This Year’s Odyssey

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A Spectacle and a Conversation Piece

It’s just a quarter-century since the nominal date of 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  This year’s odyssey, the Christopher Nolan film, isn’t a space voyage, although one might argue it is science fiction, Bronze Age style.  The perils and wonders that the ancients could imagine far across unknown oceans must, in our era, be displaced to outer space, now that Earth has no place left to hide such marvels.

The Odyssey film poster

I finally got around to seeing The Odyssey this weekend.  Though I didn’t see it in IMAX, the spectacle is immense.  The soundtrack is also extremely loud, so much so that the seats in the theatre were shaking, even without the specific haptic features I encountered when I saw the last Indiana Jones movie.  Aside from all this sensory extravagance, The Odyssey is also very good; I recommend it.

The most remarkable thing about Nolan’s version is the amount of discussion it’s touched off in the press.  Since the movie came out I’ve seen a new article every day or two.  This is another good thing:  thinking about a story adds another layer of interest to the underlying experience of seeing or reading or hearing the story itself.

By now, judging by the difficulty in getting tickets at reasonable hours, a large fraction of the public has probably seen the film.  However, for those who haven’t, I’ll issue a

Spoiler Alert!

Adaptation

The commentators are pretty much in agreement that Nolan’s version diverges considerably from Homer’s.  (I really need to reread the original poem; it’s been ages.)   There’s nothing wrong with that.  Retellings and overhauls of classic myths and legends have always been with us; Homer’s written work itself was probably a distillation of pre-existing oral traditions.  It’s even possible that a later adaptation of a story, such as a movie version, might be better than the original.  More commonly, as here, a new version doesn’t displace the canonical version, but adds another alternative.

The Odyssey, book cover

If a new version like Nolan’s reworks the themes and meanings of a story as well as the plot, purists may decry the desecration of the original, while others (impurists?) may laud the new tale’s accessibility to modern audiences.  There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides.  There’s a real benefit to engaging with a classic text when it forces it to confront assumptions and ideas that are quite different from our own.  This is one reason the introductory philosophy courses I used to teach required students to read the actual works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and others (in English translation, granted).  At the same time, a contemporary version can use the classic story to illuminate aspects of our own time and concerns, and to bring out the commonality of human beings over the ages.

Thus, for example, the curious prominence of what’s described as “Zeus’s law of hospitality” or kindness to guests, xenia, in Nolan’s version often sounds more like a modern conception of decent treatment.  One article quotes a scholar as saying that “it’s not surprising that Nolan would take a concept like xenia and tie it to more ‘monotheistic religious concepts’ such as the Golden Rule.”

Civilization and Collapse

An article by Ezra Klein in today’s New York Times, “Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse,” makes some especially interesting points.  He notes that Matt Damon’s Odysseus is not Homer’s trickster hero, but a much more straightforward man with a 21st-century conscience.  What is haunting this modern Odysseus is not just PTSD or the horrors of war, but the sense that his Trojan Horse trick to destroy Troy, in defiance of the law of hospitality, will have far-reaching consequences.  As another article puts it, Odysseus “feels that he has been complicit in the destruction not just of a civilization, but civilization itself.”

If one basis of civilization is the willingness of people (at least some of the time) to live by moral standards, whether the xenia law of hospitality or the Golden Rule, then undermining that attitude destroys far more than a single city.  Odysseus fears that his “violation of the moral order” will bring down chaos on the Mediterranean civilization in which he has lived.

Illustration of Late Bronze Age collapse

And apparently there actually was a collapse of civilization in the period when this epic is supposed to take place.  Wikipedia’s article on the “Late Bronze Age collapse” mentions a number of different causes for a “societal collapse” across the whole Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, including the Sea Peoples invasions to which Nolan’s characters often refer, along with changes in technology and warfare.  “The deterioration of these governments interrupted trade routes and led to severely reduced literacy rates in much of this area.”

