (or more accurately, poems in medieval modes), most of which is uncollected, some even unpublished. 

And then, a ray of light: thanks to Janice pointing out that the book was already available on Kindle. As a result, I've been able to get and read it before my (paper) copy has even arrived. And for those who, like me, are curious, here's a quick breakdown of this slim volume's contents:


Note on the Text by Christopher Tolkien
This is followed by Verlyn Flieger's introduction, wh. puts the piece in context (both among Tolkien's other works and from Breton legendry (Villemarque et al)

part one: the published LAY.
just over 500 lines, plus explanatory notes

part two: the two CORRIGAN poems
first poem: about a changeling (76 lines)
second poem: about the witch in the woods, the sinister Fey (104 lines). this piece later formed the core of A&I.

part three: draftings
fragment (29 lines)
manuscript drafts (5 pages and 12 pages)
fair copy (490 lines)
typescript (also 490 lines), with notes re. revisions; probable text-copy for the 1945 publication.

part four:  comparison of specific passages
--sources (Breton, French, English)
--Tolkien variants (e.g., the second Corrigan poem vs. corresponding passages in A&I)


And for the book as a whole?

My advice: pick this one up. Sooner rather than later.

It's a great chance to see a very different side of Tolkien from that on display in, say, FARMER GILES OF HAM or the Hobbit works.

As Verlyn Flieger says in the very first line in her Introduction: "Coming from the darker side of J. R. R. Tolkien's imagination . . ."

--John R.
current reading: THE CURSE OF SAGAMORE by Kara Dalkey

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