Happily Zittaw Press has published a new complete edition of Varney, edited by Curt Herr.  And Zittaw has a podcast about it here. I wrote this review for the Phila Inq back in December, but in their change of book review editors (and by the looks of their new review policies), it never ran and it is unlikely it will at this point. So here it is.

Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood
Zittaw Press

By James Malcolm Rymer

Edited with an introduction by Curt Herr

Zittaw Press, 828 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Before Dracula, there was another Victorian gentleman vampire, preying upon the rosy-cheeked young women of England. James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood was published in serial installments in 1845, more than half a century before Bram Stoker wrote his most famous vampire novel. There had been fictional vampires before Rymer’s, most notably John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in his short story, “The Vampyre,” modeled on Polidori’s sometime traveling companion, the poet Lord Byron. While both Dracula and Ruthven have been acknowledged as major influences on the development of the vampire in literature, film and other popular culture manifestations, Rymer’s Sir Frances Varney has been underappreciated by scholars and virtually unknown to the reading public.

Zittaw Press, a small company devoted to republishing neglected gothic classics in affordable paperback editions, has just released a new edition of Varney the Vampire. At over 800 pages, with an introduction and several appendices (the book weighs 4 pounds), this is the definitive version of Rymer’s book. Varney was originally published as a “penny dreadful,” a fictional serial printed on cheap paper in weekly installments with subjects that ranged from the prurient to the grotesque. With murder, mayhem and sensationalism galore, the penny dreadfuls were one of the forerunners of our popular literature.

The penny dreadful Varney ran to 237 chapters (over 700 pages in the Zittaw edition) and was so successful that original copies are extraordinarily rare. According to one scholar, Varney was “read literally into dust.” Two previous editions have been mere photocopies of the penny dreadful edition, which was barely edited itself. Double columned with typographical errors and faded text, some words are printed upside down and occasionally sentences are even incomplete.

"A Romance of Exciting Interest" Front Wrapper from 1853 edition

To call it a novel is a bit of a misnomer, as well, for these kinds of serials do not adhere to the trim, inherently concise ways of the novel. Dreadfuls were written so quickly and by diverse hands (it is suspected that Rymer, although the primary author, was not the only author of Varney) that it was impossible to keep out inconsistencies of plot or characterization. In Varney, the time period of the story shifts and even names sometimes change. But this kind of small chaos in form is perfectly apt for the story. As the vampire wreaks havoc on women, families and the class system of staid, refined Victorian society, the tumult of the plot bleeds into the very structure of the book with storylines careening into all sorts of unknown territories. Varney takes on various disguises. He is nearly destroyed more than once, but always revivified by the power of moonlight (and fresh blood). Rymer pulls out all the gothic conventions and his vampire revels in their gruesome glory.

The book, as a whole, is picaresque in nature, containing several storylines that the new editor, Curt Herr, helpfully breaks down into “sagas” in a table of contents. Varney walks among the living as a refined aristocrat and over the course of the book begins to regret his “malignant destiny,” finding no solace in his power. He is not the static evil incarnate that Stoker later imagined in his Dracula. Varney has a richly detailed history (not all of it consistent) that helps flesh out his character. Nor is he quite like the manifestations of more recent vampires (Lestat and Buffy's friends and foes), although he does undergo something akin to a modern existential crisis. He is tormented by his bestial condition. Unlike the passionately romantic scenes of Dracula in which the vampire passionately bites his victims’ necks, or lets them feed from his own bosom, Varney is violently erotic, attacking his prey with a wolf-like fury, tearing into their flesh with his enormous fangs.

Varney is an immensely enjoyable novel, packed with action and doomed romance. Rymer’s prose is furious and lurid. For the uninitiated reader, the prose style may take a little getting used to. The short, choppy sentences, ripe with clichéd imagery, seemed silly at first, but after a few pages, I was sucked into Rymer’s penny dreadful realm and found myself racing along its pages, the pace quick and suspenseful. Varney the Vampire is a feast.

