Foreword

The Elfish Gene is an autobiography of sorts which focuses on author Mark Barrowcliffe’s teenage love of Dungeons and Dragons. It is an odd book in that it sets out to tell us all about a teenage boy and the venerable old roleplaying game, but probably ends up telling us far more about the author as he is today.

Background

Mark Barrowcliffe is an author who has published a number of novels (none of which I have read) which, from their descriptions, appear to follow in Nick Hornby’s footsteps as “bloke-lit”. That is, they are lightly written comedies which attempt to gently help us to understand what it is to be a man in the modern era. If Mark Barrowcliffe is a Nick Hornby clone, then The Elfish Gene is his attempt at Fever Pitch. But where Hornby’s boyhood obsession was football, Barrowcliffe’s was Dungeons and Dragons.

The Elfish Gene

One of The Elfish Gene’s real strengths is in its portrayal of working class life in Britain during the 1970s. Barrowcliffe captures a real sense of a time and a place, and his descriptions of the fashion-free zone which was his parents’ house are wonderfully evocative.

In the early parts of The Elfish Gene Barrowcliffe makes clear that his environment had a huge bearing on his early addiction to Dungeons and Dragons. The game offered an escape from an otherwise dreary existence and allowed his latent imagination a chance to run wild.

There seems to be a good deal of scope for thoughtful exploration in this starting point. But as is to happen through-out the book, Barrowcliffe holds back and goes for the easy answer. Coventry was dull, he needed an escape, roleplaying provided that escape. But roleplaying captured Barrowcliffe so fully, so completely, that “it was an escape” seems insufficient cause to justify the effect.

“The designer of the game, Gary Gygax, once pointed out that to talk about a ‘winner’ in D&D is like talking about a winner in real life. If I had to sum D&D up that would be how I’d do it – a game with no winners but lots of losers.” The Elfish Gene, page 38.

“Almost everyone else I knew well that had anything to do with the game in a serious way was somehow off kilter.” The Elfish Gene, page 228.

Once Barrowcliffe becomes hooked on Dungeons and Dragons, it quickly comes to occupy his life. The majority of the rest of the book focuses on the author’s interaction with other gamers as he tries to feed his addiction to the game. Much of the content could easily fit in an RPGNet “creepy gamers” thread with ease. Almost all of the gamers who appear, Barrowcliffe included, are immature, arrogant, unpleasant and dysfunctional. Only one of Barrowcliffe’s closest friends comes away from the blow-torch with any degree of sympathy. This is Billy, a large, older, witty and inventive gamer and Barrowcliffe quickly falls under his spell. Their eventual parting of ways is clearly one of Barrowcliffe’s lifelong regrets and, perhaps unfairly, Barrowcliffe blames himself for the end of their friendship.

”I was universally sarcastic and unpleasant to everyone, especially my friends. I’d learned by playing D&D that this was the way to get on with people.” The Elfish Gene, page 319.

The fact that Barrowcliffe doesn’t escape the blow-torch of his own criticism is telling. The author makes clear that in his view all roleplayers are losers, and he seems to feel that to prove this point he has to prove that he himself was a loser. And this is where I really began to become annoyed with him. One of the key messages of the book is that roleplayers are dysfunctional communicators. According to Barrowcliffe a roleplayer makes himself (and according to the book, roleplayers are always male) feel superior by belittling others. There are numerous examples of this which occur through-out the book and Barrowcliffe is scathing of his own tendency to do so right up into early adult life. But what Barrowcliffe fails to see is that not only did he once act in this manner, but he is continuing to do so. “All roleplayers are losers” is the statement, and “because I am not a roleplayer I am not a loser” is the implication. There is something almost pathological in the way Barrowcliffe pursues this line. He seems to believe that the more he can convince us that he was a loser then, the more we will believe he is a winner now. Barrowcliffe wasn’t just a roleplayer, he was a bad roleplayer. He didn’t just have bad hair, he had horrendous hair. He wasn’t just anti-social, he flirted with fascism, listened to heavy metal, had odd masturbatory habits and tried to summon demons from another dimension. At points, in fact at many points, I could almost feel the author writhing with self-loathing as he described his younger self. And the point of belittling this younger self seems to be to make the reader have even more respect for the well-balanced, sensible adult that Barrowcliffe has now become.

I wasn’t a druggie or an artist or a poet or a rock star but just an unhappy and directionless boy who didn’t even recognise that he as unhappy.” The Elfish Gene, page 314.

In places the book resembles the recollections of a reformed drug addict. Barrowcliffe emphasises the anti-social squalor into which he tumbled and catalogues his eventual rebirth as a clean-living, balanced non-roleplayer. It feels like by putting his horrible memories onto paper, the author is trying to purge them from his mind.

Perhaps the real weakness of the book is in the limited scope this format offers. Barrowcliffe’s commentary never goes beyond his own personal experience with the game and he leaves us without an appreciation of any wider context.

“D&D is, I believe, something virtually unique and unprecedented in human history. It’s a story you can listen to at the same time as telling it. You can be surprised by the plot’s twists and turns but you can surprise too. It’s more interactive than any other sort of narrative I can think of. If its subject matter were more serious then it would be considered a new art form…” The Elfish Gene, page 167.

Despite the constant negativity Barrowcliffe never quite convinces that roleplaying is completely out of his system, and this is the thing which kept me from putting the book aside. There are places where his explanations of mechanics or a rule reveal something approaching passion; where you get the sense that writing that short explanation provided the author with an hour or so of very pleasurable recollection.

The only conclusion I can reach from this apparent paradox (he hates the game, but he also loves it) is that Barrowcliffe remains an unhappy person. In a sense it isn’t us he is trying to convince that he is a happy and balanced non-roleplayer, it is himself.

Conclusion

Despite all my criticism, The Elfish Gene is not a terrible book. As I have noted Barrowcliffe has a real knack for describing the era he lived in and the book is not without insights. There are passages where he describes a thought process or an activity which sent me spiralling back into a forgotten part of my own childhood love for Dungeons and Dragons. Nonetheless the unrelenting negative tone and the strain of self-loathing which runs through-out the book ultimately left me feeling disappointed.

As Nick Hornby and others have proved, there will always be a market for nostalgia. And given the impact Dungeons and Dragons had on kids back in the ‘70s and ‘80s the idea of a book chronicling a childhood with the game seems a marketable one. But ultimately I suspect this book will fail to fill the niche it aims for.

Dungeons and Dragons has a reputation for fostering inventiveness and introspection, but The Elfish Gene is curiously lacking the first trait whilst overdosing on the second. I give it a three for style, and a two for substance.