Second Breakfast

So I’m probably the last person in the Western hemisphere who hasn’t read Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code. This was somewhat intentional, as I was waiting for the darned thing to come out in paperback (mysteriously delayed to coincide with the release of the film adaptation), as I tend to avoid participating in anything that resembles a “literary phenomenon”. I waited for a long time to buy the Harry Potter books, and waited patiently for Scholastic to release the trade paperbacks of every one except for the most recent installment, which I broke down and bought in hardcover. At some point you just have to give in.

I’ll avoid spoilers here, and just talk about some of the larger thematic elements of the book.

I’ve been somewhat mystified by the popular success of the book and the controveries and debates that it has spawned. I was vaguely familiar with some of the basic premises of the book, which revolve around various elements of a history that includes: Jesus having married Mary Magdalene and having produced offspring surviving to this day, a secret society in Europe connected to the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, clues to this history in works by DaVinci (and others), and the Church’s millenia-long denigration and suppression of “the sacred feminine”.

I have also read Brown’s Angels and Demons which I picked up while stuck at an airport. Both novels follow a similar “fast-paced thriller” format, which is probably something of a formula for Brown: a main male, academic protagonist who is drawn into a series of events revolving around murder, secret societies in Europe, the Catholic Church (much of the action of “Angels and Demons” takes place in the Vatican while trying to locate an antimatter bomb [yes, really]), and so on. Brown also seems to follow a formula of very fast-paced action, so both books take place in a very short period of time, and DaVinci Code works very well in this regard, with our professor protagonist and his lovely female accomplice only minutes ahead of the French police who have wrongly accused him of a murder.

Interestingly, DaVinci Code doesn’t actually involve Leonardo’s works much at all, and the most of the shocking and controversial history that seems to cause some folks a lot of heartburn (the line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, for example) are revealed by the protagonist to his female companion as a sort of aside that contextualizes the events of the novel. Most of the events revolve around deciphering a set of clues that are to lead us ultimately to the Holy Grail, and the documents which prove and support all of this history that the Church has been suppressing for millenia.

Its an enjoyable and fast-paced read, and is definitely thought-provoking. One can either reject or be intrigued by some of the historical claims that Brown makes (his introduction indicates that most of the material he bases the novel is corroborated by historical sources), but of course the book isn’t an academic treatise, and one has to look elsewhere for source material if sufficiently intrigued to go deeper.

One place to start is to look at some of the source materials and secondary source writings on Gnosticism and the materials found in the Nag Hammadi library, such as the Gospel of Thomas. I’m currently reading Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels to better understand these traditions.

I do not like coffee. “Shocking!”, you say. “Unamerican!”, cry others. “He’s a witch!”, one bystander yells. However you berate, scold, or scorn me, I still do not like coffee, Sam I Am.

The only time I ever did like coffee was on the lap of my 95-year-old great grandmother. I was three or four, and she took her coffee with lots of milk, sugar, and a little Four Roses whiskey. When you’re that old, you can do whatever the hell you want to.

However I do like tea. I really like tea, black tea, with a little sugar. I look forward to tea in the morning, and tea after lunch, and sometimes a cup in the late afternoon. The evidence of my love for tea can be found in the variety of varieties and blends found in my cupboard, and the occasional mail order purchases to bring more tea into my house. A variety of Earl Grey blends have long been my favorite, the best in my mind coming from TeaSource. Loose tea is best, although often inconvenient and sometimes impractical. Twinings make a fine bagged tea for everyday drinking, and their looseleaf Earl Grey has been my standard brew (not as good bagged though). Until now.

At my local Meijer in the “international foods section” (where one finds chick peas for some reason) they have a shelf devoted to “English” foods (most of which are terrible I’m sure). However they did have some imported teas (all teas are imported, so its unclear why this is special, but I don’t work for Meijer), including PG Tips, which advertises itself as “Englands #1 Tea”. Being a well-known impulse buyer, I picked up a box and brought it home.

Its wonderful. Its black tea, in a pyramid-shaped bag. Its not scented or flavored. It has the mild astringency of darjeeling, with the malty, black brew of assam. Its sort of like an Irish breakfast blend without all of the heaviness. Its also rather inexpensive.

I’ll still buy some of the other looseleaf varieties for special occasions, but I’m drinking PG Tips now, thank you very much.

Although this blog has long been titled “Random Thoughts and Nonsense”, the careful reader who no doubt have noticed that my thoughts are largely not random, and tend to center on a number of things that I like, namely food and reading, with a dose of Christian spirituality and political pique thrown in. I like other things too, but I just don’t write about them very much. Actually strangely enough, a regular number of visitors to my blog seem to find me by searching Google for “random thoughts”. Go figure…apparently there’s a market out there for just about everything.

In the process of searching for something else on Amazon.com, I (randomly) came across this fascinating tome, titled “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates” by, you got it, the Rand Corporation (who are in league with the reverse vampires, but that’s another story). The fact that the deviates are normal is surprising, but they are at least well-distributed, so the likelihood that you’ll run into one of them is, well, rather minimal. While this book’s utility has long been surpassed by much more effective sources of randomness, there’s nothing quite as riveting as staring at a book of completely useless and meaningless numbers. It does make you wonder what the folks over at OMB are really doing all day.