Werewolves in love

Sharp Teeth

by Toby Barlow

Harper, 320 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” Robert Frost

Toby Barlow uses this quotation as the epigraph to his new free verse novel about werewolves. But really, he’s written a romance with some crime story elements. The werewolf thing is always there to add new dimensions to the proceedings, but this is a story of love, love lost and the affection of dogs.

I wasn’t very impressed with the verse, but I’ll admit I’m not a lover of contemporary free verse. It’s a very tricky game to play. There’s another Robert Frost line about how writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. I’m not as disdainful as that, but I do think it’s hard to recognize the difference between free verse and just a bunch of unfinished sentences. The key is the internal rhythm. In good free verse, the words flow on some wave of their own, while relentlessly pulling the reader into the current. You can’t help but feel the undulations of the poet’s power. Barlow’s waters were choppy with too many calm spots. Sometimes I’d be pulled along, only to find myself stopped dead. Granted, it’s tough to maintain a rhythm with no regular meter and if Barlow’s verse didn’t thrill me, there were still some enjoyable stretches. You can read the opening here with its epic-like invocation of one of its main characters, Anthony.

What I find most strange about Sharp Teeth is that the werewolf story-line seems contrived. Barlow has written a contemporary novel about love and familial relationships of wounded people. The characters do not struggle with their monstrous identities. Indeed, they all accept the werewolf curse with either enthusiasm or indifference. What troubles them are their insecurities, their jobs and dare I say, the meaning of life. What’s a wolfman (or wolfwoman) to do in the noir-like city of Los Angeles? It wouldn’t take much to transform this book into a literary novel concerning regular ol’ people (nor would it take much to transform it into a first rate hard-boiled crime novel) And while this may seem like a strength, that Barlow has taken one of the classic monster stories and emphasized its non-horror traits, it didn’t work for me.

I want a little horror in my werewolf tales. Okay, I want a lot of horror. And Barlow’s werewolves aren’t really wolf-like at all. Nor are they some kind of monstrous half-human/half-wolf. Barlow’s werewolves look like ordinary big dogs. And often act like them. They’re so cute that people adopt them at first sight. Yes, I know that a pack of feral dogs would be scary to face on a dark night, but, come on, there should be a big difference between a Werewolf and a dog. Here’s Barlow:

Dog or wolf? More like the one than the other

but neither exactly. Standing on four legs in her fur,

she is her own brand of beast.

She could play in your yard, but

you would not want to find her

crossing your trail in the twilight.

And were you cornered by her,

eye to eye,

you would see that

there are still some watchful creatures

whose essence lies unbound by words.

There is still a wilderness.

At times Sharp Teeth seemed like the werewolf story as written by John Grogan. Dogs just want to be loved you know. And they can be the most fulfilling of companions. Well, werewolves can be fun and inspiring, too:

These creatures may be among

the most superior predators in the world

but in the end,

as any toothless soul will tell you,

it’s a dog’s life.

No matter how big or how mean the dog, it’s just not that scary (for more on this, please see Stephen King’s Cujo).

There may not have been enough horror for me, but Barlow doesn’t skimp on the violence. When the dogs attack, there’s lots of flesh-ripping, blood-flowing gore. And one Barlovian difference between a dog and werewolf is that werewolves can eat an entire man and lick the crime scene clean of blood in less than a half-hour. After selling me on how ordinary these monsters can be, I just couldn’t believe they could even fit an entire man in their stomach, let alone the logistics of masticating an entire body, bones and all.

However, all was not lost in Barlow’s werewolf world. I did enjoy reading it. The verse waters may have been choppy, but there were enough moments of good phrasing, interesting plot twists and compelling characters to keep it from falling flat. And occasionally, there was some good horror, like when a prostitute witnesses a werewolf transformation:

This one, this particular whore, she accidentally saw something,

stumbling upon a change in progress in the warehouse,

one of the boys turning with

his flesh glistening moist, fur protruding from the swollen skin.

The shock sent her screaming.

Who can blame her, thinks Baron.

