It is hard to imagine a world without maps.

Now stop—and diagram that sentence. Break its syntax apart. You can parse it in at least two valid and meaningful ways:

• It is hard | to imagine | a world without maps. The use of maps is so embedded in our daily lives, so essential to our normal functioning, that the idea of a pre-cartographic society is as alien as the thought of a pre-literate one. On top of this, our idea of what it means to be a mapped society is itself confined to our familiarized expectations of what maps are like. How did people get by without maps—or rather, without the sorts of maps we know and understand?

• It is hard | to imagine a world | without maps. Maps govern the way we think about space, and that extends to imaginary or hypothetical spaces. Without a graphic representation on paper or in our heads, our plans for things not yet built—homes, roads, electric circuits—may be cloudy and ambiguous. They may lack precision in the same way we have trouble with describing things that are outside our linguistic abilities. This is a negative definition of maps as a form of language: to be without a map is to be without language, and it impedes us from communicating ideas in the mind—to others, yes, but also to ourselves.

In both of these senses, maps of fictional places are remarkably challenging texts.

One of my chief interests in fiction, along with art in general, is how it presents itself as evidence of the way people receive the existing cultural data around them before they process it and spit it back out. (In literary criticism you will encounter words like allusion and intertextuality, but I think of them as subtypes of a broader cognitive activity.) When an author plans out a story’s setting in place, or when a reader attempts to reconstruct it from the words alone, the maps they produce tell us not only how they imagine the depicted geography, but also how they imagine the idea of maps. Furthermore, the author/audience distinction isn’t always sharp: some privileged readers, such as the illustrators at a publishing house or manuscript historians like Christopher Tolkien, participate in the interpretive stage as well as the official construction of the space for everyone else.

So when we open up a novel to find a map, we can think of the map as an act of narration. But what kind of narration? Is it reliable narration or a deliberate misdirection? Is it omniscient knowledge, a complete (or strategically obscured) presentation of the world as the author knows it? Or is the map available to the characters in the text? If it is, then who drew up the map, and how did they have access to the information used to compose it? If it isn’t, then through what resources do the characters orient themselves in their own world? And finally, does anyone even bother to think about these questions before they sit down to place their woodlands and forts?

In the post that follows, I am going to informally sketch out a theory of fictional maps, which is to say that I will put up a lot of pretty pictures from novels and talk about why they are neat. There is likely some academic work on this somewhere—I would be astonished if there weren’t—but I’m not aware of any, and certainly nothing that has accounted for modern critical approaches to the history of cartography. Map history and the comparative study of commercial genre literature are niches within niches as it stands, and my aim is to entwine them together.

Perspective

Let’s begin with something familiar.

Depending on how you look at it, this map is one of the following:

• The map that J.R.R. Tolkien drew up for The Hobbit, which appears in the endleaf of the original 1937 edition as well as most (if not all) of the English editions still in print today.
• A map drawn by the dwarvish king Thrór depicting the environs of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Elrond deciphers the runes in Chapter III (“A Short Rest”).
• A reproduction of Thrór’s map, copied and translated by the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
• A reproduction of Bilbo’s copy of Thrór’s map, received and delivered by one J.R.R. Tolkien from There and Back Again, the first part of the discovered manuscript known as the Red Book of Westmarch.

The complexity of the document is that it serves as all of these things at once. As Tolkien’s map, which we recognize to be a fictitious construction along with the rest of the text, the map is a device to orient the reader in an imagined world. But if we dive inside the fiction, the map is also Tolkien’s way of reporting to his readers what Bilbo and Thorin were looking at—no different than if your copy of the book came bundled with a replica of Bilbo’s sword, Sting.

What’s more, in style and technique the map is fully believable as something put together by the dwarves (apart from the lettering in English, which we can think of as Bilbo’s translation if we wish to suspend disbelief). Notice that rather than being a high-fidelity communiqué of how Tolkien imagined Middle-Earth, the map is a minimalist sketch of the world according to the dwarves. The sparsely chosen landmarks appear in relative (not absolute) position, the illustrations are abstract, and the inscriptions allude to people and events that would have been known to Thrór. Scale doesn’t even enter into the equation. (Tolkien’s original draft, which I’ll say more about later on, was even sparser: aside from the runes and text, its only graphic elements were the Running River and a top-down outline of the Lonely Mountain.)

Not to be neglected, of course, is that the map also functions as a two-layered riddle. In The Hobbit, we learn that while the runes on the left (in red above) are directly visible—”five feet high the door and three may walk abreast,” they read—the runes in the centre only reveal themselves when Elrond holds the map up to the light of the moon. (This custom-made replica demonstrates the effect.) The moon-runes provide a further clue: “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.”

To complicate things further, when the dwarves first lay out the map in Chapter I (“An Unexpected Party”), Tolkien makes an authorial interjection in the text:

“There is one point that you haven’t noticed,” said the wizard, “and that is the secret entrance. You see that rune on the West side, and the hand pointing to it from the other runes? That marks a hidden passage to the Lower Halls.” (Look at the map at the beginning of this book, and you will see there the runes in red.)

Not only that, but it will say this in the text whether your edition has the map printed in red and black or not! (Now that we’re in the age of paperback dominance, it’s unlikely that this is the case for you.)

So the multifaceted nature of the map isn’t limited to its plurality of authors, each at a different level of absorption into the fictional world; also in play is a plurality of potential readers. Tolkien’s real-world readers aren’t expected to go in knowing how to decipher the runes (though nowadays, you’d be surprised at how many of them do). But the further concealment of the moon-runes tells us that within the narrative, the mapmaker had a restricted audience in mind.

If the map is an act of narration, what kind of narration is it? We have a good system for answering this type of question with respect to prose. First, there is the distinction of person—first, second, or third—which is largely a question of using pronouns to position the narrator and reader in relation to the action. The concept of person doesn’t map neatly onto cartographic works, however, unless there are pronouns involved. A better apparatus for distinguishing between the possible authors of a fictional map is what literary scholars call levels of diegesis—a technical way of delineating whether something is outside the text, inside the text, or inside a text within the text.

At minimum we are always dealing with three layers of reality, though they are not always separate: the author, the narrator, and the characters. In non-fiction, for instance, we observe no distance between the author and the narrator, and we assume that the inhabit the same plane. In the most basic form of first-person narration, we assume that the narrator is among the reality of the characters, even if he or she is far removed from the action. If we think about maps in diegetic terms—if we ask whether the documents and their authors belong to the world in the book, or if they come from outside—we unlock two of the most powerful concepts for thinking about perspective: omniscience and reliability.

Diegesis

What’s the appeal of a fantasy map, anyway? I doubt too many would disagree when I assert that maps add to the sense of immersion. If they come directly from the author—keeping in mind the intermediaries of the publisher and illustrator, too—a map tells the reader that the creator of the fictional space has really thought this place out. Storytelling always happens in façades, but evidence of the author’s forethought fills out the setting’s illusion of depth.

If we see a map of an imaginary land, we feel like we know more about the place. Like any supplementary material—timelines, family trees—it satisfies our latent curiosities. Also present, I think, is an element of bowing to the world-builder’s authority: by looking at a map we don’t simply know more about the world—we know more about how the author imagined the world to be.

But here’s the trap: the attitude of wanting to know more about a world—and moreover, believing that a map can draw us closer to it—leads the audience to default to a certain passivity. To a certain extent this is the criticism that has always been made of illustration, cinema, or any kind of embellishment beyond mere words alone: that when something is imagined on our behalf, we are robbed of our duty to reconstruct the textual reality for ourselves.

It’s strange, for instance, that the Yoknapatawpha novels of William Faulkner are notorious for compelling readers to cobble the logic and action together from jumbled scraps of unreliable narration, but with the right edition in hand we get the geography delivered to us on a plate:

From the perspective of literary history, I very much admire Faulkner’s maps: as you can see from the University of Virginia’s collection of Faulkner manuscripts, his sketches were instrumental in developing the sense of overlaying his novels on top of each other like an eternal palimpsest. And I don’t have a problem with sitting back and letting a provided map do some of the work for me, myself. The real danger lies in the assumption that authors’ maps can do this for us at all.

Regardless of whether a map depicts a fictional or real-world space, we always have to ask ourselves whose knowledge the map represents. This notion is intuitive when we think of real-world maps, where we really never have access to an omniscient perspective that lies outside our own reality. All that we have to work with are the source materials and surveying techniques that are known to us, and the rest is speculation. Increasingly, scholars of cartography now recognize that maps embed our political dispositions and socio-economic practices like any other texts: even in the satellite-enabled age of Google Earth and GPS, we start out from inside the world and set specific agendas for what we wish to represent, and how. Only superficially are maps ever “objective” views of the land.

Fiction throws a serious wrench into the way we think about maps because of our familiarity with omniscient points of view. In narration, we typically think of omniscience in terms of the narrator’s godlike reach into the interior experience of the characters, but the notion also applies to whether the narrator has access to information that the people within the fictional world do not.

In the case of an extradiegetic map, a map explicitly outside the text that serves as a direct conduit from author to audience, we tend to assume that the information it communicates is a sort of objective truth. We don’t mind so much if the liberties taken with the style of illustration—the medium, the lettering, the colour—would not have been available to the people who inhabit the imagined setting; if anything, such extravagances add to the romance and mystique.

But with maps that purport to speak from within the tale—maps with here-be-dragons blanks that delimit what the people in the fiction perceive or care about—we run into the same paradox that authors who deal with far-flung places frequently encounter with language. The author feels a certain duty to communicate to the reader with maximal precision, but the higher the fidelity of the message, the more it draws on our present-day idioms and conventions, and the more it strains plausibility.

A truly plausible map is one that we could imagine being created with the techniques and materials available to the people within the world; one where we could see the world’s cartographers as having the inclination, purpose, and skill to create something that looks like the product in front of us. Thrór’s map in The Hobbit is a classic example. Jim Hawkins’ map in Treasure Island is another:

The depth soundings, the rendering of the coastline, the dated handwritten addenda, the note that this copy is a facsimile (thereby accounting for its tidy, finished look)—everything about this illustration plays the part of an authentic nautical chart.

Then again, Treasure Island has the benefit of being set in a recognizable culture and time period, and we have a historical point of reference by which to gauge its illusion of authenticity. This can’t be said of secondary-world fantasy, the stories that take place in lands that have little to no geographic relation to the planet Earth we know.

The fictional cartographer’s paradox of perspective is more apparent in a map like this:

This illustration comes from Star Wars spin-off novel Vector Prime. Published by Del Rey when they first acquired the license to the tie-in books, it was the first officially sanctioned map of the galaxy depicted in the merchandising empire that has grown out of the George Lucas films. It’s an attractive design: the simple spiral arms and the dashing lettering recall the retro-futuristic pulp-serial aesthetic that inspired the Star Wars series. (Far better, at any rate, than some of the soulless pseudo-3D charts that followed it.)

