JRRT, JKR, UKLG, and the complexity of evil

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 19512

--- In HPforGrownups at y...> Amy Z wrote, and quotes LeGuin:
> 
> >    In many fantasy tales of the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries 
> the 
> > tension between good and evil, light and dark, is drawn 
absolutely 
> > clearly, as a battle, the good guys on one side and the bad guys 
on 
> > the other, cops and robbers, Christians and heathens, heroes and 
> > villains.  In such fantasies I believe the author has tried to 
> force 
> > reason to lead him where reason cannot go, and has abandoned the 
> > faithful and frightening guide he should have followed, the 
> shadow.  
> > These are false fantasies, rationalized fantasies.  They are not 
> the 
> > real thing <snip>

Another example of an earlier 20th-Century work which confounds the 
above description is GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.  And I 
can't really describe how the book so confounds without giving the 
multiple surprises and the astonishing resolution of the story. The 
basic plot of the novel has the protagonist - a undercover police 
officer from Scotland Yard - infilitrating the sinister Council of 
Days, a group of evil anarchists (at a time when the word "anarchist" 
provoked the same visceral reaction that "terrorist" elicits from us) 
led by the monstrous Sunday (our protagonist's code name 
is "Thursday," hence the title). 

The climatic surprise of the book is finding out who Sunday really is.

This 1904 novel is available on line

http://www.ccel.org/c/chesterton/thursday/thursday.html

  - CMC