It’s a sight that can drive men mad,

one only the initiated should ever witness.

She went running and

would have been torn to bits for seeing things she shouldn’t

but had escaped by shutting herself in one of the meat lockers

and has been wailing loud and high in there ever since.

Her shrill cries move through the whole bunker

like the haunting of a ship.

Barlow doesn’t give too much here, leaving enough room for the imagination to conjure the scene, but he does provide the key words that will punctuate the picture: glistening, protruding, swollen. Just gruesome enough. And there’s a little coda to the prostitute’s fate that sharpens the image:

For the next two years she will tell anyone who will listen,

bored bartenders, other tired girls, half naked and impatient johns

about how she once saw

boiling flesh churn into fur and muscle and

teeth that grew sharp and eyes that blazed like a furnace.

They all look at her like she’s crazy.

Until she finally falls from a tall story,

quite high and

completely mad.

I wanted more of this and less of the lovelorn Anthony and his bitch (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

In the meantime, there's no need to deprive Bibliothecary readers of my book reviewing insights, so I'll try to keep up my reading and post reviews here from time to time.  Coming this week, I have two new reviews that I'll be posting.  More to come.

Thanks for reading.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself
By Robert Montgomery Bird

Introduction by Christopher Looby

NYRB Classics. 425 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

So, you've been looking for an early 19th-century novel about metempsychosis? Look no further. Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself is back in print. What? You are not an ardent follower of tales of the metempsychotic? Let me explain. Metempsychosis is the transference of the soul or spirit from one body to another after death. Sounds like the kind of story Edgar Allan Poe might write. In fact, Poe himself reviewed Bird's novel when it was first published in 1836:

"We must regard 'Sheppard Lee,' upon the whole, as a very clever, and not altogether unoriginal, jeu d'esprit. Its incidents are well conceived, and related with force, brevity, and a species of directness which is invaluable in certain cases of narration."

There is even a blurb from Poe on the back cover of the newly printed edition, and Poe also mined Bird's plot for one of his greatest stories, "The Gold Bug."

Sheppard Lee is an indolent gentleman farmer in New Jersey who bemoans his dwindling finances, but can't muster enough energy to change his fortunes. When he dies in a foolhardy attempt to locate buried pirate treasure, his ghost discovers another deceased man, a rich Philadelphia brewer who has broken his neck jumping a fence while hunting. Sheppard wishes he could have led this rich man's life, and immediately his ghostly spirit enters the dead man's body.

Sheppard retains the memories of his own existence, but he also fully becomes the other man, gradually recovering that man's identity and memories as he walks in his shoes and interacts with his family and friends. However, Sheppard soon learns that all-important lesson about the color of grass on the other side of the socioeconomic fence. What follows are several picaresque adventures among the social strata of antebellum America, as Sheppard Lee hops from one dead body to the next.

The lives of others beckon to Sheppard like the desiderata of his own unfulfilled dreams. After the brewer, he metamorphoses into a spendthrift dandy on the hunt for a wealthy girl to marry. Then he enters the body of Philadelphia's most notorious moneylender. Next he is a wealthy Quaker philanthropist who can't give away his money quickly enough. Sheppard learns too late that each new existence has its own unique set of miseries. His metempsychotic gift becomes a curse. Sheppard is like a comic version of the Wandering Jew, roaming the streets and country lanes of a corrupt nation, solace never at hand. He is beaten, robbed and swindled.

After his Quaker self is kidnapped by Southern slavery sympathizers who mistake him for an abolitionist, Sheppard's only recourse is to jump into the body of a dead slave named Tom. Bird's satiric romp now takes a grim turn as Tom becomes involved in planning a slave insurrection on his plantation. The political and social humor is easy to swallow when the wealthy and corrupt receive their comeuppance, but slavery is a bitter pill.

