Why the book is better

 I've gotten up to The Council of Elrond in the Lord of the Rings--and I realize that this is the first time i've re-read the books since the Peter Jackson movies came out. I liked the movies tremendously: even when I didn't agree with the choices he made in his adaptation, I always understood and respected the reasons for his choices, and there were times that his vision was so close to what I had in my head it was scary.

As a result, I realize that I'd been reading the book with more of an eye towards technique this time, as well as comparing it to the movie. It was that, and not the fact that this was maybe the 43rd time I'd read it, that kept me from getting swept up in the book as I usually do.

Be that as it may, the chapter, the Council of Elrond is where the full majesty of Tolkien's story presents itself--and it's also a chapter where anyone who considers themselves a writer must look at what Tolkien does and wonder whether they can measure up to it.

It's the exposition piece to end all exposition pieces: after spending over 200 pages to get Frodo Baggins to Rivendell, in one chapter the author shows four or five corresponding narratives that were going on at the same time, each as much an adventure as Frodo's, and the whole history of the Rings set out, complete with a hint at the First Age, Morgoth, Thangorodrim and Beleriand. And all presented as people talking at a council. One chapter, folks. In a less able hand (and that's most of us) that's an invitation to the worst sort of narrative tedium--but the effect is not boring but electrifying.

And where Tolkien had been leisurely and expansive, his prose suddenly becomes taut and economical to an amazing extent--and not flat but ringing with Anglo-Saxon heft. The first time you read the chapter it's like one by one switching on the lights in the US Capitol rotunda--and still at the n+1th time, the story is revealed boldly. Elrond's history lesson alone is amazing, as is Gandalf tacking his own story up right next to Frodo's adventures, but to do that, and Glorfindel's story, and Glóin's story, and Legolas's story, and Boromir's story, all fearlessly violating the powerful Stan Lee dictum, "Don't tell them--show them", is both exhilarating and daunting.

Peter Jackson wisely put the battle against Sauron at the end of the Second Age at the opening of the first movie, both to give an instance of What's At Stake right at the start, and to spread that monstrous exposition out. It's understandable that Jackson replaces the pages of earnest wise discourse in the book with everybody shouting at once, because what's important to Jackson is the dreadful conclusion they come to, not the stately history of the Elves.

But it's with this chapter that shows just what you lose by compressing and propelling the storyline the way Jackson does. Even the odious and clueless Ralph Bakshi saw that Glorfindel was an excrescence: he replaced him with Legolas, while Jackson, in order to give one of the more important characters in the narrative something to actually do, replaced him with Arwen in the flight to the Ford of Bruinen. But Glorfindel is important: he's another glance sideways at an even greater reality. (In a way, jackson compensates for this diminution by adding the ostentatious arrival of the elf-host at Helm's Deep later on.) We learn nothing of Celebrimbor and the Three Rings from Jackson, or for that matter of the hunger of the Dwarves for Khazad-Dûm, and the daring and the folly of Balin, son of Fundin. 

But it was one sentence in that chapter that showed me just how much more wonderful the book is than the movie. 

"I beheld the last combat on the slopes of Orodruin, where Gil-Galad died, and Elendil fell, and Narsil broke beneath him; but Sauron himself was overthrown, and Isildur cut the Ring from his hand with the hilt-shard of his father's sword, and took it for his own."

That's the whole beginning of the movie--but a whole lot more. For all of the spectacle, that one sentence also contains an entire drama of father and son, and a terrible human dimension in one brush-stroke. 

Jackson had no choice to eliminate Elendil. To do that sentence in the movie would be laborious beyond endurance. Better to do a cute trick of cutting off Sauron's hand so he loses the Ring's power! And Isildur is just this hairy guy, and not a son wielding the shattered weapon of his fallen father.

Jackson's movies are better than I could have hoped for. And Jackson was almost always right in his editorial decisions to make the Lord of the Rings into cinema. But being faithful to the book? How can you be faithful to even that one sentence? It not only adds an entire family tragedy, but blurs the actual physical activity: "but Sauron himself was overthrown." (One of the great hidden principles of LOTR is point of view: Elrond didn't see it--no one did. Elrond gives you no detail he didn't see.) 

In the midst of a tight, efficient narrative what we have is poetry: not the poetry of Milton or Shakespeare or even Dante--but the spare hard power of the Battle of Maldon, tough Anglo-Saxon verse. No similes or tropes, but it withholds in one phrase and gives with the other.

Can you be faithful to that? Nonsense. Jackson knew it, and so crafted something that tried to tell the same story. He largely succeeded. His middle-Earth is magnificent--but does it seduce with a hundred other stories, of Balin's tragedy and Galadriel's redemption and the end of the Three Rings? Does it make you want to spend some time, like Bilbo, at Rivendell just listening to the Elves talk? We're moving far to quickly for that. It works as a movie--and if there's a way for a movie to write that poetry, I've yet to see it.

There's only one place where I think Jackson trips and falls: it's in The Return of the King where, in the middle of the battle for Minas Tirith, Gandalf turns to Pippin and describes the after-life. "Like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise." It's completely out of character and breaks the flow of the narrative, and is kind of creepy, to tell you the truth. The original lines are from Frodo's dream (or maybe not) in the house of Tom Bombadil, who of course is nowhere in the movie. (It's also placed, not as the climax of a chapter, but, deftly, at the beginning of the next one.) Just as Bombadil may or may not be God, the dream may or may not be the promise of afterlife, in Valinor or elsewhere. I think it's entirely appropriate that Jackson makes his one blunder because, apparently, he just couldn't stand leaving that one piece of poetry out of the movie, and had to shoehorn it in somewhere. 

I sympathize with Mr. Jackson completely--but I think the only way to can really be faithful to the poetry is to read the book.

Again.