[S]he had been brought up to know things to do with words, and to do with being able to act, as a girl, more like a man than most men do. Open. Strong and direct. She knew what she wanted. –Peter Benson,The Levels

Blokes don’t read love stories. They read about spies and soldiers and adventurers and aliens; they read about shiny things that go fast and explode; dangerous things; exciting things. Offer most men a love story and they’d sniff at it. The odd thing is that all of them will have been in love, probably several times in their lives, and most of those experiences will, especially at the start of those relationships, count as some of the happiest memories in their lives. I’m a bloke and I can report, hand on heart, that that’s true for me; falling in love is wonderful. And, yes, I admit it, especially when I was young and hormone-driven it was sometimes hard to tell the love from the lust but it wasn’t all about the sex; there were genuine feelings there, a sense of belonging, of being more than a son or a student or someone’s mate. Being in love was—is—wonderful. So why, when I look at my bookshelves, are there so few books that deal with it? One of the main reasons I would suspect is that most of my books were written by men—men who, although every single one of them will have loved and (most likely) have been loved back by the object of their affection, never thought to write about it. Odd, eh?

A while back I was sent a review copy of Peter Benson’s last novel,Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke, which was a decent book but for some reason it failed to charm me; I just didn’t connect with the protagonist. When it came to writing the review I struggled to be objective and, try as I might, I’m sure that my lack of enthusiasm seeped through. I even ended my review with the following:

I feel bad about not being about to be as excited as Christian House inThe Independentand I would certainly give Benson another go but I really was the wrong reviewer for this particular one.

It happens.Alma Bookshave now seen fit to rerelease Peter’sback catalogueas e-books, so I decided I’d give him another go and volunteered to read his first novel,The Levels, which won theGuardian Fiction Prizein 1987, TheAuthor's Club First Novel Award, and aBetty Trask Prize. Since then he has written another seven books although there is a big gap betweenThe Shape of the Clouds(1997) andTwo Cows and a Vanful of Smoke(2011). The reason I pickedThe Levelswas not because of the awards nor because this was his first book; I chose it because it was a love story, specifically a story of first love and a coming-of-age story which I’ve always been a sucker for. The title refers to theSomerset Levels, a sparsely populated coastal plain andwetlandarea between theQuantockandMendip Hills.

In arecent interviewPeter says this about himself:

I’m an instinctive writer. I don’t plan. I don’t write behavioural traits on index cards, or cover a cork board with plot points connected with arrows and colour-coded reminders. I make the occasional note, but beyond that, I simply run with the story, and hope that I’m heading in the right direction. I never know how a novel is going to end, or if any of my people will fall in love, get in the wrong car, eat pasta on a Thursday night, buy a dog, walk into a pub or die. A bit like life, I suppose. And although I always tell students to ‘write the whole thing down and worry about editing when you’ve finished…’ (advice given to me by my first agent) I don’t follow this advice myself, and edit as I go.

This information I have to say enamours me to him because that’s how I write. He also says that every novel he has written has begun with a jolt, something else I can relate to. This particular novel began when its opening line came to him as he was drifting off to sleep:

I riddled the stove, stoked it, and carried the ash to the heap. A breeze came off the sea, miles away, a flooding wind.

Not, perhaps, a contender for the Best First Line in a Novel Ever Aware but I’m not one of those people who believes that if your first line fails it’s all downhill from there.

Once I started to get intoThe Levelssomething dawned on me: this was a very similar setup toTwo Cows and a Vanful of Smoke. InThe LevelsBilly lives at home with his parents where he works in, for want of a better word for it, the family firm—he’s a basketmaker; he has a best friend, Dick, who’s not too bright and prone to getting into bother and during the course of the novel Billy acquires a girlfriend as the story progresses. InTwo Cows and a Vanful of SmokeElliot doesn’t live with his parents but he spends so much time there he might as well, he works as a farmhand, has a friend called Spike who’s not too bright and prone to getting into bother and during the course of the novel Elliot also acquires a girlfriend. The difference—and it’s a significant one for me—is all to do with percentages. InTwo Cowsthe girl is a subplot; inThe Levelsshe’s the fulcrum on which the events rest.Two Cowsalso suffers from the fact it has a plot;The Levelsdoes not, it’s a slice of life mostly with a bit of reminiscing at the start.

I likedThe Levelsso if you’re reading this Peter you can breathe a sigh of relief. There is nothing contrived about it. It’s perfectly believable. Billy and Muriel are notHeathcliff and Cathy; they’re notRomeo and Juliet; they’re notScarlett O’HaraandRhett Butler. It has more in common with any number of popular holiday romances than anything penned by D H Lawrence and yet it’s so much more. It reminded me ofKeith Waterhouse’sseminal work,Billy Liar, specifically the relationship between Billy and Liz. Billy is from the north of England; Liz is from London; they are poles apart and yet draw together. If only Billy has the balls to get on the train for London and head off towards the bright lights with her. Benson’s Billy lives in Somerset; Muriel is from London; the attraction is immediate but Benson’s Billy faces the same predicament at the end of his book as Waterhouse’s Billy: is he willing—or more importantly able—to get on the train with her and leave everything he has ever known?

