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Young World
Return to fantasy
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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Fantasy is comforting. Helping us escape from all that is bad and unpleasant. It is a clash between good and evil, where despite tremendous odds and not without sacrifices good prevails...
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One of the several Tolkien websites on the internet (a quick google comes up with close to a million results) announces to visitors exactly how many days, hours and minutes are left for "The Two Towers", the next film to be made based on Tolkien's great fantasy-world trilogy "The Lord of the Rings". And, like many others across the world, I can't wait. The grittiness of realism and the excesses of magic realism are all very well — but when realism becomes dreary and magical realism exhausting, it's wonderful to see the human imagination being used again in the creation of fantasy.
Fantasy is all the more comforting in a year that's been so bad, because it shows us A World That Might Be, If Only. A clash between good and evil in which, despite tremendous odds and not without sacrifices, good does prevail, and thank goodness for that. It started with the Harry Potter books, when parents reading to their children about Harry and his snow-white owl Hedwig were themselves drawn into the boy-wizard's adventures. And then Philip Pullman's book The Amber Spyglass, third in his Dark Materials trilogy and a kind of PG-13 version of Harry Potter, made it into the Booker long-list. And finally, with the exciting film version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring coming, people wanted to pull out their beloved Tolkiens from their bookshelves, dust them off, and read the Middle-Earth saga once again — just in case they had forgotten who exactly the Ents were, or Strider the Ranger. Whether it's the purists who wanted to identify flaws in the film version, or just movie buffs who wanted to see a good fantasy on screen, no one wanted to be left out.
The books are also great holiday reading. For a recent vacation, I carefully packed the following: the four Harry Potter books, the Philip Pullman trilogy, and our huge single-volume edition of Tolkien. While each of these fantasy worlds is unique, with a flavour of prose all its own, there are common and never-fail elements, drawn from classic and epic storytelling, that make them riveting. There is, in each of them, a Great Evil that has almost taken over the world, an evil that has been quelled earlier, but has risen again; and it is this evil that must once again be suppressed (never fully extinguished of course, but always kept in check — a kind of beast within the self). Each story is about a quest, and there is in each the Chosen One, a person (not necessarily human, and not necessarily male) chosen by a destiny that has only been whispered about until now.
If Harry Potter is a boy wizard, then Philip Pullman's Lyra Belaqua, later named Lyra Silvertongue by the Bear-King, is a young girl with only her daemon Pantalaimon to accompany her as she sets out from Oxford on her own quest. And of course, in the Lord of the Rings, young Frodo Baggins is a halfling, a hobbit, indeed a kind of Everyhobbit. And even if there are the other powerful members of the Fellowship of the Ring, chosen by the Elf-King Elrond to accompany Frodo on his journey, the young hobbit must carry the burden himself.
The tasks themselves are processes that these chosen ones have to go through on their own. And they must set out without knowing very much about their own roles in the scheme of things. Frodo waits for Gandalf but ultimately must set out from the Shire without him; Lyra and Pantalaimon stumble into their quest while looking for their friend, the kitchen-boy who has suddenly disappeared; and Harry, while studying at Hogwarts, still doesn't know very much about his destiny other than that hes learning magic and having little adventures.
And finally, the way forward is not easy. It's dark, difficult and often frighteningly dreary. There are all kinds of obstacles, big and small, strewn along the path orcs, trolls, Balrogs, life-sucking Spectres (the ones with the Capital letters are the scariest, even if its referred to as You-Know-Who), and even that small and evil creature, Gollum, who had first chanced upon the Ring of the Dark Lord. But most difficult of all is the challenge of conquering one's own fear and the temptation to give up altogether.
Tolkienians raise deeper issues. The orcs are only carrying out orders — can they help it if their boss is an evil guy? Can the ring-bearer help his actions if it is in fact the ring itself that corrupts the bearer? The stories, then, are not lightweight; and they are long. Harry Potter is only in its fourth volume, and there are at least three more to come. Pullman's Dark Materials takes three volumes to finish the story that begins when Lyra and her daemon sneak into the forbidden room at the college. Tolkiens Rings trilogy, the grand-daddy of the fantasy stories, is a vast 1069-page epic, with six appendices, including the celebrated one on the Elvish language, and a long index. While his story has meant different things to different generations of readers, standing as an anthem for antiwar and antiracism protests, it can now be seen as standing for pluralism, quiet courage, the need to come together against a common enemy — and the need to fight only when there is no other way.
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