All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘True-Life Adventure,’ by J. Paul Drew

Leave a comment

True-Life Adventure

I seem to have developed Critics’ Disease. I’ve become so obsessed with technical and artistic excellence in literature that, when presented with a perfectly pleasant little light mystery like True-Life Adventure, by J. Paul Drew, I find myself inclined to grouse. Even though I have no excuse for doing so.

This is the first book in a series, and various clues (such as a lack of cell phones) indicate that it was first published back around the ‘80s. The hero is Paul Mcdonald, a reporter who left his steady job to write mystery novels. Which he hasn’t succeeded in doing. Instead he gets by writing reports for a real private eye. But one day the private eye dies of poisoning while dictating to him. Paul, realizing that a true mystery has fallen into his lap, decides to investigate it himself so he can write it up and get it published. This leads him to the detective’s last case, involving the kidnapped daughter of a computer mogul.

The tone is light, with lots of wisecracks. Wisecracking, of course, is a hallowed tradition in detective novels, so that’s not a real criticism. I guess I’ve grown to expect some kind of serious underpinning in stories involving human deaths. Also, I found it a little hard to buy the scenario where a depressed, overweight guy somehow snags a hot girlfriend much younger than himself (I grow less tolerant of such plot lines, for some reason, as I grow old alone).

But I really have no reason not to recommend True-Life Adventure to you as light summer reading. Nothing really wrong with it.

Uncategorized

The Saga of Apple Johnson

Leave a comment

I was out of town the last few days. I took a long weekend for a trip with my brothers. I’ll share a couple pictures in a few days, when I’ve cleared up some technical problems with my camera.

It was a family history trip. We went to visit the natural habitat of one of our great-grandfathers on Mom’s side.

The man has always been something of a mystery to us. He was larger than life in family memory, half joke and half cautionary tale. But we didn’t know where he came from in Norway, or where to look for the information. The clues I remembered steered me entirely wrong.

But one of my brothers did some digging in his spare time, and not only located the old man’s grave, but also made contact with a second cousin. That cousin met us in Iron River, Wisconsin, along with his wife (nice people; devout Baptists). So we heard some stories, saw some documents, and visited some locations. The result was a more detailed, and nuanced, story of our great-grandfather, John B. Johnson.

The story:

Our ancestor was born on the island of Ytreøy, near Trondheim. The first fact that caught my imagination was that his baptism name was Johan Arndt Johanson. The name “Johan Arndt” is significant. Johann Arndt was a German Lutheran theologian in the 17th Century. Not strictly a pietist, his devotional writings were prized by the Pietists when they eventually came along. In Norway, they were particularly popular with the Haugeans, members of the evangelical lay movement (I’ve written about it here before) that changed Norwegian society, and to which my paternal family belonged.

So if a common family (and all my ancestors were common as dirt) named their son after Johan Arndt, that’s a pretty good indicator that it was a Haugean family.

Young Johan Arndt Johanson, however, was a prodigal son. A laborer and a sea cook, he was immensely strong, a prodigious drinker, and pretty much uncontrollable. Continue reading The Saga of Apple Johnson →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Runaway,’ by Peter May

1 Comment

Runaway

In London in 2015, an old man who has been a fugitive for many years is murdered. In Glasgow, Jack Mackay, a retiree, is summoned by his old friend Maurie, who is dying of cancer. Maurie makes a request, or more of a demand. The murdered man did not do the crime everyone thinks he did. For that reason, Jack must get the old band together, and they must take Maurie to London before he dies. That’s the premise of Runaway, by Peter May.

It’s a crazy request, but Jack is at loose ends in his life and has nothing better to do. Also, he’s curious. Fifty years ago, the friends were in a rock band, and they all ran off on impulse, to find fame and riches in London. What happened was traumatic, and left Jack with many unresolved questions that still haunt him.

Soon the old men are on the road, in a “borrowed” car, with Jack’s couch potato grandson dragooned into driving. As they follow the route they traveled half a century earlier, the reader follows Jack’s recollections of the original journey, the central event and great tragedy of all their lives.

