Tolkien has them, frequently-made claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Some examples just off the top of my head. (And while I’m a fan of The Hobbit, I’m not particularly a fan of The Lord of the Rings; a fan could probably come up with more examples.)

• Thorin Oakenshield. Greed exerts a regrettable influence over his behavior throughout The Hobbit, especially toward the end. Obviously he’s not evil, but he’s not exactly an angel either.

• Beorn. How do you categorize this guy morally? He’s basically benign, because he just wants to be left alone. But he’s also a threat. Bilbo and the dwarves are urgently warned not to leave the house while he’s outside it in bear form. He captures a goblin and kills it, which is morally fine since the goblins are planning on attacking a nearby human settlement. But he also lops off its head and mounts it on a stake outside his property, and skins the warg it was riding and nails the skin to his wall. Presumably the goblin and warg were in no position to care by then, but it’s rather Hannibal Lechter. You want to ask Beorn, “Um, dude? Are you…okay?”

• The wood elves of Mirkwood. Tolkien sums them up as, on balance, “good people” and “not wicked folk.” But also, “If they have a fault it is distrust of strangers…They differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise.” That’s putting it mildly. When the dwarves, dying of hunger and thirst, approach their revels to try to beg some food and drink, the elves’ response is to disappear. Three times. Later they take the dwarves prisoner. Their King, in particular, is completely unreasonable about holding them prisoner – even if they wait “a hundred years” – just because they won’t tell him what their quest is. Like it’s any of his damn business! (And he’s avaricious: “If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems; and though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more…”)

• Sauruman. Starts good, happily allows himself to be corrupted by dreams of power.

• Gollum. Good (as Smeagol long ago), then bad, then good, then bad.

We could also include some marginal cases:

• Tom Bombadil. Now Bombadil plainly is good, not evil, by temperament. Still…he won’t join the fight against Sauron, and in fact acts indifferent to the whole War of the Ring. He just lets other people fight that fight. That is not heroic behavior.

• Even the hero of LOTR, Frodo, succumbs to temptation at the end. This is a marginal case because he’s been exposed at length to the most powerful malign magical object in the world, which, we’re told, no one can resist. But still. One could make a similar point about Boromir, by the way.

Of course there are also lots of good characters and evil ones.

So all in all we have some unambiguously good characters, some unambiguously evil characters, and some morally in-between characters. In other words, everything. This is more “broad-viewed” and “nuanced,” not less so, than work that only has morally ambiguous characters! What’s broader: A work that has black, white, and shades of gray, or one that just has shades of gray?

None of this should be taken as a denial that LOTR is essentially a good-versus-evil story. But to say that everything in Tolkien is black or white, with nothing in between, is to depart with breezy nonchalance from the actual text.

There’s a much-admired American novel called, er, Swept Away by the Gusts. A major male character in Swept Away by the Gusts is a man by the name of Han Solo. No, wait, that’s Star Wars . The main male character in Swept Away by the Gusts is a man named, um, Rick Servant. But forgive my confusion, reader, because the parallels between Rick Servant and Han Solo are remarkable.

Both are cynical bad boy types. Both are experienced, worldly-wise, and comfortable in low company. Both are smugglers. Both are known to be good with their milieu’s hand weapon, blaster or pistol, as the case may be. Each commits a killing which appears cold-blooded on the surface but is justified. In the case of Han Solo, it is his smearing of Greedo without warning him or giving him a chance to draw. (This is how it went down originally, before George Lucas became a wussy and changed it to have Greedo shoot first.) Solo is of course justified because Greedo has just announced his intention to kill Solo. In the case of Rick Servant, the details (which we hear about as backstory) are thus: Servant escorts a young lady on a carriage ride, unchaperoned. Apparently in the South at this time, if two unrelated adults of opposite sex were alone together it was just assumed that they’d had sex (sheesh, and I thought I had a dirty mind). It is clearly stated that the girl isn’t knocked up. The young lady’s family demands that Servant marry her, and of course he tells them to get over themselves. The girl’s brother challenges Servant to a duel; Servant accepts and kills him.

Both Solo and Servant leave military service in an officially unapproved way. Servant is expelled from West Point for “some scandal involving a woman” and Han Solo was in the Imperial fleet before he was court martialed and dishonorably discharged for some sort of insubordination.

Leia tells Solo “I like you, when you’re not acting like a scoundrel,” to which Solo replies,

You like me because I’m a scoundrel. There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life.