The Levelsbegins in the present so it’s not hard to work out what’s happened. This is how Alma’s blurb describes the book:

Drove House has always loomed large over village life. Boarded-up for years, it is reputed to be brimming with ghosts, and is shunned by the locals – all except Billy, for whom it has been the site of childhood dens and secret adolescent adventures. When the captivating Muriel moves in with her bohemian mother, they sweep out the ghosts and breathe new life into both the house and Billy’s quiet rural existence. After an idyllic summer, though, Muriel returns to her life in London, and the newly empty Drove House becomes the backdrop for Billy’s struggle to reconcile the vanishing agricultural lifestyle he has inherited with the glimpses of a baffling new way of life Muriel seemed to offer.

So he doesn’t go. How could he go? His dad’s back’s gone and although the old man potters around acting as if he’s in charge, it’s clear that Billy’s the one that’s got to shoulder the responsibility for keeping the business afloat. For as long as he can. The days when every woman carried her shopping basket with her are dying out; plastic bags are the future and the odds are that Billy will be the last of a dying breed.

During the 1930s, over 9,000 acres (36 km²) of willow were being grown commercially on the Levels. Largely because of the replacement of baskets by plastic bags and cardboard boxes, the industry has severely declined since the 1950s. By the end of the 20th century only about 350 acres (1.4 km²) were grown commercially, near the villages ofBurrowbridge,Westonzoyland, andNorth Curry. The Somerset Levels is now the only area in the UK where basket willow is grown commercially. – Wikipedia

Of course it’s not just shopping baskets he makes but not as many as his father could:

He could make more types of baskets than I can name. Cockle pads, Fisking maunds, hundreds of Withy Butts, Seedlips, Creels, Winchesters, Swills, Flaskets, Hampers, Panniers, Pottles and Punnets, Wiskets, Fishtraps, Butter flats and Sieves.

As I’ve said the love story is central to the story but it’s really only the battlefield on which Billy wages a war with himself; with who he is, what he aspires to and what’s important to him. He goes into the relationship a boy and comes out a man although the loss of his virginity has little really to do with the outcome.

That the book is most likely based on Peter’s own experiences is not hard to guess—a great many authors start out there (I was a bit of an exception there)—he was a basketmaker and was living inDorsetat the timeThe Levelswas published although he was actually born inKent. Dorset bordersDevonto the west,Somersetto the north-west,Wiltshireto the north-east, and Hampshire to the east; all part of theWest Countryas it’s known in the UK. Mostly rural, it’s income comes primarily from agriculture and tourism; being largely flat, the Levels are well suited to bicycles. And it’s tourism that brings Muriel, her bike and her artist mother to the area; they’ve leased the supposedly haunted manor house for the summer, it having lain abandoned for years. Our first encounter with it is years earlier. It is a favourite place for Dick and Billy to go to play. They manage to reassemble a fifteen fowl hen house in the double forks of the tallest tree in the garden and it serves as a tree house for a time until the wind blows it down:

Many things happened there. We played ghosts. We looked through the dirty windows at the rooms, dusty, dark, the views from partly opened doors showing other partly opened doors into rooms we couldn’t see through any window. An overgrown elder scratched at the galvanized roof of a lean-to, once, twice, in a cold winter night.

Only once, though, do they venture inside and allow their imaginations to scare the bejesus out of themselves.

I said that this was a love story but—wisely—Peter doesn’t dive straight into it. Billy does mention the girl in passing a couple of times but the first few chapters of the book concentrate on helping us to build up a clear picture of Billy. Although none of the main characters in the book could ever be said to be two-dimensional, no one is fleshed out like him and this isn’t simply because he’s the narrator, although that obviously makes it easier. It’s actually surprising how little description some of the characters get, Muriel especially. The landscape on the other hand, as I had expected, is thoroughly described; snippets of descriptions slip in everywhere building up a detailed picture of Somerset. Muriel appears as a memory at first as I’ve said but from that very first appearance the differences between the two are obvious:

From my place at the supper table, I could watch the road. A waxing moon slid up the sky, a clearing sky, a gloomy evening mist eased itself into the spaces between the trees that bank the rhines. We ate a tin of apricots and I washed the dishes while they sat down.

When I’d finished, I left the house by the back door, walked through the orchard, and followed the river where it straightens. I walked over South Moor towardsDrayton. As the sun grew bigger, it sank, the pink deepened in the hour to an orange and bloody red. I could seeLangportandMuchelney Abbey. Many of the houses here are built fromHamstone. They were glowing in the evening. We walked this way once, but all she said was, ‘There are ten people in the world, and eight of them are hamburgers.’ I hated that.

A rhine (or rhyne), or reen (South Wales) (from Welshrhewynorrhewin, meaning a ditch) is a drainage ditch, or canal, used to turn areas of wetland at around sea level into useful pasture.

Muriel’s a city girl; you would expect her to be ignorant. She’s no different than the people who visit Billy while he’s working:

I have interested women here, watching, from that association or that guild. They are the kind of people who first came when my father asked them years ago, and I have inherited them. He comes and stands behind them in the door, but can’t be bothered to say anything, who can blame him? Why he ever asked them is a mystery. They have nothing in common with us, other than the word ‘common’, which they think we are. They always ask how many baskets I make in a day and say how nice the workshop smells. I have to tell them about willow. They bore so quickly. They always look lost between something they forgot to do when they were younger and something terrible that is going to happen one day. I try to say things that will make them think I’ve wits, and some things old basketmakers say, like ‘Never stand to the right of a basketmaker’. I tease them. They wear work shirts with ironcreased sleeves. They never buy anything, though say they’re lovely and I’m so clever. One or two ask to have a go, but I tell them I can’t stop. They will crouch and stare at me.

