The compelling mystery of ruins, and the things that lurk in them

If you've read The Lord of the Rings, what's your favourite part? My favourite of the three books is The Fellowship of the Ring. And my favourite part of The Fellowship of the Ring is when Gimli persuades the fellowship to enter the abandoned Dwarf realm of Moria. I have loved it ever since I was a child and my Mum read the book to me and my brother during long car journeys.

I'm not sure what it is about Moria, but I think that whole sequence is the best plotted and most compelling part of the entire book. It starts with Gandalf trying to work out how to get in. Then, just as he opens the doors, the fellowship are attacked by a hideous creature that lurks in the pool by the gate. After running into safety they hear the doors behind them being barricaded shut. From this point on, the only way out is forward. I guess that's part of the thing - everywhere else the characters have a choice. Here they have no choice. They have to keep going forward. Into the dark.

The gates of Moria

The film actually showed the journey through Moria quite well, although it was obvious immediately that there were no dwarves here. Just dusty, long-dead armoured skeletons. You don't learn that as quickly in the book. You have to wait until the fellowship find the annals of the dwarves who tried to retake Moria. As Gandalf reads the final, hurried entries, with the accounts of which dwarf heroes fell where, the sense of danger and impending doom is truly claustrophobic. Something evil has befallen in the ruins. And it is most likely still out there.

Discovery in the dark

That sense of evil lurking in the ruins is also present early on in The Magician's Nephew, which I think has been my favourite of the Narnia books since I was a kid. Written as a prequel to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, some time after that book, The Magician's Nephew tells the story of how Narnia came to be, as witnessed by two small children, Digory and Polly, who had been given the opportunity to move between different worlds. But here's the thing. Before they discovered the world that would become Narnia, the two children discovered Charn.

Exploring Charn

Charn was a nearly dead world, a ruinous, gigantic, deserted city under a blood-red, tired sun. Drawn by enchantment, the children enter a hall of kings and queens and wake the last Queen of Charn, a cruel and wicked tyrant called Jadis. She tells them about the grandeur of Charn; the magnificence of the world before it met its doom. And we learn that Jadis was the author of that doom, using a deep and terrible magic to win a civil war against her sister, by extinguishing all other life on the planet.

The mystery of Charn

It's a magnificent, evocative tale, which I always found more interesting than the birth of Narnia that follows. And while it provides an origin story, of sorts, for evil in the good and perfect world of Narnia, the emergence of Jadis in Charn is a much more interesting story. The series of royal statues grow harsher and crueler as the children walk along them, reaching the pinnacle of hatefulness in Jadis. The implication is that power corrupts and poisons people, leading to a situation where a wicked queen would rather eliminate every other living being than not rule over them.

I've often felt this was a commentary by C.S. Lewis on the existence of nuclear weapons and the folly of the idea of mutually assured destruction preventing someone from starting a nuclear war. What if you got someone so totally warped and wicked that they would rather turn the world into a burning atomic husk than allow their opponents to continue to exist?

I'm not sure why as a kid drawn to the idea of ruined civilisations. I think both Moria and Charn exuded a mystery that you didn't get in many imaginary worlds. There was a sense that something has happened here - something terrible. And you need to find out what it was. But finding out won't make it better. In fact, it might make it even more terrible.

But at least you will know.

The Hobbit part two, from a disappointed reviewer

SPOILER ALERT – lots of detail from the film included.

The Hobbit part 2 has been out for a while. I saw it just before Christmas. It’s hard really to articulate how I feel. On the one hand, it’s the Hobbit, it’s Middle Earth, I ought to like it, but on the other hand it was long, clunky, and daft.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the book of The Hobbit, but I can see how it could translate to the screen as an adventure story. The book is fast-paced, funny, intriguing, and carries you along with it to the final battle. The films so far have lost that sense of pace and fun. There is more danger, and this episode of the trilogy lays on the peril with a trowel, starting with Thorin being told he has a death mark on his head, written in the Black Speech, no less.

The thing Peter Jackson doesn’t seem to get about The Hobbit is that the book of The Hobbit concentrates on, er, the hobbit. That’s the point of the story – it’s about Bilbo being unexpectedly recruited for a dangerous quest and contrary to his own and everyone else’s expectations, becoming a hero on the way.

But the film isn’t about the Hobbit at all. Bilbo seems incidental to most of the activity. Instead we have various sub-plots involving Elven warrior maidens being attracted to dwarves, the return of Sauron in a ruined fortress, and the oppression of the good, honest poor people of Laketown by an autocratic ruler.

