I was going to say that this novel was just the antidote for The Children of Húrin, but on second thought they have a lot in common. Maclean is a quest story too, and is also about defeat. And it has a Morgoth-like figure of unmotivated evil: Maclean's father. But whereas Tolkien's tragedy reads like the work of the final Victorian medievalist, Donaldson's feels like a small mid-20th-century Canadian novel, like As For Me and My House or, in the case of the war scenes, Generals Die In Bed. It recounts a day in 1943 of a middle-aged First War veteran, following him around a small New Brunswick town as he tries to scrape together enough cash for a birthday present and a bottle of booze and dwells on the chances that shaped his life for the worse. Maclean's wanderings, filled with flashbacks to childhood, the trenches and his unsuccessful return from war, build toward a very 20th-century conclusion about the meaning of existence: that there is none, that for nearly everyone life is a kind of war. Reading Maclean puts The Children of Húrin with its elaborate heirarchy of powers and headstrong nobilities in a different light, as the sort of thing an officer would write.
Douglas
They'd vote PQ. They voted for Royal the Socialist in the first round of the French presidential election the other day. And the other francophone islands of the Gulf of St-Lawrence, the Madeleines, went for the left-wing intellectual PQ (the next nearest thing) in the recent Quebec general election. So if ever you looked at a map and thought, as many Canadians have, Those islands should be part of Canada, you should bear in mind that they could be just the little ship to tow Quebec away.
Here's a cheery tale. Húrin, the lord of one of the kingdoms of Men in Beleriand during the First Age of Middle Earth, is captured and imprisoned by Morgoth. who places a curse on Húrin's family, that anything they turn their hand to shall come to evil, then sets Húrin up on a throne and condemns him to watch the curse unfold. Túrin, Húrin son, carries most of the ensuing action, wandering Beleriand and rising to a position of influence wherever he goes. Characters in Tolkien always surrender decision-making to the kingliest one around, but Túrin's decisions are almost always bad. He kills one of the Elf-king's advisers in Doriath, then impulsively goes into self-exile before he can learn of his pardon, he falls in with outlaws and ultimately leads them to slaughter, he counsels the king of Nargothrond to a war policy that results in a dragon curling up in the middle of the city, he kills his best friend, and he marries his own sister. And he regifts an Elvish knife. In the end he slays the dragon, but he and his sister both commit suicide upon learning each other's true identity. (I'm not spoilering anything. It's all there in chapter 21 of the Silmarillion.) All of which would add up to a tragedy of Greek proportion, if it weren't so Victorian. A great amount of time is spent arguing over who's a churl and who isn't. Then there's the endemic racism, even if it is directed at made-up peoples. It left me wishing for something set in a less aristocratic universe, with snappier dialogue.
Here's a piece of fanfic:
For the past decade or so astronomers have been discovering planets around other stars. By discovering I mean inferring, as the process of detecting these bodies involves measuring the wobble in the star's motion or parsing spectroscopic readings of the star as the planet transits in front of it. So far about 200 planets have been found, all of them large ones as you would expect. Jupiter is the first planet you'd notice in our solar system if you didn't live here. Some of those exoJupiters are weird, though. The wobbly-star method tends to find planets with highly eccentric elliptical orbits. It's supposed that solar systems with those don't have small Earth-like planets with life on them because the eccentric giants sweep the small planets into cometary orbits. Other large planets, the "hot Jupiters", orbit in close proximity to their star. If, as is thought, these star-hugging giants spiraled inward from the outer reaches of their solar systems then there probably aren't any small Earth-like planets left in the liquid water zone of those solar systems either.