More More Elfish Gene

The truth about themselves is the one thing the majority of people find the most objectionable.

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It's an odd fact of life that you don't really remember the good times all that well. I have only mental snapshots of birthday parties, skiing, beach holidays, my wedding. The bad times too are just impressions. I can see myself standing at the end of some bed while someone I love is dying, or on the way home from a girlfriend's after I've been dumped, but again, they're just pictures. For full Technicolor, script plus subtitles plus commemorative programme in the memory, though, nothing beats embarrassment. You tend to remember the lines pretty well once you've woken screaming them at midnight a few times.

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Looking back, it's easy to see that a lot of his attitudes were the result of feelings of insecurity. Mind you, you can say that about ninety per cent of human behaviour. In fact, so much of human behaviour seems based on insecurity that it almost ceases to work as an excuse or reason for what we do.

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One of the problems of playing with adults, I'd noticed, was that they tended to enjoy the role-playing aspect of the game far more than that of ascending the levels and acquiring an ever-more powerful character stocked to the ears with magic weapons and gold. Hence, much of the evening's adventure would be about meeting people, finding clues to where monsters and treasure might be, even establishing a business in the town.

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In my mind, though, fantasy and science fiction were separate categories that should on no account be jumbled. It was like gravy and ice cream, lovely separately and even one after the other but together, never. I couldn't bear the combination of laser guns and wands, spaceships and galleons, and it really hurt me to think of someone mixing them.

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There is also a psychological phenomenon at work here that I believe is particularly male. A woman or girl--presuming one could be induced to take part in this sort of activity in the first place--having burned her hair and eyebrows would conclude that she had been lucky and reduce the amount of gas she put into the balloon next time. The man doesn't come to the same conclusion at all. He, singed and blackened, arrives at the point of view that he still has a margin of error to play with. After all, he isn't dead, and he's hardly likely to burn his eyebrows off again. They've already gone, history; he's moved on. There can be but one deduction--the dose needs to be increased.

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This is, I think, one of the big delusions of adolescence--that everyone is looking at you and that everyone will have an opinion on what you're wearing and that that opinion matters.

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There was nearly five years of my life in that book, five kid years too--the long ones, not these flashing mere afternoons of things that pass for years in adulthood. I'd had more meaningful interactions with those characters than most human beings. Poly Styrene was in there, Alf the Elf, Effilc Worrab, my nameless half-orc assassin, Foghat the Gnome, Drizzle the Illusionist, all the companions of my youth.

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I could have avoided being so annoying had I paid closer attention to the literature I was reading. There are, for instance, lessons to be learned in The Lord of the Rings, for anyone who cares to take them. I was slowly absorbing some of them--women aren't very important or interesting and generally play a subservient role. A traditional feminist criticism of men is that they divide women into madonnas and whores. This isn't the case with The Lord of the Rings. There are no whores in that.

The only women represented there are the unattainable elf maidens or the fat and friendly hobbit mothers--interestingly, sex is entirely absent from the book. I know some Tolkien dweeb is very likely going to find some example here to contradict me, but I have read the book fourteen times. This may only qualify me as a fair-weather fan, but I think I'd have found some by now. There are lessons about what good looks like--white and Nordic as in the elves--and what bad looks like--black as in the orcs and Southrons. The Southrons even obligingly ride elephants and wear turbans to drive the point home. Also, just in case you were in danger of missing the point, they come from the south. There's a lot of stuff about class and knowing your place too, but, as in any book that popular, there are also bound to be some subtler connections with life as it is lived.

Had I looked harder I would have seen very clearly that The Lord of the Rings gives a very good lesson in how to be cool. At the beginning of the book, two characters appear. One is Tom Bombadil, who was so irritating he was axed from the film. The other is the dark and mysterious Strider . . . [thus follows an entertaining but too long to quote comparison] . . .

Really, this is all about seeking approval--the best way of getting it is to look like you don't want it [like Strider and unlike Bombadil]. I couldn't see at the time that this might apply to life.