Tolkien was playing a lot of games simultaneously, not least of which was inventing a world in which to use the languages he had created--but one of his more unsubtle purposes was to wage an epic war between wood and metal, between agriculture and industry. Gandalf’s wooden staff defends a pastoral land of wholesomeness and harmony against a misbegotten, misshapen factory of death that mindlessly consumes trees and creatures in the manufacture of destruction and for the good of no one but the sole proprietor at the top. Tolkien's veneer of Norse saga of Good versus Evil barely disguises his vision of an idyllic, agrarian Britain crushed and crunched and utterly consumed by the mechanized monster of industrialization (and he definitely didn’t want to disguise it--the Scouring of the Shire coda amplifies it for anyone who had been distracted by all the shiny things). His horror is the same as that of William Blake’s at the dark, Satanic mills that so befoul and profane England’s green and pleasant land, as that of George Orwell’s at the colorless ashes of daily life in Airstrip One (or in Wigan).
That dark devastation was spreading over the land in the lifetimes of those three writers who cried out at its successive victories in the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosures, the Highland Clearances, the World Wars, and each new method of industrializing aspects of life previously unimaginable as being mechanized or standardized. Now, here at the dawn of the 21st century, we indubitably live in the world that Blake, Tolkien, Orwell, and many others saw as essentially the end of humanity. A new kind of creature, some sort of Uruk-hai, must evolve to live in this Factory, this land of interchangeable parts, of the uselessness of the individual, of electricity and petrol, of consumption and destruction.
Someone has written a novel depicting this new world--not a warning of its coming, but a portrait of life in Mordor. That person would be J. K. Rowling.
Her first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, was reviewed and discussed by people who wanted her to succeed and people who wanted her to stumble, but apparently not by anyone who could see and hear what was right in front of them. Whether the novel is “good” or not, I cannot say--it was certainly difficult to read because it is so grim--but I closed it with no doubt about what Rowling was saying. She could not have spoken more clearly:
Pagford and the Fields are Mordor Triumphant. The industrial era has rendered--and I do mean rendered--everyone’s lives meaningless. People whose grandparents were agricultural laborers now live on public assistance in the Fields, a community of junkies and thieves, and Rowling deftly makes clear the complicated thoroughness of the severing of human life from meaningful activity that has turned these people into society’s garbage. The good burghers of Pagford, though, the people whose ancestors were shopkeepers and teachers, are also brutalized by modernity. (We cannot infer whether Rowling herself romanticizes an arcadian British past of honest yeoman farmers and jolly merchants and publicans, though if she does, it is a small sin compared with wilful blindness to the ghastly cost of rendering those people redundant.) The monstrous pettiness of the villagers is almost as horrifying as the savagery of the Fields, perhaps more so. The small scope that the modern world of consumer capitalism, the Siamese twin of industrialization, offers for personal agency creates a village of grasping, desperate, snarling meanness--meanness in both senses. Pagford is a town of Dursleys and Pettigrews come alive in our own world, and without the distance and the conventions of a world of magic and epic events, it is an ugly sight.
J. R. R. Tolkien created a beautiful allegory of the human spirit wresting, with great courage and at great cost, a world of integrity and connectedness from the talons of mechanized destruction; J. K. Rowling has shown us, without the veil of metaphor, a Britain that lies, bleak and soulless, at the dark base of Barad-dur. The Casual Vacancy is a horror novel.
