Redemption

SPOILER ALERT - If you haven't finished Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings do not, I beg, read this blogpost. Be off with you to the library or bookstore and check out both series.

Yesterday, I wrote about Karma and how the idea of Nemesis must exist, internally at least. Later, one comment on the blogpost really grabbed my attention. A friend wrote that once someone does evil, and does it again, the internal guilt eases until the dark deeds are seen as "normal" by that person.

She's right, and it erases my neat metaphor of an interior angry goddess. However, I do wonder about the dreams of the people who live with dark deeds, as well as their lives. If someone is truly evil, truly in the dark side - can anything be satisfactory? Love, life, family, relationships? Do they have friends?

Oh, the fascination of villains. 

My sister, whose intellect I greatly admire, once told me that in her opinion a great book offers redemption for the villain. As an example, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gollum (that strange, brilliant character) is redeemed by one act at the very end, thus saving Frodo from soulless eternity. 

Another example is Snape, although that dude is seriously complex. I wonder as an author, if he developed himself on the page, or if JK suddenly had one of the concept flashes, the kind that hit just as you get into bed and you haven't any paper handy. (Although, of course,   he isn't a villain at all.)

Redemption for the villain ... it's a tricky concept. It has to be organic and come from within (thus bypassing the interior angry goddess) or from a series of events that evolve naturally, like a Bach concerto or the inside of a seashell. The writer has to seriously Fibonacci sequence it. 

If redemption is handed out with a Deus ex Machina fanfare, the gloriously evil villain is compressed into a cardboard cutout. No, redemption itself must come, like karma, from within.

A final word on villains - as I was writing this post, my sister and some of our friends from high school were facebook chatting about a murderer. 

The murderer didn't seem to be evil, so much as STUPID. Her act of violence and terror came from being so dumb that she couldn't comprehend that it would change her life (and, most sad of all, the lives of her kids) forever. 

That is real life, not fiction, and it brings me back to the concept of karma. Probably that sad little murderer will never even understand the depths of what she has done. But will she ever feel soaring happiness of motherhood, the solid comfort of an enduring marriage, or the quiet triumphs that come with ordinary life? 

Of course, all of that is pretty impossible behind bars. But the prison I wonder about is the one in her own mind.

JRR Day

Tolkien was born this day in 1892. He did so much that was amazing - invented an entire world, for example, along with maps, languages and mythology that went with it. His books are The Classics of his genre (which he also pretty much invented!) and his characters live and breathe as much today as when he invented them.

I first read Tolkien when I was eight. I found an old copy of The Hobbit somewhere and picked it up. After that, I was lost in a world of songs, adventure, and underground caves where a creature had lived for years, looking for one Precious item.

I loved Smaug's treasure and how the Hobbit - Bilbo Baggins - evolved from a peace-loving elderly gentleman into a first-rate burglar. I loved the names - Oin and Gloin especially. And let's not forget Gandalf - a character so real, so amazing, that he has reappeared under different names in many different fantasy series and books.

It took much longer to get into Lord of the Rings. It was so solemn after the riotous Hobbit, and Tom Bombadil nearly finished me off. Plus, there was the constant lack of food ... it seemed the only thing that Sam and Frodo ever had on them was tobacco. Reading LOTR invariably made me hungry.

Plus, the lack of female characters made me itchy. Sure, there was Goldberry and Galadriel, but what did they do besides dispense high-brow wisdom and look lovely? It wasn't until the movies came out and I saw that Eowyn was a character to take my breath away that I went back and finally read the trilogy. 

Maps - glorious maps

But that was a product of the times, and Tolkien's writing is amazing. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” 

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.” 

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” 

“Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.” 

Holding out for the Anti-Hero

Ross Kitson is in the house! He is the author of Dreams of Darkness Rising, the first volume of an incredible epic fantasy that I just can't wait to read.  I've read his short stories, and they are amazing, and plus his book has MAPS. I'm a sucker for a map in a book, ever since Lord of the Rings.

One of the maps from Dreams of  Darkness Rising

Ross works during the day as a consultant in Intensive Care and Anaesthesia at Tameside Hospital in Manchester. He is married with three lovely kids who soak up most of his free time. He writes his epic tales in the wee hours augmented with a combination of stella and red wine.

