Children’s fantasy on NPR

Yesterday, I caught an NPR segment on children’s fantasy literature. It was a really good segment — Neil Gaiman is always a seemingly effortlessly good interviewee — but a comment by Christopher Paolini, the whiz kid whose first novel was written when he was 15 years old, made a comment that I fundementally disagreed with. He said — and you can listen to the segment online yourself and hear his wording — that J.R.R. Tolkien’s works weren’t really concerned with people going away and returning home, grown up.

If you consider Lord of the Rings to be a single novel (as Tolkien did), I think it’s hard to find a fantasy novel of his that isn’t about this. In The Hobbit, Bilbo is fundementally changed when he’s roused out of his comfortable home and taken out into the wide world, which is much more complex, much darker but more wonderful than he imagined back in Hobbiton. In Lord of the Rings, the book ends with the hobbits returning home to the Shire, not as child-like innocents who have to be protected by non-hobbits every step of the way, but as heroes capable of routing Sauruman from their homeland all on their own. Even Farmer Giles of Ham features a character going away on what he thinks is a simple journey but ending up becoming someone he never expected as a result.

Anyway, an otherwise great piece, especially the talk about Narnia (I had no idea that Gaiman had written a sequel in the Flights anthology).

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