I was uncomfortable with this book at first. I feared it would be yet another celebration of the glories of the Love Generation, with its supposed idealism and courage. But what the band encounters in this story is much closer to the actual truth – passions running riot, drugged confusion, and cynical predation by exploiters. Jack is victimized, and victimizes others himself, to his eternal regret.

It’s a sad story, but insightful, and – in the view of this survivor of the era – pretty authentic. I also ought to mention that on one particular social issue – I won’t spoil it for you – it takes exactly the right side.

This wasn’t an easy novel for me to read, but in the end I found it rewarding and enriching. Cautions for language, sexual situations, and disturbing content.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Printer and the Preacher,’ by Randy Petersen

Leave a comment

The Printer and the Preacher

I picked up this book with great anticipation. It’s fairly well known that Benjamin Franklin and the English revivalist George Whitefield were friends. An account of their friendship promised a very entertaining and educational story. Unfortunately, though it was educational, the entertainment element was largely wanting in The Printer and the Preacher.

Author Randy Petersen clearly did a lot of research to produce this book on two remarkable men. George Whitefield to a large degree invented popular evangelism as we know it – emotional, dramatic preaching, avoiding denominational distinctives for a “mere Christianity” gospel. Benjamin Franklin, as his major publisher, supported his work (most of the time) because of its positive social effects, but could never accept the deity of Christ. Nevertheless the two men liked and respected each other, and were friends for many years, until Whitefield’s death. Whitefield again and again urged Franklin to consider Christ’s claims, and Franklin politely put him off.

Wouldn’t it be intriguing to have been a fly on the wall during one of these men’s meetings, when the very concepts of what would become American religion were being worked out by two men of intelligence and wit? Alas, The Printer and the Preacher never provides any detail of such a meeting, even in summary. Apparently such accounts don’t exist, and the two men’s letters don’t preserve the kind of interchange we’d like to have. What we get, instead, is bits of factual information scattered like raisins in the great oatmeal bowl of the author’s analysis. Don’t get me wrong – the analysis is good, as far as I can tell. But I wish the author had trusted his story more, and felt less obligated to explain each point to us. Of course that would have left us with a much shorter book.

The Printer and the Preacher is a useful work. But it’s not a great pleasure to read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Drop,’ by Dennis Lehane

Leave a comment

The Drop

Bob’s church is closing. That, I think, is the central metaphor of The Drop, a masterful novel by Dennis Lehane.

Bob loves his church, and goes to mass every day. But he never communes, because he refuses to make confession. He loves the old church’s traditional beauty. He finds a kind of peace there. But the Boston diocese can no longer support it, due to legal obligations to victims of priestly abuse.

Bob is a nice guy. People like him. But he’s lonely. Women don’t find him attractive. His only real friend is his boss, his cousin Marv. He and Marv set out to be gangsters once, years back, trying to be tough. But then the Chechen mob moved in, showing them what tough really meant. They took over Marv’s bar, and Marv and Bob sank back, almost with relief, into semi-respectability. Except that the bar is now a “drop,” where from time to time gambling money is collected for pick-up by the mob’s messengers.

Then one night, Bob hears a noise from a garbage can. He opens it to find a puppy there, bloodied and abandoned. A girl watches him rescue the animal, and in one night Bob acquires both a pet and a (sort of) girlfriend.

Bob doesn’t know it, but people are making plans, intending to use him as a pawn.

They are making a big mistake.

This is one of Lehane’s best novels, in my opinion, which is saying a lot. Not only does he ratchet up the tension mercilessly, but he plots with elegance. I wasn’t prepared at all for the conclusion.

Christianity plays a major role in The Drop. I don’t think Lehane is advancing any kind of apology for Christianity, but he asks the right questions, and poses the big problem (in my view) entirely correctly.

Highly recommended. Not for kids, or those easily shocked.

Religion, Uncategorized

Faith of our founding fathers

1 Comment

Proposed Great Seal
Benjamin Franklin’s proposed Great Seal of the United States, showing the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea.

Thoughts after reading a book on Benjamin Franklin:

It is often stated that Franklin and Jefferson were Deists. This is justified in a sense, because they thought of themselves as Deists. But they really weren’t.

They believed that prayer had value, that God could be petitioned. That is completely opposite to true, continental Deism, which believed in a God who paid no attention to His creation.