Could the Trojan War have kicked into motion a chain of events that led to this widespread a collapse?  The archaeological evidence, of course, can’t say much about that detailed a conclusion one way or the other.  But this unknown is what gives the storyteller an opening to speculate, and to use compelling characters and events to show possible implications.

Into the West

From this perspective, Nolan’s ending, which is quite different from Homer’s, adds a welcome note of hope.  The Odysseus of the film leaves his son Telemachus in charge of the Ithacan kingdom and sails off into voluntary exile with his reunited love Penelope, fulfilling her plea earlier:  “What if we ran? . . . headed for the horizon.  Held hands on deck as we rode west at dusk, chasing the escaping sun.  There’s a world beyond these walls.”  (see Wikiquote)  I don’t recall exactly the final lines, but Penelope says that “civilization will rise again,” and Odysseus responds:  “A new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

It’s a comforting thought that even if Odysseus’s Bronze Age civilization is headed for a dark age, there can someday be a renaissance—as did occur in the Mediterranean, when the dark age was succeeded by what we now think of as classical antiquity.  When we are concerned about the fate of our own civilization, we should always keep in mind that possibility of renewal—with or without an intervening dark age.

That note of hope fits well with the movie’s final scene, the image of going off “to sail beyond the sunset,” in Tennyson’s phrase.  One is irresistibly reminded of the final image of The Lord of the Rings, in which Frodo and his companions leave Middle-Earth for the blessed lands of the West.  Whether for individuals who have suffered as Odysseus, Penelope, and Frodo did, or for our whole culture, there may yet be new hope, if we can find the right direction.

An Epic Flash Mob Carol

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Every year at Christmas I treat myself to a viewing of a YouTube video by a family of musicians called The Five Strings.  The video is titled “O Come All Ye Faithful – Epic Flash Mob Carol,” and that title pretty much summarizes it—but hardly communicates the warmth and effect of the piece.  Here’s a link:  you might want to watch the 4:45 video before going on to my spoilers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI2c9yptr4U

I ration my viewing because I don’t want to let the effect grow stale.  By the end of the song there are tears in my eyes, my chest is swelling with joy, and I feel rejuvenated with the grace of the season.

So, to paraphrase Jo Walton’s classic question, what is it that makes this performance so great?

The Song

To start at the least important end, it’s awfully cute.  The young performers are adorable, and the idea of a set of siblings setting out to bring cheer to the world is charming.  Second point:  they’re good.  The voices are wonderful, and the instrumental performances are great.  And of course the surprise and joy of the people listening are lovely to see—not to mention the visible enthusiasm of the performers.

The music itself is brilliant.  We all know the song, of course.  Here, though, the lyrics are slightly different from the familiar ones—just different enough to catch our attention.  And the musical arrangement raises the well-known tune to a new level.

Singer from The Five Strings begins the carol

The flash mob method means the song starts off with a single lonely voice, which is gradually joined by more and more voices and instruments.  Variety grows as the song proceeds.  There’s a quick violin interlude at 1:40 that’s almost like an Irish jig, and it seems to shift time signatures as it segues into the second verse.

The low notes of the cello that enters about 2:20 add depth to the sound.  And at 2:34 the phrase is unexpectedly drawn out, leading into a crescendo to the third verse and the sight of the whole company facing the viewer in song, with a lighted star behind them.  At 3:13 the harmonization of the refrain shifts, along with the lyrics, lifting the song to a new level of glory.  And the very end brings all this grandeur to a hushed conclusion.

And the Singers

The very idea of a flash mob has an effect here.  A group of people coming together in a seemingly random fashion, out of careful planning, just to entertain or amuse, is pretty nifty in itself.  A 2010 video of a flash mob in a food court doing the Hallelujah Chorus is fun partly just because of the absurdity of imagining that something as complex as the Hallelujah Chorus could come together out of nowhere.  It’s reminiscent of the movie musicals in which everyday people seem to be able to break out spontaneously into song-and-dance numbers at will (see TV Tropes’ “Musical World Hypotheses” for an entertaining discussion).  One of my favorite examples is “That’s How You Know” in Enchanted, which slyly pokes fun at itself (as does the whole movie).  Apparently Giselle came into the mundane world with the ability to cast the spell ‘Summon Production Number’.

