After a binge of LOTR and the Silmarillion, I find myself hooked on Tolkien’s gorgeous, often poetic, “elevated” style (yet still modern enough to be accessible).
I don’t want to slow down my reading streak but I’m having trouble switching to other authors with more pared down, contemporary writing styles.
What other books/authors outside of Fantasy might scratch that itch?
by hanburgundy
2 Comments
My strong recommendation would be HP Lovecraft. He fancied himself an 18th century gentleman, though he wrote through the 1930s.
Would I compare HPL’s prose directly to Tolkien’s? No, not by any stretch. But HPL’s cosmic horror is defined just as much by his highly elevated (arguably purple at times) prose as he is by his sense of dread!
The Worm Ouroboros was actually written before Tolkien, and he deeply admired the prose while civilly despising the story. It’s written in a sort of Elizabethan style and/but it’s an absolute joy to read.
Charles Williams was a member of the inklings who wrote fantasy novels based on a sort of mystic Anglicanism, some of them are fantastic in the process lovely but also has that touch of social satire the British do so well. Descent Into Hell and The Place of the Lion are both wonderful.
Looking outside of fantasy, Sylvia Townsend Warner, E M Forster, and Galsworthy are my prose gods. I know exactly what you mean about how hard it is to step down from that kind of writing to the current – what Martin Amis once characterized as “a sentence is a paragraph, a word is a sentence”— style. If you don’t mind a heavy dose of social satire and social life, Forster’s Howards End or Room with a View, or Galsworthy’s Man of Property are among the best books ever written.
Warner wrote fantastic novels and short stories, and if you don’t mind a bit of feminism you may love her 1926 book Lolly Willowes, about a Jane-Austen-like old maid who horrifies her family by moving alone to the country, only to discover that her landlady is in a coven.
She also wrote a series of short stories about fairies that appeared in the New Yorker in the 1970s(!!), collected in a book called Kingdoms of Elfin— they are definitely not for kids! And the writing style…