The Two Towers (The Lord Of The Rings #2)

Continuing on from my reading of The Fellowship of The Ring, this sequel takes place immediately after the last sentence of its predecessor and it’s palpable that Tolkien had no initial intent on splitting these stories up in 3 separate entries. This does give it a nice flow when reading them back to back because no time is lost setting the scene up again, it just gets into it without dilly dallying which by Tolkien standard is a rarity. Unfortunately the first impression here is awful. Boromir’s death is little more than a cliff note and the fight between Uruk Hai and the fellowship happens “off screen”, it lacks essentially all of the emotional element that the movie added whether it’s the exciting choreography of the fight or the touching “my people” moment of Boromir’s death.

Speaking of Uruk Hai, they’re also very disappointing compared to their movie representation. They are present and a big component of both Pippin’s chapters and Helm’s Deep obviously but the way they are described and written fails at making them stand out from regular orcs; they’re a bit bigger, look a bit more like humans but they’re otherwise just good old regular orcs. If it hadn’t been for me having seen the movie beforehand I wouldn’t even have taken the Uruk Hai as a particularly big deal. I mean great Saruman made his own version of orcs, they cosplay better as humans and are 10cm taller big whoop, it’s ultimately not a big deal but descriptions are what Tolkien is meant to be good at and I feel like he undercut his descriptions of Uruk Hai compared to what they could have been.

Finally, to get the last related major disappointment out of the way: Helm’s Deep. For one the move to Helm’s Deep is pushed by Gandalf, the point the movie made of it being a dead end where Rohan would trap itself is gone and instead of Gandalf going out to get help and telling Aragorn to “wait for him on the morning of the sixth day” he just leaves. The walk to Helm’s Deep is also painfully plain, there’s no warg combat, Eomer is present which means that when the rescue does arrive on the sixth day, it’s some random Rohirim we know nothing about who leads the charge. The actual combat chapter is…fine and it’s bothersome that I can’t describe it as better than that. The entire fight is very…plain once more, Rohan is losing from the beginning which also means that when Saruman’s bomb does explode, it’s not a turning point nor an emotional gut punch, it’s just making Rohan lose a bit worse. There’s no elf reinforcements, no emotional moment when their leader dies, no Aragorn death fakeout obviously (because no warg fight), the reinforcements are on foot (the ROHIRIM, the lord of horses are running down a hill for an epic charge on fucking foot?!), it’s just a probably very realistic but in doing so very boring siege. There are some upsides which the movie also had kept in with Gimli and Legolas prioritising their kill count challenge over anything else which is amusing, Theoden does get his little speech of despair just before riding out but overall I find it difficult to not say that the movie is just strictly better than the book version here.

To make matters worse it is followed by one of the most filler and useless chapters I have ever read and not just in this saga but across my entire reading experience. The march to Isengard is a complete waste of time, there is nothing of significance happening, no additional characterisation, not even some new lore, it’s Tolkien at his worst by simply being a chapter about some people walking to a place.

Going back to some positives though, these Aragorn/Rohan centric chapters are intertwined with a few chapters following Pippin and Merry who at the start of the book have been kidnapped by the Uruk Hai. Whilst captured, Pippin rises up as a smarter and more courageous character, it gives him some nice added depth and prevents him from falling into the cliché the movie picked out for him of being the simple minded idiot. I will still argue as I did for the first book that this feeds into the issue of “every character gets to do everything” problem where they could for the most part all be interchangeable because everyone gets to be heroic, everyone gets to be sad, everyone gets to sing, etc; but Pippin’s cliché in the movie veered a bit too far in the other direction. I would also argue that in Pippin’s case especially Tolkien wrote a nice switch in his personality between when he has to take the lead to help Merry and escape from the orcs and when he goes back to being relatively safe among the Ents and can lean back into his less mature behaviour.