Yet you can see how its heart is in two places at once. It’s a two-dimensional printed work depicting a universe where there isn’t a shred of print anywhere to be found: Star Wars, you will remember, is famous for projecting any and all visual information into a hologram or wireframe schematic. There are no illusions here that this map originates from within the galaxy, as it clearly doesn’t. But the map also situates itself in a limited heroic point of view. It’s the world according to the protagonists, with its hyperspace trade routes and dotted-line expansion frontiers, its Unknown Regions and Wild Space—all of it condensed and flattened into the pancaked realities of the twentieth-century printed page.

In a way, the map’s abstraction of the galaxy reminds us that we are dealing with a comic-book reality, albeit a thoroughly developed one. It has the omniscient privilege of sitting outside the text, but instead of filling in the blanks it elides them with the flair of escape.

Materiality

As it turns out, the pragmatics of publication have a noticeable effect on the kinds of maps we see in fictional works.

If we return to our first example, Thrór’s map of the Lonely Mountain, notice the orientation. The Iron Hills to the east are somewhere up top; the spiders of Mirkwood out west are down at the bottom. Now, as readers receiving The Hobbit as a freestanding text divorced from history, it’s easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for why the map is east-side-up. We could say that it’s a cultural peculiarity of the dwarves. We could even say that it befits the direction of Bilbo’s quest, upwards being the way forwards. But if we delve into how the book ran its course from manuscript to first edition, a different story emerges.

Tolkien’s original concept for Thrór’s map was a page in portrait orientation, with north on top and south on the bottom as we would typically expect. As we know from Tolkien’s correspondence of January 1937, the plan was to have the map inserted into Chapter I at the point where Gandalf first shows it to Bilbo and Thorin. In the original unpublished map, the moon-runes were inscribed in reverse on the back of the page so the reader could reveal them by holding the map to the light, just as Elrond does in Chapter III of the novel. (I unfortunately don’t have a picture of Tolkien’s original manuscript map at hand, but it’s in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. Tolkien drawings 33); I believe it also appears in The Annotated Hobbit.)

The orientation of the map was rotated into its present form when Tolkien’s publisher, George Allen & Unwin, refused to produce it in the form that Tolkien intended, primarily for reasons of cost. Thus the map was redrawn as an endleaf in landscape orientation, with the dimensions of two pages side by side.

Where the plot thickens is when you look at The Hobbit in translation. Here is Mikhail Belomlinsky’s map from the Russian edition of 1976:

The illustrations in the Soviet Hobbit have a very distinctive look; Gollum, in particular, is fantastic. As for the map, Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps has already written an excellent analysis of its Slavic character, which I will not repeat here.

One thing to notice, however, is the map’s use of space—specifically, its complete spread over the page. Rather than adhering strictly to the canonical geography of Middle-Earth, which was by then widely known (outside of Russia, anyhow) thanks to The Lord of the Rings, Belomlinsky tucked something interesting in every nook and cranny. Look at how Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains snake along with the rivers. Spanning the whole adventure from Hobbiton to Smaug, west to east, bottom to top, one almost forgets to catch that the directions on the compass rose are wrong.

Observe: с, в, ю, з—северо, восток, юго, запад—north, east, south, west. By preserving the orientation of Thrór’s map in the English edition but not adjusting the compass directions to match, we end up with an erroneous map where Hobbiton is to the south and the Lonely Mountain is to the north. Preposterous! Yet we arrived here at the first place because of a series of publishing decisions across multiple editions that determined if the map would be printed on one page or two.

Flipped cardinal directions are hardly unique to The Hobbit, mind you. For a very long time, maps of L. Frank Baum’s Oz had the Munchkins to the left and the Winkies to the right, despite how clear it was to every Oz reader that Dorothy landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and made her way westward to Winkie country:

If we think of fictional maps as a study in the medium constraining the message, where it gets interesting is when you consider the maps that exist as documents within the story. Publishing considerations have the power to shape the reality of the imaginary place. Thrór’s map in the narrative plane of The Hobbit is oriented east-side-up because Tolkien’s map had to be so.

Stepping inside the fiction, we may ponder if the material constraints on mapmaking play a part in the story. In the context of these imaginary worlds, is there any suggestion of how maps are produced, transported, and preserved? Does their content spring forth from an overriding purpose or utility? These are considerations that buttress the depth and plausibility of a map, much as how Tolkien’s meticulously crafted languages and folkloric songs carry the impression of a bottomless history—the sense that this world and its people weren’t born yesterday.

Indeed, one of the finest touches in the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings is the scene at the exact midpoint of The Two Towers: Faramír, having captured Frodo and Sam and returned to his refuge at the Window to the West, goes over a map with his lieutenants. It’s a minor but effective embellishment on the book that sums up the various troop movements on the board while providing a brief visual treat for the Tolkien enthusiasts—and rather than displaying the map as an animated overlay with voiceover narration, it’s presented as a thoroughly creased parchment over which Faramír runs his finger. The map isn’t any old god’s-eye-view: like a real-world map, it’s a strategic instrument on the field. As a study in condensing an immensely challenging work for the screen, this subtle directorial decision stands out as a masterstroke.

Verisimilitude

One crucial point to take away from what I’ve said thus far is this: the coherence of a map with respect to the fiction it represents is not necessarily the same as its realism or level of detail. As much as we may desire to imprint an author’s vision onto our own with the utmost fidelity, I do not believe this ought to be the aim of fantastic cartography. As anyone who has been following the brief history of computer animation would know, verisimilitude isn’t at all the same thing as immersive reality. It is not the case that maps draw us closer to a believable fictional space with greater topographical accuracy or ever more lifelike terrain.

Take, for example, the six-book series by William Horwood that begins with Duncton Wood. The Duncton books revolve around communities of moles that worship the ancient stone circles of Great Britain, and some of the moles are capable of inscribing things in writing with their claws. One of the characters, Mayweed, is a talented navigator who sketches a map that appears (in translation, of course) in the third volume, Duncton Found:

Now contrast the deliberate, playful simplicity of this map with the one below, which appears in the second Duncton trilogy:

The second map looks substantially more attractive at first, thanks to the naturalistic depiction of terrain features. Unlike the original sketch, it looks like the sort of work that only a professional illustrator could pull off, and so it has the air of being the more polished, artistic piece. But it is also indisputably drawn from a human’s overground point of view—odd for a series where the moles largely keep to their burrows and humans are barely present apart from the odd occasion where they zoom along in their “roaring owls” (automobiles). And we might be fine with taking it as an omniscient artistic rendering from the publishing house, but the claim in the caption—”Based on Mayweed’s map found in Seven Barrows”—so brazenly contradicts the perspective of the map that it only serves to throw us off.

So as readers, we may appreciate the second map of Moledom as the superior illustration purely in terms of artistic merit—but it’s not clear at all that this map is better suited for the books. To the contrary, it presents a greater impediment to our ability to suspend disbelief.

The gravitation towards realistic detail in maps is especially remarkable if you remember that maps are inherently abstractions. The whole point of a map—of any variety, not solely the geographical kind—is to pack the chaos of information into a selectively delimited and instrumentally efficient container. Short of the 1:1 scale maps of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, cartography is a form of compression.

In terms of utility, the value of going from abstractions back to high-fidelity detail lies in how distinguishing visible landmarks—coastlines, mountains, fortresses—is useful for navigation. Before the proliferation of contour lines and coloured heat maps as methods for representing elevation, solutions for shading peaks and valleys led to the maps we now look back to fondly as exquisite in their artistic finesse. Satellite photography, which offers the highest fidelity of realistic representation we can achieve, is an excellent general-purpose tool because for a clientèle as diffuse as Google Earth’s, one never knows which topographic peculiarity might be useful at any given time.

Contrast that with maps of imaginary places, which are like their real-world kin in that all of them are works of art, but differ in that not all of them have a targeted function beyond serving, somewhat vaguely, as guidance for the reader (and often the author, as architect and city planner). Beyond looking pretty, framing the action, and setting the scene, the stylistic decisions often seem to lack any functional rationale.

Have a gander at this:

This is Ellisa Mitchell’s much-admired painting of the lands of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, which for some reason is held up by some as one of the gold standards of fantastic cartography. When the up-and-coming fantasy novelist Saladin Ahmed called on Internet artists to produce a map for his forthcoming book, one that would outstrip the “very serviceable, basic, black-and-white line map” that his publisher could provide and “move beyond utility”, Mitchell’s map was one of the exemplars he had in mind.

Now, it’s obvious why Mitchell’s map is well received. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that inveterate fantasy readers like Saladin Ahmed admire its colour and natural gradients, things you would never find in a mass-market paperback for reasons of cost alone. And embellishment for purely aesthetic reasons is certainly nothing new: back when printed atlases were engraved, colourists would fill in rivers and trace political borders on individual copies by hand. But look at how the version above compares to the black-and-white paperback map:

At first glance it seems like Mitchell’s painting is simply a more expensive and lovingly crafted reimagining of its monochrome counterpart. What it actually does, however, is emphasize topography at the expense of features that are more narratively functional, like political borders and roads. By foregrounding the terrain, the linear elements of the map recede.

(Doubly fascinating is that for all her good intentions, Mitchell unwittingly captures the trappings of the Robert Jordan series—indulgent top to bottom, muddled to the point of being unreadable, and plastered with a faux-medieval ethos that screams inauthenticity. I know, I know; I’m being much too harsh. Comparing the map to the books is incredibly unfair to the map.)

So here’s the question we should ask: why is it so attractive to conclude that the painted poster is the superior piece of work?

In part, this has to do with the realities of the mass-market fiction industry. Considering the practical limitations in the age of desktop publishing and (in many cases) direct-to-paperback, it’s uncommon that books will come with endpaper maps printed in multiple colours like the first edition of the The Hobbit. You’ll certainly never see historically accurate engravings in the mode of Treasure Island. In this environment, it isn’t altogether surprising that readers would treasure maps in other media for their relative rarity—even though in truth, maps for the flagship fantasy brands (particularly those adapted to film) are issued and sold en masse.

What this explanation doesn’t address, though, is why topography is the element that takes precedence to everything else in receiving what you might call the artistic treatment. In all probability, this is grounded in the desire for immersion; read any encomium for fantasy mapmaking and the first thing you’ll hear is that maps make the world more real. But realism is really just a code for saying that something is more in line with our embedded assumptions about what it means to perceive the world, and in the cultural value system we live in today—empirical, literal, photographic—it refers to the imagined experience of seeing the physical terrain with your own eyes.

Weltanschauung

The most striking thing about fantasy maps as a whole, especially the sort that dominates the industry of doorstopper mythopoeia that claims to be descended from J.R.R. Tolkien, is how rigidly they stick to convention. No matter how nice they look, structurally they reduce to orthogonal landmass drawings. Rarely, if ever, will you find visualizations of an imagined cosmology like the commonplace depictions of Midgard and Asgard wrapped around Yggdrasil in Norse mythology—and you would think high fantasy in secondary worlds is the genre that could use them most.

