Walter Moers, Rumo
& His Miraculous Adventures, trans. John Brownjohn (2004)
You know how when you heartily recommend a
novel you recently read to someone, that person tends to have an irritating
habit of asking what said novel was about?
Granted, it’s a perfectly reasonable question;
and granted, I myself display the same habit of asking it; but all the same, it’s
proved a difficult one to answer in any kind of manageable, coherent, accurate,
and appealing way with regard to the novel I’ve been most heartily recommending
to people in recent months, namely Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures by
Walter Moers.1 This is because Rumo is a very strange book. I
don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have never read anything else
like it. In terms of subject-matter, it’s a sort of high science fantasy;2
in terms of scope, it’s remarkably close to a traditional epic (though in
prose); in terms of tone, it frequently reads like a highfalutin academic
article. And as for what it’s about … well, I have tried to write some
sort of a blurb that doesn’t give too much away and I just can’t manage it. I
am simply going to have to steal the one off the back of the book.
 |
| This, of course, is the front of the book. |
Rumo is a little Wolperting who will one
day become the greatest hero in the history of Zamonia. Armed with Dandelion,
his talking sword, he fights his way across Overworld and Netherworld, two very
different worlds chock-full of adventures, dangers, and unforgettable
characters: including Rala, the beautiful girl Wolperting who cultivates a
hazardous relationship with death; General Ticktock, the evil commander of the
Copper Killers; Ushan DeLucca, the finest and most weather-sensitive swordsman
in Zamonia; Professor Abdullah Nightingale, inventor of the Chest-of-Drawers
Oracle; and, worse luck, the deadly Metal Maiden.
Much as I take my hat off to the blurbist3
responsible for this description, it’s worth remarking that he or she hasn’t mentioned,
for instance, the heart-restarting abilities of the Non-Existent Teenies’
subcutaneous submarine; or the floating rock populated by Demonocles who make a
point of only eating things that are still alive; or the city of Murkholm,
where the foul weather really is out to get you; or the long and bloody history
of the monarchs of Hel, who have for some years operated a devious forced
immigration policy inspired by a children’s picture-book; or the dead yetis who
serve as Netherworld’s ferrymen, owing their continued animation to the powers
of the Cogitating Quicksand in which they were asphyxiated; or the many sieges
of Lindworm Castle, inhabited by highly intelligent dinosaurs who could rout
armies just by dancing but were eventually brought to ruin through flattery of
their creative-writing skills.
On which note, I’m strongly inclined to
offer Walter Moers a good deal of flattery as regards his creative-writing
skills (not forgetting the skills of John Brownjohn in translating Moers’
original work into such elegant English). I have no idea how he manages to come
up with this stuff – one brilliant madcap invention after another, and what’s
more, all the different brilliant madcap threads are beautifully tied together
throughout the course of the story, so that none of the captivating bizarrities
that populate it seems superfluous. Moers has put together this astonishingly
rich and enthralling universe just from out of his own imagination – out of
nothing.
Only that’s not quite true, is it? Because
however stupendously original Moers might have been in creating the world of
Zamonia – indeed, however stupendously original any author might have been in
dreaming up his or her own fictional universe – it is nevertheless the case
that all his raw material was already given him. Every product of the human
imagination is only a variation on what already exists in the real world. Take
Professor Abdullah Nightingale’s Chest-of-Drawers Oracle: chests of drawers and
predictions of the future are well known enough to us already; what Moers has
done is combined the two. Or take the Cogitating Quicksand that reanimates the
dead yetis: quicksand is already a known quantity; what Moers has done is ascribed
to it a characteristic – the ability to think – that in the real world belongs
to other things, and then run with that idea by throwing in some more
pre-existent ideas about the yeti and reanimated corpses. The same is true of
everything supposedly original that a human being has ever produced. It’s like
Professor Ostafan Kolibri, another of the unforgettable characters that Rumo’s
blurbist failed to mention, said about doctoral theses (a particularly pertinent
opening quotation given that I currently stand on the brink of starting a PhD
of my own): everything we produce that seems new is just an agglomeration of
what other people did before us. We don’t come up with this stuff in a vacuum;
all we can ever do is push around the pieces of what’s already there into
different arrangements. We build on what our predecessors have built on what
their predecessors have built on what their predecessors have built on
what THEIR predecessors have built, and so on and so forth, and push
back far enough and you’ll reach a bedrock of something that exists in the
world without any dependence at all on human imagination. There’s a sense in
which human imagination is subordinate to the natural world: it cannot
prescribe to it what it will be like, but only fashion Cloudcuckooland4
after its independently pre-existent likeness.
