Conan the Babbling

So last time I said I’d review some new piece of fiction, but nobody’s sent me anything that really sparks my imagination. That’s not a real criticism: I’ve had a tough week of editing a piece of academic writing of mine, and I just haven’t had the brain-power to think through somebody’s new fiction. Next week.

But the other night, my son (age 15) and I were home alone, and I suggested we watch a movie. He said OK, but had no further input to give. I suggested genres, and he said whatever, and so I homed in on Action-Adventure, and he said OK, so finally I said, Modern, Scifi, or Fantasy, and he said Fantasy, so that was something. I put on Conan the Barbarian, because why not?

Watching it now—and I’ve seen it many times—I had two bits of my brain working that aren’t usually, or not in the past. First, my fantasy-writer brain; second, seeing it through Sam’s eyes. And I found some remarkable things.

The screenplay constantly runs into well-worn tropes and clichés… and then ignores them. At the start, Conan’s family is murdered along with his entire village, and this starts a whole revenge thing, and you know for sure two things: 1) Conan will be obviously driven by this throughout the film, and 2) there will be flashbacks to his dad talking about Crom and the Riddle of Steel.

I suppose on the surface, the film does actually do these things, sort of, but not really. There are no actual flashbacks, for one thing, and for another we don’t really believe that Conan cares all that much about revenge. He does, but it’s sort of notching his sword: if he had never run across Thulsa Doom again, he’d have pretty much forgotten the matter.

Then there are these incidents that don’t have anything to do with the plot and yet get major billing. There’s the bit where he falls into an ancient tomb and finds a sword, but we never know whose sword it was or why it was there. Some old king, whatever. And there’s the bit where he runs across this lady in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere, who seduces him (not hard to do) and then sort of turns into a fanged monster (as one does). He flings her in the fire, and she turns into a bunch of shooting fireballs and flies off into the distance, and… nothing. It’s just a story.

What’s brilliant about this is that it is exactly how the stories work—I mean the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. Conan is going along, doing his thing, and he stumbles on something. Stuff happens, usually involving sex and always a lot of violence, and then that’s it. It’s not part of anything, it’s just stuff that happened to Conan.

Where I’m going with this is that I think it’s something that makes Howard’s work successful and is pretty much impossible in the current climate of fantasy writing. Everything has to be part of a big plot: you can’t just have an incident for its own sake, revel in it, and move on. The whole Game of Thrones furore is an example, as is of course Peter Jackson’s interpretation of the Tolkien books. Everything completely incidental is stripped, and it’s all plot all the time.

In The Hobbit, let’s recall, the incident with Gollum and the Ring isn’t really all that different from the wonderful incident with the trolls near the opening. It’s just a thing. As it happens, the Ring is quite useful to Bilbo later on, but that’s not plot, it’s (to use Propp’s terminology) the Transmission of the Magical Agent. Gollum as Donor doesn’t return as a later villain or anything, he’s just there. Same with Elrond translating the moon runes on the map: he’s not coming back into this, he’s just useful in passing.

I think this is part of what makes Tolkien so good, actually: he stitches together unrelated incidents in such a way that we know they’re somehow integral to one another, but ultimately it’s never explained. You can treat The Hobbit as a string of tales (Bilbo and the spiders—Addercop to you too—or Bilbo and the palace of Thranduil, or whatever), and that doesn’t change its functioning as a novel, but with hindsight from The Lord of the Rings, it really does seem like Tolkien has been planning it all from the start. (Yes, I know, in a sense he was, but I think actually at a more functional level he wasn’t. My guess.)

Coming back to Conan, one of the truly nifty things is that Conan gets killed. And resurrected. And then in the final battle his dead girlfriend shows up with no real explanation. Which is nice but never commented on. And then at the end, the super-special sword that his father made, in the opening forging shots (whoopee!), gets broken. Not in a big moment, but just a fight between Conan and the bad guy with the mustache. And that sucks and all, I guess, but whatever, because once Thulsa Doom is dead, Conan just heaves the thing down the stairs and forgets about it. It’s just a thing, right? Riddle of Steel.

I don’t mean to give advice as such, but I do think that fantasy writers could take a tip from this. Movies are much more constrained than novels, but Conan got away with it! In a novel, allow some things to happen because they’re nifty and feel right at the time, and then (as the song has it) Let It Go.

Consider the thriller. Just because someone has built the best gun in the universe, and the hero encounters this guy, and he’s got an assassination job on hand, it isn’t actually necessary that he come to terms and acquire this gun. But in a thriller, that’s weird: as with Chekov, if the gun appears in act 1, it’s got to get used in act 3.

Fantasy isn’t like that. You can have irrelevant incidents, because they do have a function: they flesh out the world. This is the kind of world where the following really weird things happen, albeit not often, and it’s not because of fate or the gods or whatever, it’s just stuff. A fantasy world is chockablock with stuff, and if you make it all actually meaningful, you’re setting yourself an impossible plotting task and actually tasking (and boring) the readers. Just shove it in and Let It Go.

Like Conan with the sword. Done its job? Not useful hereafter? Chuck it and walk on.

If you haven’t seen Conan the Barbarian, definitely check it out.

While you’re at it, check out The Black Eyed Witch, by Rowan Staeffler, this week’s share.