When I was forced to watch The Shannara Chronicles before (re?) reading The Elfstones of Shannara, I was a bit miffed. Now, I realize that I should not have been. I am now glad that I watched the TV show first, leaving me in the dark about what parts of it were faithful to the book and what parts were introduced for “today’s audience.”
I’ve said it a couple of times before but… I cannot remember reading Elfstones even as I’m pretty sure that I did when I was a teen. Watching the TV show did not refresh my memory. Now, reading the book also does not refresh my memory. Maybe that’s because I never did read the book. If so, now I have.
One thing I was right about, whether it was remembered or just imagined, is that Terry Brooks’ writing is much improved in the second book when compared to the first. I also see in this story some originality, as opposed to a wholesale lifting of Tolkien’s better-and-better-written story. In fact, I’m tempted to discern how Brooks is laying some foundations for future genre authors; namely The Wheel of Time.
It is, of course, clear to me now how (and how quickly) the TV series deviated from the source material. The TV show begins with elfin* heroine Amberle bravely flexing her girl-power to crack the glass ceiling of the Chosen. Through superior agility and endurance she beats out the bumbling male competition. Her story then goes on to interleave with the book version, but demonstrating how she is driven away from her home and her duty explicitly. The book, to contrast, begins with Amberle missing and, in fact, very much an unknown quantity. Brooks takes his time explaining why she was, in fact, “chosen” despite that honor typically (but not always) going to the elves of the male persuasion.
Bending and twisting is required to add the modern all-girls-are-superheroes theme. Had I seen it that way from the get-go, it might have bothered me. Seeing it without that context and it appears merely a nod to the pressures of making entertainment for the woke masses.
We also had to titillate the MTV audience (whomever that might be these days). Thus, having Wil Ohmsford boinking all the hawt femmes in the show is entirely out of place for the book but absolutely expected for current-day “young adult” entertainment (not to mention young “adult entertainment”). I’m tempted to hold forth upon the differences in the way that the nerdy fantasy fanatic views beautiful elfin princesses circa 1950s versus 1970s versus the “red-pilled” 2020s, but I doubt I’d say anything worth-while.
So the book, as I said, is better. It is better writing than Sword and it is better, content wise, than Chronicles. It still isn’t great – just better by comparison. To me, it seems like the legacy of these books is less the books themselves than the influence that they’ve had on the genre. Surely, the majority of high fantasy writers from the mid-eighties onward had to have had read Brooks. I say this because there was so little else to read, circa 1977 (not including Tolkien, of course). The Robert Jordan connection seems obvious to me but I’m sure I could find others were I to apply myself.
Comparing it to the simplified version from the TV show, the book seems relatively deep. The oddly-square world of “The Four Lands” aside, Brooks makes an effort to plausibly move his opposing armies about the map and engage them in tactically meaningful battles. Granted, it doesn’t hold up so well today but I’d venture to say it was probably very well done for 1982. It is far-and-away more satisfying than the two-armies-run-at-each-other-across-a-soundstage version shown on MTV.
In the end, I bear no malice towards that TV production. The popularity of the show (to whatever extent that was) may well have sparked a resurgence of interest in the books, which, in telling an emphatically better story, may lead to a world of exploration for new readers. It may help its cause that Elfstones of Shannara is, by no means, a literary classic. Was the story altered significantly from the original, maybe to its detriment? Probably. Does that destroy the legacy of the original books? Umm… what legacy?
Should a major production effort set out to re-imagine, say, The Wheel of Time or (Lord forbid) The Lord of the Rings, I’d look on it very differently. I would probably do so even if the levels of distortion and (some might say) destruction of the underlying material was equivalent. When grabbed by an urge to make “Generic Fantasy Series #112,” one should be mindful of the importance of the source material that you’ll be using to brand your effort. Although Chronicles objectively does not improve on Elfstones, it probably wouldn’t have been hard to craft a Sword that upped the game of the original.
Worse yet, large black dwarven Queens do feel more like a cultural assault than a cute little girl-power flourish in the Generic Fantasy Series formula. We fantasy-fiction fanatics may be lacking entirely when it comes to social awareness but it doesn’t mean we’re unaware of the society in which we are forced to live.
*This is an inside (my own head) joke about the spelling of elfs versus elves. I read a (possibly made up) quote about the arguments between Tolkien and his editors as he introduced his versions of these words, spellings which have come to be “the correct” way when it comes to fantasy writing. Thus the distinction is fresh in my mind; Elfs make toys for Santa whereas Elves have mighty kingdoms deep in the forest. It’s a point of amusement for me that the WordPress spell-checker prefers both elfin and elves as the correct spelling.