The bits of the film that are quite good are the bits that are in the book: the Mirkwood spiders, Beorn, the escape from the Elven kingdom in barrels, and the conversation between Bilbo and Smaug the Dragon. But those bits don’t get much screen-time. In fact, the dwarves’ imprisonment – several weeks in the book while Bilbo figures out how to get them out – is reduced to an overnight stay and Bilbo working out the escape route in a matter of seconds.

The bits between those authentic parts of the story, in contrast, seem to drag. The quest was difficult enough without the introduction of a snarling orc leader tracking the dwarves, for reasons that probably were spelled out at some point, but I yawned and missed it.

There are some good bits – Sauron materialising in Dol Guldur from the pupil of the lidless eye was well-rendered – but they are few and far between. Instead we have a load of sentimental tosh designed to make the story more Hollywood. Tauriel, a veteran Elven warrior, barely claps eyes on one of the dwarves before she is smitten in the most unlikely romance ever.

There are other things that make the film suck too. I’m sorry to do this to Stephen Fry, but his ‘performance’ as the Master of Laketown was one-dimensionally pompous. And the bigger problem is that he was obviously playing Stephen Fry, the QI quizmaster host, albeit with the ‘lovable’ setting dialled down. I was half expecting a klaxon to sound and one of his minions have points deducted for saying something wrong or too obvious.

The film didn’t need Legolas either. Or rather, if you did include him, include him in a knowing cameo inside the Elf citadel, maybe commenting on how he would never trust a dwarf. And then we could all smile to ourselves, because, of course we know what’s going to happen later and the friendship he would forge with Gimli. Instead, he is over-used as a cross between a ninja and the Green Arrow, slaying orcs left, right and centre.

We also have a ridiculous escape plan inside the Lonely Mountain, where furnaces that have not been fired for years are lit and instantly produce a river of molten gold for Thorin to ride on in a wheelbarrow. I’m no metallurgist, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how blast furnaces work and it’s impossible to ride molten metal like that. Not only did it not make sense, but it looked like a sequence crafted solely for inclusion in a computer game of the movie. And not even a good computer game. A shitty platformer churned out to cash in on the movie.

Now, I know at this point, you could be forgiven for saying,‘Well, it’s a fantasy movie, it doesn’t have to be real.’ And I’d agree to a point. I can forgive the highly unlikely barrel ride, even though that stretched the bounds of credibility. But the ‘it’s only fantasy’ doesn’t work. If you have created a universe that is supposed to be real, it has to have a certain level of authenticity, otherwise you could just make up any old crap. Why bother with the wheelbarrow? Why not just have Thorin surf the molten gold in a pair of magic ski socks knitted by Beorn from his shape-changing eyebrows? It makes as much sense.

The Hobbit is a well-known, much-loved book, with an existing fanbase that any movie can tap into. So, my main question is, why does Peter Jackson cock this up so badly? I know I’m inviting the charge that I haven’t directed any Hollywood adaptations, so what do I know. But that’s the thing, having watched this, I’m not sure what I could do to wreck the story any further.

My five star books

Since 2002 I have been noting the books I read and giving them a review of between one and five stars. A bit sad, I know, but it’s helpful when I can’t remember whether a book was any good or not.

Anyway, here’s a list of the books I’ve given five stars to. I was a bit surprised at some of the ones on this list. Obviously I really liked them at the time. I’m not sure I’d rate them all so highly if I read them now. That shows how subjective this is. I’m also interested by what is not on there – no J.D. Salinger, for example.

God’s Debris – Scott Adams
Stupid White Men – Michael Moore
The Silmarillion – J.R.R. Tolkien
The River of Time – David Brin
The Incarnation – St Athanasius
Sabriel – Garth Nix
Becoming Fully Human – Patrick Whitworth
Lirael – Garth Nix
How to Read the Bible for all it’s Worth – Gordon Fee
Paul, the Spirit and the People of God – Gordon Fee
Abhorsen – Garth Nix
A New Kind of Christian – Brian D. McLaren
A Theology of the Dark Side – Nigel G. Wright
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Velvet Elvis – Rob Bell
Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks
Nineteen Eighty-four – George Orwell
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks
Wonder – R.J. Palacio
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
Ragnarok – A.S. Byatt
Generation X – Douglas Coupland
Wise Children – Angela Carter

I’ve noticed that as time has progressed I’ve stopped rating Christian books so highly. I’ve also started reading more well-known authors, which is probably the influence of my book group. But I’ve awarded fewer five star ratings as time has gone on, so I’ve given F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salinger, Solzhenitsyn and others four or four and a half star ratings, where a few years earlier they would probably have got a five. (This also explains why Stupid White Men is in this list. I don’t think I’d give that a five now.)