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Book reviews |
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Every issue of Stimulus contains book reviews, with reviewers carefully chosen for their expertise in the required area. One of the editorial team – our Book Reviews Editor – focuses specifically on sourcing good books to review and good reviewers to review them. An example of a book review is included below. Typically these are intended to be in the range of 300-600 words. Whereas most book reviews are commissioned, we welcome enquiries from potential reviewers. Reviewers are requested to include a 25-35 word biographical note. If you would like to review a book for Stimulus, please e-mail our Book Reviews Editor: editor@stimulus.org.nz. Books can be sent to: Also, check out our guidelines for authors. |
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Example book review (from August 2004)
Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in the Lord of the Rings Matthew Dickerson. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2003. 234 pp. ISBN 1587430851. US$14.95.
One consequence of the hype surrounding Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies has been an explosion in the production of secondary literature on Tolkien. Extending far beyond the hordes of officially licensed movie tie-in books, it includes an array of scholarly, semi-scholarly and popularist publications tracing Tolkien’s sources, delineating his worldview, and reflecting on his influence. Some of these are very good (notably, Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century), while others seem largely interested in making a quick buck.
Given Tolkien’s deep-rooted Christian faith, it’s unsurprising that Christian writers have contributed significantly to this literary outpouring, though they are generally more interested in deriving spiritual than financial capital from the endeavour. Matthew Dickerson’s Following Gandalf is a representative example. Eager to claim the success of Tolkien’s fiction for Christianity, Dickerson’s book unpacks the assumptions underlying The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit, and explains their consonance with a Christian theology. Initially, Dickerson’s explanation is somewhat guarded, but by the book’s end, he unhesitatingly declares Tolkien’s work to be an indelibly Christian myth.
There is nothing particularly novel about this claim, and Dickerson does a reasonable, if somewhat laborious, job of justifying it. Examining particularly the motivations of Tolkien’s characters in The Lord of the Rings, Dickerson concludes that the novel’s vindication of free will, selflessness, and moral responsibility flow necessarily from the Christian beliefs of its author. These conclusions seem to me sound, and Following Gandalf provides a useful summary for anyone new to the issues. Still, Dickerson says little that a thoughtful reader, familiar with the outlines of Christian theology, would be unable to discern for herself, which raises various questions about his method and intended audience. So determined is he to quarry moral absolutes and theological principles from The Lord of the Rings (e.g. pages 60, 76) that Dickerson ends up treating the book more as a moral textbook than a novel. Tolkien himself insisted that his prime motivation in writing The Lord of the Rings was to …try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them… (“Foreword”, 10).
While Dickerson quotes this passage towards the end of his book (203), he struggles to accept its full implications. Art, as the musician T-Bone Burnett argues, must be “irresistible”. Anything that aims to instruct or inform or teach people is “resistable”, and therefore “not art”. If Burnett’s analysis is applied to The Lord of the Rings, it suggests that the book is profoundly Christian because Tolkien’s imagination was thoroughly baptised, not because he set out to write a join-the-dots introduction to Christian theology.
In places, Dickerson’s didacticism also presumes theological simplicities that Tolkien avoids. For example, he reads a dualism into Tolkien’s work which sees “our spiritual nature” as “infinitely more important” than the physical (149), neatly eliding the inextricability of the two throughout The Lord of the Rings. Eowyn and Merry combine to kill the Lord of the Nazgul with swords and shields; Sam piggybacks Frodo up Mt. Doom to destroy the Ring. Dickerson should know this, for he rightly stresses that Gandalf’s prime role is to encourage the people of Middle Earth in fighting evil, rather than using his own supernatural power to blast it (135-136; 230-233). Yet despite this insight, Dickerson still separates “bodily salvation” from “spiritual salvation” (150), a separation ultimately unthinkable to anyone who takes the resurrection of the body seriously. Again, Dickerson seems not to realise the full implications here of something he quotes from Tolkien, to the effect that a doctrine of redemption still requires work “with mind as well as body” (“On Fairy Stories”, quoted 233, emphasis added).
In the final analysis, my quarrel with Dickerson may be more about nuance than substance. At times, he is very helpful, as when he contrasts Tolkien’s treatment of free will against the determinist materialism of Bertrand Russell and others (84, 112-113, 117-118). His willingness to judge United States foreign policy in the light of Denethor’s realpolitik is also refreshing (73), while he offers some interesting (if partial) reflections on whether Tolkien’s writing glorifies war. Yet these insights are joined elsewhere by a boldness in drawing theological conclusions that belies the complexity of Tolkien’s work. It troubles me, for example, that Dickerson so casually refers to God as “the Authority” (182ff), a label which he takes from a single Tolkien letter and which, since Philip Pullman, stands for everything oppressive and life-denying in Christian history. Likewise, he ascribes the sorrow permeating Tolkien’s work solely to “the absence of Christ” in Middle Earth (215), an assertion that overlooks the sense of exile colouring a good deal of Christian literature, from Romans 8, through the Old English poem “The Seafarer”, to the work of Tolkien himself.
Among other possible instances, a neat final example of Dickerson’s cheerful reductionism comes in his quotation of the optimistic passage, central to Jackson’s first movie, where Gandalf suggests to Frodo that he was “meant” to have the Ring, which “may be an encouraging thought” (quoted at 188). Neither Jackson nor Dickerson goes on to quote Frodo’s response to Gandalf: “It is not”. This response, I think, captures the difference between a sentimental and a thorough reading of Tolkien’s text, and of his theology. Good theology, as much as good fiction, needs to allow for the uncertainties and doubts that characterise so much of life. While Dickerson’s book is at times instructive, it is ultimately too cheerful about these contingencies to do full justice to the complexities of either Middle or planet Earth.
Tim McKenzie holds a PhD in Literature & Theology from Glasgow University. He teaches Humanities at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and has worked as a tutor and guest lecturer on a Tolkien course at Victoria University. |
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