The time period is never stated explicitly but as Peter is ages with me and as a teenager Billy talks about the UK as a member of theEEC, the main events in the book have to take place after 1975 making Billy about seventeen (since he can legally drive) if he’s a proxy for Peter, but he’s young seventeen; I related strongly to him. At times though the book felt as if it was set further back, perhaps in the thirties, but then I imagine life wasn’t that dissimilar to what it had been then.

On the surface there’s nothing that special about Billy’s story; there’s nothing special about Billy. He’s not well educated, lacks life experience, hasn’t travelled far from home and hasn’t much ambition; he’s quite naïve in fact. Muriel, on the other hand, is everything he is not and from the start she realises this is just a fling. Not that’s she’s not fond of Billy but when he says he loves her, the response is not what he might have expected:

‘Muriel,’ I had said, ‘I love you.’ She’d looked up from her towelling, dabbed a string of water off her stomach, and smiled.

‘You love me,’ she said, ‘I’ll never forget.’

Been there. Done that.

This is a gentle short novel—176 pages when out in paperback—but there is a lot to recommend it. I especially liked its cyclical structure. The book ends where it begins:

Spring. A new beginning. I tried to make it so. Another day. I riddled the stove, stoked it, and carried the ash to the heap. A breeze came off the sea, miles away, a flooding wind.

It’s a nice touch.

***

Born in 1956, Peter Benson was educated in Ramsgate, Canterbury and Exeter. His first novel,The Levels, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. This was followed byA Lesser Dependency, winner of the Encore award andThe Other Occupant, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award. He has also published short stories, screenplays and poetry, some adapted for TV, radio and many translated into other languages. His new novel,Isabel’s Skin, described as “a slick gothic tale in the English tradi­tion, a murder mystery, a reflection on the works of the masters of the French Enlightenment and a tour of Edwardian England” will be published by Alma this autumn.

Time equals life; therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life. – Alan Lakein

Time is precious. I say that and it reads like a cliché. Time is valuable but most people aren’t willing to pay us a fraction of what our time is worth. I know what the government says the average wage is—currently that would be about £26,000 per annum—but I’ve never earned anything like that. In fact when I was on £15K I thought that was good money, about £7.70 per hour before taxes. So what is you spare time worth?

I am going to die. Not soon. At least I hope not soon. But we all die. If I live as long as my parents that means I’m two-thirds done. If I read a book a week until the day I die that means I have time for just about 1200 books. I’m two-thirds done and I’ve not read 2400 books. I’ve not read 1200. 600, maybe. As I write this I feel very, very guilty that I have wasted decades of my life. From a scholarly perspective I have and I have to live with that. But I’ve lived an interesting (if not exactly an exciting) life that I’ve been able to draw from. Living takes time and if you don’t live what have you to write about? I met a girl once—androgynous-looking thing she was—a Canadian, who was visiting the UK with her fiancé who was a family friend with latent gay tendencies—an odd couple; let’s put it that way. She just finished university after doing two degrees back-to-back and although she was clever—Christ, was she clever—she was also completely ignorant about life; all her life up till that point had centred around academia and her fiancé was literally the first boy she’d dated. I wonder if they’re still together.

My dad told me that when I got older time would speed up. Now I’m the first to admit that I’m no science geek but I knew that that wasn’t going to be the case and yet the older I get the more time feels as if itisspeeding up; weeks scurry past as if they were days and I am always—always, always, always—always behind in my goals.Milligan and Murphycame out three months behind schedule and yet when I look back on those three months, although I know I was busy for every single day of them, I still have this huge list of things to do. I had planned to do another mass submission of poems and stories like I did in 2010 but it’s now 2012 and I only sent out a handful of things last year. What have I been doing? And more importantly was the return on my investment worth the effort involved?

Time management, at least according to Wikipedia, “is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity.” I’m clearly very bad at it. And, despite the success I’ve had in every job I’ve ever done—shop work, office work, training—I don’t think I’ve ever been especially good at it because I’ve always put in extra hours in all of them; it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to maintain my own personal standards. That’s always been the problem with me. I’ve never been content with ‘good enough’. Good enough was never good enough.

Now I only have my writing to worry about and, unlike so many writers—hell, I used to be one of them—I have all day every day to be a writer. Luxury. Ab-so-lute luxury. And yet I hardly write and it’s starting to annoy me. Honestly I wrote more when I was working sixty hours a week. Writing has never been a job for me. I can’t treat it like one. Not the creative side of my writing. I can sit down—Idosit down—faithfully every day and hammer out articles like this and book reviews no probs—1000 words a day average which is perfectly respectable—but I am finding that I can’t do that when it comes to my fiction. And I think that’s because I see the art of writing as something quite different to the craft of writing. I can sit down any day and write on any subject you give me and it will be competently done, possibly even entertaining and informative but I won’t care about it. Many people say about what they do to earn a living, “Oh, it’s just a job.” And I’ve had just jobs. But my fiction-writing doesn’t feel like it could ever be just a job.

