The Hobbit: A Review (Part 2)

Disclaimer: The fact that I'm reviewing this right now has nothing to do with the release of the movie.

Note: Those of you who have read my "Of Significance..." page may remember that The Hobbit is listed there, so this is (by far) not my first reading of the book.

Part 1 of this review is here.

It is of great interest to me that Tolkien is considered the "father of modern fantasy" when so much of modern fantasy has nothing to do with what or the way Tolkien wrote. While it's true that The Hobbit is a classic fantasy story, it is not classic in the sense that it uses all the normal conventions of fantasy. In fact, despite that many (most?) people would say that modern fantasy is largely based on Tolkien, you will find few to none of what we consider basic fantasy tropes in The Hobbit (or The Lord of the Rings).

One of the most common bits of fantasy literature is the young, male protagonist. Young often means teenager. Most often, probably. The last couple of decades have finally brought us a bevy of female protagonists, but, still, youth is the most common theme. Bilbo, however, is not young. He's not even what we would consider middle-aged. He's not quite "old," but he's definitely on his way. Definitely "established" and definitely set in his ways. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other piece of fantasy literature that's like that except The Lord of the Rings, because Frodo (and the other hobbits), also, is not young (something Peter Jackson conveniently forgot). [And it's not one of these things where hobbits are old but still young like elves can be, because hobbits are Tolkien's stand-ins for humans and age about the same way (when Bilbo is turning 111 in LotR, he is old, as in really old, as in ancient).] The closest other thing I can think of is Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, who is not old but is definitely not young.

The next piece is that this young protagonist is frequently (almost always) an orphan of some kind. Maybe, s/he has one of his/her parents, but the protagonist generally has lost at least one of them and almost always to some kind of violent circumstance. Maybe this is why the orphan princess is so common in Disney? Bilbo is definitely not an orphan. Which is not to say that his parents are alive, because they're  not, but, then, he's 50, and there is no indication that they died of anything other than old age. Or, maybe, boredom.

Then there is the requisite prophecy about the protagonist. The list of fantasy literature which feature a prophecy would probably exceed my usual word count, so I'll just remind everyone of Harry Potter and how he fits all three of these so far. Even The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has a prophecy. The Hobbit contains no prophecy (neither does LotR). There is nothing "special" about Bilbo in that sense. He has not been chosen by fate to do what he does. This is a story about a hobbit that rises to the occasion. It's more like your boss at work needing a job done, choosing the person the boss thinks is most qualified, and that person choosing to do it.

And there is no "party" of adventurers. No, the dwarves don't count, because they're all interchangeable on the whole. And Gandalf abandons them half way through. So there's no wizard, no fighter, no ranger, no healer, none of that stuff we expect to find among the heroes band of followers. Just the burglar, and that's Bilbo.

Possibly the biggest break from convention is that Bilbo is not the valiant warrior that "saves the day" in the end. He does not slay the dragon, and he does not defeat the goblin army. He's not even conscious for most of that. Bilbo is a hero of another type, let's say a moral hero, which is so much more important and believable. Bilbo's bravest moment is when he walks down the tunnel to see the dragon. Not to fight the dragon, just to see him. I love that bit:

Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

And his most significant contribution to the end of the story is standing up against his friends when they are set on a wrong path. Neville Longbottom's stand against his friends and Dumbledore's rewarding of it very much reminded me of Bilbo handing the Arkenstone over to Bard.

Basically, despite what everyone says about "all fantasy" being based on Tolkien, almost no fantasy is based on Tolkien. What Tolkien did was original and, amazingly, remains original to this day. No one else has written a story like The Hobbit (and, although people have attempted stories like The Lord of the Rings, no one has succeeded), and I have to wonder if that's because the story becomes so much bigger in our minds after we read it. Bilbo becomes this larger than life hero that he's really not in the book, and that's, frankly, amazing. We remember him fighting the spiders and riddling with Gollum and the dragon, but we forget that it's Bard that kills the dragon and the Eagles that save the day in the Battle of Five Armies. It really is like what Gandalf tells him in the end:

You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.

We don't tend to have characters like that in our fantasy. Our protagonists are huge, essential characters who have the fate of the world hanging on their shoulders, and Bilbo is not that kind of hero.

He's just a guy that learns that he's capable of more than he believes he is, and I think that's an important lesson to learn. And I love that we see that change through the pages of The Hobbit. He goes from being a guy that runs away from just the idea of an adventure, of anything different, to the guy that gets them all caught by trolls, to the guy that everyone depends upon. There's no unlocking of the secret, magical talent that only he possesses; there is only Bilbo learning to use the "gifts" that everyone is given. There is only Bilbo deciding to go instead of stay and to do instead of not. It is Tolkien telling us that there is a bit of the Tookish inside of all of us... if only we can wake it up.

Unexpected Applause: Cassastar

So... following on the heels of all the discussion about reviews is... a review. And, probably, this is one I should have gotten to a long time ago, but I have a huge stack of books waiting to be read, so it took a while to get to this.

Alex Cavanaugh is pretty well known in these parts and not without reason. Not only has he written a couple of best selling books, but he's incredibly supportive of other writers. His name gets around. But we're not here to look at the author but his book. His first book, that is: Cassastar.

As usual, let's look at the technicals first:
This is easily one of the best edited small or independently published books I've seen. In the top 3, for sure. I wouldn't know more specifically than that without going through those three books and actually counting up the errors, and I'm not going to spend the time doing that. Although there are a few more toward the end than in the beginning, except for one consistent misspelling of a word by substituting in a homophone for it, all of the mistakes were just things that got missed, like "as" instead of "a" or things like that. There are no consistent punctuation errors at all. Without the rather routine editing issues I've come to expect from independently published works, this became a rather enjoyable read for that alone. I'd give it an A on technicals.

Without getting into the actual plot of the book, I'd say it's a fairly routine space romp. Think Top Gun meets A New Hope with a dash of Battlestar Galactica thrown in for good measure. Of course, Alex does add in his own bits, too, such as the telepathic abilities of the Cassans (and possibly other, more rare, mental abilities that we don't encounter during this first book (well, we do encounter one other, but that would be telling)), and those abilities play a role in what unfolds with the plot, so they're not just icing on the cake, so to speak.

At any rate, the plot is not very complicated or unpredictable, so, if you're looking for some big twist ending or endless convolutions in your plot, you should look somewhere else. Plot-wise, you're going to get a fairly straightforward story. The only real issue with this is that Alex waits to reveal the conflict, or that there is any conflict, until well after the first third of the book. It left me feeling somewhat adrift during Byron's training because it was impossible to tell that anything else was going on other than boot camp.

Of course, the plot is not the point of the story. Cassastar isn't about an interstellar war, it's about the characters, and Mr. Cavanaugh does a very realistic job of drawing his characters and fleshing them out. In fact, there is real character growth in the book, which is not something that's all that common in these days of flashy, all out action all the time. Byron is not the same character at the end of the book as he starts out being. Neither is Bassa. The book is about friendship and how "iron sharpens iron;" the plot is only there to facilitate that journey. In this respect, the book often reminded me of the relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Lord of the Rings. It's all very British feeling.

It's a solid job of story telling. Good characters. Good action. A nice, entertaining read. There's enough to it to make it above average, and, coupled with the lack of grammar issues, I'd give it a nice, solid "B." It's not great or earth-shattering, but it is good entertainment with some insight into "humanity" thrown in to make it worth the time.