I love Tolkien's work. I have not read it recently, but the Lord of the Rings sticks out in my memory as one of the most deeply mysterious of all books I've read. It is the essence of the modern epic.
It attracts me in just a few ways primarily. I've never considered its characters themselves the most likable, interesting, or deep. That is not the strong suit. The absence of any romantic angle in the story save that between Aragorn and Arwen, which I scarcely consider romantic due to the distance and perhaps the distance between now and when I last read the trilogy.
Instead to me there are two great attractions. One is the lore and history behind the world. The idea of legends, mysteries, unexplored depths and heights and places, shadows, corners and secret passages have always held a special place in my heart. Tolkien's work is perhaps most famous for the deeply plotted ages of history and heroes that provide this exceedingly rich backdrop to his story.
The other attraction is the quest, whose parts are two: the enemy and the goal. The quests in Tolkien's work are so amazing partially because of the extremes of their properties. Sauron is this excessively evil, unfathomably powerful entity with armies and dread warriors at his beck and call. The consequences of his ascendance are no less than the destruction of all that is good about the world. Likewise the goal of the quest is rigidly narrow in focus. You must take this dangerous object to this remote location and dispose of it there. There can be no wavering, and the slightest mistake will bring about doom.
The similarities between this quest and that of R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse series is what excites me so about the latter. Except that, for my taste, Bakker adds some things to the soup that, if you'll forgive me, make his epic even more epic.
The lore of his world, while not equal to Tolkien's is at least of the same scale, which itself is very rare. His stories have remote elder gods, strange concepts of magic and power, ancient sects of monks trained in the ways of the mind and fist, wicked demons, and the echoes of a catastrophe from millennia past. Every nook of his story is laden with symbolism and linguistic, religious, and metaphysical allusion, from the onta which sorcerers manipulate to holy war that comprises the first three books.
Bakker's quest is even more grueling and merciless than Tolkien's. While Tolkien wrote mostly in allegory, sometimes abstracting or distilling the failings of men, Bakker is up close and personal with the flaws of the human heart. Before the characters in the story can even get about the business of saving the world, they have to save themselves from each others' treachery.
The goal is likewise more singular. Sauron is abstract evil to which I can attach some vague foreboding but whose exact properties are never really made clear except in the context of the Fellowship's quest against him. Mog-Pharau, the abomination that will precipitate the Second Apocalypse, is a being so unspeakably evil that his very existence on the Earth causes all children across the world to be stillborn. Moreover his strength is so great that he is vulnerable to only one known weapon, which has itself been lost to the ages, and he manifests as a tornado that can singlehandedly defeat armies, while also commanding goblin-like hordes, ogres, and dragons. To put it shortly, there's a lot more meat on this bad guy than Sauron. And there is no Gandalf-like figure to guide the heroes in Bakker's novels, only weak humans scrambling with scarcely a source of light.
I would not after only thirty minutes of study presume to judge the better of the two. But it is with this mindset that I eagerly await the White Luck Warrior, the fifth book in Bakker's series, due out some time this year or next.
