On Saturday I went to the library to collect The Time Traveler's Wife, a book my daughter has been wanting to read for some time. The previous evening, we had been to Festival Walk to see the cinematic version of the novel by Audrey Niffenegger – a name that sounds as if it were made for a Steve Martin routine. Needless to say, my teenager loved it, while my wife and I were rather less enamoured of what is essentially a one-trick pony of a movie – a Ghost for the pseudo-cultured of the Noughties, where the Righteous Brothers have been replaced by the old German advent carol Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen ("Lo! How a Rose E'er Blooming"), better known to C of E types as the tune to which the hymn "A Great and Mighty Wonder" is set.
The key to the inspiration of the latest in the Fordist production line of American fairy tales comes early in the movie, when the titular time traveller, research librarian Henry (played by a post-Troy Eric Bana, looking more and more like Christopher Reeve as the film progreses until the transformation is finally complete when he appears in a wheelchair after contracting frostbite), overhears arty student Clare (Rachel McAdams) ask another librarian for a book about paper making at Kelmscott.
Now, not many people will have read the monumental 300,000-plus word Earthly Paradise by Victorian poetWilliam Morris , but I am a fair bristling with pride to report that I have a mere 90 pages more to go before I can say that I have, as part of my ongoing C S Lewis project. Interestingly, of all Lewis's major influences – Virgil, Boethius, Dante, Herbert, Milton, Morris, Chesterton, George MacDonald chief among them – Morris stands out as one who appears to have grown colder towards Christianity as he grew older: although he studied Theology at Oxford, he decided not to become ordained but to dedicate his life to art. (Virgil gets on the list as a kind of "proto-Christian".)
Although none of the 24 tales that make up The Earthly Paradise is drawn on directly in the film, Henry's fate (the theme of the last third of the movie – "If only he would hurry up and die!", as my wife succintly put it) could have been drawn staight from the pages of Morris's retellings of Greek and Northern myths that constitute his best known work.
More broadly, the influence of the life and work of William Morris on The Time Traveler's Wife is difficult to overestimate. The film's central figure, Clare, is an artist with a penchant for handicrafts; Morris was virtually synonymous with the English Arts and Crafts Movement. The significance of "Kelmscott" is that it refers to the Kelmscott Press, which was founded by Morris in 1891 and to which he devoted the remaining five years of his life. Like "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane, the word works to set the tone for the whole piece, to evoke a desired atmosphere.
In The Time Traveler's Wife, it evokes a longing for a vanished and irrecoverable pre-industrialised era through the romantic idealisation of a craftswoman taking pride in her personal handiwork – marrried to a half-baked fatalism. My advice is to stick with Morris. Poet, novelist, architect, artist, furniture and textile designer, this man was the real deal. If The Earthly Paradise is too long for your taste, try Sigurd the Volsung, rated the best of his poems by many readers, including himself.
Cinematically, I await District 9 and Matt Damon resurfacing in nerd mode in The Informant.
The key to the inspiration of the latest in the Fordist production line of American fairy tales comes early in the movie, when the titular time traveller, research librarian Henry (played by a post-Troy Eric Bana, looking more and more like Christopher Reeve as the film progreses until the transformation is finally complete when he appears in a wheelchair after contracting frostbite), overhears arty student Clare (Rachel McAdams) ask another librarian for a book about paper making at Kelmscott.
Now, not many people will have read the monumental 300,000-plus word Earthly Paradise by Victorian poet
Although none of the 24 tales that make up The Earthly Paradise is drawn on directly in the film, Henry's fate (the theme of the last third of the movie – "If only he would hurry up and die!", as my wife succintly put it) could have been drawn staight from the pages of Morris's retellings of Greek and Northern myths that constitute his best known work.
More broadly, the influence of the life and work of William Morris on The Time Traveler's Wife is difficult to overestimate. The film's central figure, Clare, is an artist with a penchant for handicrafts; Morris was virtually synonymous with the English Arts and Crafts Movement. The significance of "Kelmscott" is that it refers to the Kelmscott Press, which was founded by Morris in 1891 and to which he devoted the remaining five years of his life. Like "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane, the word works to set the tone for the whole piece, to evoke a desired atmosphere.
In The Time Traveler's Wife, it evokes a longing for a vanished and irrecoverable pre-industrialised era through the romantic idealisation of a craftswoman taking pride in her personal handiwork – marrried to a half-baked fatalism. My advice is to stick with Morris. Poet, novelist, architect, artist, furniture and textile designer, this man was the real deal. If The Earthly Paradise is too long for your taste, try Sigurd the Volsung, rated the best of his poems by many readers, including himself.
