Once again, I find myself at an impasse--and like Frodo momentarily trapped in indecision between letting the awful eye of Sauron fall upon him or taking off the Ring at once (a wonderful bit of foreshadowing of Return of the King, by the way), I hesitate between waiting for my friends Ben and Eric to catch up with me so that we can finish the The Fellowship of the Ring together, or give into temptation and finish the novel now, then wait for you both to catch up before starting The Two Towers.
I give into temptation--I post my review now. May Frodo have stronger will-power than me.
It's just that it's taken us so long to finish this book--and as real life (bar exams and new jobs, new babies, grad school, ex-girlfriends and family drama) has persistently disrupted our respective readings, it's almost as though this months-long journey of the Fellowship has occurred in real time. I almost prefer it that way, as though we have felt the full weight of these travails, both on the pages and in our own lives.
But enough with the melodramatics--now that I stand at the precipice overlooking Minus Tirith and Mordor, where do I even start? For starters I suppose, I'd forgotten that the action-packed ending of the first film doesn't actually occur until chapter 1 of The Two Towers. On the one hand, this rendered the finale a bit anti-climactic; but on the other hand, that narrative understatement bewrays a quiet confidence on Tolkien's part, one that goes right back to that most innocuous of first lines "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday..."
Tolkien knows (as Peter Jackson didn't) that he does not need to beat you over the head with a hammer of massive set pieces, that the scope and stakes of this story are sufficiently epic enough to over-awe you in even in its most intimate moments. Indeed, simply sending these two little "half-lings" alone into the Land of Shadows--particularly two as comically-unprepared as we've repeatedly seen throughout this novel--is more than enough of an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger. "No, you fools, don't go alone!" we almost want to shout at Sam and Frodo, "You two schmucks were almost killed by the Old Forest for crying out loud!" Oh, Sam and Frodo splitting off from the actual competent travelers just multiplied the danger by full degrees of magnitude! Clever move, Tolkien.
Furthermore, this understated ending keeps the focus of the narrative squarely not on empty and bombastic action sequences, but upon the characters, upon interpersonal connection, as we see Frodo and Sam's relationship become something more than mere Master/Servant, but something approximating true friendship. That way, we feel real investment in these people, so that there is a stronger sense of stakes when the action actually begins.
But with all due respect to Frodo and Sam, you know who actually touched me the most in this chapter? Borimor. Poor Borimor. Not gonna lie, I honestly felt for him.
We hardly even knew him--and I'm willing to assume that that opacity was intentional on Tolkien's part, so that Borimor's sudden temptations hit the reader as abruptly as they did Frodo. But this isn't merely The Temptation of the Frodo, no--in just a couple pages, we learn more about Borimor's character than we did the whole rest of Book II combined--we learn both his pride and his pitifulness, of both his deceptive kindness and his true belief in his cause, of both his thirst for power and the sad vulnerability that fuels it. Honest to goodness, though I felt for Frodo and his horrid Sophie's Choice made all the harder by Borimor's temptations, I actually felt all the worse for Borimor when he broke down in tears and begged forgiveness of the empty air. Nearly wept myself. For reals.
For it would be easy to classify Borimor as a sort of tempter-figure, a Satan testing our Christ-Frodo in the desert. But Tolkien's master-stroke is that he reminds us that we already have a Satan-figure in Sauron; Borimor, poor Borimor, is not a tempter, but just a man, one with hopes and dreams and doubts and fears, who nonetheless almost ruined everything in one moment of passion and weakness.
Just like the rest of us often do.
May we never be like Borimor, poor Borimor, even as we recall all the times we have been. It is with genuine sadness that I realize I will hardly get to know him more.
Until The Two Towers, gentlemen.
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