It’s easy to identify where all my time is going. It’s gobbled up by reading blogs, newsfeeds and Facebook entries and I’ve been thinking about a lot of the stuff that I’m reading and it is a complete, total and utter waste of time. Facebook is the easiest to illustrate. In some of the groups there are people who will say something like:

While writing, do you ever find yourself making the same facial expressions your characters do? Like furrowing your brow?

I picked that one purely at random and no offense to whoever posted it if you happen to read this; I could have chosen from a couple of dozen easily. It is actually a fair question. I’d never thought about it before. And I’m not sure I can say categorically that I don’t but I suspect I don’t. So far eleven people have stopped what they’re doing to answer that question. Who knows how many people have read the question, taken a minute to think about it and then decided as they couldn’t think of anything witty to say they’d not say anything at all and they probably spent more time trying to think of something witty that those who actually left a comment. The thing is on its own that question will have only wasted a minute or two of anyone’s time and so you could say, “Where’s the harm?” It’s a cumulative thing though, isn’t it? Ten questions like that will waste ten minutes and then there are the cute photos—which I am guilty of posting—and the blogs telling us what they did on holiday last week and once you add it all up an hour of your life has vanished that you will never get back. I easily spend an hour every day just weeding out the stuff I’m not even going to bother reading. It’s probably more. I should really time myself.

Just before Xmas I got aMotorola Xoomtablet to replace my Kindle which I’ve not been happy with since I got it. Kindle is supposed to read PDFs and itdoesread them but not very well and, as I have hundreds of articles saved in PDF format (most about Beckett in case you wondered) I really was looking for something that could handle them. That was why I bought the tablet but I discovered that it had other uses that I had not anticipated: I could use Google Reader, e-mails and check Facebook on it and so that’s what I’ve started doing, often while watching TV or while taking a break for a meal or a snack. I scud down the list, identify the stuff I actually want to read and pass on. Most things get my attention for about a second. It seems very harsh but it’s practical because I don’t have time to waste and—and I’m being deadly serious here—if I can’t organise my life so that I’m in a position—clear-headed and refreshed—to do some real writing then I’m going to take an axe to all these other things I’m doing to try and keep up my public profile. If I could see the benefits of putting in all this time—i.e. I was starting to sell a few books—then I might feel that it was justifiable and it’s okay not to write for a couple of years while I attend to this but that’s not the way it’s going.

Why do we do what we do? Before I started blogging I spent a long time—weeks, literally—reading about how one blogged. I knew it was never going to be enough to write and readers would miraculously appear, eager to read what I’d written, so the question was: How was I going to attract them? I found several approaches, different places to list my entries, places likeDiggandStumbleupon, and the fact is after religiously listing my blog I can now boast hits exceeding 8500 per month which works out to about 1400 per individual post since I only post six times a month. That said, only a fraction of those stay on the site for more than a few seconds; it’s terrifying to see how many don’t even hang around long enough to read more than a couple of sentences. I wonder why because, without being cocky about it, I write good stuff most of the time: well-researched and pondered over. The problem is not me. It’s everyone else. We are all so acutely conscious of how little time we have that we quit on things before we give them a chance and I think that’s a terrible shame.

A lot of people, like me, have a regular blogging schedule and that’s recommended. Some hardy souls post daily, others weekly but the frequency isn’t really as important as the regularity. That’s what people say. What I say is that there’s only about two blogs that I subscribe to (out of a total of about 250 currently) that I actually look forward to and both of those individuals (who I will not embarrass by naming) only post once a week. If I didn’t see a post by them in my feedreader by Sunday night I’d go and check to see if there was a problem with the program. Most people could stop posting for weeks and have done and I’ve never even noticed. I feel bad about that but the bottom line is that so many people don’t post stuff that really matters. We post because it’s time to post. Because we think people expect us to post. And they don’t. They really don’t.

The old adage says: If you have nothing good to say, don't say anything at all. I say: If you don’t have anything meaningful to say don’t say anything at all. Don’t waste my time. Don’t wasteyourtime. Time is precious, especially if you’re a writer, especially-especially if you’re a 21st century writer who has to do all the ancillary crap that, in the good old days, other people did for you like arranging promotional material or reading tours or posting out review copies. We don’t have time to waste. So you really need to ask yourself if you’re investing your time wisely. What is thereturn on investment? Return is a hard thing to measure but let me illustrate. I belong to a Facebook group for self-published writers and for a while there the group discussions were being clogged up by incessant promotion: Read my book! Read my book! Will someone please read my goddam book? And a few times I chipped in and pointed out that these people were all frittering away their time marketing to the wrong people. As you all know I do regular book reviews. Mostly I review books by traditional publishers but if I get an interesting offer I’m game to plug anything I think is worthwhile; it would be hypocritical of me not to and I do often feel guilty that I don’t have more time to review some of the excellent independently published material that crosses my path,but there you go. The thing is most of the people in the group do book reviews and all of us have more books in our to-read piles (or shelf in my case) than we can ever get through unless we do nothing bar read those books for a straight year because that’s how long it would take me to read my pile. So why market to people like that? It’s a waste of time. The people we want to locate are those who are looking for something to read. And that’s the hard thing. That’s where investing time in a site like Goodreads is probably a better idea because there will be people there actually (and possibly even actively) looking for stuff to read.

