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The Two Towers
"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."
"I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to."
On The Road
"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road."
"It was embarrassing. Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night?"
A Few Thoughts
The Two Towers benefits greatly from being the middle child in Tolkien's Lord of The Rings series. I didn't even include The Fellowship of The Ring in this tournament because, due to Tolkien's elaborative style, it gets off the ground in the slowest way possible and isn't among my favorites. It's an intriguing read the first time through when you don't know the story, but I'll never scan its pages a second time because its plot moves like molasses uphill. Further, as I detailed earlier with Return of the King, Tolkien was dissatisfied to let the narrative end and extended the resolution by chapters more than was necessary. The Two Towers, though, is safe from positional extenders and hits the ground running about as fast as anything written by Tolkien does.
Every battle I've ever imagined models itself from the Battle at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. It's the definitive large-scale fight scene. I can't imagine how hard it would be to write a scene with tens of thousands of participants, but Tolkien pulls it off. It has the right mix of descriptions of what the major characters are doing at any given moment and what successes the greater mobs are having with larger objectives. Tolkien's not alone or unique in this ability, but he was one of the first to pull off the large feat of this large feature.
As Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski famously detailed, vehicles in science fiction works often travel at the speed of plot. So, too, do so many horses, eagles and dragons in Tolkien's world. What are the odds of the ring-bearing hobbits encountering Boromir's surviving brother on the outskirts of Mordor? How about Gandalf getting to the gates or Isengard just in time to find the two lost hobbits? And who could forget the sudden appearance of a forest at the aforementioned Helm's Deep. It's not that I mean to put a premium value on suspension of disbelief in a book about hobbits and wizards and the like, but I always remembered The Two Towers as feeling a little unnatural. You knew the good guys would eventually win because of the good luck and chance encounters that feel less like serendipity and more like deus ex machina.
Still, it's easy to say that 60 years on when even fantasy novels have become much coarser and more morally ambiguous than the genre that Tolkien fathered. It's a small foible in a book that had its role as a gamechanger for 20th century fiction.
Before I read On The Road, a friend once remarked to me that every one of his buddies who'd read it proceeded to get sad. It was a confusing thing, given that it's a semi-autobiographical road trip adventure, but reading the book made me understand: Kerouac writes this style so well that he makes people sad that it's not them. Luckily, I feel as though a couple 6000/8000 km driving jags with friends that I experienced before experiencing Kerouac helped vaccinate me against this sadness, but my reaction notwithstanding; it's a testament to Kerouac's writing ability that he is so capable of expressing the feelings of experiencing the open road with friends and youth and drugs and everything that has come to exemplify the decades immediately after On The Road's publishing.
One of Kerouac's greatest achievements is Dean Moriarty. It's questionable how much of his character is created and how much of Neal Cassady's real-life insanity wrote itself. I feel that almost everyone has a Dean in their life; a friend who is at once endearing and infuriating, who's a beacon for both adventure and trouble. Sal Paradise's on-again, off-again friendship with Dean against an ever-changing backdrop of US cities and wild nights, though a rare experience, is definitely relatable just for the confounding comfort he finds in that relationship.
Like much autobiographical fiction, one of On The Road's weakest points is its ending. I complained about The Two Towers' coincidental timings; meanwhile, On The Road is never serendipitous, but a series of recollected adventures. It sort of feels like a collection of five short stories without any tension in their ending, with the plot just floating as if on waves without any real destination. This is both good and bad: the best parts of any road trip are the in-the-moment decisions of following the road as it takes you—but that doesn't lend itself extensively to the fiction novel format. It's not that it's a novel where nothing really happens, but moreso that it's a novel where nothing really changes.
That said, the purpose of reading On The Road isn't just about passive reception of a story. It's about Kerouac's ability to turn a phrase, and about following him and his friends on an adventure worth sharing.
Head-to-Head
Characters: Both are rife with interesting folks. It's a little odd deciding in favor of a book whose characters are as rooted in fact as in fiction, and what's more, Tolkien's fellowship are the literal basis for most fantasy character tropes today. But, the deciding factor: Dean manages to be the most one-of-a-kind rare bird that everyone knows, and that duality is impressive.
Advantage: On The Road.
Plot: Frodo & Sam's adventure manages to be more exotic than any of Sal & Dean's. And that's not considering the orc-filled battlefields to supplement them!
Advantage: The Two Towers.
Ending: The Two Towers ends on several cliffhangers because that's what trilogies' second books are supposed to do—but, for the fourth time in this blog, dat Battle.
Advantage: The Two Towers.
Language/Writing: Kerouac's style elevates a glorified collection of real-life short stories to a readable, mostly-cohesive novel. And he's insightful, to boot.
Advantage: On The Road.
Philsophy: Lord of the Rings is largely about the narrative. While there are themes of scorched earth and a bleak future in The Two Towers, On The Road had #yolo down to an art form 30 years before Drake was even born.
Advantage: On The Road.
Winner Winner Turkey Supper
It's funny: ask me what my favorite Lord of The Rings book is, and I'll almost definitely answer The Two Towers. But, while Return of the King made it through to round two, The Two Towers faced a tougher first round draw for Tolkien, and his best book is sent packing.
On The Road travels on to the second round.
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