But in the Five Strings video, the gradual accretion of a mob of musicians has a greater effect.  It’s as if the faithful really are coming together at the summons of the song.  There’s no attempt to make it seem spontaneous—it’s obvious that the effort has been planned in advance—but the stepwise addition of more and more strands to the performance is like opening a series of Christmas presents.  Except that here, the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts.

It occurs to me that the emotional effect lies near to what Samantha Edmonds calls “the rally” (or “the Riders of Rohan phenomenon”).  She puts it this way:

This isn’t just a “sudden happy turn” in a narrative: as I’ve argued, what sets these scenes apart from other kinds of eucatastrophes is that the RoR phenomenon is specifically a choice made by a community. This is the moment your team shows up. Another friend agreed, explaining, “What makes these scenes so important is that often it’s chosen family who is arriving in these moments of great need, when things are darkest and most unwinnable.” . . . .

. . . . .I argue that the greatest “Consolation” of the fantasy genre isn’t the happy ending: it’s Companionship.

Granted, we don’t think of Christmastime this way when we wax sentimental about it.  And there’s nothing wrong with that sentiment.  But the Christmas story itself is precisely about sudden hope arriving in the moment of great need.  And when one enthusiastic group of companions after another arrives to join in the song, that is rather like seeing “your team” show up.  Even if they’re strangers to the people listening from the front doors, they belong to a common cause.

The Five Strings, whole company

Maybe I’m placing too much weight on just a few minutes of celebratory song.  But do take a look at the video.  I think you’ll enjoy it, and if you too find that it moves you, maybe someday we’ll figure out why.

Terabithia and Narnia

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Recently I picked up Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977), which I kept hearing about but had never actually read.  I had had the impression it was a portal fantasy about a couple of children, but that isn’t correct:  it’s about a couple of children with vivid imaginations who play at fantasy.

The edition I read had an introduction that tipped me off that something terrible was going to happen in the story.  (Since this book is almost fifty years old, I’m going to forgo a spoiler alert.)  So I was prepared when a tragedy did occur.  But I found the ending uplifting nonetheless, because of how the author describes the change this tragedy works in the main character, Jess.  Which may be the point of tragedy, on the whole.

The denouement did get me thinking about something I’d never quite been able to articulate, having to do with the Narnia stories.  Narnia keeps coming up in Bridge to Terabithia; it largely inspires the characters’ imagined world.  So the connection was out in the open.  It isn’t mentioned specifically in the Terabithia quote that sparked my reflection:

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king.  He had thought that was it.  Wasn’t king the best you could be?  Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted.  After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on.  For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile?  (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.)

Now it was time for him to move out.  She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them.  It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.  (ch. 13, p. 161)

The aphorism that kept coming to mind was “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. 17).  But that’s not quite it.  That line is about continuing to be a king or queen.  But what I kept thinking about was becoming a king or queen in the first place.

See, the Pevensie children, who become kings and queens in Narnia, don’t start out as heroes of mythic stature.  They’re a pretty normal bunch of kids.  There’s no suggestion that they are of extraordinary strength, courage, intelligence, or virtue. They certainly rise to the occasion:  we see them becoming heroes as the story develops.  But their only qualification for royalty, in the first book, seems to be simply the fact that they are “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”—that is, human beings. (ch. 2 and 8)

The notion that a human being as such has a royal destiny isn’t far from Jess’s thought in the Terabithia quote above.  The other world is where you’re knighted, where your true self is recognized; but you’ve already got the potential.  The other world simply calls you to realize it and carry it out (“pay back to the world in beauty and caring”).

The underlying thought that my reading of Terabithia teased out is that simply being a human being (or, more broadly, a person), a child of God, is enough to qualify one for the kind of dignity and respect that we associate with royalty.  And that’s something worth remembering.

Here’s the appropriate song—unrelated to either book, but matching very closely in theme:  “Kings and Queens” by Audio Adrenaline (lyrics).