Cinematically, I await District 9 and Matt Damon resurfacing in nerd mode in The Informant.
9 comments:
Interesting review, Ulaca. I talked myself into reading the book last year, and didn't make the artsy craftsy connection, although Clare's artistry is of course made the object of much self-satisfied preening. Myy review of the book, if you're interested, is here, although I can give you the short version, which is that I detected another overweening influence on Wagneresquely-surnamed author, and that the proverbial wild horses couldn't drag me to the movie.
BTW, the word verification for this post is 'inclest'. I think 'pledophilia' would be more appropriate to the subject.
CS Lewis criticised a lot of science fiction writing for taking us out of this world (in the case of space travel) merely to give us the "same old stuff we left behind", citing love stories a one example. He believed that sci-fi should deal with the "strangeness that moves us more than fear". HG Wells' novella manages this in 100 pages, but it sounds as if Niffenegger's fails at five times the length.
Re your other points (in the review), we're all too good at faking it and the modern world encourages it more than ever. Sometimes we need to "find our inner child and kick its little ass", as Don Henley puts it in "Get Over It".
The Time Machine is the Wells' novella I'm referring to, of course.
Yes, I'm glad you mentioned Lewis. What do you think of his own scifi? Does he succeed according to the criteria he has set?
It's always seemed to me that Lewis ducked through a neat little escape hatch he provides for himself. That is, scifi must be strange, other. But, on the other hand, he agrees with Tolkien that stories are good stories when (I'm paraphrasing and reducing wildly here; forgive me) they open a window to behold the great Myths, the stories that embody the Truth of the creation.
So Lewis has it both ways: his scifi trilogy does -- in a sense -- give us the 'same old stuff', i.e. it's the Great Love Story of the Christian Myth. But since God is Other, since unfallen Creation is conceivable but unobtainable, then he fulfills the 'strangeness' criterion on these merits.
For what it's worth, I admire the scifi trilogy, but feel little need to come back to it. I know other differ . . . .
I wonder what C.S. Lewis would have made of much of the more recent SF? He'd probably have quite liked Philip K. Dick's wrestling with his religious visions, been appalled by James Tiptree Jr's bleak pessimism, found himself at odds with Ursula Le Guin's anarcho-libertarian-atheist-feminist utopias, and found William Gibson totally incomprehensible.
I'm the opposite of a sci-fi buff, so cannot comment on those authors, PB, only two of which I'd even heard of. As regards Lewis, I understand that his standing is quite high among sci-fi aficiandos. Personally, I like his first one best (Out of the Silent Planet). I found the descriptions of the floating islands exceptional in Perelandra. He's good at seascapes - his description (indeed, his conception) of the underwater world in Voyage of the Dawntreader is magical. But, as for the rest of P., I found it went on rather and wasn't moved by the Great Dance stuff at the end, although others salivate over it! That Hideous Strength (the "third" in his sci-fi "trilogy") he subtitled "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups", and that pretty much sums it up. I like that one too, but others turn up their nose at it because of the influence on it of Charles Williams.
Let me quote at length from a letter of CSL written two years after publication of Silent Planet, as it gives some interesting insights into its genesis and reception:
"What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonisation quite seriously, and the realization that thousands of people, in one form or another, depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human species for the whole meaning of the universe - that a 'scientific' hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity ...
You will be both grieved and amused to hear that out of about sixty reviews only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but a private invention of my own. But if there only was someone with a richer talent and more leisure I think that this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England; any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance without their knowing it."
All of us in the UK owe an enormous debt to Morris, since his preservation work, in particular for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments, which he helped found, led to the foundation of the NT.
There are some who would argue that the Bible is one of the greatest works of fiction to attempt to smuggle theology into people's minds. Somehow I don't think that's what Lewis meant.
For a crash course in the SF I mentioned, try Dick's Valis; Tiptree's Houston, Houston Do You Read; Le Guin's The Dispossessed (and her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas); and Gibson's Neuromancer. A dose of J. G. Ballard is also recommended.
Whereas the prevailing tone of early SF was all agog with excitement at what a wondrous universe there is out there to explore (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), the prevailing tone of much current writing in the field is gloom about what we are likely to do to it.
I suppose Lewis would have been thinking more of Wells and Verne in his day. I read his trilogy many years ago and thought that, unlike in the Narnia books, the theology was laid on a bit heavy-handedly. Those who like them will probably also enjoy James Blish's A Case of Conscience and Black Easter, both good examples of SF built around serious theological questions.
Lewis's major sci-fi influences were Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus), Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros), Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men) and Wells (First Men in the Moon and The Time Machine).
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