I think all of us would do well to step away from the keyboard for a few minutes and just have a wee think about how we fill our time but especially how we might be guilty of contributing to the burdens of others. My mother had a favourite expression (it’s not new but she liked it): You are what you eat. I have another one: Rubbish in, rubbish out. If we fill our minds with crap what are we going to produce? More crap. Crap begets crap.

This post will fall on deaf ears mostly as is usually the case with good advice but if I get even one of you to stop and think then this post has been worthwhile. That’s me said my piece. I have an hour and a half left this afternoon and I aim to use it wisely. Starting with a fresh cup of coffee if only to stretch my legs.

Every writer of modern fantasy was influenced by Tolkien to some degree. He was the premiere fantasy writer of the last century, and all of us writing today owe him a huge debt. –Terry Brooks

If you enjoyedJRR Tolkien’sThe Hobbitthere’s a good chance that you’ll enjoyJonathan Gould’sMagnus Opum. Or not. I guess it all depends on how passionate you were overThe Hobbit. Some readers are a bit precious about Tolkien’s work and parodies likeThe WobbitandBored of the Ringsdon’t sit well with them. I was probably about fourteen when I first read the book and I’d no sooner finished it than I fed a sheet of paper into my dad’s old typewriter and began to pound out a sequel. Several chapters in and with Bilbo and his new companions trapped atop a giant’s table I had pretty much written myself into a corner and so it was with some relief—but really more annoyance—that I learned that apparently Tolkien had already found the time to pen his own not insubstantial follow-up and so I abandoned the project.

Tolkien intendedThe Hobbitas a fairy story and wrote it in a tone suited to addressing children although he said later that the book was not specifically written for children but had rather been created out of his interest in mythologies and epic legends. This is something Jonathan has also said about his own writing, that it’s not specifically aimed at children—and the reviews from adults of his first two ebooks,DoodlingandFlidderbugs, provide ample evidence that grownups can and do appreciate his unique approach to storytelling—but this reviewer most definitely had to access his inner child to enjoy them. Which I did, be they parables, fables, satires or just funny stories. The blanket term he uses to describe his style of writing is ‘dag-lit’ which I discuss inmy review of his first two booksbut if you’ve not read my article this is how he defines it:

It’s a term I’ve used to create a genre for my books, obviously based on things like chick-lit and lad-lit. Dag is Australian slang for someone who is uncool and doesn’t follow the crowd but usually in a funny kind of way. Originally it was an insult (a bit like nerd) derived from the wool industry (the dags are the bits of poo stuck to the wool on a sheep’s bum) but its meaning has been flipped around and many people (myself included) now wear that badge with pride. I like it, partly because, like a true dag, my stories don’t follow the crowd and can be hard to classify. It also gives a sense of the audience I’m writing for. Dags can be young or old, male or female – they just need to have their own unique view of the world. And that’s a good description of the sort of readers I’m aiming for. – L.T. Suzuki,‘Jonathan Gould Interview’, Author’s Den

ThatMagnus Opumis derivative goes without saying but I’m going to let Jonathan say it anyway:

Magnus Opumis an epic fantasy with a twist. Tolkien meetsDr Seuss.

It’s an interesting amalgam especially since Geisel felt that children couldn’t handle ancient myths, except those that were largely visual: Thor and his hammer, Hermes and his winged sandals. But then he was thinking about very young children. NeitherThe HobbitnorMagnus Opumis suitable for very young children.

The question is: Is it a parody?

Those who oppose parody dismiss it as merely secondary (rather than original) and contend that it tends tomock its model and criticise its target, that it does not pay any respect to acclaimed works of art and their creators, that its humour is tasteless, and that it, therefore, ultimately damages its intertext. Parodists have also been suspected of being envious of the success of others and resorting to parody as a means of revenge. – Beate Müller ed.,Parody: Dimension and Perspectives,p.5 – italics mine

There are those who argue for a more positive view of parody but in general the word has been viewed negatively for so many years that they have their job cut out for them. For parody to work well it does rely on a knowledge of the original text and where that is lacking many of the in jokes will fall flat on their faces. Here, for example, is howThe Hobbitbegins:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats-the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it-and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

And this is how the home of Magnus, the Kertoobis, is described inMagnus Opum:

The village of Lower Kertoob was, as the name suggested, built at the bottom of a shady green hill. When the Kertoobis first arrived there many years ago, there had been talk of establishing another village at the top of the hill, to be called, of course, Upper Kertoob. There were even plans to found a series of In-the-middle Kertoobs on the slopes of the hill as well. As it turned out, life in Lower Kertoob was so idyllic that nobody ever got around to actually making a start on any of these other Kertoobs. Still, the intention was not forgotten, and to that day, the hill was always referred to by the inhabitants below as Upper Kertoob.

[…]

Home for most Kertoobis was a little five-sided house, known as a kertottage. Each of the five walls was painted in a different colour, with the brighter sides facing towards the street and the duller sides facing towards the back. The two street-facing walls each had their own separate front door, so you weren’t stuck with going in and out of the same old door every day. The other three walls were filled with an array of oddly sized and shaped windows, to provide numerous different views of the world around.