After the smashing success and Icarus-like fall of James Frey’s “Million Little Pieces”, this book is sure to be a hit. Just check out the Amazon.com reviews if you don’t believe me.

Yeah, I’ve been on a Guy Kay kick lately.

This is I think the best of Kay’s standalone (but similarly-constructed) books, each of which is set in a place that is analagous to a European locale: “The Lions of Al-Rassan” in a Moorish Spain-like place, “The Last Light of the Sun” in a Viking and Celtic Northern Europe setting, and “Tigana”, which is set in a place that evokes the fractuous Italy of the pre-unification of the 19th century, the Peninsula of the Palm (named so because of its hand-like shape.

The Peninsula is occupied territory, divided between two powerful conquering empires: Barbadior to the east and Ygrath to the west. Tigana is the name of one of the provinces of the Peninsula, whose name is completely eradicated in an act of magic by Brandin, the Emperor of Ygrath and a powerful sorcerer, after the death of his son in a battle with the people of Tigana. The novel follows a group of Tiganaese exiles who are plotting, slowly and over many years, to regain their country and ultimately to unite and free the Peninsula from both occupying powers.

The style that we saw being developed in the Fionavar books is in full use here, and Kay uses a voice, style of plotting and approach to character development that in my mind defines his approach to fantastic literature. While the events of the novel are driven by acts of magic, this is ultimately a story of patriotism, loss, revenge, and love that is set in a place both evocative and familiar, yet original.

Kay is a careful writer, and his concern for his readers and love for his characters reminds me of LeGuin at her best. If there’s one Guy Kay book you were to read, this should be it, and if you’re like me at all you’ll find that you’ll need to spend time with the rest of his books, and this might be one you’ll want to savor and reread more than once.

I bought and read these books several years ago, and these were the first of Kay’s writings that I had discovered, I think. I remember at the time thinking that they were well-written, but felt rather derivative of Tolkien and other writers. I decided to re-read them in a fairly concentrated sitting, and my opinion has changed — I think these are examples of fantasy writing of the highest order.

Besides being a very fine author himself, Kay is also known as helping Tolkien’s son Christopher edit and publish The Silmarillion (no small feat given the vast amount of material that needed to be organized and edited to come up with that book), so his connection with Tolkien’s work is immediate and intimate. And although he intentionally uses many of the same tropes that one finds in Tolkien’s work, his intentions here are explicity to redeem the genre of “high fantasy” that had emerged in response to the enormous success of The Lord of the Rings:

I wrote Fionavar, in part, as a response to what was happening with the genre since Tolkien; that is, the genre had become destructive to any sense of development and creativity. It was my attempt to respond to what I saw as the barbarians invading the temple of high fantasy. After The Lord of the Rings became such a commercial success, so many people were doing lazy, derivative and purely commercially driven works in the field.[1]

So although we find familiar elements from LOTR (a Morgoth-like dark god character intent on domination and destruction; a western-European map with “another world” to the West; humans, elves, and dwarves; a Sauron-like wolf-lord character; Beren and Luthien parallels, and so on) Kay’s intent here is both to redeem the genre, and to extend it, for he says:

What was missing in general, for me were two significant things; one was the real sense of character - and you know you’ve never had a writer who didn’t say that - but the genre didn’t have it … with the exception of Stephen R. Donaldson. He made what I think was a gallant and ambitious attempt to play with some post-modern elements of the anti-hero. The second was that the notion of interweaving post-Freudian awareness of myth and legend was never embedded within the genre. Tolkien and many of the others writing fantasy, in his time, were pre-Freudian in their consciousness. My generation, and all those after us, cannot be so. Nevertheless the genre seemed to be lacking any real awareness of the psychological underpinnngs of myth and legend forms.[1]

Kay does in these three books exactly what he sets out to do: he takes the now familiar mythic elements of Lord of the Rings and reworks them to make them his own, he extends the work to incorporate elements of other European mythologies (including a beautiful set of Authurian motifs and characters, and other Celtic-inspired connections), and he introduces well-developed, compelling and contemporary characters. These are much less heroic fantasies and more character-driven fantasy novels. Kay’s prose is beautiful and finely-crafted, and one can see the emergence of a style that becomes even more refined in his later works.

Like many others who have felt so strongly impacted by LOTR and Tolkien’s mythology, I have often wondered “How do you respond to this in a creative and unique way?” Its a problem I’m sure every fantasy author has struggled with: how to write fantasy after Tolkien? Whereever you go, there he is. Kay’s answer, at least initially, was to not avoid Tolkien, but embrace him, and go beyond him. Of all of the homages and responses to the Ring that I have encountered, this is by far the most beautiful, creative, and successful.

Highly recommended.

[1]
http://www.brightweavings.com/ggkswords/nyrsf_halasz.htm