This is a problem that plagues much of the fantasy genre in its modern form, and why it has yet to fully escape the unfortunate stigma of juvenilia. The more you learn about history, and the more you are able to see through the anachronistic façades, the less imaginative conventional fantasy seems. We see this in action with language all the time: it’s almost expected these days to see gratuitous apostrophes as a desperate grab for an illusion of foreignness, not to mention unquestioning adherence to the “glottals ugly, labials pretty” phonetic valuation that Tolkien laboured to design. The same applies to maps.

(Ironically, children’s books are rather good at averting the implausibility trap, thanks to their embrace of figurative thinking. Witness the chart from The Phantom Tollbooth, featured at the top of this essay: like the novel it accompanies, it takes the abstractions of interior experience and projects them into real space.)

Indeed, as fantasy has entrenched itself in a self-propagating commercial set of norms, it has developed a reputation for being extremely conservative in form and politics. Jonathan McCalmont explained it well in his breakdown of the norms and values of “fat fantasy”: accessibility, immersion, and (less obviously) the safe escape of a reactionary aesthetics. All of this put together, along with the commercial considerations of how the publishing industry works, accounts for why a genre that benefits so much from cartography yields maps that are so extraordinarily literal.

For the commercial market, officially published maps are passive documents that serve as the easily readable evidence that the author thought things through. The maps embed our familiar expectations and unquestioned ideologies because the novels they accompany do the same. Perfectly content to assume that a map is the world, these fictions ignore the map as an instrument for grasping the world. Even if we step back from lofty cosmology and into functional lay-of-the-land geography, it is shocking how rarely fantasy maps explore the notion of the map as a visualization of a subjective and contingent worldview, a picture of an imaginary people’s collective weltanschauung.

Just to pluck one example out of thin air, in all of modern fantasy fiction, you will perhaps never find a map as fantastic as this:

The map contained in this 18th-century print by the Dutch publisher Pieter van der Aa is Giovanni Domenico Cassini’s Planisphere terrestre of 1696, which was meticulously assembled on the floor of the Paris Observatory from the most ambitious global survey of the time. (Working for Louis XIV assuredly had its benefits where funding was concerned.) The azimuthal projection centred around the North Pole looks warped to us today, accustomed as we are to the distortions we get from Mercator. But get past the initial unfamiliarity, and we can unpack all sorts of information from the structure of the map. We can see how it reveals its own construction in standard longitudinal slices, made possible by advances in astronomy and observational logistics; how the South Pole encircles the rim as the outer limit of human exploration.

Given the quiet proliferation of challenging fantastic fiction that is conscious of literary nuances in prose, one would hope that the cartography eventually catches up. Maps could do a lot more to dive into the perspective of an imagined land’s inhabitants, revealing how the people see their own world as well as their techniques and motivations for piecing that picture together. There is much room for subtlety in made-up maps, just as there is in lexicons, timelines, and family trees, and authors who do not feel bound to mainstream fat-fantasy conventions are in a unique position to explore the possibilities.

That said, it’s understandable why this hasn’t happened yet, and it has much to do with the specialization of labour along the pipeline of publication. With the rise of the e-book, prose content has become increasingly divorced from the totality of the book as an object, and authors are prose-module specialists more than ever.

One of the stories about Tolkien that has gotten a bit lost these days, I think, is the considerable control he exercised over his own work as a book designer who drew up his own cover art, runes and all. This isn’t to say that he had the visual talents of, say, William Blake, who remains the supreme English example of the all-in-wonder author/artist, but Tolkien’s relationship to his publisher is continuous with that tradition. This is the precondition that allowed a quirky thing like Thrór’s map of the Lonely Mountain to make it into the public sphere.

Outside of the vanity presses, this level of control is practically non-existent these days. Probably the best solution towards opening up the variety of maps we see is to develop the kind of author/artist collaboration for cartography that you see for graphic novels, where the writing doesn’t exercise any peculiar authority that confines the illustration to a secondary, supplemental role.

Authority

The question of authorship is a fascinating issue all to itself. Where exactly does a map (or indeed, an illustration of any sort) cross over from narration to interpretation? Is this solely a question of who is officially licensed to participate in the world-creation of an intellectual property? We can tear down the intentional fallacy all day from a theoretical point of view, and insist (quite reasonably) that the author has no better say than anyone else in the interpretation of the text; but in practical terms, reader communities who crave immersion derive their sense of a “canon” from officially sanctioned materials.

Consider this quandary: how would we mediate a discrepancy between Christopher Tolkien (who has privileged access to his father’s manuscripts and the legal authority of the Tolkien estate, and who delivered most of what we “know” about Middle-Earth in posthumous publications) and Barbara Strachey’s essential interpretive atlas, Journeys of Frodo? Do we rule in favour of the archival drafts, or do we side with the charts that are directly inferred from the final published text of The Lord of the Rings?

To return to what I said about omniscience early on, perhaps the demarcating factor that defines fictional cartography—what sets it apart from pictorial representations of real spaces—is the presence, however provisional, of the author as God. When we read non-fictional maps, we can perform a kind of analysis similar to what I’ve walked through here, looking at means of production, political agendas, and underlying worldviews; but it’s fairly unambiguous which plane of existence the cartographers reside upon.

Fictional maps introduce the complication of having, at minimum, two layers of authorship: the layer outside the text that has the power to dictate and reshape the world, and the layer that belongs to the reality of the world. It’s clear that the author is in the first and the characters are in the second, and that having the first speak for the second passes for a kind of ventriloquism or free indirect discourse. But these are not the only stakeholders in play. The “narrator” of the map, if it’s discernible as a separate voice, can belong to either layer or both. And once we introduce the other living participants—the readership and the publishing apparatus—determining who influences our perception of the fictional space becomes considerably trickier.

For one thing, it isn’t safe to take it for granted that immersion in a world means the same thing as immersion in the author’s mind, as if the goal of literature were some sort of telepathic telos of lossless communication. Among other problems, this attitude towards literary immersion as a matter of filling in the blanks has no way of dealing with deliberate ambiguity.

To see what I’m getting at, take a look at this:

This is the fold-out from The Discworld Mapp, a companion book to the Terry Pratchett series designed to the instructions of Pratchett and Stephen Briggs. It’s a fascinating map in view of what I’ve said thus far, not because of its superficial resemblance to the Cassini planisphere if you zoom out far enough, but because it achieves the look of an azimuthal projection via being a fiercely literal map in a two-dimensional rectangular coordinate system. Much of this, of course, is due to how the Discworld was conceived to be exactly that—a world where an azimuthal projection is a one-to-one circle-to-circle mapping, and therefore no transformation at all.

As far as companion publications go, The Discworld Mapp sounds par for the course—that is, until you look into how the map came into being. Stephen Briggs was a playwright who made a name for himself as an amateur Pratchett loremaster who adapted several books for the stage (and who, unlike Steve Vander Ark, knew better than to publish derivative works without legal sanction). When Briggs first decided to map the Discworld novels, beginning with The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, he did so with Pratchett’s support; but the project went against the author’s original insistence that Discworld was a fluid, aleatoric wander of the imagination that could not and should not be mapped.

Terry Pratchett’s opinion on cartography still appears on his official website:

There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

This is a very sensible position, and as much as I love cartography I am somewhat inclined to agree. There is something completely bounded about maps. We all know that the data they present is highly selective, as is also true for prose, with strategic omissions and gaps left for future exploration. Yet the boundedness of maps commits to an illusion of having reached a roughly finished state, as if everything inside has already been fixed and everything outside is still untouched and malleable.

From the perspective of someone involved in creating a world, particularly in a series that continues to emerge over time, a map intended to serve as an aid may also be a suffocating constraint. Mapmaking does not seem to permit carefully targeted ambiguity with the same flexibility as prose alone. With other forms of book illustration, one always gets the sense that the visual depictions could always be replaced or re-envisioned some other way. Maps exert a stronger form of authority: any improvements or revisions by readers or in future editions take place within the author’s borders as if they were immutable, objective truths.

It is a strange twist indeed that we are less liable to accept in fiction than in reality that cartography is a form of language: a medium for our perception of place, not to be confused with place itself. If there is a remedy for this, it may resemble the solution we developed for language, and take the form of self-conscious experimentation with maps as narrative voices—subjective, perspectival, and often unreliable. Literary writing deserves a literary map.

As for the alternative, let’s defer to what Lewis Carroll said in The Hunting of the Snark:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Bellman to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”

Further reading

I am certainly not the first to gush over fantasy maps in the blog format. The most thorough look at fantastic cartography that I found while researching my post is “Beyond the Aryth Ocean”, a four-part series (1, 2, 3, 4) by Jason Denzel, who manages the biggest Robert Jordan community online and who therefore holds opinions that differ substantially from my own. He knows a lot of genre fiction I don’t, however, and his series on cartography is definitely worth a look.

Brian Sibley, who co-authored several map books with the eminent Tolkien painter John Howe, wrote a post about fictional maps with an inside perspective on the community of artists who work on these kinds of projects.

Of the dedicated cartography blogs on the Internet that cover fictional maps from time to time, two in particular stand out. The first is Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps, which you probably know about already if you’ve followed some of the links in this essay or are interested enough in cartography to have made it this far down at all. (I also recommend the book.) The second is Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room, which devotes equal attention to historical geography and modern surveying, and features an extensive subsection dedicated to imaginary places.

The Tumblr site entitled Fuck Yeah Fictional Maps really speaks for itself.

The Map History site maintained by Tony Campbell is an extremely comprehensive resource, mainly directed at serious scholars but certainly useful for enthusiasts of early maps.

For those of you with academic journal access through JSTOR, Imago Mundi is the history of cartography’s inexhaustible resource par excellence. The journal dates back to 1935, and skimming the tables of contents alone will give you a picture of how cartographic scholarship has developed over the past century.

Speaking of academic map history, one name to look out for when it comes to the literary turn in cartographic studies is J.B. Harley, best known for his collaboration with David Woodward on a compendious multivolume history of cartography that remains to be finished. (Harley and Woodward are both now deceased.)

Late in his career, Brian Harley became the radical subversive postcolonial deconstructionist of map historians, but he isn’t nearly as scary or loopy as that iconoclastic description makes him sound. In fact, the sort of critical theory that literary scholars overworked to the point of Sokalian fashionable nonsense seem positively fresh and sensible when applied to maps (see for yourself), and it’s rather puzzling that in the twenty-year history of the literary study of maps, fictional cartography has remained largely untouched.

Link-dumping has never been an adequate stand-in for commentary of my own, and if you want to read what I read you are better off checking Twitter (the only circumstance where that is ever the case). Nevertheless, here is a slice of the pileup.

• Let’s lead this off with one of my great loves and frustrations in the world: science journalism. Begin with Martin Robbins’ incisive parody of sensationalist science reporting. Then read Ed Yong’s remarks on objectivity, neutrality, and whether journalists should take sides.

