A brief thought vaguely related to the latest Harry Potter arguments. I've been simultaneously reading The Hobbit to my kids and re-reading the first of Le Guin's Earthsea novels. With both one thing has been remarkable to re-encounter: Their extraordinary narrative compression.
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Before I started in on "A Wizard of Earthsea" the last fantasies I read were "The Name of the Wind" and "Wise Man's Fear," by Patrick Rothfuss, both big fat bestsellers. They were interesting books, uneven but also very inventive. But when it came to advancing their story ...
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... which is similar in a way to Le Guin's, and also in a way to the Potter novels (reckless young wizard at wizarding school, etc.), they take a thousand pages (literally) to get where Le Guin gets in two hundred.
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Sprawl has its charms. I liked the Potter books' Dickensian side; I enjoyed some of Rothfuss's digressions. But generally both Tolkien and Le Guin offer reminders of how often less can be so much more.
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So many of the modern fantasies I've liked have been killed by bloat, from The Wheel of Time to now increasingly A Song of Ice and Fire. And Rothfuss finished his second novel seven years ago; as with Martin his fans are stuck waiting.
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Whereas the most successful recent series as a finished whole, Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, had some bloat but still managed to wrap things up in three books like old JRR.
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If I had an assignment for fantasists, it would be to re-read The Hobbit, Earthsea and maybe Narnia before they start on each new volume. Just as a mild inoculation against the disease of the modern fantasy novel -- its addiction to world-expansion at the expense of plot. /finis
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There's something to be said for Whistler's point - JRR Tolkien needed tens of thousands of pages of Old English and Teutonic myth (plus his own Middle Earth Nachlaß) to write the Hobbit in 200pppic.twitter.com/Q1FLZOEzH1
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