Sacrilege saith the hordes (The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien)

Member Name: dave27

Product:	The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Date:	06/06/02 (341 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Still way above average

Disadvantages: Suffers from comparison with LOTR

There is clearly an art to enjoying The Hobbit, with the obvious thing being not to have read the Lord of the Rings first, because when you do so you will soon find that the Hobbit is little more than a fanciful fairytale of little people, little adventures, great danger and little point. The Hobbit is always cited as being a classic novel, one of the very best of the sword and sorcery genre, but having just read it for the first time in almost 30 years, I can honestly say it was a sad disappointment, even at less than four quid from my local Tesco.

I was surprised and overjoyed when I found it at this bargain price, because my interest in Tolkien and all of his works was reawakened by seeing the wonderful feature film version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring just before last Christmas. I'd always been a mad keen fan of the book, and had looked forward for ages to seeing what promised to be a wonderful film. You'll know, if you have read my review elsewhere, that the film fully lived up to expectations.

I'd always looked forward to reading The Hobbit as an adult, because my only real experience of it was brief snatches of memories from infant school where my very fanciable young female teacher read excerpts dealing mainly with a despicable acts of the bug eyed eyed monster, Gollum, "My Precious, what hass it got in its pocketses". It is always seemed a really magical book from those brief excerpts, although I never actually got round to reading the whole thing, just those blissful excerpts.

I graduated on to the Lord of the rings when I was in the first year of secondary school and happened across the second volume, The Two Towers which completely floored me. It didn't take me very long at all to check out the entire book and persuade my mother to get me my own copy, which I loved, and read over and over again.

Perennially over the years I came back and back again to the wonderful
book but never checked out its predecessor, the Hobbit. Then, as I said at the start, after seeing the film and coming across the offer in Tesco I couldn't help myself and seized the moment.

Getting through The Hobbit took me about a week and a half, but I can't say that I wasn't able to put it down at any point in time, it just didn't have the same addictive, compulsive, wonderful magic of the follow-up. It's not that it was a bad or even unsatisfactory read, it's just it suffered enormously by comparison to what was, is and always will be a masterpiece of storytelling, the like of which we are never likely to see repeated. Next to this any book would seem shallow and uninteresting, so naturally the Hobbit suffered.

It felt a bit to me like a series of half finished sketches, unrelated to each other more than tenuously, but stitched together into one whole, in a quite disjointed fashion. The story of Bilbo, Gandalf and a bunch of dwarves all searching for a massive hoard of gold and treasure guarded by a dragon in a far off land was a decent enough vehicle for Tolkien's sketches, but that's all they were, even the one about the Trolls that got turned to stone, a bit like the Portuguese footie team today against the US of A, another one bites the dust, eh what?

You might well think I've been a bit harsh on what is still probably a decent enough book, I'm sorry if you feel that way, but I'm only being honest and that's what reviews are all about, don't you think? Well actually, I don't really care what you think because variety is the spice of life and the secret of writing a good review, shame Old JRR isn't still around to cop a lesson or two from a real master like dave27, perhaps his estate would like to get in touch and we can make a deal on a decent rewrite, of course, Mrs D would make a far more scary monster than any bloody Trolls or goblins, after all, turning people
to stone is her party trick.

I'm not going to spin this one out anymore because I don't see the point in going over and over the same ground too many times. The Hobbit is loved by many, many people and so it should be, I just don't happen to be one of those, and I don't expect you to love Leeds United, even though you be a fool not to.

Evening all...

Summary: