Alex ’s Comments (group member since Jan 23, 2012)

Alex ’s comments from the Pre-Tolkien Fantasy group.

It's been a long long time since I read Titus Groan. It really is a terrific book, a completely colourful grotesquery of weird and wonderful characters. I suppose in the sense that the characters are very vivid and over the top, and the prose could be considered very colourful and long winded, that there's a comparison to Dickens but Peake is on the whole a lot denser and darker.

Who knows, just try it. You'll know after 20 pages if it's your type of thing - i's that type of book.

Welcome to this slightly inactive group Jocelyn! :D

I haven't but I want to!

Well, the jounrey is more important for the characters. The heroism and being regarded as heroes by others is more important for the characters too... there's a wonderful line where Juss brags so much about how many amazing deeds he's performed it's blatantly absurd and for a small moment the reader - surely - thinks "do I really like these guys???"

Yeah, I agree... reading literature is about going on a journey and when we finish the novel, if it's good, we're a little bit sad and kind of want to start again, or start the next one right away.

Well, I finished and wrote a sort of review to try and capture how I felt about it. It's not the kind of book that one can sum up in a couple of hundred words... It's a terrific book

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

To try and have a stab at Simon's question. I don't think one should take what an author writes about his/her work at face value necessarily. I think that Eddison, on this occasion, was probably wary that people would approach his work in a particular way due to the nature of it being a "fantasy" novel and therefore a little peculiar, so he wanted to say, "look, just enjoy this as a story". Also, like LOTR I don't think that there's necessarily a direct allegory or meaning to the work and I think he was probably trying to discourage people from thinking that it was an Animal Farm style allegory, wherevy the Juss represented x and Gorice represented Y etc.

i.e I don't think that the story is without meaning or that he's trying to say that it's a meaningless story and "just for fun" (though it is fun)

I agree with Simon. I truly love the language of the book and I'm not lying when I say that I've gotten a kick out of something on nearly every page ... I think it's just so beautifully written and descriptive. Absolutely the dialogue and the exchanges between characters is something that draws me into the world rather than pushing me away.

Lots of strikeouts on this book.

*ducks for cover*

I didn't mean to imply that I thought you were disliking it or being unreasonable. I enjoy that you can disagree and say that aspects of the text don't work for you etc. My views about this book may be blinkered, also, because I have a particular fondness for it... so I may be a little uncritical in my approach to it.

I agree, what you state as "expository" I see as part of the pseudo-medievalism of the text. The book isn't trying to be modern in its sensibilities ... it's emphatically and self-consciously the opposite, so I giess it's deliberately ignoring a lot of the "rules" of modern literature (as it were). I don't mind when books break rules deliberately, they're usually the better for it... I think that "show don't tell" is a good rule of thumb for someone new to writing novels, but I'm not sure it's something that needs to be applied rigorously. I'd say that for me the language is colourful and I find the dialogue exchanges charming and intriguing... I understand if you don't, that's fine!

I'm about 60-70 pages in (yeah yeah, not been reading much....) and I don't agree about your "showing not telling" thoughts at all - but then, I rarely agree with you when you use that criticism. I personally find there to be an excellent balance between description, action and expository dialogue. I do, however, tend to enjoy scenes of dialogue and characters interacting with one another ... I don't feel that to be "telling".

It's interesting, that framing device. It's not entirely successful as it's quite detailed and then just...disappears, but to my mind it's there to establish to the reader that this is a story set on a fictional fantasy world and to create a link between the classical/medieval styles of literature that are very fantastical and Eddison's own work which just happens to be set on Mars, rather than in a medieval fantasy setting. Really, Worm Ouroboros could be an Arthurian fantasy or something, it's ultimately very similar in feel.

I think that the mistake is in thinking that having to pay attention a ltitle bit to the language is somehow distracting from the enjoyment of the book. Sure, it can be a slog at first when you encounter an unusual writing style but after awhile as you get used to it, you realise how rich it is and how that sets it apart from other books.

I agree completely with Simon that you should perservere because after a few chaptyers you get used to the style and it becomes easier to read as you develop a feel for it.

I am reading it but I'm only a couple of chapters in so far! I'm feeling a little exhausted from 1,000s of pages of Song of Fire and Ice so I'm taking it pretty slowly.

Safe to say I still think that Eddison is an incredible writer, his prose style is really beautiful and I find his descriptions suck me into the world and setup the story pretty wonderfully.

Except that librivox recordings are almost universally very poor....

This is the first monthly group read for the pre-Tolkien fantasy group and so, naturally, we've gone for the blindingly obvious and picked probably the most famous and influential work of fantasy this particular side of Tolkien.

It's been nearly 15 years since I read it myself so don't have much to say other than to point out that it was a crucial book in forming my own love of the genre after I'd grown up and realised that David Eddings wasn't actually for me... I first heard of it when the Fantasy Masterworks series started publishing - it was one of their initial choices - and thought it would be fun to try somethingthat influenced Tolkien, rather than the other way around. I fell in love with its aloofness, grandeur, intellignece and dreaminess. Eddison's prose was lovely to read and his adventure had a surreal quality that I found appealing. I've always quoted it as one of my favourite books, so hope it holds up as well for me now as it did when i was younger...

I hope everyone who reads, enjoys it ... I'm looking forward to heraing what people think!

Thanks for the review. I've got to read this now, I'm definitely keen to give Morris another go! I always take Davis giving up early in a novel as a recommendation, anyway...

Yes we are! I'm about to create the thread for it...

Dulac3 wrote: "Inserted poetry in Eddison's works (sometimes cited sometimes not) is where the list comes in (Homeric, Sappho, Norse Saga etc.), but the actual prose of the story itself is pretty much Jacobean."

Ohhh duh! That makes sense. Thanks.

From wikipedia

"Eddison's books are written in a meticulously recreated Jacobean prose style, seeded throughout with fragments, often acknowledged but often frankly stolen, from his favorite authors and genres: Homer and Sappho, Shakespeare and Webster, Norse Saga and French medieval lyric"

I guess this will give us something to discuss. I'm not quite sure how something can be reminiscent of all of those things at the same time, frankly.. since they're all completely different.

D_Davis wrote: "I don't think I'm looking for an authentic quality in an affected style. What I look for is when the chosen style makes the narrative better, or, like Simon said, a quality of effectiveness."

I don't remember it too well but I recall that Morris was going more for more of an "epic poetry" feel that might have been popular several hundreds years previous. Authors like Eddison and Dunsanydon't really have the same authenticity in their prose, they go for an affected style that helps drive the narrative forward a bit more for modern readers. (not that Eddison is fast paced and IMO loses the plot by the time he wrote Fish Dinner in Memison, which I found coma inducing).

I like what Morris is trying to do in theory but I'm not all that patient eith Epic poetry either.

haha Simon, I have to admit I thought the same thing.

I find Dunsany to have pseudo-Archaic in spades though ... so who knows? Who can see into the mind of D Davis and make these predictions?