The Foxie Chronicles, contd

Curious: has anyone else encountered a dog who sits like this? I'd really like to know.


This is one of the strangest things about Foxie, and we don't know exactly why she does it: is it because her hind-legs are disproportionately long (they are) or because her backside is very high (it is) or did she just pick it up through careful observation of us humans sitting on our chairs and sofas in the early days of her pupdom? My mother's unscientific view of things is that she was a mermaid in her last birth.

(Note: the photo above doesn't capture the best version of the pose, which is when she puts up just one of her hind legs on a chair seat and allows the other one to dangle. If I get a better picture at some point, I'll put it up here.)

Another possibility could be that Foxie greatly treasures her behind and wishes it to be in a state of maximum comfort always. (The first thing she does each morning is come to me for her daily back massage, turning her head sternly if the rubbing isn't vigorous enough.) But it's still not a very dog-like way of sitting.

Being long and gangly, she also has issues moving about in small spaces. One of the sofas that she likes to sit on is located 3-4 feet away from a bed that she also likes to sit on, and when she moves from one to the other there's a peculiar moment of undulation where the front part of her body is climbing up one item of furniture even while the back part is still in a state of descension. The sight reminds me of this description of the mighty dragon Glaurung in Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, from a passage where a group of people hidden in a ravine mull their prospects of survival:

"But how can he come forward so?" said Dorlas. "Lithe he may be, but he is a great dragon, and how shall he climb down the one cliff and up the other when part must again be climbing before the hinder is yet descended? And if he can so, what will it avail us to be in the wild water below?"

And while I'm on the subject, a few more pictures:

Bow-zzat?


Afternoon siesta


In which we are very aware of the camera


Expression of bliss as evening head massage occurs


How many other doggies have such a big pile of books to bury their chewy bones in?

[Click pics to enlarge. Earlier Foxie posts here, here and here]

The LOTR disc-set

The 12-disc extended edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is available in stores in India now. I picked up the set a couple of days ago and it looks sumptuous. As anyone who reads this blog often will know, I make a lot of noise about DVD extras and the need for directors to use the medium to provide value-addition for home-viewers (rather than simply have the film on the disc along with a “songs selection” feature, as many DVDs of Hindi films lazily do). Well, what Peter Jackson and his team have accomplished with this disc-set represents the most thoughtful use of the medium I’ve yet seen; it’s obvious that they've relished the opportunity to show off the behind-the-scenes material that piled up during the many years of shooting. “Specially created for home viewing” says the package, and the booklet accompanying the set adds that with no constraints on running time, each film was extended by between 30 and 50 minutes (sounds a bit like a 600-word film review being expanded on a blog!).

But rather than simply inserting deleted scenes, Jackson approached this Extended Edition as if he were creating a whole new version of the film. He and editor John Gilbert carefully evaluated material to be integrated into the film, and then worked to bring each scene up to the same polish as the rest of the feature – visual effects were completed, dialogue was recorded and sound effects created.

Based on what I’ve seen of the discs so far, these are no idle claims. Each of the three films in the trilogy – The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King – has its own box with four discs. Two of the discs in each box are labeled Appendices and Jackson himself introduces these, explaining the bonus features and how the menus should be navigated. The features include dozens of good-sized documentaries about various aspects of the filming; galleries with thousands of categorised images (storyboards, artwork created for the production, behind-the-scenes photos); four separate feature-length commentary options (by the director and the writers, the cast, the production and design teams, each group providing a specialised perspective on participating in one of the grandest movie epics ever); and detailed interactive maps, based on the ones that Tolkien created for his books, which allow the viewer to trace the routes taken by various sets of characters (a mini-screen simultaneously plays part of the relevant scene from the film, so the various complicated place names can be easily related to the landscapes in the movies). Whoever put this material together must have had a lot of fun doing it.

Of course, to get through all these features you have to be an obsessive fan of the trilogy, or a Tolkien-nerd, and also have an obscene amount of free time on your hands. It’s staggering to think of how much time would be required to navigate everything on this set. The films by themselves add up to around 12 hours and if you were to listen to all four of the commentary tracks (I did say you have to be obsessive), that means a cool 48 hours spent in front of your TV screen. The documentaries run into several hours too, and it’s impossible to estimate the amount of time needed to see all of the images in the galleries or to study all the map routes.

I doubt I’ll be able to do all of this anytime soon, but for now I’ve watched the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring as well as bits of The Return of the King, and the extra material has been quite good, especially the quieter scenes that punctuate the grand moments (this is something I occasionally thought was missing in the films when I saw them on the big screen): such as the melancholy scene early in the first film where Frodo and Sam watch a group of ghostlike, fading elves marching slowly towards the ships that will take them to Valinor; or the confrontation between the heroes and Sauron's sarcastic messenger (known as the “Mouth of Sauron”) outside the Black Gates of Mordor just before the final battle begins.

More info here, here and here.

The Golden Compass, and thoughts on fantasy adaptations

It’s a tricky thing transferring a high-quality fantasy novel to the big screen, even given all the advances in computer technology – and sometimes because of those advances. When we've used our imaginations to give shape to unfamiliar vistas and characters (or even, if we choose, to keep them nebulous, as I do with Tolkien’s The Silmarillion) and they are then given a definite form on screen, the results can be problematic. I know this can be said of any book-to-film adaptation, but personally it affects me most when it’s done in fantasy.

Much as I admired the grand vision of Peter Jackson’s 10-hour filmisation of The Lord of the Rings, there were times when the images in my head simply refused to make peace with what was on the screen. When the Dark Lord Sauron (bereft of corporeal form in the books and all the more menacing for it) was turned into a giant roving flashlight – wistfully scanning Mordor for stray hobbits – in Jackson’s The Return of the King, the Tolkien nerd in me wept. It wasn’t really the filmmakers’ fault – it’s hard to see what else they could have done to visually convey the Eye of Sauron looking out for his (its?) enemies, especially given that the film was reaching out to a mass audience, including people who hadn’t read Tolkien – but that points to the difficulties of bringing a richly imaginative book to the screen. When Christopher Tolkien said his father’s works were "peculiarly resistant to filming", he wasn’t necessarily being over-conservative.

(Sometimes I think the only Lord of the Rings film that would really satisfy me would be a black-and-white one made in the jerky, otherworldly style of movies of the 1920s, like Fritz Lang’s Siegfried. At any rate, this is the only way The Silmarillion could acceptably be filmed.)

I had a similar response to a few scenes in The Golden Compass, the movie version of the first book in Philip Pullman’s celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy. For instance, one of Pullman’s most notable conceptions is that of the “daemons” – physical manifestations of people’s souls, which take the shape of animals, birds or insects. It’s a very effective idea on paper, but when depicted on screen it can occasionally become jarring. In an early scene where children are running about (accompanied, naturally, by their chattering little souls), what I saw was an assorted bunch of kids and small furry animals all apparently in danger of tripping over each other. And when daemons in the film take the shape of talking cats and mice, the special effects used to make the animals’ lips move had me thinking of the cheesier scenes in Stuart Little and Babe. (Note: using technology to anthropomorphise cute animals is just wrong.)

Pullman’s trilogy is a hugely ambitious work about, among other things, the dangers of organised religion and threats to individual freedom. A running theme is that of children (their minds not yet put into boxes, their souls not yet "fixed") in danger of being corrupted; in fact, some of his concerns about youngsters being moulded and stripped of their individuality reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ point in The God Delusion that children shouldn’t be seen as belonging to any religion. (Inevitably, children are also saviours, the chief agents for the creation of a better world.)

In the film, the anti-religion themes have been softened into a more general anti-authority tone. The story is set in a parallel world not too unlike ours and the central character is Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), a headstrong young girl who has, in the tradition of Frodo Baggins and other "little people" of the genre, been saddled with momentous responsibilities. She must rescue a friend who has been kidnapped by a vicious group known as the Gobblers, take custody of a truth-telling device called an alethiometer, help an armoured polar bear regain his self-respect and his kingdom, and foil the plans of a powerful, oppressive organisation called the Magisterium. Perhaps most importantly, she must decide whether or not to trust the inscrutable Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman), who has taken a special interest in her.

The Golden Compass is a brisk film – perhaps too brisk for its own good, given how much it tries to pack into a running time of under two hours. This ensures that there’s nearly always something intriguing going on, but it can also make the sequence of events confusing and the characters emotionally uninvolving, especially for someone who hasn’t read the book. This is a problem when you consider that audiences will have to wait a year for the next instalment in the trilogy. Characters come and go in the blink of an eye, relationships are formed and explanations given too rapidly, no scene is milked for its full dramatic potential (I was especially disappointed by the throwaway handling of one of the darkest, most chilling passages in the book, where Lyra encounters a boy whose daemon has been torn from him) and even the big action setpiece, a bear-fight, is slightly anti-climactic. Perhaps this would have been better as a three-hour movie.