• “Our daughter isn’t a selfish brat; your son just hasn’t read Atlas Shrugged.”

• Witnessing the Twelfth of July festivities in Northern Ireland this year led me to this must-read piece of ethnomusicology, where Stephen Howe scrutinizes the musical identity of the loyalist marching bands (the ones with the “kick-the-Pope” drums).

• Ron Rosenbaum explains agnosticism. I have a few problems with how readily Rosenbaum buys and sets up the all-too-common straw man of the so-called New Atheism, but the article’s spirited defence of uncertainty and rejection of tribalist debate makes it worth a thorough look.

• This has been a bumper year for exciting stories in espionage. By now everyone has read about the KGB’s suburban infiltrants and forgotten them too, but that doesn’t make revisiting the coverage any less fun. So neighbourly were they, yet so incompetent! Just look at those complaints.

• When I was a wee lad I co-moderated a Tolkien-themed discussion board that was, in later years, overrun by home-schooled creationist kids. Someday they will grow up to be Republican senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, whose views about Arwen and Éowyn are oddly more informed than her views about anything and everything else.

• Popular Science gives us a look at the Pentagon’s $58-billion killer robots.

• Lisa Poisso interviews a Lutheran pastor who runs a World of Warcraft guild and who has a host of insightful things to say on faith and fantasy.
• Finally, I must share Patrick Barkham’s remembrance of class and culture at Cambridge University—more reflective of the undergraduate life than the relatively new postgraduate one, I think, but still relevant today.

In brief: An impressive adventure story from head to tail, Adams’ bunny-rabbit odyssey truly shines as a demonstration of how myth-making and nation-building go hand in hand—or in this case, paw in paw. The history, legends, and language of rabbit society show off a depth of imagination that stops just short of overwhelming the tale on the surface. Here is a novel unashamed of its bid to be a classic, and has the mettle to pull it off.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Watership Down, keep reading below.)

Richard Adams is the Walter Scott of rabbits.

Never mind the overt allusion to Robin Hood as the human analogue of the rabbit folk hero El-ahrairah, the Prince of a Thousand Enemies. In stylistic considerations alone, Watership Down is a self-aware high romance in the tradition of Ivanhoe, a book where every chapter opens with an epigraph that appeals to everyone from Shakespeare to the Duke of Wellington as if calling to the Muses in a Homeric, yet quintessentially English invocation. Narrow escapes, daring rescues, sieges in the dead of night—this, dear readers, is High Adventure.

Walter Scott, if you’ll remember, reminded me of J.R.R. Tolkien; so by the transitive property, Adams reminds me of Tolkien too. Not so much the Tolkien of The Lord of the Rings, but the Tolkien of The Hobbit (although, one must admit, Watership Down is a catchier title than, say, The Rabbit). If you haven’t read Watership Down—and you really must—The Hobbit is a decent point of reference for the style of novel to expect. Perhaps the likeness comes from the serial structure of the adventure plot, which dashes from one escapade to the next in a domino-chain of cause and effect, or the author’s unrestrained love for the English countryside and concern for its preservation.

What readers will notice right away, from page one, is Adams’ mastery of English letters at their elegant, unironic best. Apart from the sparse appearance of automobiles and signboards of urban development, one could easily mistake Watership Down for a novel written and set in the nineteenth century.

But the most Tolkienian facet of the book is the consistent integrity, and thus plausibility, of the made-up language sprinkled throughout the text. We only see Lapine in scattered crumbs of words, phrases, and names—almost all of the communication and nomenclature in the novel is sensibly anglicized—but there is a stunning plausibility to it that implies a whole unwritten history of etymological growth. From what I gather, Lapine has a Gaelic lilt, but with a noticeable flavour of Arabic on top. This befits the cabbage-patch legends of the rabbits, which are less reminiscent of the Robin Hood stories than they are of the Arabian Nights.

Remarkably, Adams weaves all of these elements into a good story while taking very few liberties with how rabbits actually behave. Apart from the gift of language, a propensity for storytelling, and a highly developed consciousness of political organization, the characters in Watership Down have few human traits. The novel tells of a band of rabbits who flee from a warren threatened by modern real estate and build themselves a new home. Never do we lose sight of their common drive: the base instinct of survival—to go forth and multiply.

Indeed, a few of our protagonists’ actions could never pass muster were humans conducting them instead. This is, remember, a novel about buck rabbits who build a warren, settle down, suddenly realize they have no mates, and set out on a journey to rob farms and neighbouring rabbit settlements of their does. It thankfully makes little sense to apply feminist critiques of political correction to Adams’ unabashed depiction of female rabbits as breeding machines, when that’s how rabbits behave.

Thus far, I have spoken of the rabbits in the novel in a strictly communal sense, but one of the endearing qualities of Watership Down is the individuation of the leading characters. There are so many characters to go around that by and large, they do not have what we might call “depth”—but they have a uniqueness of identity. Like the epic heroes of myth, they are defined by their superlative abilities: Hazel is the wise and reluctant leader; Bigwig, the great warrior; Fiver, the prophet of doom. (My personal favourites should come as a surprise to nobody: Blackberry, the clever problem-solver, and Dandelion, the master storyteller.)

Adams hardly needs to acknowledge and enumerate these traits, although he does so on the odd occasion: they emerge from the story itself. We don’t need to be told that Hazel is a model of leadership; his decisions make it obvious. And even when he falters, even when he does something reckless to put himself in unwarranted danger, the trust the other rabbits place in him quickly reminds him of his responsibilities as the captain of the ship.

By far the best thing about Watership Down, however, is the occasional interlude where Dandelion tells the stories of El-ahrairah. These are exquisite tales that beg to be read aloud, even in the privacy of your own study (and here, I must admit that this is exactly what I did). The El-ahrairah tales are trickster capers, origin stories that explain how rabbit-kind came to be. Rabbits, we are told, were put in the unenviable position of being hunted by virtually every predator imaginable as a punishment, but given a talent for stealing vegetables as a compensatory gift.

Like most stories with aspirations to myth, there is a temptation to read them allegorically. I can’t decide if the sombre tale of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé, which ends on a note of unappreciated self-sacrifice, is a figuration of El-ahrairah as a Christ-figure or as a returned military veteran. It closes with this conversation between El-ahrairah and the sun god Frith:

“‘Are you angry, El-ahrairah?” asked Lord Frith.”

“‘No, my lord,” replied El-ahrairah, “I am not angry. But I have learned that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.”

The passage above is by any account the most overtly Christian gesture in the book. Whether it is that way by design is a different matter: El-ahrairah gets along just fine not as a displacement of other myths, but an original myth to be displaced. As the surface story of Hazel’s rabbits emerges, we receive the distinct impression that it’s best not to think of El-ahrairah as an allegory for anything, but of all of Watership Down as an allegory for El-ahrairah.

This is an essentially Tolkienian attitude to mythic literature, and the source of the novel’s charm.

I made a similar argument about the nature of fairy tales in my review of J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and it applies well enough here that I’ll repeat it verbatim:

The magic of fairy tales has never been in their straightforwardness. Fairy tales draw much of their lasting power from their ability to say a lot more, in very little space, than any individual explication. It is therefore easy to get the sense that the imposition of any single reading takes away from the conceptual space of possibility opened by the deceptively simple architecture for which fairy tales are known.

Adams goes one step beyond using an invented mythos to buttress an imagined community: he does it in a way that lays a cultural foundation for a particular kind of society that is already familiar to us on this earth. By the end of the novel, we see that the adventures of Hazel and company have played their own part in permuting the next iteration of the El-ahrairah legend.

Curiously, we never get a strong sense of what distinguishes the rabbits on Watership Down as a model of Good Governance, although Adams is more than happy to present us with contrasting communities that represent Bad Governance. The distinguishing mark of Hazel’s warren on the down is the presence of a storytelling chamber for the rabbits to congregate. Apart from that, the ethical position of our protagonists—that is, the factor that makes their society a positive one—is founded on little else other than an unrelenting dedication to survival and self-sufficiency, and a structure of leadership that relies on respect instead of fear.

Oddly enough, the warrens that Adams presents in contradistinction to Watership Down—the models of Bad Governance—are classical Hellenic extremes. Hazel, Bigwig, and the gang spend the second half of the book scuffling with the rival warren of Efrafa, a police state of Spartan warrior rabbits, to liberate their does—the justification being that Efrafa was so overpopulated, so literally spartan, that the does were miscarrying their litters anyhow.

But at the opposite pole is the warren the heroes encounter along their initial escape—a well-fed society of effete, cultivated poets on the verge of discovering representational art. These rabbits, the Athens to Efrafa’s Sparta, are the height of civilization as we know it. You can tell by their mournful, unrhymed poetry, a sample of which follows below:

The wind is blowing, blowing over the grass.
It shakes the willow catkins; the leaves shine silver.
Where are you going, wind? Far, far away
Over the hills, over the edge of the world.
Take me with you, wind, high over the sky.
I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind,
Into the sky, the feathery sky and the rabbit.

We soon discover that, in their complacency, these rabbits have shed their survival instinct entirely and become resigned to their fate as a declining species of prey. They have cast El-ahrairah aside as a thing of the past, a country legend for country folk.

To that end, the value that Watership Down cherishes the most—the principle for which Adams most strongly advocates—is the enduring relevance of the folk-hero. The distinguishing mark that separates the folk tale from religion or modern art is that it exists neither to provide teleological assurances nor to express a state of being, but to whip a society into taking charge of its own destiny. Folk legends are by nature nationalistic—and it is all the more exciting when we learn that from a nation of rabbits.

In brief: Astounding. How often do you see a serious (but ironic) novel about serious (but ironic) things like immigration, masculinity, and postcolonial despotism get away with comparing the Dominican Republic to Tolkien’s Mordor, casting a mongoose as a guardian spirit, and measuring acts of brutality in hit points of damage—and make it all look so genuine?

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, keep reading below.)

A week ago I was lamenting the difficulty of bushwhacking my way through Ada‘s jungle of literary allusions and multilingual puns. Now here I am with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a book where every oblique allusion is a pleasure, not a puzzle, and the constant code-switching into Spanish flavours the prose with an indulgent but palatable spice (especially once I started punching some of the Spanish turns of phrase into Google Translate and discovered that most of them were, as I suspected, vulgarities).

The title may be misleading, but then again, maybe not. Oscar de Léon (“Wao” is a mispronunciation of “Wilde” that he doesn’t mind adopting) is the centre of attention in the novel’s first and last act, but he isn’t central throughout in the manner you might expect. At first, Oscar comes off as almost too cliché to be true: a lovelorn nerdboy antihero in the extreme, he is overweight, alone, trapped behind the dungeon-master screens of his role-playing games, and proportionately desperate for a girl. The novel takes off when Oscar recedes into the present and Díaz takes us into his family’s past, where we begin to see Oscar as a residual product of the Dominican Republic’s turbulent history—indeed, a transgenerational curse called the fukú.

