All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘Missing or Murdered,’ by Robin Forsythe

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My ongoing attempt to shift my recreational reading to older novels is not, I must admit, going as well as I hoped. I’ve discovered some gems, it’s true – Frank H. Spearman’s westerns, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s spy stories. But my attempts to acquire a taste for Golden Age mysteries seems fruitless. Aside from Dorothy Sayers, I honestly can’t think of a Golden Age mystery novelist I care much for. Robin Forsythe did not change that judgment.

Robin Forsythe was an English civil servant who went to prison for a while for fraud, and came out determined to make his living writing mysteries. He did all right too, for the remainder of his short life.

His fictional detective was Tony “Algernon” Vereker (I never did figure out quite how to pronounce that last name). Vereker is a London artist of independent means. In Missing or Murdered, the first novel in the series, his old friend, Lord Bygrave, a government minister, disappears. Vereker attaches himself to the investigation (the Scotland Yard detective in charge is oddly untroubled by the intrusion). He follows the detective around and compares notes with him frequently. They make the investigation a sort of competition. Eventually the work out what happened to Lord Bygrave and who is responsible.

I suppose my tastes have been corrupted by postmodern culture, but I had trouble enjoying Missing or Murdered. Both Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams liked Forsythe’s work, but for my money they both leave him in the dust. There’s lots of talking in the book, with some rather forced wit, and everything is leisured and decent, and it bored me silly. Couldn’t wait for the thing to be done with.

But it’s fine if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Someone to Save You,’ by Paul Pilkington

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Sam Becker, the main character of Someone to Save You, is a London pediatric heart surgeon, who met his wife on a relief mission in Africa. He’s good at his job and rising in his profession.

He’s haunted by a tragedy in his past. His sister was raped and murdered, and his then best friend was convicted of the crime. Sam’s passion for saving lives, perhaps, rises from his perceived failure to protect his sibling.

Driving home from a commemoration of what would have been the sister’s thirtieth birthday, his car is flagged down by a young girl in the road. She frantically directs him down a slope to a railroad track, where the girl’s mother has stopped her car, intending to kill herself and her children. Sam gets the remaining children out of the car in time to save them, but the mother dies.

Sam is a hero to the press, but he hates it and feels like a failure. However, something worse than that is happening. There are threatening phone calls, and attempts to sabotage his career, and hints that his sister’s true killer walked free. And then someone is kidnapped.

The whole story is very complex and tightly plotted. Author Paul Pilkington is very good at his craft. He creates interesting characters and cranks up the drama inexorably (most of his books, oddly, seem to have female protagonists. This one is an exception).

Not much objectionable material here, either. There’s one conversation about religion, which is fairly noncommittal, but not anti-God.

I happily recommend Someone to Save You.

Authors, Blogs, Socials

No Bull

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It may come as a surprise to many, but most Norwegians were never particularly proud of their Norse ancestry. The little knowledge they had of the Viking Age and our common ethnic and cultural heritage was usually horribly outdated. Until recently, in popular culture the Vikings were almost always portrayed as dumb, brutal rapists and villains. Also, Norse mythology was a subject of parody and not to be taken as anything more than naive stories told by our stupid ancestors. Those of us who thought differently, those of us who had already connected with our Norse ancestry, were ridiculed.

Aside from its praise for the awful History Channel “Vikings” TV series, I was pleased but not especially surprised by this article “How the Americans Taught Us Norwegians to Love Our Viking Heritage.”
One thing I learned in my translation work for Prof. Torgrim Titlestad (they tell me our book’s coming out this spring at last. We’ll see. Watch for it in any case; it’ll be called The Viking Heritage), is that for several decades now the Norwegian school system has taught almost nothing about the Viking Age. The main reason was a higher critical view of the Icelandic sagas, our main source of information about Norwegian politics in that time. The same kind of destructive skepticism that scholars have applied to the Bible, they also applied to the sagas. Since the sagas were written a century or more after the events described (much longer than is the case for the gospels), they argued that no information of value could be derived from them.

Scholarly views are changing, though. Sociological studies have shown that substantial useful information can be preserved by oral (non-literate or semi-literate) cultures for much longer than is the case in cultures which rely on books for their records.

Bjørn Andreas Bull-Hansen, the writer, is a novelist, screenwriter and blogger living in Norway. A brief perusal of his site indicates that he’s not crazy, which is generally a good thing.