So however in awe I am of Walter Moer’s
creative abilities in dreaming up the astonishingly rich and enthralling
universe of Rumo, it’s got to be nothing next to how in awe I am of
God’s creative abilities in dreaming up the astonishingly rich and enthralling
universe we live in. God started with nothing. He didn’t just think of
every single one of the items that exists in the universe – stars and solar
systems and galaxies and air and water and rocks and mountains and volcanoes
and trees and flowers and insects and animals; the daffodil and the duck-billed
platypus, the northern lights and Niagara Falls, the moon and the Milky Way –
but conceived of the whole framework within which all that stuff would exist.
God dreamed up gravity. He dreamed up the atom. He dreamed up dimensions and
the passage of time. He dreamed up the five senses and the four seasons. If the
universe were a symphony, God wouldn’t just be its composer, but the inventor
of the entire concept of music.
For Jesus has been counted worthy of more
glory than Moses – as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honour
than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of
all things is God.5 –
Hebrews 3:4
Whatever we build, and however new and
unprecedented our constructions may seem, God remains the builder of
everything. He gave us not only the natural-world items and phenomena that
ultimately inspired our creative endeavours, but also the imagination to push
around these pieces into different arrangements – brilliant, madcap,
astonishingly rich and enthralling arrangements. However in awe I am of Walter
Moers’ creative abilities, it’s got to be nothing next to how in awe I am of
God who gave him them; indeed, the more in awe I am of Walter Moers’
creative abilities, the more and much more I must be in awe of God who gave him
them. God built each of our brains. There is, there can be, no invention
we have the capacity to dream up that could ever stray beyond God’s capacity to
dream things up. That’s not to say we don’t distort our use of our creative
abilities to dream up things that stray beyond the goodness of his nature, but
even that is only distortion and so, again, not true originality. God’s
creativity is the ultimate creativity, the original originality to which every
other creative invention owes itself.
And so how much more glory than Moers or
Moses or anyone is God worthy of? Every creative endeavour – be it novel,
doctoral thesis, or blog post; be it music or visual art or drama or whatever
else – is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.
Footnotes
1 It was given to me as a present by two extremely lovely
friends – several years ago, actually, but it’s an intimidatingly large book
and it was only earlier this year that I actually managed to settle down and
finish it. Here it is on Hive, https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Walter-Moers/Rumo/145408,
which if you didn’t know is a way to shop online for books while supporting
local independent bookshops; win-win.
2 ‘High fantasy’ means fantasy set in its own fictional
universe, rather than the same one we inhabit. ‘Science fantasy’ means fiction
that sits somewhere between science fiction and fantasy. I call Rumo ‘science
fantasy’ because the universe in which it takes place seems to operate on scientific
principles rather than outright magic, but it’s still all extremely far removed
from the world as we know it.
3 Which is a real word; scroll down to ‘related forms’:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/blurb?s=t.
4 Here meaning not the bubblegum happyland that gets destroyed
in The Lego Movie, but the general realm of fantasy and fiction and
creative ideas. The term comes from Aristophanes’ Birds, by the way, a
fifth-century-BCE comedy in which a couple of Athenians decide life in the polis
isn’t really working for them and set off to found their own utopia on the aerial border between gods and mortals.
5 Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+3&version=ESVUK.
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