Oscar Wao‘s middle chapters have the same appeal as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, another superb novel that investigates the immigrant experience with a comic, contemporary reflection on the past lives that seemingly boring and conservative migrant parents keep hidden from view. Díaz’s is the tighter, darker book: the nonchalant narration that tosses scraps of escapist subculture this way and that is constantly at odds with what it depicts. Characters are beaten within an inch of their lives, and Díaz still dares us to laugh at the image of the violence as the passing consequence of a Dungeons & Dragons dice-roll.

Somehow, it works.

You see, the scenes in the Dominican Republic are set in the thirty-year reign of Rafael Trujillo, whom you may also have heard of as El Jefe (though Díaz prefers to call him the Failed Cattle Thief or alternatively, Fuckface). Díaz’s argument throughout the novel is that Trujillo’s regime was so outlandishly corrupt, the magnitude of its abuses so unthinkable, that “not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.”

The specific comparison is to Sauron. In case you haven’t already noticed, Oscar Wao is an absolute dream of a novel for the Tolkien enthusiast. As I was reading it, I found myself looking forward to every digressive footnote on Dominican history, most of which portray Trujillo’s lieutenants as ringwraiths and Morgul Lords. Díaz presents a Dominican Republic where dictatorship, misogyny, and violence have gone so far to beat everyone senseless that the only recourse is to engage with and ridicule it through escapism. His modus operandi is the verbal transfiguration of reality into myth and magic—a conscious reversal of world literature’s by-now-orthodox convention of magic realism, where fantastic elements have a “real” existence but characters accept them as nothing extraordinary.

I have no problem with magic realism when it is done well, but Díaz’s challenge to it celebrates the essence of what storytelling is supposed to do: make reality even more interesting in the presentation. Oscar Wao is a kindred spirit to that other Pulitzer winner (and my favourite American novel), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and not only because of their common literacy in superhero comics. What Junot Díaz and Michael Chabon have both observed is that life is full of wonders, as well as rife with all manners of villainy that compel us to escape. Genre is not something we should grow out of as we age, but an alternative cultural code for understanding the world.

And if we choose to be meta about it, genre offers a way of understanding how we understand the world. When Díaz compares more than one beautiful woman to Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, he invokes all the values and biases of sci-fi’s Golden Age—the politics of skin colour and cultural hegemony that we cannot divorce from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ infamously colonialist stories of Martian adventure. Díaz spends the whole book sharing his (and Oscar’s) obvious love of Tolkien, which is also the narrator’s reluctant but insuppressible love of Tolkien, and then he drops this bomb:

He read The Lord of the Rings for what I’m estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest loves and greatest comforts since he’d first discovered it, back when he was nine and lost and lonely and his favorite librarian had said, Here, try this, and with one suggestion changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line “and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls” and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much.

On the Dominican side of the multicultural coin, what should we make of the fukú?

The fukú americanus, the family curse attributed to the Dominican Republic’s very own He Who Must Not Be Named (Christopher Columbus—oh, bugger), is the real driving force of the novel. I would even argue that the two major questions that string the reader along the plot of Oscar Wao are, “How did the curse begin?” and “How will it affect Oscar in the end?” (i.e. “Will he ever get laid?”). As Díaz writes in the prologue:

It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these “superstitions.” In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.

By the end of the book, even this imperturbable sceptic walked away convinced that the fukú was very, very real. Let me explain.

The fukú, as I understand it, is just another name for the Dominican Republic’s history of violence. Díaz traces it back to the arrival of You-Know-Who, but more pertinent to the novel is how the cyclical culture of division and resentment escalates under the genocidal rule of the Trujillato, and leaves its mark on generations to come. So the fukú is not genotypically inherited, as it would be in the naïvest conceptions of ethnicity, but phenotypically disseminated through an entrenched set of cultural norms that promote an expectation of hypermasculinity—power as expressed through woman-beating sexual dominance.

As I said at the beginning, Oscar isn’t especially unique as a stereotypical overweight nerd. What makes him a romantic antihero is the context in which he lives, where to be anything other than an alpha-male is un-Dominican. Oscar thinks he wants sex, but what he actually wants is love, and that’s what sets him apart from everyone else.

And that’s where the fukú comes in. Regardless of Oscar’s ideals, there is no escaping the scar that Trujillo’s regime—a nightmare of post-imperial misrule at its most extreme—has inflicted on all Dominicans. Or is there? I guess you’ll have to read the novel to find out.

On a final note, I want to draw attention to one of my favourite allusive moments in the book. And I have to do it carefully, because it comes right at the end, and I don’t want to give anything away.

In the penultimate section of the book, Díaz makes an explicit allusion to the ending of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. (I am sorry to say that Díaz gives it away. Read Oscar Wao, but read Watchmen first.) Then in the ultimate section of the book, the last three pages, Díaz rewards those of us who have read Watchmen with an implicit reprise of its final rays of hope.

It’s as if the book prepares us to think of Alan Moore in one way, then calls upon his powers in another. This is intertextual counterpoint at its best. You don’t need to be familiar with the allusion’s source to appreciate the sublimity of the scene, but it’s a brief, wondrous moment if you do.

In brief: Somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Tolkien resides this beautifully written romance of 12th-century derring-do, an exemplary specimen of literary nostalgia for some good old-fashioned English chivalry. Armed with a healthy measure of Norman-Saxon linguistic hostility, a critique of Christian anti-Semitism, and a bit of Robin Hood here and there, Ivanhoe is, in a word, ideal. While the novel loses its focus as the plot expands in scope, and at least one plot thread feels resolved by divine providence rather than moral action, Scott’s colourful supporting characters and sweeping historical reach keep the story alive at every turn.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Ivanhoe, keep reading below.)

I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody actually knows what novels are. In my youth, I adhered to the view that novels were any works of prose fiction above a certain length; the precise minimum word count is a matter of publishing convention, and varies by genre. By and large, this is still as specific as I’ll define the novel in criterial terms, and one of the rare instances in which I agree with the commonsensical perspective of the laity.

As I was exposed to more literary history and criticism, I was astonished to discover that the application of the term is often more specific, yet more ambiguous on account of the inconsistency of its use. Apparently, not everything textual that sees its way to publication is called “literature” (imagine that), and not every work of prose fiction above a certain length is automatically a “novel”—at least, not in the sense of the words employed by scholars and critics of linguistic constructions, narrative or otherwise. Much of this, I suspect, prevails as a relic of the institutions of scholarship that not too long ago regarded prose fiction as a lesser form of art than drama and poetry. In historical terms, only recently did contemporary novels begin to be taught as serious literature—not unlike our growing but begrudging acceptance of genre fiction and comic books these days.

I bring this up in relation to Ivanhoe because one of the statements that has always puzzled me is the claim that Don Quixote was the first novel. The proponents of this statement typically constrain the novel to an equation with the modern, realistic, and low mimetic: the novel, they say, triumphs over its antithesis, the high romance, by the maturity of its valorization of the ordinary and human. As the paragon of chivalric parody, Don Quixote bears the standard for this particular idea of the novel thanks to its wholesale lampooning of knightly escapism.

Personally, I’ve always read Quixote’s disillusionment as the height of tragedy, and I find that the lasting charm of Cervantes’s novel is how in mocking the conventions of knight-errantry, it became the greatest chivalric romance of all. But that’s another story.

Two centuries later—1819, to be precise—along comes Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, an English epic of jousts and castle sieges that delivers a list of gallant heroes and nefarious villains without a trace of irony: in short, precisely the sort of book that would send your friendly neighbourhood Quixote to the nearest windmill posthaste. And, might I add, definitely a novel.

Mind you, it would be inaccurate to portray Ivanhoe as being solely or even predominantly concerned with the exploits of its trio of archetypal champions, the disinherited crusader Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the mysterious Black Knight, and the ever-trusty Robin Hood (here called Locksley). Hamlet needed its Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Star Wars needed R2-D2 and C-3PO; likewise, the heart and soul of Ivanhoe are its characters of lower standing—the jester, the friar, the oppressed Jewish moneylender (to name but a few). Indeed, it is initially unsettling to see just how little the book is about the Knight of Ivanhoe, though it bears his name: he sits out half the book as an invalid, and exists primarily as a lofty ideal.

Nonetheless, Ivanhoe is fundamentally a story of knights and lords amidst the strife and disorder of Prince John’s England in the absence of Richard the Lionheart, and never are we made to forget it. It is perhaps telling, then, that its place in literary history—insofar as it has been accepted by those who perceive escapist romances to be more than idle fancies for children to outgrow—appears to centre around its historicity.

Ivanhoe, we are told (in the admittedly small sample of bits and pieces I have read), is significant because it is the first historical novel, the precursor to the likes of Alexandre Dumas and James Fenimore Cooper. If you pardon the minor anachronisms, the 19th-century rendering of 17th-century theatrical English depicting the 12th-century stew of Saxon and Norman speech, and the occasional historical liberties Scott makes for the sake of letting King Richard get in on the action, the novel is a panoramic window into the customs, manners and dress of medieval rulers and subjects who toasted one another with a Waes hael and Drinc hael. To celebrate Ivanhoe in its capacity as a work of historical fiction is to acknowledge its dedication to historical accuracy.

Not being a medievalist, I appreciate the level of detail, but locate the appeal of Scott’s novel somewhere completely different. The historical setting is a bonus, as it must inherently be whenever we are dealing with England in the time of Robin Hood, but the true accomplishment of the book is how it plays with familiar ideals in a way that evades cliché.

Let me put it another way: Ivanhoe is the most proto-Tolkienian novel I have encountered to date.

As far as I can discern with the help of my assistant, Google, this isn’t a comparison that many have made, though the connection is so obvious to me that Sir Walter’s influence on The Lord of the Rings is just begging to be explored. In some ways, Ivanhoe is a stronger reminder of Tolkien than any post-Tolkien high fantasy I’ve ever touched—which, I’ll grant, isn’t much; I adore Tolkien, but have very little patience for his legion of imitators. It reads like a distillation of all the elements of The Lord of the Rings that people forget to copy: the centrality of language to the characterization of individuals as well as society; the genuine, folkloric Englishness that drips from every line of dialogue, whether it is the rustic speech of a servant or the decorative rhetoric of a nobleman; the periodic digression into verse and song, usually with the complicity of a pint of ale.

Consider Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the disinherited wandering knight, and his paternally forbidden pursuit of the Lady Rowena. We know, as a consequence of chivalric convention, that he overcomes the necessary obstacles and wins her in the end; I am sure I spoil nothing by giving that away. Gradually, though, we discover that the plot of the novel is so aware of the cliché’s sheer inevitability that it relegates it to the background for much of the action. In the scheme of things, Ivanhoe is only one hero among equals, and Rowena is too much of a perfect Saxon princess to be a significant agent of plot progression: they are both made compelling by the external impediments to their desires than any internal defects of character, and Scott is too busy to threaten the two of them all the time.