There’s also some Tolkien signature moments of quality world building here that are lost from the movies. The dynamics and politics between the different orc groups and Uruk Hai are very interesting to follow, Rohan’s horses being actually something special bordering on magic (which also gives Shadowfax a nice bit of extra background), and the Ents definitely are the stars of the show here. The movie really cuts away a lot of Merry and Pippin’s time with Treebeard and other Ents. There is a lot more depth to be found here between Ent houses, insights into their culture and their usage of language as not only a way of communication but also a unique way of interpreting and interacting with the world around them. One major faux-pas that the movie committed here is to keep the “don’t be hasty” line. It is emblematic to the Ents to be slow and careful in movement and thought but in the movie it is played at the expense of Ents’ characters by making them waste time on pointless bits like “are Hobbits really just tiny Orcs” and even ends with them refusing to go to war because…I don’t know really, them refusing to go to war was always a stupid point in the movie. The book version not only shows Merry and Pippin being a lot more open minded and patient with the Ents “lack of hastiness” but also shows the Ents being competent, they decide against Merry and Pippin being orcs pretty quickly because that’s an obvious thing and they do actually decide to go to war because that’s the logical thing to do. That’s where I need to highlight Andy Serkis’ voice acting again; as I did with the previous book I spent a lot of time listening to the book instead of just reading it and Andy will get several shout outs from me here for his performance but he was also instrumental in making me bear through some of the more boring chapters. In any case his voice acting of the Ents’ war chant was amazing and I am gutted it was not a part of the movies.

Unfortunately we don’t really get to see the battle for Isengard itself so that’s at least a point back to the movie and we only get it retold by Pippin after that painful march to Isengard chapter. This also marks the reunion of Merry and Pippin with Aragorn’s group and as it comes at around the end of Aragorn’s side of the tale for this book, there is a very nice feeling of finality to it all. It feels like a deserved reunion and rest and the relaxing chapter spent with both groups telling stories, having some food and a smoke is very cosy. It is however not the end of the story, not at all and it is followed by another stand out both in writing and voice acting for Andy Serkis: Saruman. Saruman’s been essentially absent so far, as we only followed either Aragorn, Frodo or Pippin in the chapters, the only exposure we had to Saruman was what Gandalf was willing to tell and I did miss him. He is meant to be the antagonist, maybe even more so than Sauron because his threat is more immediate and he is the one who created the Uruk Hai, the one who imprisoned Gandalf, the one who is threatening Rohan and yet he’s not had a page to himself yet. I am saying all this to emphasise the following point: book Saruman is a better character in the one chapter he is in than in all movies combined. Movie Saruman is carried by Christopher Lee’s acting but movie Saruman isn’t written very well; he supposedly has power in his voice that is never well represented, he’s got punchy one liners when talking about his tens of thousands of Uruk Hai but their aura is fully due to the delivery of Christopher Lee and not their writing. Book Saruman is a monument, when he talks, you listen, his dialogue is perfect and it is supplemented beautifully by Andy Serkis’ voice acting switching up Saruman’s voice and talking style depending on who he talks to and how in control he is. This also leads to another movie faux-pas: not everything has to be action. I miss the powerful combat scene in the books but I do not miss the movie making the Saruman-Gandalf confrontation about a fireball and a brutal stabbing. Saruman being defeated through Gandalf’s words and being left in the tower powerless is a much more impactful moment because it doesn’t rely on cheap brutality. I remember movie Saruman because of the actor, I will remember book Saruman because in that one chapter where he gets defeated he still owned the scene.

At this point despite some disappointments with the key battles, The Two Towers is on a solid path to another 9/10 rating. The first half following Pippin and Aragorn were fun, they had a lot of good world building, some notable improvements over the movies but here comes Frodo. I don’t like the split into “sub-books”. I think if Tolkien was able to switch between Pippin and Aragorn chapters as need be, then he could have also added Frodo into the switching cycle. The problem really is that Frodo’s chapters are about him walking and that’s kind of it and that’s really boring a lot of the time. I did not take any notes for almost 100 pages because there just was nothing to say, Gollum is introduced but that doesn’t change that all they do is walk.

