he first decision this reviewer made on starting to read Pat
Murphy's giggly new novel was not to think about the grave of J.R.R.
Tolkien and him turning in it. This saved a lot of useless ponder time.
There and Back Again has about as much to do with The Hobbit: Or,
There and Back Again (1937) as "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by A. Child has to do with The Book of Job.
Something must be said about the connection, all the same.
The Hobbit is both sombre and hilarious; There and Back Again
is neither. In The Hobbit, Tolkien (most clearly in the revised
editions from 1951 on) hints at moral issues bigger than Bilbo can grasp,
and makes sure we understand that most (if not all) the named characters
in the story are deeper and darker than they first seemed. In There and
Back Again, Murphy utters a few sage comments on the value of friends,
and makes sure that all the named characters in the story turn out nicer
and more huggable than we could have first thought they were.
But There and Back Again does have a story of its own, told by
Pat Murphy pretending to write in collaboration with a certain Max
Merriwell, whose photograph on the back flap uncannily resembles Pat
Murphy wearing a small mop on her chin, or perhaps Shirley Temple wearing
a small mop on her chin. Max Merriwell (whose name above the mop
uncannily evokes one of Frodo's pals) does not, in other words, exist.
But the book does. So back to it.
Wormholes and pirates
Here we go. We are in a space opera universe, with miners in
space and wormholes and pirates and clones and Resurrectionists (who use
clones for spare parts) and a female fighter cyborg who is an ace pilot
and pataphysicians (a nice touch) and a hauntingly wise museum curator
whose name (we learn at the end of the book) is Pat Murphy and colonists
and more usual suspects.
The tale starts in our own solar system's asteroid belt, which is
owned by a tribe of short plump humans who call themselves norbits (from
trying to say "in orbit" when you're drunk) and inhabit cozy cave-like
hollowed-out asteroids. The nicest and laziest and plumpest of these
norbits is a middle-aged scavenger farmer named Bailey (from trying to
say "Bilbo" with a mop in your mouth) who wants nothing better than to
make his garden grow. Gitana has other ideas.
Gitana is a tall female who looks like she might be from Old
Earth. She tells Bailey that the Farr family, female clones who have made
their fortune identifying wormhole routes (a neat play on dwarf miners)
through the galaxy, is coming to have dinner. It turns out that he has
scavenged a message pod which contains a call for help from a far-flung
Farr who may have discovered a mother lode of holograph wormhole maps.
From this point, we know the rest.
Edgy clone friends
Bailey and the Farr clones and Gitana go on a great adventure to
find the wormhole map in a cave at the centre of the galaxy. They undergo
an assortment of adventures, picking up friends and enemies as they go.
Bailey is beleaguered briefly by a demented creature half-dismembered by
a mad Resurrectionist; the creature has lost its Moebius-strip bracelet,
which allows its bearer to make time go fast or slow around him, and
thinks (rightly) Bailey may have absconded with it. Indeed, he uses it to
escape the gollum, which is the last we see of the gollum (this is a
nice book).
Again and again he uses his Moebius-strip bracelet (hence Ring)
to get himself and his edgy clone friends out of various jams, as they
progress by easy wormhole stages to the Heart of the Galaxy, where a
small moon, hollowed out aeons past by the Old Ones, contains a great
hoard of maps.
But the moon is guarded by what the cast calls a Boojum
(quatrains from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876) have
headed each chapter of There and Back Again) but which is in fact a
robot defense device of the Old Ones. Not until a great assortment of
pirates and clones and colonists and pataphysicians and cyborgs and
Bailey himself join forces can first the Boojum, and afterwards several
shiploads of unnamed Resurrectionists, be defeated.
Bailey then takes his Ring back home.
Why parody Tolkien?
It's a story which, pumped up to its regulation 300 pages, is
very little more complicated than this synopsis. Why then is there such a
to-do about the thing? Why Lewis Carroll (whose great nonsense poem says
exactly the reverse of anything Tolkien might have said about the
meaning of the quest in life or literature)? Why the author's note at the
end explicitly and rather portentously tying the plot of There and Back
Again to the myth of the hero expounded by Joseph Campbell in The Hero
With a Thousand Faces (1949)? Why parody Tolkien at all if you don't
mean it?--after all, no discernible lesson has been extracted from any of
the parallels between model and mock.
And why Max Merriwell? And if Max Merriwell is actually meant to
be a pseudonym (that is, a disguise), why blow his cover for the book on
the very cover of the book?
And why a Ring which does its bearer nothing but good? Tolkien's
Ring, even in The Hobbit, is anything but a free lunch. Tolkien's Ring
(and Wagner's) say to their bearers: Do what you will. Then pay for it.
Murphy's Ring says: Do what you will. Because you are nice.
But hey, why so heavy. Isn't Pat Max Murphy Merriwell just having
some harmless retro fun, here at the end of the century, looking back
indulgently to the days when stories meant? There and Back Again is just a game, right?
Right.
Right right right.
But I hear something turning in the grave.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at
the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