Bird distrusts everyone who would attempt to alleviate the suffering of the downtrodden. His Quaker philanthropist is a fool who ruins himself trying to help those who scorn his charity. His abolitionists are scaremongers, sowing discord that will erupt in violence. Whereas early in the novel it's often hard to interpret Bird's political stances - some of his lines are pitch-perfect irony - when it comes to the effects of an abolitionist pamphlet in the hands of slaves, Bird pulls no punches. Humor leaves his pen and bloody carnage follows. It seems clear that Bird had no love for abolitionists or their cause.

It's not that Bird is pro-slavery. As a dramatist he wrote a heroic account of the Roman slave revolt led by Spartacus and declared that the play could never be performed in the South without its author being lynched. What scares Bird is the very real threat of violence over the slave question. He already sees enough misery and injustice in his society. The threat of a slave insurrection is too horrific for him to accept as a valid solution.

Poe wrote that the novel is "a farce of very pretty finesse." True, but Bird's humor is also sharp, even cynically driven. He leaves no social group (not even slaves) unscathed. Although I am suspicious of his characterization of the issues of slavery, it fits the broader purpose of his novel, which is to dissipate the delusions of a corrupt society. Sheppard Lee's imposture of his fellow citizens mirrors the false pretenses of a nation. Bird's richly nuanced novel wears the dramatic mask of comedy, but underneath lies the mask of tragedy.

More Doyle, yet still Unsated

Books on Holmes' creator leave mysteries unsolved.

A Phila. gentleman warms to Lincoln

A Philadelphia Perspective: the Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher

Edited by Jonathan White
Fordham. 282 pp.

by Edward Pettit

"Met Mr. Ryan on the road. He told me news had just come to town that the Republican Party had nominated a Mr. Lincoln for President. I never heard of him before," writes Sidney George Fisher in his diary on May 18, 1860. "It will calm many fears, allay much animosity and inspire hope of better times throughout the country, whoever Mr. Lincoln may be."

Sidney George Fisher was a member of Philadelphia's high society in the mid-19th century. He came from a wealthy family, hobnobbed with the merchant and banking aristocracy and, though not rich himself, spent his days as a gentleman farmer.

Fisher gave speeches to historical and agricultural organizations. He wrote books and pamphlets on the major political questions of his day, such as slavery and constitutional authority. Fisher was, as Samuel Johnson once said of Boswell (according to Boswell), "a very clubable man." Respectable, sociable and determined to make his mark (as long as he didn't have to break a sweat doing it).

Fisher, also like Boswell, kept a diary for most of his adult life. From 1834 until 1871 Fisher commented on the daily minutiae of his own life and of the society in which he lived. Only death halted his voluminous output: He died a mere three days after his last entry.

Unlike Boswell's, Fisher's diary is not filled with details of sexual encounters. While Boswell's journals would not seem out of place as a contemporary blog, with its author's private life splayed for all to see, Fisher writes with a precision and formality that suggest he hoped for readers in years to come. He was not merely taking notes for future writing projects. He was crafting an autobiography, in daily detail.

Fisher's diary has been a boon to historians of 19th-century America for some time. Nicholas B. Wainwright first edited and published a single-volume edition in 1967. This new one, edited by Jonathan White, is a reprinting of only the Civil War years from Wainwright's edition. White has not added any previously unpublished material, even though, as he notes in a preface, Wainwright only published "5 to 10 percent of the original diary." White adds that the Civil War years, in Fisher's own original format, "span some twenty-two volumes." Considering that White was only republishing a few years from the diary, couldn't he have added some extra material? Are there perhaps some salacious Boswellian moments that we don't know about?

From the first entry in this edition, on Jan. 1, 1860, Fisher crafts himself as a man apart. On not attending church service, he writes, "It is very well for the multitude to have a day consecrated to religious observances. . . . But for the thinking man, every day is Sunday, he sees the moral, the divine in truth, and truth governs every day and all things, the most common and familiar." He's not one of the rabble. This passage also suggests an iconoclastic distrust of organized religion.