To cover the Gollum side of things though, he is weirdly absent for a lot of the trilogy I realised. The story of The Two Towers in book format has Frodo’s group all the way to Sam beating Shelob. This means that Gollum was absent in book 1 (as he was in the movie), present in book 2 (with some caveats I’ll get to soon) and in all likely will mostly be absent in book 3 as he doesn’t reappear until just before the ring is destroyed. The movies smartly have Cirith and Shelob occur in movie 3 meaning there is a more even split of Gollum’s presence. However, even in this book 2, Gollum’s presence is…rare as in the 50% dedicated to Frodo he’s only in about half of those chapters. It’s odd how impactful a character he became despite only being in 25% of one of the books. Frustratingly I also read most chapters where he was present and listened to the ones where he wasn’t so I didn’t even get to enjoy that much of Andy’s voice acting for his own character. His character’s also a bit more…plain…again. The movie has him reject his “Precious” persona as he finds new meaning and happiness with Frodo, a persona which returns when he gets abused by Faramir and his men (another display of brutality I never understood in the movie) and convinces him to betray Frodo and get him eaten by Shelob. Book Gollum doesn’t have that first change of heart, his plan always was to betray Frodo and so when he gets caught by Faramir’s men, he isn’t a simple victim, he fights, he bites, he tries to kill and in doing so the violence against him becomes understandable, something the movie just missed or forgot about. The problem with Gollum never having that first change of heart though means that he is a bit more boring and plain, the lack of twists and turns makes the story predictable even without having seen the movie before.

Faramir though was an unexpected highlight as he is a lot nicer than his movie equivalent and him taking Frodo and Sam away doesn’t make him as dislikable. He is meant to stand out in the book for not wanting the ring but that’s where the elephant in the room is: who even cares about the ring? I’m reminded of a video by LinksTheSun on Youtube where he talked about what a McGuffin was (i.e. an object that is required for the plot to progress but is otherwise irrelevant) and how he disagreed how people were mentioning the ring as being a McGuffin as he saw it as a character in its own right. That was something I agreed with, based on my experience watching the movies, the ring is an ever present weight on Frodo, it keeps trying to sway him, to betray him, to get him back to Sauron. Book Ring does not do that, book ring, is forgotten about for almost the entire book. Frodo never visibly struggles with its weight, we never get into Frodo’s mind and thoughts about the ring, Faramir doesn’t even want it and there is no tension between Sam and Frodo because of it. Speaking of which, the split up between Sam and Frodo at Cirith Ungol is apparently a movie exclusive thing, in the book they just both walk into Shelob’s lair together as BFFs and I find that disappointing because for a saga called The Lord of The Rings there’s been no ring action since the end of The Fellowship and even then it was only for 1 chapter at the very end of the book. I thought the rising tension between Sam and Frodo to be a key aspect of the story of the movie as it was perfectly displaying how insidious the ring is, how it progressively but surely ensured that Frodo would end up alone and that’s just not here, the ring really just is a McGuffin.

Finishing the book and this review off we are left with the fight against Shelob and the dreaded last chapter. The fight against Shelob is good, it’s maybe even better than the movie for once because the movie just action for action replicated what was written in the book. Aside from visuals you don’t get anything additional out of the movie for this scene. The book even has the added benefit of adding a lot of context to both Shelob and Galadriel’s light, an item that is terribly disappointing and underused in the movie. Shelob being more than just some big spider as she is in the movie is very welcome and this is Tolkien at his best. Unfortunately, it’s followed by a chapter of Tolkien at his worst, a 80 minute long chapter of Sam panicking over Frodo’s body followed by orcs arguing about random stuff with no consequence (with no interesting politics or dynamics as was the case earlier with Pippin’s Uruk Hai) and that’s where the book ends.

In the end the Frodo chapters were a letdown, Gollum on his own isn’t enough to carry to 250 pages of “walk walk walk” and it really kills the pace of the story to have all these chapters bundled together as a second half. It also unfortunately kills my appreciation for book 2. I liked the first half, it wasn’t perfect, I still think that Helm’s Deep is strictly worse, I still think that not having the warg battle scene is a shame, I still think the march to Isengard is an event of time theft that should be illegal but it had some really strong moments with the Ents and Saruman and was overall just well paced. I have very little positive to say about Frodo’s chapters though and so whilst I’ll always happily rewatch the second movie, I don’t think I particularly want to re-read or even re-listen to this second book, at least not its second half. Still going to read the third book though.