My genre is fantasy. I love it; have always loved it, ever since I could read. As a kid I was captivated by the total escapism of fantasy, by the idea of magic being a reality, by the virtues of the heroic struggling against insurmountable evils. It was a passion fueled by an adolescence dedicated to role playing games, tucked away in mates’ sheds and front rooms, for far too many hours until my complexion emulated Gollum on a bad-skin day.

So here’s a quandary. Given that many of us who read fantasy and sci-fi and all its sub-sub genres (Elfpunk anyone?) came into the genre loving tales of the great and good defeating the gibbering armies of The Dark ^Tm , how come the anti-hero is so pervasive in speculative fiction?

They’re everywhere! Take the most successful fantasy series of the last ten years—George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire—it is replete with anti-heroes. Tyrion Lannister has to be the favourite character amongst a sea of schemers and blaggards. He’s selfish, rude, corrupt, bitter, in fact all the traits that make a great bad guy. Yet amongst his venom there are redeeming features that make us fascinated by him. By book two we love him and by the latest he’s more or less the only one (other than Arya) we care about.

Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series has Locke Lamora, a thief and a con-man as the main character. Here we have a different flavour of anti-hero. Whereas Tyrion is a nasty piece of work who occasionally displays redeeming features, Locke is actually an alright guy—he loves his friends etc.—who screws people over for a living. Like Robin Hood or the IRS. He’s a ‘hero’ who is also criminal.

And there’s so many more in fantasy that you wonder if we ever wanted true heroes. Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (torturer…tick), Sand dan Glotka in Abercrombie’s The First Law books (yay, another torturer…tick), Thomas Covenant in Donaldson’s epic (rapist…tick), Cugel the Clever in Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth (thief, cheat, rake…tick), Raistlin in Dragonlance (black magic, betray brother…OK…tick), Fitz in Hobb’s Farseer trilogy (assassin? Hey, sure…beats looking after the horses…tick) and, of course, Elric.

Now Elric I did love as a kid. More accurately I coveted Stormbringer, the soul-drinking sword that Elric was dominated by. To a DnD player the idea of a sword that munched on opponents life energy (and therefore boosted your own) was fantastic. The weapon Black-razor in White Plume Mountain was an obvious copy and Elric even got his own RPG supplement for RuneQuest. 

Elric and Stormbringer

 Elric was the first great fantasy anti-hero in my mind. Before him we had the muscle bound might of Conan, the noble Aragorn and the almost biblical Aslan. In his very first appearance we meet him on the way to slaughter his own nation. He then further fails to impress us by wining about his doom-ridden destiny, betraying people all over the place, becoming addicted to a vampire-sword and then killing all his buddies one by one. Admittedly some he kills by accident, because he gets carried away with Stormbringer; but you’d still not add him as a friend on Facebook would you?

So why do we love them? These are characters that are far darker than the tough guys of the cinema. We all admire the surly Han Solo and love the hard as nails Clint Eastwood characters. But these are characters that are morally dubious, at times nasty and at times ruthless. They are killers, torturers, thieves—the sort most of us would eschew in reality. Why do we enjoy reading about them?

I think it’s the escapism in another form and I think therefore that that is why fantasy (the ultimate asylum from our troubled world) is replete with them. These are characters whose achievements within the books seem all the more admirable, characters that surpass all the faults and the weaknesses that they have, to become victorious. They are creations who resonate with us because of their flaws, which after all we all have (though perhaps not to the extent of these characters). Why should a being in a fantasy world have to have any less hang-ups than us?

Anti-heroes act in ways that appeal to our darker instincts. They allow us to slip away from the frustration of modern life and the constraints of society and unleash a bit of spite. Far better to read about Tyrion Lannister’s Machiavellian antics or Elric hoovering up a few souls than turn around and give our annoying bosses a head-butt on the nose.

And we can see characters every bit as flawed as ourselves and revel in the redemption that many achieve and know that for even the most screwed-up and damaged that there is hope.

So long live the anti-hero and remember even Aslan probably had some darker moments that were cut from the books. I fact I distinctly remember him hanging out with the Snow Witch sharing a crack-pipe…