The personal nature of a diary almost forces a reader to make emotional judgments about the subject, and I found myself disliking Fisher for much of the first year's entries. Longing for the aristocratic ways of yesteryear, lamenting the growing numbers of the uneducated, Fisher often comes off as a prig. But, in documenting the swirling events of the Civil War, Fisher evolves before your eyes. His views on slavery shift. He waxes philosophical. One day (March 13, 1861) he is viewing Barnum's exhibit of African and Central American natives, but can only see (like most of his time) "man in an arrested state of development." The very next day Fisher turns to metaphysical rumination: "We thus die daily and yesterday is as much lost to me as the hour of my birth."

Most interesting is the development of Abraham Lincoln's reputation in Fisher's eyes. From the first mention, quoted above, Fisher is longing for a statesman to save his society from its secessionist mess. And although, as a result of Lincoln's nomination, no fears were becalmed and those "better times" would come only after four years of bloody civil war, Fisher sees the light at the end of the dark tunnel, choosing to quote "the mystic chords of memory / better angels of our nature" part of Lincoln's first inaugural address. Lincoln's speeches gradually win him over and galvanize his commitment to the Union.

A melancholic tone, as Fisher nurses various ailments and mourns Lincoln's assassination, concludes these diary entries as if recording the final days of some lost America. The diary is, at times, an aristocratic idyll in which the classes are forever separate (and not at all equal), and at other times a place where Fisher can explore the ideas of his day and provide the reader with honest opinions. All in all, well worth reading.

Philadelphia Inquirer

A most worthy gathering of Philip K. Dick sci-fi of the '60s

Four Novels of the 1960s
By Philip K. Dick

Library of America 830 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

The Library of America has issued its first volume featuring a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick's Four Novels of the 1960s (The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ubik), edited by novelist Jonathan Lethem. Dick, who died in 1982, began his writing career in the 1950s churning out dozens of science fiction stories for the pulp magazines (nearly 70 stories from '53 to '55 alone) and a few paperback original novels, but it was mainstream success he sought. So, for a couple of years, Dick dedicated himself to writing "realist" novels. None of them sold (almost all have since been posthumously published), and Dick returned for good to the SF genre that turned out to be the most fertile for his own visions of alternate realities.

The four novels in this collection were created during Dick's most prolific years. He wrote 23 novels in the 1960s (a dozen in the three-year period following The Man in the High Castle). The fuel for such productivity was his prodigious intake of amphetamines. In fact, he claimed he had never written a novel without the help of stimulants until 1973's A Scanner Darkly. "The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands." While this approach to creativity brings to mind Truman Capote's remark about Jack Kerouac's books - "That's not writing; it's typing" - Dick mastered his craft and these four books not only are SF gems, but they also easily cross generic lines and rival the multifaceted brilliance of other revered writers (Kerouac himself, by the way, joins the Library of America series in September). And considering that schlock supernatural horror hack H.P. Lovecraft was published by the LoA just two years ago, it is a relief that they have chosen to honor a science fiction writer as talented as Dick.

Although most of his work is chock-full of the futuristic gadgetry and interplanetary settings one usually encounters in the SF genre, Dick is concerned less with "the shape of things to come," as H.G. Wells phrased it, than with the shape of the mind to come. What happens to people as they are forced to confront their own humanity? What happens if the world we live in is just an illusion? Does the nature of humanity change if our consciousness becomes unmoored from not just our material selves, but from all that we perceive as materially solid? Dick is a writer not of physics, but of metaphysics.

These novels grapple with spirituality, rather than science. In The Man in the High Castle, set in a United States that has been defeated by the Axis powers in World War II, the characters use the ancient Chinese text I Ching to determine their actions. In The Three Stigmata, hallucinogenic drugs provide virtual reality experiences that lead to discussions of the existence and nature of God. Do Androids Dream features a religion, Mercerism, in which adherents experience real suffering through a machine that registers their empathy for a sacrificial victim. Ubik utilizes the Tibetan Book of the Dead to examine the existence and consciousness of an afterlife.

