Lalaith - I can't answer you that yet as I'm enjoying reading it nice and slowly.
And I believe Adam T will indeed be inheriting his father's role!
Now I've listened to that AS Byatt review with interest as her book Possession is my second favourite; it's a work that has all the required 'literati' features but seems to go a bit beyond that too and satirises the 'establishment'. Plus it's a beautiful story. If you are looking for an evil character she has a fabulously loathsome one in this novel in the form of Mortimer Cropper, the academic who has decamped to an incredibly wealthy US university and is engaged in buying up every last scrap of memorabilia or paperwork relating to the fictional poet Ashe (a thinly disguised fictional Tennyson) and squirreling it away in the archives where only the 'authorised' can ever view it. I think some folk here (not me
) might find the evil displayed by him redolent of their own feelings about the control over the Tolkien archive?
Byatt, like a lot of the literati alas, displays her snobbery in the interview. Slipping in that her mother went to Cambridge and how clever she was as a child by reading her mother's Cambridge texts, even though its irrelevant. Had to laugh at how she saw people re-enacting battles as 'strange' - personally the thought of getting dressed up in 'a nice dress' and going out to 'dinner in a nice restaurant' with one's mother is strange to me. She may have been born in Sheffield but she was born into a life quite, quite far removed from The Full Monty. But anyway...snobbery and inverse snobbery aside...as that's to be expected in a BBC review (unless reviewing something by a young writer when such folk always want to appear as 'street' as is possible with a cut-glass accent *cynic*).
Under all of this there was an interesting counterpoint to Drout's argument that there is too much description in LotR. Byatt's beef with CoH is that there is not
enough description, and I'm inclined to agree that what the works after Lord of the Rings
are lacking is the long, lingering descriptions that we found there! We are told of long lists of places but have little or no context in which to place them - we are also told of many places and swords with multiple names in LotR but it doesn't seem such a bombardment
because of all the lingering descriptions!
Lawson we'll ignore. He's a nice presenter and looks pleasantly unthreatening in his tweed jacket and beard/glasses combo (Viz comic have spoofed him - they do like popping the bubbles of the literati, meh), but he's not a terribly original writer himself I'm afraid. He might pick up on Dyson's supposed gripe "Not another effing elf" but has someone said to him "Not another effing satire about the media"?