What these men actually were, was Christians without the Incarnation. They accepted Christianity as a positive social good, but denied that Christ was God.

In essence they were secular, non-kosher Jews, who would never have considered converting to Judaism for social reasons.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Entry Island,’ by Peter May

1 Comment

Entry Island

A warm sun slanted out of the autumn sky, transforming every tree into one of nature’s stained-glass windows. The golds and yellows, oranges and reds of the fall leaves glowed vibrant and luminous, backlit by the angled rays of the sun, turning the forest into a cathedral of color. Sime had forgotten just how stunning these autumn colors could be, his senses dulled by years of gray city living.

Another novel by Peter May. Another home run, in my opinion. This guy can write.

As Entry Island begins, a man has been stabbed to death on Entry Island, in the Madeline Islands on the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Detective Sime Mackenzie is sent to act as translator for the investigators. The province is francophone Quebec, but the people on Entry Island still speak English, which is also Sime’s (short for Simon’s) childhood tongue. He’s not eager to go – he’s exhausted, debilitated by chronic insomnia. And he doesn’t get along well with the other officers – especially the one he used to be married to.

The murder victim was the richest man on the island, and suspicion centers on his wife, who says she was attacked by a knife-wielding man, and her husband died defending her. But the moment Sime meets Kersty Cowell, he has an irrational sense that he’s seen her before. Then she remarks on the signet ring he wears, an heirloom from his father. She has a pendant that matches it exactly, she says – though she can’t find it when she looks for it.

As he pursues the investigation, Sime is tormented by brief, vivid dreams during his short periods of sleep. In these dreams he relives the experiences of an ancestor who bore his name, who was a victim of the 19th Century land clearances in the Scottish Isles (his grandmother read to him from the man’s journals). He loved, tragically, a woman also called Kersty. History, dreams, and police work come together in a drama that might save Sime, or drive him mad – or kill him.

Once again, Peter May presents a fairly far-fetched plot, but closes the deal with style. His characters are good, his dialogue vivid, and his descriptions cinematic. As a Christian, I had trouble with suggestions of some kind of reincarnation, but the faith of the Christian characters is presented with sympathy and no axes are ground.

Cautions for the sort of things you’d expect. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes transcendent, Entry Island is a superior reading experience for mystery fans.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Extraordinary People,’ by Peter May

2 Comments

Extraordinary People

I’m becoming a fan of Scottish writer Peter May. Extraordinary People, which seems to be the first book of a new series, only added to my enthusiasm.

Enzo MacLeod (half Italian, half Scottish) is the father of two daughters. One, whose mother died, adores him and lives in France. The other, whose mother he divorced, will not speak to him. However, she too lives in France.

Enzo used to be a forensic scientist for the police, but now he teaches biology at the University of Toulouse. As a sort of a lark, he makes a bet with a friend, a journalist who’s writing a book on unsolved disappearances. Enzo bets him that he can solve the disappearance of a famous professor, public intellectual, and film critic about ten years before.

Quickly he is able to identify a skull discovered in a metal case in the catacombs of Paris as that of the missing man. Along with the skull various items were found, and Enzo believes they are clues to the motive and murderer. He begins to run the clues down, using the resources of the internet, which did not exist when the man was murdered. Along the way he gradually learns that someone is following his investigation, someone willing to kill him and those he cares about to keep old secrets.

The form of this mystery is one I don’t generally buy into – the serial puzzle mystery, where the detective has to solve a series of obscure riddles to solve the crime. Such things happen in real life, I think, never. In outline, this story resembles the National Treasure movies, which I found contrived and unconvincing.

But May plays the game at a much higher level, and while I recognized the implausibility of the plot, I still had a good time following it. Enzo is an ambivalent character who can sometimes repel the reader, but his growth in maturity and self-knowledge is part of the story.

Cautions for the usual stuff, plus a couple naive comments in the Dan Brown line. But overall I enjoyed Extraordinary People very much.

Uncategorized

Photographic evidence

1 Comment

Our friend Roy Jacobsen, who used to run a fine writing blog called Writing, Clear and Simple, dropped in for a chat during the Viking festival on Saturday. He took the picture below.

Moorhead 2016

Past the canvas you can see, seated, my friend Kelsey, who sewed my tunic.