In many ways, the true heroine is Rebecca, the daughter to match the ducats of the book’s Shylock figure, Isaac of York. In Scott’s portrait of England, the Jews are clear victims, at once depended upon as the gatekeepers of the financial system and derided as extortionists by borrowers who have no intention to settle the bill. Rebecca is a heroine by way of generous action, not social standing: she is the story’s healing force. Conversion to Christianity is out of the question to her, as is any hope of being wedded to Ivanhoe, though there remains the lingering feeling that Rebecca is a deserving woman curtailed by circumstance. So of course Ivanhoe and Rowena end up together—but the convention is renewed afresh because Scott asks us to wonder about an impossible alternative.

To turn to The Lord of the Rings for a second, we can discern a similar triangle. The relationship between Aragorn and Arwen is peripheral at most, and is more of an exogenous source of characterization for Aragorn than a significant piece of the foregrounded plot. Éowyn, on the other hand, is the woman who proves her mettle and worth for the reader to see, though the royal couple leaves her on the outside looking in. Now, I should clarify that Scott’s Rebecca is nothing like Éowyn, but they do perform similar functions in the way they introduce a hint of complexity to an otherwise straightforward story of forbidden love.

If high romance and escapism meet with frequent criticism on account of their natural predisposition to be conventional—if the familiarity of events that simply must conclude a certain way is what separates them from “novels” or “literature” in some eyes—then we should look to the uniqueness of the medieval romance as it is practiced by the masters of the form. Walter Scott is one, and I daresay Tolkien is of his ilk. In any genre or medium, the nature of an exemplum is to manage the feat of being ideal and inimitable at once.

But it’s only chivalry if the language is up to task, and Ivanhoe captivates in no small part thanks to the elegant lyricism of Scott’s prose and dialogue. Sir Walter’s English has the flavour of a lost art, and the sincerity of his style feels beyond duplication in modern times. Oh well; man dies, but glory lives.

I’m unabashedly a word-lover. One of the consequent afflictions of word-loving, though, is a passion for cute little alphabetic clumps that extends so far beyond their utility as meaning-carrying units that this utility becomes fully detachable. And as soon as one accepts that language can be beautiful in and of itself without having to communicate anything, one begins to see all kinds of instances where language in its meaningful state is intrusive and wholly unnecessary.

This is going to turn into a post where I make fun of hip-hop; but first, a few words about Tolkien.

I have, on one occasion or another, heard someone dismiss The Lord of the Rings on the grounds that Tolkien merely intended the mythology of Middle-Earth to serve as a playground for his invented languages. While not strictly untrue, this is an oversimplification and a misunderstanding. The way I read it, what Tolkien had claimed from the beginning is that the sound-patterns of a language – which would naturally include invented ones, since the meanings of individual lexical units are to some extent arbitrary – are able to contain and reflect the cultural history of a people, even a hypothetical people.

And so you have the Elves, whose unvoiced consonants slip and slide off the labiodental oh-so-gently, whereas the Orcs speak in abrasive, glottal coughs and hacks. In both the physical world and the speech-world, the Elves dance lightly, the Dwarves weigh themselves down; and the language and nomenclature of Rohan are lifted straight from Old English, so there’s no question about where that places them in Tolkien’s cosmos. (Allegorical conclusion: the French are beautiful and the Germans are ugly.) But the important thing is this: the mimetic position of each culture is discernible before meaning is introduced in the form of definitions.

This observation, and the illusion of authenticity that it permits when it comes to an invented tongue, separate Tolkien from all the cheap imitators who think dropping unpronounceable apostrophes everywhere is sufficient. For one thing, it makes no sense for an English-language narrator to anglicize everything except for the funny names, especially in a quasi-medieval setting reflecting an order of society organized around appropriation and homogeneity. I like to think of this as a case of contradictory suspensions of disbelief: how is it that English narrators speaking of a world in which English does not exist are somehow incapable of transliteration? Did they never have Peking Duck at the Turin Olympics?

But enough about bad fantasy. After all, this isn’t my area of special expertise. Talk to Wolf Wikeley, or better yet, watch My Fair Lady. Me, I just play keys.

At this juncture, I want to talk about what inspired this post in the first place. About three weeks ago, I comped a chart featuring my old schoolmate Ian Keteku, who now frolics on the Edmonton rap scene and goes by “Emcee E”. It was a surreal experience, and while in rehearsal, the pair of vocalists coordinating the shindig had to remind me on several occasions to keep the harmonies simple and not swing the time. It’s a struggle to let go of the upper structures and blue notes once you’ve internalized them, and I have no idea how Herbie Hancock ever managed to not only do it, but go on to record a hit single with Christina Aguilera. Then again, he’s Herbie Hancock.

Curiously, the last time Ian and I shared a stage was when he passed the microphone to me at my high school graduation banquet – a legendary evening that, roughly an hour later, went down in history (or down in flames). But the really bizarre thing about this whole scenario is somewhat more transparent.

Jazz guy. Rap guy. We’re not supposed to get along. Think of the Capulets and Montagues; now think of one of them as illiterate, and you’ve got it.

Two days earlier, Kenny Drew (not the one who played with Bird, but his son, who is also a pianist) wrote an article on All About Jazz entitled “What the F**k Happened to Black Popular Music?” – which, predictably, led to an explosive messageboard discussion about the decadence of American youth.

The animosity towards rap is uniquely strong in jazz circles for two reasons. First, rap has taken the place of jazz as the inspirational voice of black America, and there’s a certain cultural jealousy at work – jealousy in its second-most justified form (the first being an armed response to the Universal Constant of the Treachery of Women).

For my part, it is my learned opinion that jazz was, and is, a discovery, not an invention; it does not belong to black America, or America on the whole, any more than the moons of Jupiter belong to Italy. At the same time, I am not going to disrespect the forefathers of the great musical artform of the twentieth century by ignoring the hard fact that the syntax of jazz improvisation developed out of a specific ethnic milieu motivated by the desire to express a positive racial identity. The very problem is that once jazz was properly recognized as a universal construct, it lost its importance to African-American youth.

The second peeve, and the more fundamental one, is that jazz is an extension of the accepted musical dimensions of melody, harmony and rhythm, whereas rap thrives on the absence of the first two and the minimalistic reduction of the third.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of whether or not rap is music. Hip-hop production is no small task, even if it constricts itself to a limited subset of possible syncopations in 4/4 time – which, at face value, isn’t too different from the rhythmic complexity of early swing. It’s just that one requires a MIDI keyboard and a handful of plagiarized samples, whereas the other requires an instrument and practice. But as with any artform, the EffortMeter is merely the first line of aesthetic defence, and leans heavily towards exclusion (or, in the case of aurora borealis at 28,000ft, religion).

The repetition of vowel sounds produces a series of resonances that could be characterized as a harmonic system of its own, though it’s no more sophisticated than Eliza Doolittle reciting nursery rhymes about the rain in Spain falling mainly in the plain or Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor tapping to “Moses supposes his toeses are roses” over half a century ago. And melodically speaking, there does exist a “correct” diction that distinguishes “good” rap from cheap imitation President’s Choice rap, though in either case, it still deserves a bad rap.

So the genre passes all three tests. I accept that rap is musical, in the same way that the ziplocked excrement of an underfed chihuahua decorated with parsley (the excrement, not the chihuahua) is edible. Technically, yeah… it’s just that I prefer the filet mignon, especially when it’s offered for the same market price.

And I will state, for clarity, that it’s not like all rap is intolerable simply because its musicality is relegated to technical excuses. I will concede that the most outstanding track on Bound Together, a tribute to the music of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound, is the rap remix “Da Black Market”. I will concede that for some reason, French rap is actually not bad; if it’s as full of crass proletarian gutterspeak as the English variant, I don’t know it. I will even concede that the sight of a shrimpy Japanese-Norwegian rugby player channelling the Wu-Tang Clan is hilarious.

However, I am going to identify a general cause behind all of this semantic infighting.

Contemporary popular music has a problem. It happens to be the same problem as the one in mainstream computer animation: there are too many goddamned words.

Rap is the extreme case: the distillation of music for the consumption of the lowest common denominator of the tone-deaf breakbeat bobblehead. Somehow, it always manages to stumble its way back to the but-it’s-poetry tagline excuse. But in almost every genre, there is this depressing tendency for kids with mad guitar chops to obscure their playing with vapid half-sung lyrics about love or death or whatever else is fashionable this afternoon on the bipolar planetoid of Kazaa, when the music is perfectly comfortable speaking for itself.

The meaning of the words is at most a supplement to the music, or a part of some larger dramatic mixed-media construction. The words do not equal the music in any respect apart from acting as signals in the soundspace. Remove the words, and you still have music. Remove the triumvirate of melody, harmony and rhythm, and the music is gone; lyrics are not information-preserving. There’s a reason we file operas by composer, not librettist.

Louis Armstrong recognized the self-sufficiency of melodic expression and invented scat. Annie Ross turned it into a joke and pioneered vocalese. And when jazz vocalists still anchor onto the old standards, the melodies suggest a template for creative interpretation, a crucible for the formation of a personal musical identity. The notes on the page by your Gershwin or Rodgers or Porter, and the words that fit them, are norms. What you listen for are the erratic deviations.

I don’t say this to exclude. I have a lot of respect for the burgeoning poetic tradition of the singer-songwriter, be it those who can sing (Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell) or those who can’t (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen). But in most cases, the words do not equal the music. They are separable, as lyricophiles consistently demonstrate; and that also implies, quite correctly, that the musical dimensions can be isolated. Unless, of course, the music is absent. Just as bad music can get in the way of well-meaning lyrics, bad poetry – or poor enunciation thereof – often obscures the music. And there’s way too much of both going around. Curiously, market forces are driven by the verbally empowered and musically illiterate, a subdivision that is disturbingly representative of consumer society at large where everybody hears and nobody listens.

That’s one possibility, anyhow. The other one is the ego of the musician who feels the need to disrespect the audience by spelling out how it should feel and what everything means. That’s not poetry, it’s narcissism. And when the words are superficial blotches of noise designed to obscure an underlying monotony of composition, the practice is especially reprehensible.

I don’t deny that words can serve a very direct musical function, and in fact, that is what works in rap. That is what works in opera when you ignore the supertitles and listen to the enunciation of a foreign language, which is itself emotionally indicative of something. That is what works in John Coltrane when he chants along to Jimmy Garrison’s bass line in his spiritual “Acknowledgment”: a love supreme, a love supreme. Which is the dominant function, and which is the supplementary one? Here’s a clue: most of what you hear today has it the wrong way around.

ROTK may be the most successful of the three instalments in terms of not feeling harmed by its time constraints; but as with the first two, it has clearly set itself up to be a case where the DVD edition can and will eclipse the present cut for good. There are too many things that everybody knows were shot but mysteriously absent – the Mouth of Sauron, Merry being made Théoden’s squire, and at least one Gandalf-Nazgul confrontation – that ensure this will not end up being the preferred edition.