Inside the kertottage, a very particular floor plan was always followed. There was a master bedroom as well as a spare bedroom because Kertoobis loved sleepovers. Then there was a lounge room, a dining room, and a baking room for making pflugberry pies.

So, yes, there are obvious similarities but I don’t hear a mocking tone here. And that’s an important consideration for me. Here though is howThe Wobbitbegins:

In a wholly below-ground apartment there lived a wobbit. His apartment was not as nastly, dirty, and wet as a hole, but it wasn't as fresh, bright and fun as a beach house. It was definitely at the"nasty" end of the home spectrum. Plants can cheer a place up, but the wobbit's apartment only had the mold in the walls and the mildew in the bathtub. It was a basement apartment, and that means fungus.

The wobbit was not very well-to-do, and his name was Bunkins. He worked as a barista at a local coffee bar, which was honest work, at least. Prior to that he was in banking.

So, no, I don’t think it would be fair to callMagnus Opuma parody ofThe Hobbit. It is, however, a pastiche based on the definition inOxford English Dictionary:

a medley of various ingredients; ahotchpotch, farrago,jumble

This meaning accords with etymology:pasticheis the French version of the Greco-Roman dishpastitsioorpasticcio, a kind of pie made of many different ingredients.

There is no mockery intended here; Jonathan’s not trying to be clever or to get a cheap laugh by ridiculing his source material—thinkSpaceballsorSaturday the 14thor many of theCarry Onflicks—but that doesn’t mean he takes his sources too seriously either. The mocking of course does not need to be malicious—many fans create spoofs to laugh at themselves.

Of course I should point out thatThe Hobbititself is not all that original. There is along article in Wikipediawhere Tolkien’s influences are discussed;The Hobbit clearlyowes a debt to Norse mythology and I no sooner read that than I heard the opening words toNoggin the Nog:

In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale... and those tales they tell are the stories of a kind and wise king and his people; they are the Sagas of Noggin the Nog.

Edward Wyke-Smith'sMarvellous Land of Snergs, with its 'table-high' title characters, strongly influenced the incidents, themes, and depiction of Bilbo's race inThe Hobbit; Mirkwood appeared first inThe House Of The WolfingsbyWilliam Morris,Samuel Rutherford Crockett'shistorical novelThe Black Douglaswas a touchstone as was the Anglo-Saxon poemBeowulf.

Nothing is truly original. But that’s okay.

As much as there are obvious similarities between Tolkien’sMiddle-earthand Gould’s world there are differences: the quasi-medieval world populated by dwarves, elves, trolls and various monsters, or their counterparts—check; the small, meek, overlooked hero on an epic quest—check; the powerful villain who is set on world domination—not really; the strange, magical artefact that can save everyone—again not so much, in fact there’s no magic whatsoever inMagnus Opum.

But what about Dr Seuss? I didn’t grow up with him and it wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I read my first book of his which I think wasThe Cat in the Hat Comes Backand perhaps one other;Fox in Socksrings a bell. To this day I’ve not read his best known books.

Most of the time, Ted never even thought of himself as a children's author. He simply did what he did: drew pictures and wrote rhymes. Honing his style with his first books, driving himself (and the other authors writing for Beginning Books) to mercilessly high quality standards, his style remained essentially unchanged through the years. Other than his brief stint at research in 1949, Ted basically never considered that he was writing for children. He was happy that adults and children loved and bought his books, but he wrote and drew to amuse himself. – Melissa Kaplan,Theodor Seuss Geisel: Author Study, 1995

What we get when grownups write about him is usually along the lines of what Dr Seuss himself called “bunny-bunny” tripe. That is, he was “everyone’s inner child”; he was “the master of the batty and wacky, the lord of the goony and loony,” the “creator of inspired lunacy,” and so forth. In other words, cotton candy cuteness. Fun, fluff, and frivolity along with an occasional commonplace moral lesson, we are left to understand, is about all we can expect from this man who himself abhorred the “cute.” – Robert L Short,The Parables of Dr Seuss– p.x

The fact is that there is hidden depth to what this man wrote:

The Lorax(1971), about environmentalism andanti-consumerism;The Sneetches(1961), aboutracial equality;The Butter Battle Book(1984), about thearms race;Yertle the Turtle(1958), aboutHitlerandanti-authoritarianism;How the Grinch Stole Christmas(1957), criticizing thematerialismandconsumerismof the Christmas season; andHorton Hears a Who!(1950), about anti-isolationismandinternationalism. – Wikipedia

And the same is true when we look at the writing of Jonathan Gould. All you have to do is look at what people have written in their reviews ofDoodlingandFlidderbugs—which you can readhereandhere—to see that there is a surprising depth to his writing. How many kids’ books get called a “social satire” let along a “political satire” and yet these are accurate descriptions of both books.

So, isMagnus Opumalso a satire?

