The Worlds of Fantasy

Last night I watched The Worlds of Fantasy which was about J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion) and Mervyn Peake (author of the Gormenghast books). It was an interesting show. And of course, although the two writers both were writing at around the same time, and they both wrote fantasy, they really were worlds apart in terms of style and subject. Gormenghast for example features no magic or monsters. The books are set in and around the vast, decaying castle of Gormenghast and the characters in it are recognisably human, but really grotesque charicatures. Peake started out as an illustrator, and that was very much his style. Apparently he applied to become a war artist during the Second World War but was refused and ended up being drafted into the Army, where he was such a bad soldier no-one knew what to do with him and so just left him to his writing. Tolkien was a soldier as well, in the trenches during the First World War, and a lot of people claimed that that was his inspiration with some of his fiction, but Tolkien claimed that by the time he started writing seriously he could barely remember any of it. I always think it's incredible to be able to create a complete, detailed imaginary world.

It was another really quite uneventful day at work, although the computer systems seemed to be working okay.

On my way home I got the latest issue of Empire magazine, so that was pretty interesting. It had a feature on the history of film novelisations. I used to read a lot of them when I was younger. Especially of films that I couldn't get in to see because of the censorship ratings.