And it’s all there. Gandalf and the Witch-King face off, and it’s perfect. Merry is anointed as Théoden’s squire, and it’s perfect. The Houses of Healing make a brief appearance, and it’s perfect. The Corsairs of Umbar, the march across Mordor, Saruman and Grima’s fates (the omission of the Scouring aside, but to that I am already accustomed) – perfect. The Mouth of Sauron is damn well more than perfect. Like the other two Extended Editions, I am utterly baffled that I was ever okay with how some of these scenes were left out in spite of being filmed, and that Jackson still finds the theatrical editions to be more definitive. They’re not.

I am convinced Peter Jackson is Santa Claus. For three consecutive years, he has given me and countless others the Bestest Christmas Present Ever (or at least, for that particular holiday season). The Extended Edition could marginally qualify as a fourth. As further proof of the Kiwi director’s true identity, I offer the Elves.

But this year, my Christmas wish was for something that Jackson was not in a position to give. This year, the role of Cinematic Santa was entrusted to someone entirely less reliable, whose vision of one Harvey Dent played by Tommy Lee Jones was hardly up to par as far as legendary bearers of half-scarred faces are concerned.

Now, I think I’ve been a good boy all year, and all I asked for was this:

Joel Schumacher: please, for the love of all that is good and holy, don’t screw up The Phantom of the Opera.

This is one of those Christmas moments where I got my wish fulfilled in such a way that I wonder if maybe I should have asked for more.

So to answer the implicit question – no, Joel Schumacher did not screw up The Phantom of the Opera. In fact, it is his best film. (Take that with a grain of salt, as I have heard him acclaimed for Tigerland, which I have not seen.) This is clearly leagues above anything else I have ever seen him do, and as expected. much of it is on the strength of the source material – but that is not to discredit what he contributed.

Those of you who are unfamiliar with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s flagship musical should stop reading here and go see it. I deliberately leave “it” ambiguous as to whether I refer to the stage production or the film, but know that the latter more than suffices as an endearing introduction to the material, and I think it will last, though you might not come out of it with an understanding of why some people are just so darned crazy about it. But you’ll love the songs.

Before you go, however, I would like to offer this piece of advice: do not expect Moulin Rouge! or Chicago. Phantom is a completely different animal, and the first of its kind to make its way to the silver screen in what history will remember and already remembers as the movie musical revival of the early 2000s. It is not a fun movie. You will not be observing the whirling dervish of “Sparkling Diamonds” or the finger-snapping, toe-tapping vaudeville joy of “Roxie.” Phantom has a closer attachment to reality, and its visual stylings are conventional. It’s supposed to be like that.

That’s the difficulty of figuring out this movie: it feels so traditional, like it treads on a well-worn path, but there’s something almost indescribable that makes it distinct. It’s tempting to say that it hearkens back to the Oscar-winning wide-shot period epics of the sixties, but it is entirely more serious, and in a way, more subdued in the isolation of its setting. Here, there is no Grand Tour of Salzburg (The Sound of Music), New York (West Side Story), London (My Fair Lady), London (Oliver!) or London (Mary Poppins). There is no orchestrally-backed Overture and Entr’acte – something I attribute to the impatience of modern audiences, but that’s a different can of worms entirely. Phantom takes place almost entirely in an opera house, and this actually precludes it from qualifying as a Big Movie, spectacular-spectacular to use the old vernacular. It’s perhaps aesthetically closest to Beauty and the Beast, except in live-action and without Gaston gulping down a dozen eggs at a time.

The comparisons just aren’t going to suffice, so let’s get into specifics.

I went into The Phantom of the Opera with an apprehension that seemed familiar, the origin of which was difficult to trace. Ten minutes in, I figured out where I had last experienced it: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s an easy feeling to describe once you have identified it. The sets are great, but you would venture that they look a lot better in person on the soundstage. The pace is perhaps a bit rushed, and it’s like the movie is fighting to get to the parts everyone wants to see. The director doesn’t move the camera entirely enough, the lighting is rather static in such a way that the photography lacks a distinct voice of its own, and you wonder if maybe this project should have gone to someone with true cinematic acumen like Santa Claus – er, Peter Jackson.

(In all seriousness, this would have been an amazing Peter Jackson film. Maybe I’m still riding the post-Extended Edition high, but it’s fun to match great directors to musicals that suit their style perfectly, and I think this is a match – albeit one that will never happen.)

The first screening never truly suffices when a film is based on a source that is near and dear to your heart, or has played an instrumental role in defining who you are as a person and what you look for in art. You see it the first time to get used to the methods and madness of the retelling, and unless there are major complaints that you absolutely cannot work around, you see it a second time to get past that baggage as best as you can and evaluate its lasting power as a self-contained entity. To that effect, I think I am beginning to develop a vocabulary of the common sensations that may or may not appear in films of this sort. Here follows a glossary of a few that apply.

Diagon Alley: The moment when a shaky adaptation finally eases you in and makes you think, hey, I think I’m really beginning to like this.

Quidditch: The would-be showstopper that everyone wanted to see, but was not in any way close to being the high point of the film.

The Mirror of Erised: The scene that is definitive enough a representation that it secures the film’s place as the definitive treatment of the source, unlikely to see a remake in a very long time, if ever.

Balrog Moment: The scene that was perfect, exactly as you imagined, and made you sit up in your chair and squeal with glee as you mouth those too-familiar words in sync with the actors on screen.

Hobbit Reduction Algorithm: When a translation to screen creates a perspectival drift that moves the centre of narrative gravity away from the characters in which it lay in the source material; this can be for both good or ill.

You will notice that these are all from The Philosopher’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring, but this is for the sake of clarity more than anything else. There are reams of other terms you can graft from the likes of Troy, and historical adaptations can provide a lexicon of their own.

With that brief preamble out of the way, let’s talk Phantom.

It opens in the same way Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ends, but going in the opposite direction – breathing life and motion into a grainy monochrome photograph that defines the aesthetic for all of the twentieth-century scenes. Yes, I said scenes – the 1919 auction is not alone in its depiction of the reminisces of the aging Raoul, though appropriately, it is the only part that features any dialogue. This sets the stage for the transition back to the timeframe of the main story with all the requisite elements – Lot 666, the chandelier coming back to life, and a very nice touch where the opera house floods with colour and the netting of spider’s silk melts away from the seats. On the whole, the transitions from 1919 to 1870 work a lot better than the other way around; fundamentally, they are not something that should be unfamiliar to anybody who remembers Titanic, but they serve their purpose on their own terms.

Through both the auction segment and our introduction to the various characters in the performance of Hannibal, everything was still a bit rushed and unsettled. When Carlotta (Minnie Driver) starts prancing about and being generally ridiculous, Driver plays her as such a caricature that one is unsure of whether it is intentional and praiseworthy or if it is too much. Later in “Notes” and “Prima Donna” the film provides the audience a better sense of where it wants to take Carlotta, but there is some initial discomfort.

Phantom finally shows off its first shining moment when Christine sings “Think Of Me,” and you realize that there is absolutely nothing to worry about on the casting front here. Emmy Rossum owns the role – she has the voice, the looks, the age, the demeanour, the talent. It’s a joy to see her break into song. This is less of a Diagon Alley than the satisfactory clearing of a hurdle that one is right to be concerned about upon entering the cinema, but take it and like it, because there is a lot to like.

“Angel of Music” draws no complaints, and makes for as good an expository device as it does onstage, if not better on account of the movie’s freedom of movement between sets. It possesses a lovely melody to begin with, and when the lights go out in the opera house as we approach the Phantom’s revelation in the mirror, we begin to get a sense of what a lavish and delicate production this is when it tries to be.

Then we get to the title song, “The Phantom of the Opera,” as the Phantom leads Christine into the catacombs. This is, in a word, Quidditch. In fact, the sequence retains something that the film should have dispensed with, which is the original orchestration. In my mind, it should have kept the organ, but none of that percussive eighties texture with a hint of electric guitar. Film gives you the ability to use a much better orchestra than the one you can typically afford to deploy in the pit, and it is puzzling that Phantom takes advantage of it almost everywhere but here. Some of Christine’s lines are also done in voiceover, almost with the air of internal monologue, and it lacks that visual drawing power of the lips that most take for granted until it is gone.

In the Phantom’s lair comes his signature solo, “Music of the Night” – and it is safe to say that depending on how discerning a listener you are, this is the make-it-or-break-it moment insofar as Gerard Butler is concerned – that is, if you have already gotten over just how young he is. His voice is haunting enough to set up the Phantom as a character, providing him with the emotive capability that he cannot express facially because half of his visage is concealed under the mask – but haunting does not equal powerful, and it is easy to wish the Phantom had a bit more stage presence.

For “Music of the Night,” though, Butler does his job. The real concern in this scene is a cinematographic one. The lair is lit by hundreds of candles, but even so, it had no business being that bright. This scene needed some shadow. In fact, it begged for it. It looks like the Hogwarts Great Hall, and it needed to feel much, much darker. The brightness does not stop the scene from being magical, though, and when Christine faints in the Phantom’s arms, the softness pays its dues.

And then we come to “Notes.” This is Diagon Alley, the turning point where Phantom gets so good that it drains away that tendency to criticize everything about it, no matter how good a time you are actually having. “Notes” is superb, and André and Firmin (Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds, respectively) are an electric pair here and for the rest of their numbers in the movie.

At this point I want to skip ahead and identify what I think is as much of a Balrog Moment as a member of the audience, Lloyd Webber buff or otherwise, is going to find in this movie. There’s snow on the rooftop when Raoul and Christine make their way there, and it sets the stage for the glorious perfection that is “All I Ask Of You.” The full orchestra swells, just as I asked. The song is as beautiful as it always was, one of the most memorable duets to see the light of Broadway. But it’s the ambience of the mise en scène that takes a great song and weaves it into a truly beautiful scene. The number is simple, but lovely, and is probably the most outwardly romantic scene in any movie this year, with the possible and highly arguable exception of Peter Parker and Mary-Jane with their backs to the web near the end of Spider-Man 2.

“All I Ask Of You” captures exactly what it is that makes the best movie musicals shine: not only does the film capture the spirit of its source material, it adds to it and makes it better by taking advantage of a certain cinematic freedom, and sets the song to pretty pictures. Here, the film cries out with a voice of its own beyond what Lloyd Webber so generously provided, a voice that had up to that point been largely kept to a whisper.

You will notice that there is no mention of a chandelier so far. It falls, but not when you expect; this is actually not a reprehensible plot change at all, given that the lack of an intermission would have dulled the effect of a midpoint chandelier disaster anyhow. The repercussions are hardly noticeable.

“Masquerade” is as grand an ensemble offering as it needs to be, but it also shows a lot of restraint. More than anything, it demonstrates that Phantom is a song musical, not a song-and-dance musical. There is no showstopping choreography, but whether or not it would fit in the first place is a different matter. Upon the Phantom’s disappearance in a burst of flame like a certain Wicked Witch of the West we know, there is the interesting filmic addition of Raoul attempting to follow him, but winding up in a hall of mirrors that brings Enter the Dragon to mind. Yes, I kid you not – The Phantom of the Opera has a visual reference to Bruce Lee. But when you consider the mirror motif in the play, which translates exceptionally well to the film version, it makes a lot of sense.

