The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Our book club decided to read The Fellowship of the Ring, which is book 1 of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I didn't love that first book as much as I thought I would. That could have been because I listened to the audio version and so may have been distracted. I decided to read the remaining two books and I'm glad I did.

I don't know what I can say about The Lord of the Rings. It's become so culturally prevalent, it's hard to add anything to the conversation. I've seen the extended version of the movies several times, and I notices the movies track along with the books pretty well. Even the twelve hours of footage, however, leave out a few scenes. I'll admit that having the visuals to refer back to helped me greatly as I read. Tolkien has a gift for description, but knowing the way the scene is portrayed in the movie and constant referral to the maps in the back helped tremendously.

What sets Tolkien apart from every other author is his ability to create entire universes in his head. Not only does he conjure up whole physical world, he brings to life an entire made-up history. His character have family trees and backstories. He refers to ancestors with the assumption that the reader has heard the story and needs the information as a point of reference. I have no idea how he does that! It makes the story so rich. It's not just the history and geography of an imagined place, but it's a world he, as a story-teller, asks us to enter into. Normal history  is not like that. The best historians can try to weave a tale out of the events and people who populate the past, but even the giants are stuck with myriad unfamiliar names and places which can make communicating a big story difficult. Tolkien has set up for himself the best of both worlds. He's a great historian telling a tale with enough extra-textual information to make it seem real, but no more than he needs to tell the story he is telling. Somehow, he manages to place all those details in service to a narrative involving two small hobbits. Do we need the entire hobbit geneology? No. Does it add richness and depth and a sense of reality if we do? Absolutely!

The book is long. My copy clocks in at 1178 pages including the appendixes, index, and maps (seriously, what fictional book has all that?!?). But do not leave life on this earth without immersing yourself in Middle Earth!

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Our book club decided to read East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I had been wanting to read this book since the summer of 2019, so I was pleased with the selection. 

In the past, I have not really enjoyed books by John Steinbeck. And although it took me a bit to get past the "And that's why I don't love Steinbeck" moments, I eventually got to a place where I loved the book.

The thing about Steinbeck that has always turned me off is his lack of nuance. He sees things in stark contrast. People are usually somewhat good or very bad. A situation starts bad and gets worse. He rarely lands in the little middle ground. Traveling from Oklahoma to California during the dust bowl is a frying pan to fire situation (Grapes of Wrath); Incredible luck will turn into incredible disaster due to the evil of men's hearts (The Pearl); Lenny must be killed humanely before the mob tears him to pieces (Of Mice and Men). Life is bad. People are the worst. The end.

That still existed to an extent in this book, but not entirely.

Obvious from the title is the concept of the battle between good and evil. And yet Steinbeck seems to be making the point that evil is not as evil as it seems and good is not as good. There's the nuance. He may be making the argument that Cain has been unfairly maligned. He ends with the idea that Cain always had a choice. That choice may have been constrained by events outside his control, but he had a choice.

In addition, I believe Steinbeck is pointing the spotlight back on the father (or possibly God, himself) in order to lay some of the culpability for Cain's sin on the Father. After all, God was the one who, through his seemingly irrational choice, put Cain in the position of having to resist the evil welling up inside himself.

This story is told in an intergenerational way. Two brothers, Adam and Charles (notice the "A" and "C" connection to Abel and Cain) are very different from each other and each struggles with a fallible father who both loves too little and too much. Later, Adam's sons, Aron and Caleb ("A" and "C"), also very different from each other, must navigate a complicated relationship with their own father. All four sons are in some way abandoned by a father intent on his own interests. 

Into this picture enters another family, the Hamiltons, who boast a wonderful father, and yet the children struggle in their own ways with living up to that great man. Steinbeck, the author, is the grandson of Samuel Hamilton, and has incorporated family lore into the fictional story. Is Steinbeck saying the father, whether good or bad, has little to no impact on his children? Maybe.

Adam's house servant, Lee, a Chinese-American, and therefore an outsider, plays the role of suffering savior. Although Lee has his own struggles, his life is subsumed under that of Adam and his boys. Lee, alone, sees the bigger picture and is imbued with wisdom. Yet even Lee cannot straighten the crooked path people have embarked upon. It is Lee who discovers the secret to the Cain and Abel story: Cain did not have to kill his brother. God warned him to choose wisely. 

The final important character is Adam's wife and Aron and Cal's mother, Kate. Adam has tried to redeem her with his love, but she will have none of it. She is the town whore and plays the role of pure evil. 

All the parallels to Scripture make it impossible to understand the story apart from that. Themes run throughout of original sin--Caleb struggles with his parentage; Adam's father is a self-centered con and a liar--Freewill--to what extend do the "bad" sons like Charles and Cal have the ability to be good--and what does it even mean to be good; Aron is the "good" son yet spends his whole life believing himself bad; The truly evil Kate has no such compunctions. The reader simply cannot get away from the biblical story of the Fall.

This is complicated book, yet Steinbeck's heavy touch makes it a bit cartoonish. I, however, really enjoyed it. I think Steinbeck has a lot to say. I believe he feels God put Cain in an impossible situation and then gave him a meaningless "choice." Human fathers, according to Steinbeck, do the same, but their human sons still have an ability to make a meaningful choice. I believe that in Steinbeck's estimation, an imperfect human father is better than a capricious heavenly one. Clearly, I don't believe that God forced Cain into an impossible situation; I do not attribute malice to God in the narrative of the murder of Abel. But I do believe humans are complicated. We can seem backed into a corner with no ability to make any kind of a meaningful choice, and yet I believe we always have a choice.

In the end, I think Steinbeck wrote East of Eden in order to redeem Cain. Does he succeed? Well, I suppose so, in the scripted world Steinbeck has constructed. I'm not sure how much the real world reflects Steinbeck's, however.