Not so obviously as the previous books, although there are satirical elements. The common factor that runs through all of Jonathan’s books so far has been one of difference especially the inherent difficulty in communicating with someone else who is holds an opposing viewpoint or simply who sees the world a little differently to you. The most obvious example is the difference in ideologies held by the Triplifers and the Quadrigons inFlidderbugs: the tribes disagree on just about everything but the most fundamental issue on which they cannot see eye to eye is with regard to how many points the leaves on the Krephiloff Tree should have: the Triplifers are adamant it is three, the Quadrigons insist it is four. It takes one member from each tribe to put aside their differences and listen to the opposing view before peace can be achieved. And that’s very much what happens inMagnus Opum. Only in this case we have The Glurgs versus everyone else; everyone else being the Kertoobis, the Doosies, the Cherine, the Oponiots, the Querks, the Frungoles, the Gleeprogs and the Pharsheeth and a few others.

And this is another area where we see a nod to Dr Seuss in the fact that a number of the aforementioned races are anatomically outrageous, e.g. the Doosies have three ears, “two in the normal places and another on the back of their heads – so they could hear absolutely everything that was said by anyone in the vicinity” and then there’s the Gleeprogs, “a race of highly evolved fish capable of living on land, [but who had yet] to evolve lungs and so were required to go around with large bowls of water over their heads.” The important thing is that Jonathan doesn’t just insert a bizarre creature or character without some explanation and this is something Geisel felt strongly about:

This is the crux … a man with two heads is not a story. It is a situation to be built upon logically. He must have two hats and two toothbrushes. Don’t go wild with hair made of purple seaweed, or live fireflies for eyeballs … Children analyse fantasy. They know you’re kidding them. There’s got to be logic in the way you kid them. Their fun is pretending … making believe they believe it. – quoted in Thomas Fensch,The Man who was Dr Seuss: The Life and Work of Theodore Geisel, p.97

Seuss is, of course, world famous for the (occasionally groanworthy) rhymes in his books. This is not so evident inMagnus Opum. There are a few rhymes like:

If you’re after the newsy,
Then speak to a Doosie.

or

If you seek for the truth, of course,
Never make a Doosie your source.

and a number of songs that Shaindor has a habit of spontaneously bursting into but they’re more reminiscent ofThe Hobbitthan anything Seuss wrote. InMagus OpumShaindor sings:

Oh Mountains of Mounji, so high in the air,
When I climb your great heights I forget all my cares.
I shall breathe your fresh breeze, dip my feet in your streams,
And be carried away to a land of sweet [dreams].

And inThe HobbitThorinsings:

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.

There is, however, a playfulness to Jonathan’s use of language that does remind me of Seuss. For example, wherever the diperagoff is mentioned it is always referred to in full as “the seldom seen but much discussed diperagoff” no matter who’s doing the talking; likewise the Drungledum Valley always gets called “dingy, dungy Drungledum Valley” which reminded me also of theBog of Eternal StenchfromLabyrinth.

This is how the book begins. Some months earlier Jangos, Magnus’ brother, had got the Grompets:

On the whole, Kertoobis were the most settled race you could possibly imagine. Their idea of excitement was sitting around on the main street discussing the pros and cons of using fresh or preserved fruit in pflugberry pies. Their idea of adventure was going out through the left door and in through the right door every day except Wednesdays, when they liked to reverse the pattern. But every so often, strange things happened to individual Kertoobis. They would get a kind of wanderlust, a desire to go out and see the big wide world around them. This desire was so inexplicable to the average Kertoobi that a name had come into use to describe it, a name that was uttered with amazement and fear. That name was the Grompets and Jangos had as bad a case of it as Magnus had ever heard.

[…]

There were a number of treatments recommended for the Grompets but these generally involved ropes, chains, shackles and large buckets of water, none of which Magnus was keen to impose on his brother.

And so, one day, Jangos upped and left. At first he sent back reports of his travels and the wonders he had seen—delivered by messenger flythrops (birds with bright lilac wings and bulging green eyes “frequently used as a delivery service due to their rare gift of being able to read minds through pictures”)—wonders like “the glistening gardens of Glen-Arbee and the sweeping sands of the Drushida Dunes.” And then, one other day, the reports stopped. Finally, some three months later, a pair of Doosies arrive in the town:

Of all the races, Doosies were the biggest storytellers and gossips you could ever meet. They had three ears – two in the normal places and another on the back of their heads – so they could hear absolutely everything that was said by anyone in the vicinity. In addition, they had long, prehensile noses, perfect for sticking into other people’s business. Unfortunately, they only had one eye and not a very good one at that, so there were often substantial discrepancies between what they heard and what had actually happened. Not that this ever got in the way of a Doosie telling a good story.

One of the stories they have to recount concerned the discovery of “[t]hree bodies … on the road leading to the rim of the fabled Whounga Canyon, famous for its iridescent cliffs;” two Cherine and a Kertoobi with a letter addressed to Magnus Mandalora. Glurgs are blamed for the crime. Overcome with grief Magnus quickly determines to seek vengeance:

Magnus found it difficult to even think the word, let alone say it. It was one that was not often uttered in the village. The Glurgs. The most horrifyingly revolting, detestably repugnant creatures ever to have defiled the world. Vicious and savage and ruthless and cruel. The Glurgs were the scourge of all other races, the enemy in a great struggle that had gone on for as long as history had been recorded.

A great wave of fury swept over Magnus. He hated the Glurgs for what they had done to his brother, hated them like he had never hated anything before. He wanted to hurt them like they had hurt Jangos. He wanted to kick them and beat them and bash them and mash them till nothing was left of the whole accursed race but the slimy, squalid mulch they had been born from.

