Looking for the King — Revisited
After Marcel Bülles’ positive review, I put Looking for the King by David Downing on my wishlist and was promptly given the book for Christmas. After reading, I cannot join the laudations.
At least the reader cannot say he has not been warned – though the warning comes after the novel in ‘Source Material’. Downing wonders whenever he reads historical fiction “which parts are history and which parts are fiction” (267). The question is easily answered for his own work: Whenever one of the Inklings appears, the reader gets more or less literal quotes from their works. The diligent scholar gives reliable references. But what does that mean for the story?
The main character Tom, given to feeling intellectually overwhelmed by all things British for no apparent reason, first encounters C.S. Lewis in the Turf pub (without the usual problem of finding the location). With Tom’s inferiority complex, you soon get the impression of some, admittedly well-written, fan-fiction à la “I’m totally not worthy, but if I met my favourite author/scholar, I’m sure we’d get on like a house on fire.”
Yet that is not the major flaw of the novel. It is rather the cardboard cut-out feel one gets when faced with the Inklings. Meeting Tolkien at his home for the first time, we get quotations from Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography on the man comparing himself to Hobbits and the ‘green great dragon’ incident. And, by the by, “I love trees and gardens, anywhere I can get away from cities and machines. I try to avoid travel and adventures, and I dress plainly. But I do have a fondness for splendid waistcoats” (159). These statements are all made on only one page and the fictional Tolkien goes on in this haphazard manner, touching on all sorts of aspects of his scholarly and fictional endeavours, spiced with behavioural observations gleaned from Carpenter. It feels as if you get the ‘Tolkien Digest’ but it is certainly not a realistic way to portray a character in a novel, unless we are talking stream of consciousness. No one would bombard a total stranger with all these essentials in just five minutes of casual conversation.
It works to some extent with Charles Williams, whom we encounter in a lecture hall where he talks of the Holy Grail and we get an overview of his theological theories. The situation lends itself to conveying basic concepts unlike the private meetings with the other Inklings.
While Downing’s quotational approach is an interesting exercise in itself, it certainly does not function to flesh out plausible characters in an adventure novel. Putting a few more imaginary words into the Inklings’ mouths would definitely have aided this here reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.
Reference edition: Downing, David. Looking for the King. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010.
Marie-Noëlle Biemer studied English, Russian and Business at the Justus-Liebig-Universität in Gießen and Business Studies at the University of Bradford, UK. She wrote her diploma thesis on ‘William Morris’s Prose Romances and Their Influence on Tolkien’, taking a look at Morris’s late fantastic romances and some striking similarities that can be found in Tolkien’s works on Middle-earth. She now works as a news editor in Frankfurt. As Vice-Chair of the board of the German Tolkien Society, she spends her free time organising events for Tolkien enthusiasts and is an editor of the society’s Webpage and academic journal Hither Shore.
