Books of the year: Worlds of fantasy and fame brought home to the local

From JRR Tolkien’s letters, and Matthew Gasada’s plays, to Back to the Local by Maurice Gorham, Michael Duggan selects his books of the year

JRR Tolkien: The Ring encapsulates and exposes one of our defining delusions of power and how we would use it. Picture: AP

The Letters of JRR Tolkien: Revised and Expanded edition edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (Harper Collins, £30.00)

I was a late convert to JRR Tolkien. At the very time in my life, male adolescence, when (at least, as far as the stereotype goes) I should have been most susceptible to him, I was, in fact, completely indifferent, greeting any reference to The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit with a shrug. I wasn’t hostile but I had no interest in him or the fantasy genre.

Well, things have changed. These days, while I certainly lay no claim to being a super fan, I have come to appreciate Tolkien’s achievement, not least in the creation of a literary metaphor of enormous significance and permanent relevance.

The Ring encapsulates and exposes one of our ultimate and defining delusions: that if we had the power that we see others holding, we would be different, we would use it wisely and for the good of all.

It is an inexhaustible lesson in humility, up there with 'The Emperor’s New Clothes' in its explanatory power for human behaviour.

The revised and expanded edition of his letters, edited by his biographer Humphrey Carpenter and his son Christopher, shows that Tolkien had simply no idea of the impact his magnum opus was going to have, both in his lifetime and beyond.

Getting The Lord of the Rings written and published was an ordeal with work on it crammed in between his duties as a professor at Oxford and as a devoted husband and father of four.

His ambition “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” was breathtaking or, as he put it, the result of an arrogance that made him tremble.

Yet the gains to be had were doubtful: “I have exposed my heart to be shot at,” he wrote to his friend, Fr Robert Murray, SJ.

The letters contain moving reflections on the course of his own life, scarred in childhood and youth by orphanhood, poverty, and the loss of his best friends in war.

The times he lived in often caused him dismay. In 1944, upon observing from his Oxford garden a “skywide Armada” of bombers leaving England, he wrote to one of his sons, then in Africa: 

“By the time this reaches you, somewhere will have ceased to exist and the world will have known about it and already forgotten about it.”

Life, he felt, “is always and at all points ‘frustrating’ — it is a matter of the degree in the pressure and the interior counter-pressure”.

There are surprises too. Despite the masculinist reputation of his appeal, some of the longest and most complex letters are written to female readers; and despite the impression one might have of Tolkien as a Shire-bound lover of the rural scene, he confessed to an equal imaginative need for “bare rock and pathless sand and the unharvested sea”.

Then there is his correspondence with WH Auden, the great modernist poet, who championed Tolkien’s work and mistrusted anyone who didn’t like it.

Because he was at one point a regular visitor for professional purposes, we also get to read about what Tolkien made of Ireland and the Irish: 

“I go frequently to Ireland (Eire: southern Ireland) being fond of it and (most of) its people; but the Irish language I find wholly unattractive.”

Who exactly, one wonders, wasn’t he fond of? And what exactly did this great expert on ancient European languages find unattractive about Irish? Questions to resolve another day.

Dimes Square and Other Plays by Matthew Gasda (Applause, €26.09)

Dimes Square is a very long way from Middle-earth. It is a New York ‘microneighbourhood’, sandwiched, roughly speaking, between Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

A couple of years ago it was being “feted as the heartland of cool in the city” ( The Guardian) and the playwright Matthew Gasda seemed to emerge as the district’s laureate of sorts.

The four pieces contained in Dimes Square and Other Plays plunge us into the lives of various young Manhattan scenesters: indie musicians, college students, filmmakers, fashionistas, and so on, with financiers and lawyers thrown in too.

Nearly all the characters, even the successful ones, are experiencing some form of career frustration and we see them mostly hanging out and bickering in their apartments and lofts. (A number of the plays had their first performances in actual lofts scattered about New York.)

There are a couple of things one needs to accept in advance when reading a Gasda play.

First, nothing much is going to happen. All of the ‘action’ is in the dialogue through which the characters continuously bite mainly small, sometimes larger chunks out of one another’s self-worth and sense of purpose, practising a form of relentless emotional cannibalism.

While the plays generally eschew great emotional dénouements or epiphanies, they leave the reader with the feeling that even those characters who bite the hardest are themselves being slowly diminished as much as their victims.

In a couple of sentences (which are nearly long enough to constitute a speech in Gasda terms), Clara, a writer who appears in ‘Minotaur’, comes as close as any to nailing the essence of this milieu:

“I don’t get how my life can feel meaningless and stressful at the same time. Stress should mean something meaningful is at risk; but I don’t feel like that’s the case with me.”

A reckoning, you feel, must be coming, but showing us such reckonings is (mostly) not what Matthew Gasda is about — or at least not yet what he is about. 

Instead, he lets his characters bob around on a sea of casual sex and illegal drugs with no land in sight. (Compared to this lot, the characters in a Sally Rooney or Niamh Campbell novel would qualify as medieval ascetics.)

The second thing to accept is that these often very obnoxious people will occasionally make you laugh out loud as they trade their bitter one-liners, mingled with utter, careless banalities.

The beauty of literature is that you can spend time in their company without having to deal with them. And, as a result, you can somehow come to like them.

Back to the Local by Maurice Gorham (Faber, £9.00)

Maurice Gorham had an interesting life in broadcasting. Born in London in 1902 to a father from County Galway and a Lancastrian mother, he was a BBC man in the thirties and forties (editor of the Radio Times, in fact) and director of broadcasting at Radio Éireann in the fifties.

Those were, perhaps, more bibulous times in the world of journalism, and when it came to the pubs of London, Gorham was an expert through experience.

His 1948 book, Back to the Local, reissued this year by Faber in a handsome paperback, complete with Edward Ardizzone’s simple but distinctive and very affecting illustrations, reminds us that things were never what they used to be.

Eighty or so years ago, the golden age of the London boozer was already coming to a close, prompting Gorham to outbursts of nostalgia for everything from pre-War cold sausages at The Nag’s Head in Covent Garden to rings as a game to be played in pubs. (I’m with him on that.)

Back to the Local is a wonderful chance to roam the pubs of forties London with a guide at our shoulder who knows every nook and cranny.