Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton Book

I am not a scholar, so my reading in letters is haphazard at best. So, as far as I know, this is the first literary treatment of writers who came after Tolkien, but there's a twist. This work does not tread Tom Shippey's ground (it's not an apologia for Tolkien and his influence); Butler is neutral about Tolkien'even-handed with pitfalls and praises'as he looks at four writers who attended Oxford when Tolkien (and Lewis) were teaching there. And then goes on to examine the work of writers who may or may not have been influenced by Tolkien, but who then went on to find their distinctive fantastical paradigm and voice.

Alan Garner, arguably, shows the most influence with his first popular book, though he loudly denied it later. I remember reading Weirdstone as a kid, and thinking that it was a rehash of JRRT. But with each succeeding book he left the shape of the Tolkienian quest tale farther behind. Butler gives us a good look at Garner's subsequent work from the inside and outside.

His take on Diana Wynne Jones is excellent. I'm glad when I see discussions of her work other than the witty (and true) Tough Guide to Fantasy. Butler, being a writer himself, has an exacting eye for Jones's qualities. Here's a random quote, which I think enlighting on why Jones isn't more popular with those who need to slot books into neat categories:

…Jones has come to cross generic border with increasing frequency. Jones herself has expressed impatience with generic restrictions, and certainly there is no reason why writers need feel constrained by convention from combining genres, but such hybridization is not without consequences. [SF] tends to extrapolate from our current world to a time or place that may be vastly different, but that still belongs to the realm of hypothetical possibility. Its distance from our reality can be measured along what in Jakobsonian terms we might call the syntagmatic axis. Fantasy, by contrast, is related to our world by analogy rather than by extrapolation, and is a fundamentally paradigmatic form. This is, of course, a crude formulation: there are many science fiction worlds that have metaphorical application to our own, and I have argued elsewhere that a purely metaphorical reading of fantasy is unlikely to be satisfactory.

And here's a bit from the opening of the chapter called "Plotting the Map to Logres":

The synthetic and analytic capacities, the abilities to see connections and to make distinctions, are basic tools of perception and of argument. But there are fashions in these as in other things, and I think it fair to say that in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Garner, Cooper, Jones, and Lively began to be published, it was in a climate more hospitable to the synthetic impulse…[interesting summary of Eliade, Murray, Graves, and Rees]…As I write we seem to be at the opposite end of the cycle…[interesting summation of debunking and reassessment by skeptical academics of subsequent generation]…While academics retrench, a portion of the general public seems eager to accept each fashionable New Age idea that comes to its notice, often with little apparent demand, and even some scorn, for hard evidence. With a dogmatically skeptical academic community on one hand, and a credulous popular taste for all things mystical on the other, fantasy writers of the present day can only look back in envy at the relatively-homogeneous climate of thirty years ago, when it seemed much easier to find territory both imaginatively fertile and intellectually defensible

As you can see, this is no gosh-wow fangush, it's a fascinating, witty, well-written, meticulously researched piece of work. (And I might add on the short list for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for this year.)