The Last Ringbearer: or, playing in someone else's sandbox, sort of a review

I recently had the interesting experience of reading The Last Ringbearer, by Kirill Yeskov. If you've read The Lord of the Rings, the name sounds oddly familiar, and it should: The Last Ringbearer is a novel written parallel (or maybe crosswise) to the plot of LOTR, with the central conceit that Tolkien's novel is a "victor's history" written by Gondor's partisans after their successful war against Mordor.*

I can't recommend the book on its own merits**, but I'm not here to rag on it either. If you're a quick reader and the above sounds interesting at all, then do read it***, or at least the first part, which tracks most closely with the events of Tolkien's book.

LRB diverges from LOTR from the first page, and it diverges hard. Beyond the broad category of "fantasy" the books don't even share the same genre: LRB starts out reading something like a Conan yarn, and it evolves into something more like a Cold-War spy thriller. What gives?

I'll tell you what. Because I could complain about the genre shift as "missing the point" of the source material--and other people have--but I think that, itself, is missing the point. In an important way, Yeskov's Middle Earth is strikingly true to Tolkien's Middle Earth.

You see, Tolkien's Middle Earth was a canvas, or perhaps a terrarium, which he filled with linguistics, Norse epics, his experiences in the Great War, and an undercurrent of Catholicism--in short, anything and everything that interested him. Later writers have mistaken Middle Earth for an archetype, and hesitated to deviate from it.

I think Yeskov did what Tolkien did, and filled his version of Middle Earth with whatever the hell he found interesting: rationalism, politics, spycraft, werewolves, parallel universes, and so on. I honestly couldn't tell you whether J.R.R. Tolkien would approve of the result, but I'm pretty sure more fantasy writers could stand to learn a lesson from it.

* Perhaps in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story of Jane Eyre from a perspective more sympathetic to Bertha Mason.

** It was written in Russian originally, and the English translation is the sort that you have to make allowances for. The plot itself is a little disjointed and, pretty conventional if you sift out the fantasy elements. Yeskov's Middle-Earth amalgam is certainly the most interesting thing about the book. But then, I don't think the book was meant to be sold commercially, and it's free (see next footnote), which softens but doesn't obviate criticism.

*** Because the book is from Russia, and the Tolkien estate is not a fan, the book can't be sold. The e-book, on the other hand, is freely available from the translator.