I don't want this to sound as if Dick is some dry-as-bones, proselytizing prophet. These novels are also funny, thrilling and stimulating. There are shootouts with renegade androids and undercover spies. There are parodies of consumer culture. There are debates about historicity and drug use. Each novel offers a reading experience that is cathartic while reading, yet offers fruit for continued thought afterward. I didn't want any of them to end and, in a Dickian sense of warped reality, each grew in shape and scope in my own mind (my own alternate world) for long after I put the volume down.

Like those of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Dick's novels are permeated with the paranoiac mood that, in his own words, "things are seldom what they seem." Characters in Dick's novels are forever trying to gauge their position in an ever-shifting mindscape. Dick once said his novels "try to pierce the veil of what is only apparently real to find out what is really real." Unlike Pynchon and Vonnegut, Dick has remained on the periphery of literary recognition. The title of this new collection, Four Novels of the 1960s, may be hinting that more of Dick's work will be forthcoming. Certainly a volume of his short fiction and several more of his novels would hold its own on a shelf surrounded by other Library of America luminaries such as Melville, Faulkner and Wharton. Pynchon and Vonnegut will have to wait.

Mystery sequel concocted from 'Crime and Punishment'

The Gentle Axe
By R.N. Morris

The Penguin Press. 320 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

In Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, the beleaguered student Raskolnikov murders two women with an ax and would have escaped undetected if not for the investigating magistrate, Porfiry Petrovich. Raskolnikov wanders the dark streets and fetid tenements of St. Petersburg , handing out kopeks to its demoralized, poverty-stricken inhabitants, searching for meaning in the ghastly murders he has committed. Petrovich, however, is like an armchair detective who wanders the tortured passages of the student's criminalized mind, searching for motive, but more important, hoping to lead the murderer to confess his crime.

R.N. Morris returns the reader to 1867 St. Petersburg in his historical mystery The Gentle Axe. A year has passed since Raskolnikov's crime, and Petrovich is faced with another murder and another student, Virginsky, with his own curious moral compass. A man is found hanging from a tree in a park, a bloody ax in his belt loop. At his feet, half-buried in snow, is a suitcase crammed with the body of a dwarf whose head has been bashed in. Not so gentle, this ax. Nor is this crime so easily solved as a murder/suicide. Indeed, there are more killings to come and these first two dead bodies, blanketed in snow, are no preparation for the bloody carnage to follow.

Petrovich acts as a kind of anti-Sherlock Holmes. He explains his method to his assistant, Salytov:

"I do not believe these mysteries are solved rationally, through the exercise of cold deductive, reasoning. . . . One must go to a place within one's self. It is a kind of Siberia of the soul. In the criminal, it is the place where these deeds are conceived and carried through. But we all have a similar place within us, or so I believe. I know that I have."

Like the catchers of serial killers in contemporary thrillers, Petrovich attempts to get inside the head of the murderer, find out what makes him tick and trace his actual steps. He empathizes with the criminal, to draw him out. And unlike the traditional armchair detective, Petrovich actively and personally pursues his quarry through the squalid crime scenes of bloody destruction.

We follow Petrovich and Virginsky through an icy maze of decrepit pawnshops, seedy brothels and vodka bars. A prince, a prostitute and a missing actor have an interest in the investigation. As Petrovich follows his leads, he must discover not only why an ax of a particular size was used ("It was in precisely such a detail that the killer would betray himself"), but also the connection between a respectable publisher of European philosophy translations and another publisher of pornographic books. Virginsky, like his predecessor, Raskolnikov, proudly wears his cloak of poverty while moodily denouncing the injustices of his society. As a good mystery writer should, Morris weaves a complicated plot, revealing just enough to raise more questions, but not quite enough to provide any concrete answers, until the final, harried denouement.

In using characters from a previous novel, and also by specifically referring to the events of the previous novel, an author does not create a distinct stand-alone work. A sequel, no matter how well written, is still an extension of its predecessor. Morris' characters and setting do ring true to Dostoyevsky's originals. So, too, does his retelling of the philosophic debates that swirled like the snow through 19th-century St. Petersburg . But Crime and Punishment is not a mystery novel. There is no mystery to solve. The murderer is not only known to the reader, but is also discovered by Petrovich fairly early in the novel. Dostoyevsky's book is about the metaphysics of murder, the "psychological account of a crime," he called it. In his notebooks for the novel, he wrote, "Man is not born for happiness. Man earns his happiness, and always by suffering." Raskolnikov, deranged with guilt, bears the burden of this sentiment.