The Great Reread:  Hobart Floyt & Alacrity Fitzhugh

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Too Many Books

Picture of old man on ladder in large library

Can one have too many books?  I want to say no.  (See the illustration, which hangs on our front hall next to the library.)  On the other hand, it’s become difficult to fit my accumulated collection comfortably into any reasonable home—and doubly so when you add in my wife’s lifelong collection as well—even without the eight or ten boxes of books I sold off to the fabulous Wonder Books in Frederick in an attempt to thin out the collection.  And nonfiction is another story.  (Well, the stories are in the fiction section; but you see what I mean.)

This is so even though I’ve tried to exercise restraint by buying only those books I’ll want to read over again.  I prefer to try out a new book by getting it from the library, and, after reading, to decide whether this is a “keeper” that I always want to have available.  The rare exceptions are new books that I already know I’ll want to own, generally in a series.  While Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga was still coming out, for instance, I’d grab those off the bookstore shelves at once, sight unseen.  (Though I admit I do have only an electronic copy of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen—but that’s another discussion.)

Aside from considerations of space, it occurred to me some years ago that the “read again” rationale necessarily diminishes over time.  Given my likely lifespan, how many times am I likely to reread any given volume?  That number is constantly decreasing.  This makes me a little cautious about buying new books—as opposed to using the library.  One of the great perks of my current job is that there’s a county library branch right on the first floor of our building.  I can put a book on hold and nip down while at the office to pick it up.  Same thing to return it.  A wonderful arrangement . . . at least until I retire . . .

The other motivation I’ve had for accumulating books has been a vague notion that they serve as a kind of reference library.  In writing posts like these, it’s convenient to be able to grab a favorite book to check on some point or to make a citation precise.  For years, I kept around an old paperback copy of Neil Jones’s The Planet of the Double Sun (1931, paperback edition 1967), merely as an example of a really crummy old-time SF yarn.  It finally occurred to me that there was no particular purpose in having it—rereading it would be too boring to be worth any use I might make of the mention—and I ditched, er, released my copy to find a new home with some historian of SF.  Haven’t missed it since.

The Great Reread

In the process of going over my packed-and-unpacked-and-reshelved books (two moves in the last two and a half years!), I’ve sometimes found it hard to recall what some of the stories were actually like.  Or I feel as if I’d like to read a book once more before I consign it to the outermost depths.  So I find myself rereading a lot of old material.  Some of it holds up pretty well.  Others, I wonder what I saw in the tale in the first place.  The rereads end up being a combination of final trial—do I want to keep this book?—and fond farewell.

Of course I continue to read new stories too:  new good books are coming out all the time.  But it’s rather enjoyable to revisit some old friends as part of a balanced bookish diet.

And sometimes the old stuff may be worthy of comment.  So I’m going to include the occasional post here from the Great Reread.  The inspiration comes from Jo Walton’s brilliant series of essays, “What Makes This Book So Great,” originally hosted, I believe, at Tor and published in a 2014 collection.  (There seems to be a list of links here; Walton’s own comments on rereading are here.)  I’m not spotlighting what are necessarily the greatest books—but there may be interesting things to say even about the non-great or non-classic tomes I find cluttering my shelves.

Since these books tend to be fairly well aged, I don’t think it’s necessary to issue spoiler alerts in each case.  The comments all have spoilers.

Brian Daley’s Peripatetic Heroes

Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, cover

I first ran across Brian Daley (1947-1996) in his 1977 novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde, which has the irresistible premise that a sorcerer in a fantasy land summons magical assistance from another world—and it turns out to be an armored personnel carrier, with crew, from the war in Vietnam.  The fish-out-of-water contrast was delightful and the action first-rate.  I was primed to look for more good fun a few years later when Daley published Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (1985), the first in a trilogy of adventures featuring the mismatched buddies Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh.

