KEY POINTS:
It's exactly 30 years since J.R.R. Tolkien's son Christopher brought out The Silmarillion, an extensively edited version of the vast fantasy work his father had left unfinished when he died.
I vividly remember my own father's excitement when the book appeared - I was 11 - and his
disappointment after reading it.
My dad's problem was that he was expecting a story as rich in detail as The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion operates at a much greater remove from its material.
It has to. If Tolkien had written The Silmarillion in the manner of The Lord of the Rings - as the day-by-day, step-by-step adventures of a group of closely observed characters - it would have been at least 20 volumes long. (And the three volumes of Lord of the Rings took him 15 years to write).
So The Silmarillion is lofty and synoptic, an overview of thousands of years of densely plotted history. It incorporates dozens of smaller tales. It's sweeping, it's exciting, it's piercingly sad, and I love every word.
It fully justifies the Guardian's famous reaction: "How, given little over half a century of work, did one man become the creative equivalent of a people?"
If someone wanted to torture me with false hope, they'd start a rumour that a lost archive had just been found, deep in the bowels of some obscure university, containing a fully expanded, Lord of the Rings -style version of just one of my favourite chapters: "The Tale of Beren and Luthien", perhaps, or "The Fall of Gondolin" or "The Tale of Turin Turambar".
This is not going to happen. But the next best thing just has. Christopher Tolkien has spent the past three decades piecing together fragments of his father's unfinished manuscripts, editing and collating, and has just produced a book-length version of "Turin Turambar", entitled The Children of Hurin.
Turin is Tolkien's great tragic figure, the failed Aragorn, the good man with enormous gifts who manages to do everything wrong.
He kills his best friend by mistake. He brings ruin on everyone who helps him. He sets out to rescue the woman who loves him, but arrives too late. A dragon tricks him into marrying his own sister. Finally, he kills himself in despair. And, yes, I've just told you the plot. And, no, it doesn't matter. This is tragedy in the Nordic mode, heavily influenced by the Icelandic prose sagas.
The more perceptive people in the story can see the broad outlines of Turin's gathering fate just by glancing at him. The force of the tale comes not from narrative suspense, but from watching the pieces fall inexorably into place.
Three caveats. One, this is not the version of the story Tolkien might have written had he lived longer.
The style of the writing varies wildly from one passage to the next, as you'd expect in a book cobbled together from manuscripts written over a 50-year period.
Two, there have always been readers repelled by Tolkien's earnestness, his reductive characterisation, his portentous archaism.
Don't even think of picking this book up unless you're able to enjoy passages like this one: "Glaurung therefore passed Mablung by, a vast shape in the mist; and he went swiftly, for he was a mighty Worm, and yet lithe. Then Mablung behind him forded the river in great peril; but the watchers upon Amon Ethir beheld the issuing of the Dragon, and were dismayed."
Lastly, some of the readers who love The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will find the savage cruelty of The Children of Hurin hard going. Murder, incest and suicide: if they make a film of this, the censor will have an interesting time.
But the book is a grand read. More than that, it stands at the heart of Tolkien's lifetime achievement. All his stories carry a strong element of regret, of loss, of looking back to a better age which will never come again. (Another reason some people hate him).
Though his writing spans a wide range of emotion and experience, the current of feeling running through all of it is a sharper, fiercer cousin of nostalgia: the awareness of pain and accelerating loss. Turin is the ultimate vehicle for this aspect of Tolkien's thought: a man forced to live in a world where all his efforts will come to nothing. He makes a grand tragic hero. There will most likely never be another new book from J.R.R. Tolkien. We're lucky to have this one.
It's a thing of beauty.
* Publisher: HarperCollins $49.99.
* Aucklander David Larsen writes a regular fantasy book review column for canvas magazine.