Non-fiction, Reviews, Writing

‘Less Than Words Can Say,’ by Richard Mitchell

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Children are much smarter than we think. They know when they are being deceived and defrauded. Unless they can utter what they know, however, they know it only in part and imperfectly. If we do not give them the language and thought in which they might genuinely clarify some values, they will do their clarifying with sledgehammers. None of the lofty goals named above can be approached without the skillful practice of language and thought, and to “emphasize” those “areas” in the absence of that practice is to promulgate thought control rather than the control of thought.

Richard Mitchell (1929-2002), was a professor of English and classics who published, as a sort of hobby, a newsletter called “The Underground Grammarian.” His great crusade was opposition to the ways children are educated today, especially in such programs as what is called “values clarification.” In his view, writing and thought are the same thing. If you never learn to write clearly, you will never learn to think. And when the majority of the population in a republic is no longer capable of thinking, it must fall.

I find that hard to argue with.

Less Than Words Can Say was, I believe, his first book. In delightful and often very funny prose, Mitchell skewers various examples of inflated and meaningless writing, especially (but not entirely) from sources in government and education. He disembowels selected passages out of real documents, exposing the emptiness at their hearts and mocking it. For the lover of language, his book is a very amusing read. For anyone who lacks a traditional education in English literature (including the Bible), many of the best jokes will sail overhead.

From the perspective of several decades past the publication of Less Than Words Can Say, it seems to me that things have turned out both better than he predicted, and just as bad. In terms of prose writing, at least in the academic sphere, I don’t think things have deteriorated as much as Mitchell thought they would. I’ve spent the last two years and change in graduate study, and have rarely encountered really bad prose there. Perhaps the level of literacy is higher in Library and Information Science than in other fields.

But in terms of the decay of the capacity for thought, it looks to me, on the basis of current events, that everything he feared is coming true.

Mitchell chose, before his death, to make his books available free of charge to all. You can download a .pdf of Less Than Words Can Say here.

Uncategorized

Foiled

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I’ve written before, somewhere on this blog (or its previous incarnation) about doing some genealogical detective work. I found a grave for a distant relative in Norway who was curious to find out what had happened to his great-grandfather. I took some pride in hunting the grave down, because I’m not a man designed by nature for sleuth work. Curiosity is not my strong suit, and I’d rather go to the dentist than ask a stranger a question.

There was another family mystery I thought I’d solved too. One of my great-grandfathers was mysterious in his origins. I didn’t know where he was born, and I wanted to know.

But my mother had told me some things about him, and I’d taken notes. One thing she said was that he came from an island known as the “middle island,” which was the largest island in Norway.

I did some web searching, and at last discovered that the island of Hinnøy, almost in the Lofotens, is in fact the largest in Norway, and somewhere I found it referred to as the “middle island.” So obviously, my ancestor must have come from there.

“Wrong, Watson,” said Holmes, smacking him with the Persian slipper.

A family member recently made contact with some relatives who had the straight dope, documents and all. Our great-grandfather came from the island of Ytterøy, near Trondheim.

I plead in my defense that Mom’s clues were misleading. Or someone misinformed her.

This is what comes from unreliable genes. No wonder I grew up to be a novelist.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War,’ by Joseph Loconte

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I’m not sure C. S. Lewis would have approved of this book. He maintained, on numerous occasions, that an author’s biography should be of no interest to the reader. Studying the lives of Milton or of Spenser, he insisted, would provide no insight into the meanings of their works beyond what an intelligent reader can gather from reading the plain texts.

Still, I think Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War serves a useful purpose. Amidst the tremendous popularity of the works of Tolkien and Lewis all these decades after their deaths, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about their artistic motivations (particularly in Tolkien’s case. I’m pretty sure a lot of fans of the movies think the books are about environmentalism). Loconte follows the two men’s lives, concentrating especially on their experiences in the First World War, and explains how the experience of battle (Lewis remembered thinking, “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about”) impressed itself on their memories and their imaginations. In the midst of the great disillusionment that swept Europe after the armistice, Tolkien kept his bearings, because he’d never fallen for over-optimistic enthusiasms like eugenics but had put his faith in eternal things. And in time he was able to help his friend Jack Lewis to understand as well.