Weirdness abounds when we get to Madame Giry’s retelling of her first childhood encounter with the Phantom, a story she recounts to Raoul. It is not one of the better scenes in the movie. While the visual rendition of the backstory is a serviceable substitute for generating sympathy for the Phantom’s condition – as opposed to it emanating wholly from his presence onscreen – it is not an example of the wonderment that occurs when movies augment what is provided by their sources. This is a very different kind of augmentation than the atmospheric direction of “All I Ask Of You,” – a less effective kind.

I am a completely satisfied customer with the entire sequence at the cemetery, for much of the same reasons as I was with “All I Ask Of You” – again, there’s snow, pretty colours, Emmy Rossum’s sonorous voice, and some images worth framing, or at least adopting as your computer desktop wallpaper. This is the “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” like how the mixed bag that was The Philosopher’s Stone delighted us with the Mirror of Erised. A beautiful song, a beautiful scene – but with two adaptation issues to note. The first is that the Phantom does not shoot fire. Instead, he engages Raoul in a duel – good fencing in a movie where you don’t expect to see good fencing, though the way it ends is maybe a tad sloppy.

The second is that when Raoul rides into the cemetary, and the Phantom’s voice is speaking to Christine, he warns her, “That is not the ghost of your father!” The problem is, in the context of the film, none of us thought it was – and that makes it a curious line, as it is the only trace that remains of a slightly more explicit motif in the play, something that had to be eliminated by necessity here because the Phantom is so much younger.

And so we come to Don Juan Triumphant and “The Point of No Return.” Here the major difference between stage and film comes out. On stage, what part of the action you see is up to you and your decision of what to focus your eyes upon. On film, the editing room is in control, and seeing the reaction shots adds a lot of tension. Now, Piangi and the Phantom look so different in this scene that there is absolutely no believable way anybody could confuse the two, but the film works around this in an interesting way. The implication seems to be that gradually, everybody – André, Firmin, Raoul, the police – realize that things are getting wrong and wronger, but they sit in their boxes utterly powerless to do anything about it. Christine is the only one who can, and when she pulls off the mask, you get the tension-and-release dynamic of a well-staged sequence.

As Phantom nears its conclusion and the title character takes Christine into the catacombs one last time, there is the obviation that Gerard Butler’s best scenes are with the mask off. The scarring is subdued – again, the Phantom is no Harvey Dent, and rightly so – but enough that it amplifies Butler’s range of expression and finally encourages some audience sympathy for the broken man he portrays. After spending most of the movie relegated to a minimal role by a Hobbit Reduction Algorithm of sorts, the Phantom finally takes centre stage.

It all comes together very well, though as in “Music of the Night,” the Phantom’s lair is very brightly lit. In the play, it is just as full of candles, but the thing about a stage performance is that everything around the stage is shrouded in darkness, and it produces a certain level of intimacy that is not missing here, but certainly subdued.

One expects the credits to roll after the score hits its final cadence, the Phantom exits and everything fades to black – so it’s a shock when we are suddenly thrust back into 1919, with the old Raoul visiting Christine’s grave. It is at first a questionable decision, but is actually a very nice bookend of a touch when you see what Raoul finds there.

So, with that out of the way, let us formulate a holistic impression.

The cast ranges from arguably good (Butler as the Phantom, Carlotta) to perfect (Emmy Rossum as Christine, André and Firmin). Patrick Wilson as Raoul is a mixed bag – he’s great when he sings or plays off his chemistry with Rossum, but when he speaks, he is less effective. But whether or not a Phantom fan will like this adaptation really depends on his or her comfort with Gerard Butler, be it his youth, the timidity of his voice next to Michael Crawford’s more thunderous moments or how little screentime he has.

Phantom is different from most other musical adaptations in that it is told almost entirely in song. Whereas screenwriters such as Ernest Lehman once added clever and quotable lines aplenty that fleshed out the exposition, and the Fosse duo of Cabaret and Chicago were not all-out musicals so much as they were regular films with the occasional stage act, Phantom has little to no spoken dialogue. Aside from the chandelier and some cosmetic things like the lack of pyrotechnics at the graveyard, the film version hardly ever diverges from its source – but at the same time, it adds very little. Whenever it dares to infuse a scene with a personal touch, as it does in “All I Ask of You” and “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” it amazes. “Notes” draws part of its elegance from Schumacher’s willingness to spread out his cast across his lavish sets, move them around, and move the camera with them.

The end result is that the film omits almost nothing, but adds very little – and that is perhaps its greatest source of disappointment. This is a very good movie, and one that I could see myself treasuring for some time to come – though further viewings will test that theory. But most of what is so good about it rides on the coattails of what Andrew Lloyd Webber already created. That is fine in the sense that I would imagine that Lloyd Webber is very satisfied with the end result, and most of the Fan Base of the Opera will be as well, depending on how militant they are about Butler not having Michael Crawford’s voice. It is really too bad that Schumacher offers such a faithful rendition already, but like Chris Columbus in The Philosopher’s Stone, sticks to the source in such a way that he does not dare offer anything for film buffs who find joy in movie magic beyond what the medium of origin has to offer – and this time, Alfonso Cuaron isn’t going to hop in and do it right two films later.

I am disappointed that The Phantom of the Opera, a great film with melodies you want to sing along with once you have the privacy of a home theatre and the DVD, is not one of the all-time classics in the pantheon of legendary movies. I am disappointed that it doesn’t gut you and rip out your still-beating heart like West Side Story. I am disappointed that it doesn’t stand a chance in holy hell of being a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon to rival the stage production.

But that’s the spoiled brat talking, who leaves no cookies by the fire and still expects Peter Jackson to send a masterpiece down the chimney. In the end, I got my wish. Joel Schumacher did not screw up; far from it, his film of The Phantom of the Opera is a keeper. Do yourself a favour and see it.

But popularity aside, people should really take a few steps back and wonder if a film adaptation of The Hobbit – even (or especially) one by Peter Jackson – is really that great an idea. The book is a very linear and episodic adventure in many ways, which could land it in the same adaptation trap as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. While it’s been turned into everything from a stage production to a video game with varying degrees of success, the prospect of a top-notch film project is, at this time, unconvincing. At the same time, there is the danger of the film having to choose between being faithful to the oft-forgotten fact that the novel is a children’s story, and the demands of the audience demographic riding the post-The Return of the King fallout. In terms of playing to the audience and fulfilling expectations, it faces the same challenges as the Star Wars prequels have thus far. As far as a Jackson film goes, the reason why so many fans are clamouring for one is out of the desire for stylistic continuity. But The Hobbit has little stylistic continuity with The Lord of the Rings in the first place, except for perhaps the first eight chapters of the latter, from which Jackson took arguably the biggest departure.

I saw Hellboy tonight and was suitably entertained, if not outright impressed. It never sinks down to being outright nauseating and oblivious to basic cinematic technique like some Leagues we know, but also feels second-class in the face of the A-list adaptations of the Marvel renaissance. Aside from an incomprehensible villain-story that boils down to a lot of occult symbols, reincarnation and an apocalyptic desire to set the entire world on fire, it was an entertaining piece and worth two hours of my time. I will elaborate further if I ever get around to it, but between Home on the Range, The Alamo, Kill Bill, The Punisher and a whole lot of exams, April is going to be a busy month.

While on the subject of Dark Horse Comics, I have yet to acquire The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #1, which was finally released in late February after months of legal delays. Considering the extent to which this here writer has been eagerly anticipating the title since its announcement, a purchase, reading and review are more than a little overdue.

If there was one film to finally hit the eleven mark again, it was The Return of the King. The clean sweep was clear as soon as it took Adapted Screenplay, the one that was most likely going to hold a consolation vote. But in the context of rewarding the entire trilogy – for after all, it is one movie, only with a split release sequence – well done, Academy.

The big question is, what conceivable project will next hit the eleven mark, or even break it? This may not be as impossible as it seems, given that The Return of the King was a rare winner that received no acting nominations. The sweep, though, could be attributed to both the onus to compensate for the losses of the first two – something that should have been done from the start, and was three years in the making – and a weaker, less competitive field this year. Facing facts for a moment, if The Lord of the Rings was not in the running, it would be a much tighter race, with the well-crafted but just shy of worthy Mystic River taking the prize, but win counts maxing out at five or six. Needless to say, it would be indicative of a relatively sparse year. On the other hand, if that opened the door to Finding Nemo, I would not complain – until it failed to win, that is. But this is all idle speculation.

To hit such an astronomical nomination count, let alone a win count, you need to work with built-in epic material from the start. Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings are all epic pageantry material. The Last Samurai, on the other hand, is not. It needs to be something that makes everything before it look small.

That said, the one to watch out for next year is Troy, not because it will get eleven Oscars or even eleven nominations, but because it is based on exactly the kind of source material that should poise itself for those numbers, from possibly the one cinematogenic storyteller bigger than Tolkien. But it doesn’t have ten hours to work with, now does it?

What we can expect in the film industry over the next few years is an influx of people trying to make the next Rings, like certain attempts to make the next Titanic (see: Pearl Harbor). The attempted-epic market already saturated itself this year, so let’s not see this trend spiral out of control.

The moment of the evening, of course, was Michael Moore in the midst of a “fictitious war” in the Pelennor Fields.

Based on the unlikely assumption that the entire readership has, in fact, not abandoned this page and left it for dead like a Students’ Union VP on Khao San Road, some updates are in order.

First things first: No, I have not seen Cold Mountain, Master and Commander, The Last Samurai or Lost In Translation. This abnormal deficiency of Oscar-season movie criticism, or any criticism at all, will hopefully change over the weekend. One must remember, however, that Laziness Conquers All – a certainty as physically entrenched as the Law of Ropes.

Yes, I did see The Return of the King, albeit only a single-digit number of times. Apparently there was an expectation that after surviving the marathon known only as Trilogy Tuesday, I would immediately write a detailed scene-by-scene analysis of the entire film – geek’s prerogative, one might say. I actually did this; immediately after returning from the cinema, I wrote two comprehensive analyses on the Entmoot forums – some rambly general first impressions and the rather more comprehensible adaptation notes. It has been suggested that I post these more permanently and prominently. This may or may not happen.

Coming up soon, should I have time to do it this weekend amidst catching up on the current state of cinema and editing the next UADS newsletter, will be an annotated photo album detailing various misadventures in Inchon and Bangkok, followed by the World Universities Debating Championships in Singapore.

Eventually I will do some kind of 2003 wrap-up, which will quite predictably be full of praising The Wind Waker and Finding Nemo and determining whether or not they compensated for an otherwise pretty bleak year. Don’t hold me to this.