To an extent the film does work as spectacle, consistently providing beautiful scenic visuals, even if you’re never sure where the breathtaking real-world Norwegian landscapes end and computer effects begin. It also shows some imagination in the scenes where Lyra reads the alethiometer and in its depiction of the way different people’s daemons interact with each other depending on the prevalent mood. Richards and Kidman are both good too, though the latter doesn’t really have a sustained role, and there are a few genuinely creepy moments involving Mrs Coulter’s monkey-daemon.

Ultimately a movie must be judged on its own terms, not those of its source book, but I’m not sure how well this film will work for a viewer who isn’t familiar with Pullman. Seen in isolation, it’s just another good-looking but average entry in the Hollywood fantasy canon, a poor cousin to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which is now the standard against which all such films will be judged. Too many scenes in The Golden Compass are reminders of better movies of the past. The prologue, with its solemn voiceover, is very similar to the expository opening of The Fellowship of the Ring; a late scene plays almost like a parody of the famous climax ("I am your father") of The Empire Strikes Back. Also, what’s with the tiny appearance by Christopher Lee? The next time he plays a dark wizard/threatening authority figure in this sort of movie, his character should be named Dejaa Voo.

P.S. In full disclosure, I read His Dark Materials several years ago and enjoyed the books, especially the first one, but I’m not a fevered fan. Also, I liked the trilogy principally as a very skilful, richly imaginative fantasy/adventure – I wasn’t too interested in the deeper, more philosophical subtexts, which may be why I was slightly underwhelmed by the final book, The Amber Spyglass, which deals with nothing less than the death of God as we know Him and the creation of a new republic of heaven.

P.P.S. Discover your own daemon at the film’s official website. Mine is sleek, black, solitary and - surprisingly - "a leader". Meet Xanthia.

Tolkien's unfinished chairs

The story of Frodo the hobbit and his plucky band of companions, who undertake a dangerous voyage with the One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron, is among the most beloved books ever published. Inevitably, for most of its readers the enormous body of lore behind it is nothing more than a colorful backdrop, full of incomprehensible genealogies, invented languages and unpronounceable names. Yet as the universe of hardcore Tolkien fans is well aware, the author had imagined and examined every detail of his creation… No author in fantasy or any other genre has ever constructed a world of such linguistic and historical density; it almost seems that this immense architectural work exhausted Tolkien, and with the sole exception of the "Lord of the Rings" narrative he had no energy left to tell its stories...

An outstanding review of The Children of Hurin by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, complete with the back-story on J R R’s long and complex writing career (which I briefly covered in this post).

Tolkien's The Children of Húrin

Like any other Tolkien nerd I’ve been tracking the worldwide release of The Children of Húrin, one of his oldest stories – J R R began writing it as a young man, during the First World War, and now it’s been published as a complete narrative for the first time, more than 30 years after his death. This is the latest in a series of projects by Tolkien’s son Christopher (an octogenarian himself), who’s been collating, editing and publishing versions of his father’s unfinished manuscripts for decades.

To understand why so much of Tolkien’s work has been published posthumously, one needs to understand his tortuous writing career, which spanned over 60 years, and to realise that the stories told in the 1,200-odd pages of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were mere fragments of a much larger picture: a collection of myths and folktales that described the creation and long history (over many Ages and thousands of years) of an invented universe.

Anyone who’s read The Lord of the Rings will know that much of that book’s charm comes from the many nebulous glimpses of a distant back-story: frequently, characters stop to tell each other about lore from the past, recite songs and seek inspiration in the lives of heroes from a much earlier time. In fact, Tolkien had already written detailed versions of many of these back-stories long before he wrote either LOTR or The Hobbit. He began working on these tales in the army barracks of WWI, and he worked on them throughout his life – continually revising them, often preparing alternate versions of each tale, changing the names of characters and dates, but never completing them to his satisfaction. After his death Christopher collected the hundreds of pages of manuscripts that his father had left behind, ironed out the inconsistencies, and published a series of books including (most famously) The Silmarillion and the 12-part The History of Middle-earth. The Children of Húrin is the full version of one of the many stories included in those works.

Set during the First Age of the Sun, roughly 6,500 years before the events told in The Lord of the Rings, this is an account of the struggles of the Eldar (a race of Elves), the Edain (a race of Men) and others against the tyranny of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. (Morgoth, originally known as Melkor, was the Satan figure in Tolkien’s invented universe, a fallen God and a much bigger bad-ass than Sauron, the villain of LOTR.) The protagonist of The Children of Húrin is the anti-hero Turin Turambar, a conflicted young man whose internal nature combines tragically with his circumstances; he’s one of Tolkien’s most abiding creations, and his story is as compelling as many of the mythologies it was inspired by (such as the Norse and Finnish myths).

