In one sense, its a little misleading to speak about “successors” to the Inklings. The Inklings were not a self-conscious literary movement, and as far as I know, l there are no little coteries of academics gathering in a tavern on Saturday nights to drink and read excerpts from their works-in-progress. Would that it were so. Also, I think it is hard for us to appreciate how counter-cultural Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams were, writing and publishing tales of the fantastic when the literary world was dominated by modern realists, by the likes of Lawrence, Hemingway, and Joyce.
These days, though, writing fantastic literature appears to be a lucrative pursuit., and the bastard children of the Inklings appear to have swept the field. “Fantasy and Science Fiction” occupies a healthy percentage of my local Barnes and Nobel bookshop, even more if you add the two or three shelves of “graphic novels”/manga with which it is customarily bundled.
What hath Tolkien wrought? There is so much fantasy on the shelves that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Trilogies abound, of course, and a lot of them take place in a pre-Modern setting where the red iron of brutish trolls and tragic High Elves clash on darkening plains. There is so much of this that I haven’t read because I don’t know where to start. In the ’seventies I read the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin and found them engaging. I yawned my way through the first Shanarra book by Terry Brooks and the first Thomas Covenant trilogy and found both of them tedious and uninteresting.
Nor do I think that the self-consciously Christian fantasy works that have belatedly crawled out of the Evangelical presses in Wheaton or Grand Rapids to sulk on the shelves next to Janette Oke’s prairie romances or the horrid Left Behind series will beget much in the way of mythopoeia. Sure, there are plenty of brutish Shadowghouls clashing with High Lightbearers on the Iron Plains of Bethania, but there is always a Lost Book of Hidden Wisdom that restores the Balance, or even worse, smites the agents of Darkness with the light that pours off its pages.
I think the problem with “Christian” fantasy is that Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien operated in the jagged edges of Christendom, whereas the modern Evangelical lacks that framework. “Christendom” as a political and geographical substance is great mythopoeia in its own right, and the fantastic works of Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien don’t make much sense apart from it.
There are three series I feel bad about not reading. The first is the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. I have heard much good about this series, but also I have heard that it rambles badly. If I read something that requires that much patience and effort, I’d prefer to start with the Gormenghast series by Melvyn Peake.
The Harry Potter books I haven’t gotten around to yet either, although I did read the first volume in His Dark Materials. From a philosophical point of view, Christians should be far more concerned about Pullman, who definitely has a bitter axe to grind, than they are about Rowland, who just wants to tell a good story.
Finally, I think Steven King as a mythopetic writer has been woefully underappreciated. I haven’t yet read his Dark Tower series but I believe I shall have to. I believe King, along with such writers as William Vollman, Walker Percy, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, and even William Burroughs are participating in a project of which the Inklings would be proud; the mythopoesis of America.
Neil Gaiman, in American Gods, stumbled upon the main theme of this project; America is poor breeding ground for the supernatural. We have no myths. Our country is an abstraction, based not on blood or belief, but on a sort of least-common-denominator secular frame of exchange, and we don’t know our hills and our rivers from the inside yet like the Germans know the Rhine, the British the Thames, or the Central Europeans the Danube. The strength of the hills is not yet in us.
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January 29, 2009 at 1:16 am
Steve
I’ve read and reread the Harry Potter books several times, especially the earlier ones. As you say, they are good stories, but nothing like the Inklings. Pullman’s His dark materials I have read twice, and found a little better on the second reading, but the flaws remain.
There have been countless imitators of Tolkien, as you say, most of which are dul and banal. What I haven’t found is a lot of books in the genre of Charles Williams. I once issued a challenge to Williams fans to write one for NaNoWriMo, but there were no takers. The closest I have found in recent writers is the work of Phil Richkan, but he appears to be drifting into the whodunit genre, and his recent work has been less Williamsish.
With electronic communications, it should be possible to have an Inklings with members widely separated geographically, and we have a Neoinklings forum where people could, if they wanted to discuss their own works, and those of the original Inklings. But so far there have been no takers, in the sense that no one has submitted work that people have wanted to discuss.
In theory, it should be easier to gather people from all over the world through the Internet than in a single town, Oxford, but in practice, it seems more difficult.
February 3, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Gordon
If you have not read Gene Wolfe then I suggest you start with the Books of the New Sun, a four-book series beginning with the Shadow of the Torturer. I have read a fair amount of fantasy and there is simply no one who compares, living or dead.
February 4, 2009 at 2:41 pm
The Scylding
The last modern book which I read that was any good was more Sci-Fi than mythopoeic, yet was quite good: Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn (http://www.amazon.com/Eifelheim-Michael-Flynn/dp/0765300966) . Although not an obvious Christian, the author displays a sensitivity for the late medieval Christian mind and culture that is understanding, even sympathetic.
Harry Potter I’ve read many times – it is a good yarn, and sometimes touches on the mythopoeic, but never quite reaches it. A good story, but not a classic.