Good Idea, Creative Genius(es), Failed Final Product

The book you see above is the third book in a trilogy conceived by George Lucas and written by comic genius Christ Claremont. To start: George Lucas is a brilliant storyteller. He combines the best of world mythology and good old fashioned serial action/adventure. He has an amazing capacity to tell a yarn better than just anybody alive today. No, I'm not joking. He's that good.

Chris Claremont is several rungs lower on the creativity and brilliance ladders respectively, but he's still good. He's the guy behind the Uncanny X-Men, and his 15+ years on the comic are unparalleled. We get to watch Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart on the big screen as Logan and Professor X because of what Claremont did with the Uncanny title. The X-Men, Marvel's biggest moneymaker, is alive and well because Claremont took Stan Lee's team of heroes idea and ran a double marathon with it. I love comics. I think Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are brilliant, but I'm a comic fan because of Chris Claremont - 'nuff said.

The story in the book above is the continuation of the movie "Willow." George Lucas and Ron Howard made "Willow" in the 1988. It was a commercial flop, but it retains a cult-like following to this day. I watched the movie on cable as a 9 year old kid and loved it. "Willow" is probably the only reason I ever picked up "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." It was a great movie by kid standards. I would juggle my plastic sword like Madmartigan and fight imaginary Kael's all day long. Great stuff.

So you'd think that the book above and it's two predecessors would be full of brilliance that an imagination-starved adult like myself would feast upon. The story is average. The re-characterization by Claremont is impressive. But the writing is absolutely horrific. And that kills the books for me. I still recommend them to fans, but I use examples from the book to teach kids how not to write. It's not just the comma splices and the run-ons, which are annoying; rather, it's Claremont's attempt to novelize what he has conceived of as a comic. The gaps in the story are absurd. I can only attribute this to Claremont's long-standing ability to tell great stories utilizing both text and images. These books are built to utilize both texts and images too, but Claremont has no art to help him tell his story. So, he ends up rambling endlessly trying to describe in intimate detail what a good comic artist can do in a frame. And the books suffer. Claremont jumps from episode to episode in the novel as if he could rely on comicbook time and pacing; this destroys the narrative flow. And the books suffer.

Some of the most creative minds alive are writing in sci-fi/fantasy. The fans are knowledgable and demanding, more so than in other genres even. Given this, I have yet to meet a reader who has anything good to say about the Shadow War books. And that, in and of itself, is the most revealing criticism of all. It's a damn shame too, because George Lucas's idea is still good, Chris Claremont's additions are pretty good , but things just don't work out in the end.

The Road

The Road is a small, but powerful, stretch for Cormac McCarthy who tends to write about the brutality and savagery of the US borderlands much like Martin Scorcese writes about the mob on the East coast. The setting is a dysmal post-apocalyptic world in which a father and son walk down the road towards an imaginary better life.

On the road, they meet bandits, cannibals, and other unsavory characters. In all this, the father is trying to teach the son the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. The conflict comes from trying to teach morality in a world that is not immoral so much as it is amoral. We all know the central ethical question of Les Miserables - is it okay to punish one who commits a crime to feed a child? But in McCarthy's twisted world, people are food for others, so the question is no longer relevant. Instead, we are left to wonder: can there be an ultimate good in a primal state of nature? And if so, can good be learned by a child?

In their quest for survival, the father and son attempt to answer these questions. And in the journey of the book, McCarthy has written something eloquent, beautiful, and ultimately redeeming about mankind.

I first read this book before my child was born. I imagined myself as the son and my father as the father in the story. The book became for me an examination of my relationship with my father. I asked myself what he taught me and what I ultimately learned. A later reading, after my child was born, had me switching characters. I empathized more with the father on the second reading, and it made me consider my own role in shaping my child's life. In both cases, I had to wonder about the decisions I make in life, just as the characters are forced to endlessly examine their own choices.