The heroine of Swept Away by the Gusts – Crimson O’Homa – tells Rick Servant that she likes him sometimes, “when you aren’t acting like a varmint,” to which Servant replies, “I think you like me because I am a varmint.” (Chapter XIX of Swept Away by the Gusts .) Both Solo and Servant explicitly tell the main female character “I don’t care about your rebellion, honey; I’m in it for the money.” Later, both change their minds and join her cause. Han Solo returns in the Millennium Falcon and knocks Darth Vader out of the fight so Luke can destroy the Death Star; Rick Servant decides he has to fight on Crimson’s side of the Civil War. That is, from the heroine’s point of view, each is the canonical “bad boy who really has a heart of gold” (a stock character of dubious realism; sorry, ladies).

Every now and then a critic of lit or film or whatever will slag a new work of art for not really being new, but rather falling into some standing category. One person claimed that Star Wars is essentially “a buddy movie.” Another claimed that Alien is essentially a “haunted house movie.” One’s first reaction to this last is disbelief: How could someone think a movie about an alien infesting a spaceship is a haunted house movie?!

Then one realizes these people are thinking in terms of gross similarities of structure. Suppose your education trained you to ignore details of a movie you were reviewing and attend to the broad shape of the plot. For someone trained this way, interpreting Alien as a “haunted house movie” is not outrageously stupid. After all, the plots are the same, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction: some people are trapped in an enclosed structure with a dangerous non-human entity and are picked off one by one. To a person for whom ignoring details is not only not a bad thing, but is in fact a point of pride (“I’m seeing through the details and focusing on the essence”) categorizing Alien in this way is not unreasonable. In fact, taken strictly on its own terms, such taxonomy makes sense.

However, it is easy to see what is wrong with this approach: at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, all plots are the same: Some events occur. Does this mean all stories are “really variations of the same story”? Or how about this, which fits the vast majority of published fiction: Some conflicts occur. Then they’re resolved. So again, most stories are really variations of the same story?

Hmmm, something’s not right here. Details do matter, at least for the enjoyment of the audience, which is the ultimately the whole point.

In recent years it has become increasingly common for reviewers of fiction to judge works by political criteria. This is unfortunate (I say this as someone who has never had such a review, or indeed, as of this writing, had any review, heh) for several reasons:

• It is discourteous to the review’s readers, most of whom presumably don’t want a political lecture but an evaluation of fiction as fiction.

• It is unfair to the author, who deserves to be evaluated as a producer of fiction.

• It’s lazy. It reminds me of a certain Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Calvin is taking a test in which one of the questions is something like, “When did the Punic Wars occur?” His response is, “Modern physics shows the concept of time rests on shaky foundations,” or some similar nonsense. He then turns to the reader and says, “If you don’t know the answer, attack the terms of the question.” Indeed. It’s a little too, shall we say, leisurely, to refuse to engage with a work of fiction on its own terms.

• It is unfortunate for reviewers who indulge themselves this way, since they deprive themselves of the pleasures of fiction. If you’re shouting “This is too Maoist/not Maoist enough!” you’re missing the gorgeously subtle characterization and thrilling plot twists.

The problem is the intrusive replacement of the author’s interests and the potential reader’s interests with the reviewer’s interests. If the author has written about a 19th century Transylvanian vampire, it seems ill-bred to criticize the work for failing to be a screed in favor of, say, higher or lower tariffs on imports. It is like criticizing it for failing to be a screed in favor of, say, low-impact aerobics. It simply isn’t appropriate for reviewers to interpolate their own interests that way. Obviously there’s a time and place for politics, but it’s not all times and all places.

Nevertheless, some works cry out to be evaluated – at least partially – by political criteria. Which works? Why, the ones that have a political element introduced by the author him/herself, of course.

Thus I propose this rule of thumb for reviewing fiction:

If the author has introduced politics into the work, then reviewing it according to political criteria is appropriate. If the author has not done so, then reviewing it according to political criteria is not appropriate.

So, e.g. Atlas Shrugged and The Handmaid’s Tale  – to take two particularly obvious examples – are fair game, because their authors made them fair game. Those works are overtly political. But the rule also applies to an otherwise non-political work in which the author couldn’t resist making one or two political side comments. (Some writers think that if they only do this once per novel it’s subtle. Actually, it’s like having a glaringly wrong note in the middle of an otherwise perfectly-executed piano recital.)

Of course there will be fuzzy cases, but this rule of thumb will take care of most cases.