Morris' sequel is firmly encamped in the mystery genre. Petrovich is the sleuth who must catch the killer. But Morris' use of a generic form does not dilute the idea of human suffering that Dostoyevsky wished to explore. Morris' twist is investigating the suffering of the investigator, not the criminal. In identifying with the killers he chases, Petrovich bears the terrible weight of suffering in the world. His profession forces him to perpetually wander the Siberia of his own soul. Morris' novel is a book not about the metaphysics of murder, but rather the metaphysics of the investigation of murders. As such, The Gentle Axe proves a worthy sequel.

Philadelphia Inquirer

More about Middle-Earth before Frodo

The Children of Húrin

By J.R.R. Tolkien

Edited by Christopher Tolkien

Houghton Mifflin. 320 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

When J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, he had published 11 books, almost all tales of his fantasy realm, Middle-Earth. However, the universe he created, with its own cosmology, languages, cultures and spiritual beings was far, far more vast (and complicated) than could be published. Begun as an exercise to satisfy his linguistic hobbies (creating a world out of invented languages rather than a language for an invented world), Tolkien's Middle-Earth became the grandest, most nuanced alternative realm ever created by a single author.

Since Tolkien's death, his son, Christopher, has prepared for the press some of his father's stories that flesh out the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the encyclopedic 12-volume series, The History of Middle-Earth, are all culled from incomplete manuscripts that Tolkien had labored over for almost 50 years.

The Children of Húrin is the latest of these, but it was decades in the writing in various literary forms. It began as an alliterative poem in the 1920s and was later continued in prose during the following decades. Christopher Tolkien has taken the prose parts and edited into a seamless whole the story of the hero Túrin and his battles against the forces of the malevolent Morgoth, satanic predecessor of the Sauron who besets the heroes in The Lord of the Rings. Some of this story has previously been published in both The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, but both of those accounts fall well short of this greatly expanded, complete narrative.

Túrin is the son of Húrin, a great leader and friend of elves who has been captured by Morgoth in a great battle (as were all battles in the heroic age). This tale is set in the First Age of Middle-Earth (Bilbo and Frodo Baggins live during the Third Age), and the world is still ruled mainly by the Elves, with humans only just coming into their own. Barbaric hordes of wild men, orcs and a slithering dragon have overrun the Elven Kingdoms. Túrin's mother secretly sends her child to a hidden Elven kingdom and the tale recounts his tragic wandering, during which he attempts to turn back the tide of evil unleashed by Morgoth to subvert all of creation.

The Children of Húrin follows the pattern of heroic sagas and romances in which characters behave archetypically. They have a defining trait that plays out over the course of the narrative. Characters don't evolve. They are static beings, bound to their fates, but vigorous in pursuit of their goals. This is not to suggest that they are at all boring. Who could call King Arthur, Beowulf, or Odysseus boring? Such characters resonate with the echoes of human endeavor. Reading their adventures helps define the purpose (or a purpose) of human existence.

Túrin is given multiple names in the tale, each a well-bestowed metaphor of his current standing in the story (e.g., Black Sword), but at heart he is a man of constant sorrows, ever hopeful of victory, but each fight won, each enemy overcome, only serves to add another unlooked-for burden to the weight of his journey.

Although constant of energy and steadfast of purpose, the morality of his actions is sometimes ambiguous. He is no paper-thin angel, ever on the side of truth and justice. Sometimes he is right only because his opponents are so wrong.

And for a narrative rooted in such a predictable genre, the heroic saga, Tolkien still manages to create a good amount of suspense in how events will play out. I felt the urge to rush through the short chapters because I so wanted to learn, not what would happen, but how the characters would meet their fate. Still, there were a few deaths and liaisons that surprised me.