For fans unfamiliar with the lives and the thought behind the books of these two men, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War may be very illuminating. It’s well written and well researched. I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sin Walks into the Desert,’ by Mat Ingwalson

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I’m not entirely sure what to say about Sin Walks into the Desert by Matt Ingwalson. The book’s concept was interesting enough to persuade me to download it, and I read it to the end (something I’m less and less willing to do with sub-par books). So this is a well-crafted and interesting novel. Very noir, in a modern vein, which is to say, kind of goth.

Sin (short for Anderson, his first name) is a… well it’s hard to figure what he is. He’s a loner. He looks and dresses and has tattoos like any ordinary punk, and he’s fairly neurotic. But he has special skills. As a boy (not that long ago) he was on the verge of murdering someone when his uncle (an FBI agent) summoned just in time by his worried parents, swept him up, took him home with him, and began training him to turn his natural gift for violence to useful purposes. But Sin never joined the FBI, or even the military. It isn’t made clear how he makes his living, unless I missed it.

Anyway, his uncle, whom he calls el Viejo, has disappeared, and friends fear something bad has happened to him. So Sin sets out to track the captors, employing the formidable skills he learned from the old man. This leads to a pretty shattering revelation, when all is said and done and a few people are dead.

If you like your books dark, you’ll like this one. I found Sin himself hard to like, but the writing and characterization are good, laid down in spare, downbeat prose.

Cautions for the usual. Moderately recommended, only because of my ambivalence about the main character.

Goofing

Hoo’s sorry gow?

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The other day, for reasons I don’t recall, the word “hoosegow” entered my mind. If you’re like me, you know it mostly from Westerns. It’s what crude cowboys called a jail. “Throw him in the hoosegow!”

It occurred to me to wonder about the origins of the word. Off the top of my head, I guessed it was one of those American borrowings from Dutch, like “boss.” The “hoose” element sounds like the Germanic “hus” or “huis,” meaning house.

So I looked it up. Turns out it’s not Dutch but Spanish, from the word “jusgado,” meaning jail. One of those cowboy borrowings from the Mexicans, like high heeled boots and sombreros.

And now you know too. Because I’m generous. Not a master of languages, but generous.

Update:

A Spanish-speaking friend tells me jusgado does not mean jail, but a male prisoner in a jail. This means dictionary.com is mistaken. I want my money back.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Three Hostages,’ by John Buchan

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It was around 1980 that I caught a production of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages on PBS. The dramatization was a one-off; I don’t think that particular actor ever played Richard Hannay again. But it intrigued me enough to motivate me to read The 39 Steps, the first novel in the series. That made me a lifelong Buchan fan, but oddly enough I never read The Three Hostages until just now.

It’s good. I’d say it’s one of the stronger entries in a classic series.

In The Three Hostages, World War I is recently over. Richard Hannay, British intelligence agent extraordinaire, has settled down on a farm in Oxfordshire with his wife Mary (also a retired agent), and their small son. He looks forward (or thinks he does) to living the quiet life of a country squire. But then he receives an appeal for help. Three people, one of them a small boy, have been taken hostage. There is no clue as to the perpetrator. Reluctantly, Hannay agrees to look into it. Gradually he begins to suspect the last person anyone would suspect – a rising young politician who has endeared himself to nearly every influential person in London. A hopeless-seeming but successful investigation (hypnotism features strongly) is capped by a deadly man-to-man showdown in the Scottish highlands.

I was surprised – once again – by what a fine author John Buchan was. Among all the writers of the English “bulldog” school, nobody came near him when it came to writing readable prose. Richard Hannay is a vivid and likeable character, and all his friends are just as believable (his enemies, perhaps, a little less). He especially distinguishes himself in his descriptive passages, which are wonderfully done (this pleased me especially in the short section set in Norway).

Modern readers will be put off by racial and ethnic slurs which were a normal part of English life at the time. For some reason Hannay makes much of the villain having a round head, which he sees as un-English and sinister. On the other hand, those same readers will appreciate the active part Mary Hannay takes in the action.

If you’re open-minded enough to tolerate temporal diversity, The Three Hostages is great fun.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Chad Bird on the novelist as priest

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Gene Edward Veith at Cranach links to an article by Chad Bird on how fiction brought him to Christian faith.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, however, something else was happening. The God against whom I had rebelled, and from whom I was fleeing, began to use these very works of fiction to beckon me home. As it turned out, the novels in which I had sought escape, became part of the means whereby the Lord rescued me from my own death.