They’re still good fun.   The heroes are both likable and relatable—dashing and mercurial Alacrity, a knockabout itinerant spacer with “friends in low places” across the starlanes, and staid Hobart, a minor bureaucrat from a congested backwater Earth.   Alacrity has some personal issues to get over, mostly in the third volume, but Hobart develops most, rising to the occasion as he travels into space to obtain a bequest inexplicably left to him by an interstellar magnate.  The worldbuilding is brilliant: planet after exotic planet, oddball character after still odder character.  The sheer variety and colorfulness of Daley’s cosmos is pleasing.

The Floyt-Fitzhugh saga falls into the category of the “picaresque” tale.  Originally I misunderstood that term to mean the same thing as simply “picturesque,” and the story certainly is that.  When I actually looked up the word, many years ago, I realized it had a more specific meaning:  “Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero,” as Wiktionary puts it.  That fits our heroes pretty well—Alacrity from the start, Hobart learning fast.  They’re lovable rogues, often on the wrong side of the law (or at least local customs), with hearts of about 12-carat gold.  Even in the last scene of the series, they’re off again to who knows where, one jump ahead of pursuit.

Fall of the White Ship Avatar, cover

And thereby hang my possibly idiosyncratic reservations about the story.  The plot of the first book is very good; there’s a clear goal and climax.  In the second and third books, not quite so much.  Alacrity and Hobart achieve some interesting results, but they themselves don’t actually stop to absorb or enjoy them.  Our Heroes are always on to the next thing.  Daley gives each of them a pretty good romance subplot, but these never quite resolve, since the MCs are always leaving their girlfriends behind—even at the end of the third book, Fall of the White Ship Avatar.  I was left wondering, do these two ever get to settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labors?

This is a standard issue with wandering, picaresque heroes, particularly those who star in open-ended series.  Daley even lampshades this aspect by including a whimsical journalist in the story who features Floyt and Fitzhugh in a series of utterly melodramatic “penny dreadfuls,” to Our Heroes’ perpetual embarrassment and annoyance. Daley seems to want to place them in the company of series heroes whose adventures never really end.  James Bond is never going to stop secret-agenting; he just gets re-cast with increasingly younger actors.  At the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just when we might expect Indy to retire and be replaced by his son, Indy snatches back his rolling fedora at the last moment.  The ending of The Incredibles or Spider-Man 2 show the characters resolving their personal character arcs, but nonetheless leaping into the next adventure.

One wonders if these perpetual adventurers ever retire, even as they inevitably age. We’ve pondered this previously in considering the “professional hero.” There has been the occasional hero who explicitly retires and passes on the mantle to a successor.  There’s a neat little story in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City showing how superhero Jack-in-the-Box is training his successor.  And Captain America eventually retires in the MCU, though the ‘line of succession’ is rather fraught.

Personally, I like to see the main characters settle down at some point, if only to enjoy a well-earned respite from perpetual danger and damage.  They can continue to have interesting adventures later on; “happily ever after” need not be a static condition.  Consider, for example, the somewhat atypical honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan in Diplomatic Immunity.  But it’s satisfying to see beloved characters enjoying some degree of stability.

On the other hand, there’s also a certain appeal to the hero who’s eternally “out there,” a legendary figure, always at their peak and unabatedly themselves.  In a way I don’t want to see Nero Wolfe or James Bond retire.  So I do rather appreciate the perpetual motion of Floyt and Fitzhugh, despite the lack of resolution.  To resolve, or not to resolve?  That is the question—but either answer may be acceptable.  I’ll be keeping the Daley books on my overstuffed shelves.

War of the Rohirrim

/ Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

I finally got around to watching the 2024 film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.  Missed it in the theatres, but I caught it on streaming video while my wife (who is not quite so headlong a Tolkien fan as I am) was off on a storytelling adventure.

The movie is very good.  Grim, but good.  Of course, this came out recently enough that I should issue a

Spoiler Alert!

Canon and Its Discontents

I refrained from reading about the plot until I had seen the film, so as not to spoil anything for myself.  When I went back to the source material—the tale of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, about 200 years before the War of the Ring—I was surprised to see how closely the screenwriters had actually followed what Tolkien provided in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings (section II, The House of Eorl).  This isn’t essential—but it’s helpful.