Tolkien coined a word to describe what he felt was the highest purpose of a fairy story: eucatastrophe, "the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn.' " There is a great, joyous coming together of the world at the end of his great work, The Lord of the Rings, but as an early part of the grand history of Middle-Earth, The Children of Húrin cannot end with joy.

Túrin's is a tale of grim suffering taking place in one of the many times of darkness before a light briefly shone its beams upon a weary world. But the grimness of its lost battles and the lamentations of its broken harps make a worthy addition to the epic of Middle-Earth.

A friendship that sparked great poetry

The Friendship
Wordsworth & Coleridge
By Adam Sisman

Viking. 480 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Adam Sisman's The Friendship opens with Samuel Taylor Coleridge vaulting a fence and bounding across a field, after a 40-mile walk, to meet his new friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth at their temporary home, Racedown Lodge, in Dorset. The moment is emblematic: Coleridge's youthful enthusiasm and vigor, the Wordsworths' joy at his arrival, the pastoral field in which they meet, the presence of William's sister, Dorothy. These are some of the key ingredients of the new Romantic poetry that Coleridge and Wordsworth would create. The dull parsing and analysis that passes for most literary discussion of poetry in schools today forgets the exhilaration that often begets great poetry. Anthologies weighted with endless footnotes cannot capture the passion that ignites literary movements. Sisman sets out to recreate the exuberance and intensity of the friendship between the two poets that would engender the Romantic Movement in England.

Coleridge and Wordsworth became essential to each other, their vision for what poetry should be (committed to both societal change and the revelation of the individual, the personal), their minds melding into a creative whole. Sisman writes, "Each found in each other the qualities he had been searching for." The poets revel in a "euphoria of sharing," each contributing to the other's verse, sometimes losing track of who wrote which line. The "intimate autobiographical style of the conversation poems" that Coleridge initiates is perfected by Wordsworth. And through it all, Dorothy is the "essential bridge between them."

Sisman does not give short shrift to Dorothy Wordsworth's importance to the friendship, which was often a triumvirate of like minds. Dorothy did not write poetry, but did play a vital part in shaping the impressions of both men. She was a conduit for their senses and a critic for their poems. Dorothy joined them on their long walks through the countryside. Her journals fill in the details of what the poems hint at. Of her William wrote, "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears."

Although Sisman claims to focus on only a core six years of the poets' friendship, his book begins with too much extraneous biographical detail. The meeting at Racedown, previewed at the start, doesn't actually occur until page 176. As important as are the events and feelings that shaped the lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge before they met (Wordsworth's trip to France, Coleridge's political activities), Sisman could have condensed much of this information into a short chapter and given occasional flashbacks when relevant. The first third of the book feels like one long introduction. As it happens, that isn't such a bad thing. Sisman's style and insights into the revolutionary times of the poets reward over and again. He is such an engaging writer that the overlong buildup is more entertaining than the core of many other biographies.

Sisman often recounts the walking excursions of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In adddition to Coleridge's walk to Racedown, Wordsworth and another friend walk through France. Dorothy and William walk through Germany. They all walk throughout the Lake District where the Wordsworths will eventually settle. No wonder another writer called their times the "age of Pedestrianism."

The poets even composed on foot. Coleridge would pace for hours in his garden. Wordsworth would compose outside, "keeping step with the rhythm of his verse, his head down and mumbling to himself. Often he would pace back and forth along the same route until a poem 'kindled' in his mind. He held the poem there, rarely committing it to paper until it was complete." Sisman offers the cost of paper as one reason for this, but the act of writing as it were on foot, like Coleridge's vaulting the gate, is also emblematic of the poetry these men created, vigorous and in tune with nature. Their poems often mirror the natural landscape around them, like a reflection of a mountain on the calm surface of a lake. Sisman's account of their friendship shows how their poems are not just flat words on a page, but ideas and images that walk across the mind's own landscape. This is a pedestrian biography in the literal sense of pedestrian - an energetic and exuberant walk through the lives of two men.