Dragonchasers

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sometime in the mid-1970’s. I remember cutting school because I couldn’t put the books down, I was so entranced. I new then that I was going to be a JRR Tolkien fanboy (though we didn’t use that term back in them old days, sonny!) for life. I do have some remembrance of also reading Farmer Giles of Ham and finding it unsatisfying.

Fast forward to last fall when I finally read The Silmarillion. Call me silly, but I’d been ‘saving’ that book for all those years, not wanting to find myself having read everything Tolkien wrote. And when I finally did read it, I was vaguely disappointed in it.

Which brings us to The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. This is a tale of the Eldar Days, long before The Shire and the Hobbits that dwell within. It’s a tale told, in much briefer fashion, in The Silmarillion as well, but this longer version has a slightly more narrative feel to it.

That said…I’m sorry, but it is still not even close to the magnificence that is The Lord of the Rings. The reader still feels distanced from the characters in the story, much more like listening to a narrator telling the tale as opposed to living it ourselves. And the tale itself is so unrelentingly morbid and sad…there is no lightness to it. It seems like despair from front cover to rear.

Once again, it is worth reading for Tokien buffs. But let’s face it, they’re going to read it no matter what I say. But if you kind of like Lord of the Rings but didn’t go nuts over them, you can safely skip this volume.

I’ve been quite lax, to say the least, in my blogging. I finished Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog quite some time ago, and never reported in. And in fact since then I’ve reread The Hobbit but I won’t be reviewing that here since I’ve read it so many times that there’s no way I could do approach it with any resemblance of objectivity. But anyway, back to the Dog.

The only other Connie Willis book I’ve read is The Doomsday Book which was about a future historian time traveling back to research The Black Death. I read it quite some time ago but I remember it as being rather somber, as the topic would suggest. In To Say Nothing of the Dog we follow another time traveling historian but this time out the tone is distinctly light-hearted.

The title here is a tribute to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat: to Say Nothing of the Dog!, published in 1889. This is the story of, well, three men and a dog taking an excursion along the Thames. The hero of Willis’s book, Ned Henry, also ends up in a rowboat on the Thames and actually encounters Jerome’s trio.

And I’m telling you nothing about the actual book, am I? Aye, I’m a bit rusty.

Anyway, Ned Henry, historian, has been doing too much time traveling of late, resulting in a bad case of ‘time lag’ which leaves him generally confused. He is sent back to Victorian England for some R&R, but immediately gets caught up with ever more convoluted and silly adventures when he does so. Watching him trying to navigate the social customs of the times while trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of the upper class without doing anything to corrupt the time stream becomes more and more funny as the book goes on.

Yeah, well, it’s been a good while since I finished it…so I’m doing a lousy job of explaining it. But I will say I really enjoyed it and plan on looking for more of Ms. Willis’ novels. She captures the feel of these historical times so … well, I was going to say accurately, but how should I know what it really felt like to be rowing down the Thames in 1889? But it *feels* accurate, and that’s good enough for me!

I’m still working my way through the pile of World Fantasy Con books. Glenn Meganck’s George & The Angels was next up. It’s from Beachfront Publishing which I’m guessing is some kind of vanity press, because this work wasn’t ready for publishing. In fact, it read like a first draft, minus most of the typos. There’re tons of punctuation errors, horrible and nonsensical POV shifts and an overall rough and unpolished feel to it.

As for the story itself…it’s a mess. Imagine sitting down with a young child and asking them to tell you a story, and that’s what you get in George & The Angels. More or less random events strung out in a line that points generally to an ending. We have George going on a quest and a basic theme of him having to defeat an ultimate bad-guy, and that’s where things stop making sense. Characters and creatures appear and disappear with absolutely no logic or consistency. About two thirds of the way through another world is introduced for no apparent reason. Some characters just kind of fall by the wayside, such as George’s wife, who is called “Elaine” in some chapters, but “Mrs. Richards” whenever the children are on-stage. We see her struggle with George’s disappearance for a while, then she just gets discarded, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, George is one of those ‘constantly carried along by events’ characters that never really does anything to make you like him. In fact, the only remotely likeable characters in the story are his kids. The world is too much of a mish-mosh for you ever to get enough of a handle on it to enjoy being there. If you really enjoy trippy weird stories that are all topsy-turvy, go read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Mr. Meganck obviously has a vivid imagination and a lot of potential, but it seems to me like he’s not willing to do the hard work of writing, and so has tried to cut corners by self-publishing. (I don’t know for a fact that this is self-published but it looks as if this small press might even be owned by Meganck and one or two other authors.) You, dear reader, deserve to be treated better. Avoid this one like the plague.