So our hero’s quest begins but it’s not for something tangible like a holy grail or a ring; no, it’s for something abstract. No sooner has he set out on his travels than he encounters the Plergle-Brots and would have perished there in the Plergle Swamp were he not rescued by one of the mighty Cherines, Shaindor, who serves as his guide and protector until they reach the city of the Cherines, Sweet Harmody. No better ally could he have hoped to run into because “[t]he Cherines had been at the forefront of all the great Glurg Wars;” they had defeated them in the past, driven them from their lands and destroyed all their strongholds bar one, Hargh Gryghrgr, where, Magnus learns, they have been amassing troops for a new assault. When in Sweet Harmody, Magnus finds his quest modified. He is asked to volunteer to act as a spy on behalf of the Cherines. He is to infiltrate Hargh Gryghrgr and discover what “the Krpolg” is; they fear it is a terrible new weapon and are hesitant to attack the Glurg without this intel. With Shaindor as his protector and with a Pharsheeth, Biddira, as their guide they set off to find the Parghwum Pass that will lead them over the mountains. So not quiteThe Wizard of Ozbut when they stop to consult the wisdom of the Great Oponium I did wonder a little.

TheHero’s Questis one of the basic fantasy plots and on the surface you would think thatThe Hobbitticked all the boxes only it doesn’t really. For starters there is no clear antagonist.Smaug, the dragon, is merely an obstacle to overcome as is the Blerchherchh inMagnus Opum. The great quest Bilbo sets out on is to reclaim treasure stolen by the marauding dragon, something tangible, but even once the mysterious Krpolg enters the picture Magnus’ quest is still abstract; rather than revenge he finds himself looking for information which, admittedly, will hopefully lead to his being able to avenge his brother’s murder. Bilbo certainly has a wizard as one of his travelling companions and “supernatural” aid is a key element of the Hero’s Quest—even inStar Wars Episode 4: A New Hope,Obi-wan KenobigivesLuke Skywalkeralightsaber, an object that later helps him confront his father,Darth Vader—all Magnus gets handed is the letter-opener that belonged to Gronfel the Brave since he’s too small to wield the legendary warrior’s actual sword. The real question is what are Bilbo and Magnus fighting for in the end? Both start off with one goal in mind and end up in a completely different place.

Both books begins in peace—in the case of Magnus we first meet him out in his pflugberry field, trying to get his borse, a creature worthy of Dr Seuss that “looked a little like a cow and a little like a pig and not an awful lot like a horse at all [and whose] two legs on the left were substantially shorter than the two legs on the right,” to plough a straight line—and both books ends in peace but it is a different kind of peace. Life goes on as normal but things are not normal. And only the privileged few know what’s different. When Bilbo returns home he finds he is no longer accepted by respectable hobbit society but he doesn’t care; Magnus, following his return, is “regarded as a bit odd, rather grumpy … and extremely private, but as the Kertoobis were by and large a tolerant lot, this was all fine by them.” The difference is knowledge. Magnus returns home knowing a truth that most of the Kertoobis, the Doosies, the Cherine, the Oponiots, the Querks, the Frungoles, the Gleeprogs, the Pharsheeth (and, it turns out, even the Glurgs) are not ready to accept. It feels anticlimactic, but it’s realistic. If he had marched back into his home town wearing theGolden Fleecethings might have been different. Instead he is just older and wiser.

Bottom line, then. When I first readThe HobbitI loved it—that’s obvious—but I was younger then. I’ve never readThe Lord of the Rings(I did see the films and, Christ, they were long) but I cannot in all honesty think of any other work that one might classify as fantasy that I have read. NotStephen R. Donaldson,Robert Jordan,Robert E. Howard,George R.R. Martinor evenSir Terry Pratchett. And so I have to admit that I wasn’t looking forward to readMagnus Opumas much as you might imagine, considering how effusive I was when writing about his previous works of fiction. It was theHobbitthing. No matter how good a job he was going to do with this from page one I saw ‘Magnus’ and read ‘poor man’s Bilbo’. It was, for me at least, impossible not to and that was the book’s downfall because it’s notThe Hobbit. And I don’t think I am especially precious about the book. It’s just a hard act to follow. That said, with all the current interest in Peter Jackson’s forthcoming film I have little doubt that those who have read all of Tolkien and are desperate for the next best thing (or next-best thing) will be tempted by Jonathan’s book and I expect the majority will be pleased by what they find there; it’s certainly a far cry fromThe Wobbit. I do wish though that he had displayed more originality. Yes, make it a fantasy quest by all means, but not a pastiche ofThe Hobbitand not another story where the moral, for want of a better word, is that different does not equal bad.

As I wrote this there are seven 5-star reviews on Amazon and a couple of 5-star reviews on personal blogs and I fully expect there will be more by the time I post this. I don’t give stars and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The question I have to answer, though, before I finish is this: Does the book succeed in doing what the author intended it to do? I would have to say: Yes, and I think a lot of people will enjoy this,BUT I think he is capable of more and, for my money, this book only highlights his potential. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next. Just please not aRocky Horror Show/Fraggle Rockmashup.