Second Breakfast

So I got my offical membership card to the Tolkien Society last week (membership # 7696). The membership is cool, and you get a whole packet of resource materials on Tolkien’s work. They are having a conference next year, August 11-15, in Birmingham England. I am seriously considering going.

Anyone want to join me?

In the grand tradition of Blogging, I thought it would be useful to me, and perhaps others, to keep track of books that I’m reading and what I thought of them. Enough Said.

Book: Duncton Wood by William Horwood (ASIN 0070304343, McGraw-Hill 1980)

If you have read Watership Down by Richard Adams or the Redwall series (which I haven’t read), then you will be familiar with the general motives of the book: animal protagonists in a human-like society engaged in a struggle between good and evil. While the material itself isn’t necessarily completely original, Horwood’s treatment, his language, and love for his characters makes for the finest novels of this kind that I have encountered.

The novel, part of an extended six book cycle, centers on Bracken and Rebecca, two moles living in the ancient system of Duncton Wood, which has come under the domination of Mandrake, Rebecca’s father, and Rune, an evil mole whose scheming and plots is poisoning their community. Once a great community, Duncton Wood is in decline, and the great standing Stone, the worship of which once formed the center of their communal life, is no longer honored, or visited on Midsummer or Longest night. Into their lives comes Boswell, a scribemole from the Holy Burrows of Uffington, and these three (Bracken, Rebecca, and Boswell) become connected through many journeys, much suffering, and great love.

There is a great spiritual element here, and Horwood goes to great lengths to develop the mythology of the Stones, including a great history and prophesy that connects the novel from the distant past into the future. The central figure is rather Zen-like “Hear the silent Stone.”

This is no fairy-tale, but rather a sophisticated but accessible novel about real and endearing characters struggling against individual and collective evil, and the sacrifices they each must make to overcome it. It is also a novel about great courage, deep love, and friendship.

I read this book when I was a kid, and have found it as rewarding as an adult as then.

Horwood’s novels were never hugely available in the US, and I think most of these are out of print now. Horwood has a number of other series he has published since in a similar vein.

From the preface:

“Bracken was born on an April night in a wrm dark burrow deep in the historic system of Duncton Wood, six moleyears after Rebecca. This is the story of their love, and their epic struggle to find it.

It is a true story drawn from many sources, and the fact that it can be told at all is as great a miracle as the history it relates. But without one other mole, the Blessed Boswell of Uffington, Bracken and Rebecca would have died the death of legend, their tale declining into the darkness of time as a simple story of love. It was much more than that [... and] but for his love and enterprise there would be no Bracken now. Yet without Bracken, Boswell could never have found his great task.

And without Rebecca, there would be nothing at all to tell.

So link their three names together in a blessing on their memory, and on the troubled time in which they had to make their lives…