The Children of Húrin isn’t a previously unpublished work. I’ve read most of it before – the bulk of it can be found in the “Narn I Hin Húrin” section of Unfinished Tales, published in 1980. This new version has an extra chapter or two and slightly more risqué language (at one point, Turin “sets the point of his sword in [an enemy’s] buttock” while pursuing him; this wasn’t in the earlier version), as well as new illustrations by Alan Lee. Also, the version in Unfinished Tales was interspersed with editorial commentary and footnotes, while the form it takes here is of an uninterrupted narrative.

Inevitably, there’s going to be some scepticism about the timing of this release. With the new Harry Potter just a couple of months away, it’s difficult not to see this as a marketing strategy – remember that the film version of The Lord of the Rings brought Tolkien’s works to a new, younger market that might be eager for more of the same. However, readers who are only casually interested in Tolkien are unlikely to develop a taste for this book. Also, before you pick it up and toss it to your younglings, a word of caution: small children will struggle with the language, which is in the dense, archaic style one associates with myths. (Personally, I enjoy the repeated use of such words as “verily” and “smite”!) There are many character and place names, which can be confusing. And some of the content is adult: there’s a subplot featuring incest, with shades of the Oedipus myth and the Kullervo story from Finnish mythology. That said, it’s definitely not “X-rated”, as an article in the Sunday Times suggested.

P.S. For the patient reader The Children of Húrin can work on its own terms as a high tragedy, full of interesting characters and twists of fate, but it’s much more satisfying and contextual if you’re already familiar with – or willing to become familiar with – Tolkien’s mythologies. Suggested supplementary reading: The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales, Vol 2. Also see The Encyclopaedia of Arda, an exhaustive and ever-growing online resource on Tolkien’s world.

The charm of Big Books

My bed groaned loudly when I flung the 950-page Shantaram onto it; it’s already playing host to the equally thick Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Susannah Clarke) and Underworld (Don DeLillo). Well, too bad. There’s a very particular charm that Big Books have (I mean the ones that can actually be read, not the Finnegan’s Wake variety). This is a strange thing for me to say considering my frequent complaints that I only feel up to reading short stories nowadays; I hesitate to get started on something really mammoth because there’s always a good chance that before I finish it something else will suddenly come along for review, and I don’t like deserting a book midway.

But as I came to the end of Murakami’s epic The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and turned it over in my hands as per ritual, I thought again about how comforting it is to spend time in the company of a big, big book. A few years ago movie critic Roger Ebert, reviewing the first of the Lord of the Rings films, wrote of Tolkien’s novel: "Reading it, I remembered why I liked it in the first place. It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many sights to see, many adventures to share..." These words might seem especially relevant to a fantasy/adventure novel but they apply equally well to most of the really fulfilling Big Books I’ve read.

The first big books in my life were Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. If I’m not mistaken, both have suffered a decline in critical appreciation over the years (though East of Eden was never ranked among Steinbeck’s three or four best novels in any case) but I still remember them fondly. (In an abstract sense that is, since most of the plot details have slipped out of my memory.) They came along at a time when I had just started aspiring towards "higher reading", having moved beyond the Hardy Boys stage, and it was good to feel like I was reading something worthwhile, something substantial. Undoubtedly the very size of the things contributed immensely to that impression at the time.

In his review Ebert also says "Lord of the Rings is not about a narrative arc or the growth of the characters, but about a long series of episodes in which the essential nature of the characters is demonstrated again and again (and again)." I don’t completely agree with that bit - character growth and a narrative arc do have a part to play in LOTR and I don’t see how these things can be completely absent from any successful book, whatever its genre. But it’s certainly true that many of the great Big Books are built on an episodic structure: Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers come instantly to mind. Naturally, this has a lot to do with the fact that many of the early novels were first published in serialized form in magazines or journals. (It might also help explain why classics like Tom Jones are surprisingly easy to read even compared to some modern novels that are half the size.)

Can go on and on about my favourite Big Books but my attention has been diverted. I’ve been book-tagged by my libertarian buddy Yazad Jal and while I’m terrified at the prospect of naming just five books that mean a lot to me, I think I will get around to it soon. Separate post for that one.