I hadn't remembered that AB liked The Once and Future King. I bought it on one of my weekly circuits of the secondhand bookshops of north London, largely because I recognised the author (The Goshawk had been one of my O-level Eng. Lit. set books). It excited me greatly and led me on to La Morte d'Arthur. The Questing Beast with "half a hundred hounds in its belly" has stuck in my memory. Later, buying Disney movies for my son, I found they had cherry picked some scenes for The Sword in the Stone.
TLOTR is all too easily read as an entertainment, and the historical parallels are only going to be obvious to those who know their history—history through which AB had lived and it surprises me that he was not struck by this. I take it he was not one of those who preferred to forget the war, given that he wrote A Vision of Battlements, and I can't think it went over his head, so I have to assume he saw the parallels and thought them weak. Perhaps he was too distracted by the philology to pay attention to the story! You are absolutely correct that fantasy was the poor relative of science fiction in those days (and SF was, I confess, the main reason for my haunting used bookstores in those days, but then I grew up....)
It's interesting to think about. I don't think we'll ever know what led Burgess to form these opinions of Tolkien's work -- he is not averse to other fantasy novels, such as those by Mervyn Peake. Perhaps a future post will explore this more thoroughly...
I hadn't remembered that AB liked The Once and Future King. I bought it on one of my weekly circuits of the secondhand bookshops of north London, largely because I recognised the author (The Goshawk had been one of my O-level Eng. Lit. set books). It excited me greatly and led me on to La Morte d'Arthur. The Questing Beast with "half a hundred hounds in its belly" has stuck in my memory. Later, buying Disney movies for my son, I found they had cherry picked some scenes for The Sword in the Stone.
TLOTR is all too easily read as an entertainment, and the historical parallels are only going to be obvious to those who know their history—history through which AB had lived and it surprises me that he was not struck by this. I take it he was not one of those who preferred to forget the war, given that he wrote A Vision of Battlements, and I can't think it went over his head, so I have to assume he saw the parallels and thought them weak. Perhaps he was too distracted by the philology to pay attention to the story! You are absolutely correct that fantasy was the poor relative of science fiction in those days (and SF was, I confess, the main reason for my haunting used bookstores in those days, but then I grew up....)
It's interesting to think about. I don't think we'll ever know what led Burgess to form these opinions of Tolkien's work -- he is not averse to other fantasy novels, such as those by Mervyn Peake. Perhaps a future post will explore this more thoroughly...