12) Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth

This book carries a recommendation by A.N. Wilson to the effect that it's "the best book about Tolkien that has yet been written". While I don't think it is actually better than Tom Shippey's work, it is none the less a very good book, moving well beyond the cliches of equating the Dead Marshes to the Somme. It basically concentrates on the story of the friendship between Tolkien and three of his schoolmates, G.B. Smith, Rob Gilson and Christopher Wiseman, who together formed an intimate group called the TCBS. It could have been the story of any group of naive and idealistic young men, pledged to change the world and to renew a sense of old values through their works of literature, except of course that one of them actually did.

Garth saves his analysis of the effect of the war per se on Tolkien's writing for an afterword, and concentrates for most of the book on the narrative of what actually happened to the four friends. This is very effective. The actual events of the Somme are dealt with surprisingly quickly, but Garth manages to balance a detailed account of where Smith, Gilson and Tolkien were (Wiseman was in the Navy) with a sense of the overall perspective of the agonising shifts in the 1916 front line. (This may be what A.N. Wilson was getting at - I haven't read much else about the first world war, but I find it difficult to believe that there are many other accounts of it that are as lucid as this.)

Of course, the effects of the Somme were devastating. Gilson and Smith were both killed, and Tolkien invalided home with trench fever; he never returned to the front line, fortunately. And it's fairly obvious that the deep friendship between Tolkien and Wiseman was fatally undermined by their war experiences. Garth makes a persuasive argument for the deep impact of the TCBS on Tolkien's writing. I would like to know more about the effect of Tolkien's relationship with his wife Edith, who he was courting and marrying at this time, on his writing. Perhaps there is little to say, or to be discovered.

There are two lengthy postscripts to the main narrative. The first looks at the relationship between what Tolkien was actually writing during the Great War and his eventually published work (two decades later for The Hobbit, four decades later for The Lord of the Rings). The second ranges freely across the whole spectrum of English literature in the twentieth century, pointing out that Tolkien describes both the heroism and the horror of war (where Owen and Sassoon concentrate on the horror, to the point of concealing what they themselves were up to), and concluding with a favourable review from C.S. Lewis about the realism of Tolkien's portrayal of the psychology of wartime.

There's lots more here. Recommended.

13) Aldiss Unbound: The Science Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss, by Richard Mathews

A very brief, 60-page pamphlet, published in 1977, in other words not even half way through Aldiss' writing career (he was born in 1925, and first published in 1954). There's a bit too much retelling of the plot and quoting favourite lines from Aldiss' books and short stories. One particular concept that I found interesting, the idea of "slouch" as a particularly Aldiss brand of humour, simply wasn't explained well enough for me to make up my mind. The one point that made me sit up and think about why I enjoy Aldiss' work so much was Mathews' quotation from Aldiss' contribution to the 1975 volume of sf writers' reminiscences, Hell's Cartographers, which I quote here in its original form, but with my added emphasis:

I have written a number of books which I believe contain something like a creative vision, no matter in what other ways they may be flawed. Although I see my true strengths to lie in he short story field, I have novels for which I cannot but feel some warmth; most of them are involved with the portrayal of landscape, such as A Soldier Erect, Report on Probability A, Barefoot in the Head, and Greybeard, all of which depict figures in  landscape. Non-Stop and Frankenstein Unbound show figures swallowed by their landscapes. So, I suppose, does Hothouse, a novel from which I have always felt distanced, perhaps considering the miserable circumstances under which it was written. Cryptozoic (An Age) has landscape as surrealism, Male Response landscape as comedy. Eighty Minute Hour has an exploded landscape.

On rereading those words in Mathews' abbreviated (but better contextualised) presentation, I suddenly realised that I am a real fan of books with a carefully thought out landscape behind them. I suppose (from the fact that books I hated because their fictional landscapes made no sense to me, such as Cherryh's Downbelow Station and Cyteen, nonetheless have devoted fan followings) that this is not universal. But it helps me realise what sort of book, what sort of writer, appeals to me, personally. It's related to the concept of dinnseanchas, as Ciaran Carson explains it. I'm trying to write something substantial about Irish sf and fantasy at the moment and it all helps to firm up the picture for me.