At this point LotR has become a mythological wellspring of its own.  I think it’s legitimate to treat the Tolkien materials as a basic canon that may still allow for some improvisation and variation, just as the stories around King Arthur are open to a variety of individual interpretations, and, generally, a powerful myth can be “malleable” in the right hands.

In other words, I’m not going to be scandalized just because a Middle-Earth tale isn’t entirely consistent with the canon.  Firing salvos back and forth about canonicity isn’t very productive.  What matters is what we do with the canon (or without it).

At the same time, if a work is worth adapting in the first place—book into movie, for example—then the adapters would do well to understand what made the source appealing.  We can use a source simply as a convenient hook on which to hang a different story, but we’d be wasting what’s worthwhile in the original.  Merely arbitrary or casual departures from the canon often degrade the result, rather than enhancing it.  We have to look at the changes case by case.  (The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies themselves are full of examples both good and bad—but that’s a subject for a much longer dissection, one of these days.)

Thus—to take an SF example—when Gregory Benford wrote one of the sequels to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Foundation’s Fear, Benford threw in a new means of interstellar travel—via wormholes—in addition to the “hyperspatial jump” that was standard in Asimov’s works.  This addition made the story seem a little more up-to-date, since wormholes had come into fashion in SF after Asimov wrote the original stories.  But inserting these wormholes into the background  created unnecessary tensions in the worldbuilding, since events in the original series might have played out quite differently if these wormholes had been around as Benford assumes.  And it added nothing much to the actual interest of the novel.  It wasn’t a big deal, but it was an annoyance.

Thus, we can evaluate War of the Rohirrim fairly by looking at how well it used the original Tolkien material, and how effectively it went beyond.

Adding and Expanding

Poster for The War of the Rohirrim

I thought the screenwriters here did a good job.  The Riders of Rohan as pictured in the movie are recognizably the same civilization we saw in the book and the LotR movies.  Helm Hammerhand is not at all the same character as Theoden, but he comes from the same culture.  Rohan’s relationship with Gondor is consistent with what we see in the books, allowing for two hundred years’ difference.

When the movie brings in LotR’s “oliphaunts,” or mûmakil (appropriately, only the latter name is used, since the former is more of a hobbitish coinage), that may seem an anticipation of the LotR storyline, but it’s plausible enough, drawing on Tolkien’s worldbuilding to add a danger and a challenge to the bare-bones tale of Helm in the books’ appendix.  The Wikipedia article on the movie makes some good observations here, and I’m inclined to agree.

The writers’ key decision, I think, was to use Helm’s daughter as the primary viewpoint character for this story.  She’s mentioned in the book, but her name is never given.  The screenwriters’ choice of “Héra” rather unfortunately invites confusion with the Greek goddess of the same name (less an accent), but it does fit her appropriately into a family containing Helm, Haleth, and Hama.

Telling the story as Héra’s tale allows the movie to create a sense of continuity that would be hard to achieve otherwise, since Helm and his two sons all die in the course of this war, one by one.  None of them survive to carry the viewer through to the end.  It is plausible, though, for Héra to come out alive.  And that also enables the screenwriters to give us something more like a happy ending than would have been possible if the focus had been on, for example, Helm himself.  Helm’s nephew Fréaláf takes the throne, and that’s fine.  Héra, however, can continue forward unconstrained and free.  The writers have wisely left her tale open-ended, rather than resolving it with a romance or other specific commitment.  That open prospect—“the Road goes ever on”—seems an appropriate conclusion for a story that is wound almost too tightly around one set of royal family conflicts and geographic environments.

I’ve found Amazon’s The Rings of Power somewhat disappointing; I’m cheered by this modest, but enjoyable, alternative venture into Middle-Earth.  Who knows:  someday (if the intellectual property rights align) we might even see the stories of the First Age, the Silmarillion, come to the big screen—and wouldn’t that be a sight to see!