Joel Friedlander draws lessons from the J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith episode. Galbraith’s book was highly praised, but sold 1,500 copies before the Rowling news. Friedlander explains: “My opinion is that it was the complete absence of any platform for Robert Galbraith, the lack of any fans, anyone who cared about him, the lack of anyone willing to host him on a blog tour or help him set up readings at bookstores, or a tribe that would greet his long-awaited first book with enthusiasm that held back sales of what’s obviously a well-written book.”
Season of the Witch, by Arni Thorarinsson
I am brought out of my musings by Jóa, who produces a plastic bag from the roadside café in Varmahlíd. She takes from it two small chocolate eggs and offers me one.
“It’s a bit early, isn’t it? A week before Easter. Aren’t they for Easter Sunday?”
“That’s so last century,” answers Jóa like a continuation of my thoughts at the wheel. “Now everything is allowed, always.”
Back in 2008, I posted a reading report on an Icelandic play called “The Wish,” by Johann Sigurjonsson. It’s a drama about a young man who throws his life away in pursuit of power and self-gratification in magic. Oddly enough, that play (under an alternate title, “Loftur the Sorcerer”) is at the heart of a mystery novel I just read, Season of the Witch by Arni Thorarinsson. I’ve been dipping into Scandinavian mystery novels for a while now, and as often as not haven’t been much impressed. Season of the Witch, I’m glad to report, pleased me quite a lot.
Einar (I’m not sure if his last name is ever given. Can’t find it) is a recovering alcoholic and a reporter for an Icelandic newspaper. He used to cover crime in Reykjavik, but a recent management shake-up sent him up to the small northern town of Akureyri. Here, along with a couple of colleagues sent into exile with him, he’s reduced to reporting on petty crime and local politics, and asking “Questions of the Day” to people on the street. He hates it. He also hates his local editor. He’s attracted to the female photographer who is the third exile, but she turns out to be unavailable. Also he’s separated from his daughter, the only person he really cares about.
But then things start happening. The wife of a local industrialist is killed in a kayaking accident, and her old mother insists she was murdered. Then a popular high school student who was to star in a school production of “Loftur the Sorcerer” is found murdered in a junk yard. There are rumors of drug dealing, and tensions rise between native Icelanders and immigrants (this book was written back before the Icelandic financial crash).
Einar isn’t the kind to settle for easy answers. He keeps poking at the evidence after everyone else is satisfied.
But he does more than that. Einar also acts as a dispenser of grace. He performs kindnesses for people he doesn’t like, and covers up evidence in cases where the law would only add to the tragedies.
Not at all a Christian novel, Season of the Witch is a Christ-haunted novel. Einar walks in a culture full of the old landmarks of the Faith, and the absence of faith is always conspicuous in his mind. Without offering specific answers – aside from allusions to Jesus and to the Christian play “Loftur the Sorcerer” – this story asks all the right questions.
Cautions for rough language, adult situations, and earthy humor. I liked the book, and I especially liked the hero Einar. Recommended.
Kindle here. Paperback here.
Map Showing Oz North of Narnia
A “Speculative Cosmographer” gives us a few maps of imaginative lands.
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Post test, post script
And another box has been checked off my list of things to do. Remember that Miller Analogies Test I took a week ago, the one that disappeared in a cloud of electrons? I took it again today, and this time it worked, and I’m done with that. The preliminary score I got when I finished was 475 out of 600, which disappointed me at first. But according to what I’ve been able to learn in a web search, it would seem to actually be a pretty good result, because of the way it’s calculated. Scores above 500, I read somewhere, are pretty rare.
Here’s an interesting item by way of Instapundit: Apparently there’s a reason all the movies you watch these days seem the same. It’s because everybody’s following the same identical template.
Apparently a guy named Blake Snyder wrote a book called Save the Cat!, published in 2005. It became a hot seller in Hollywood, and everybody has been following his pattern to the letter ever since.
When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.
This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. If any community in history has valued creativity more, and possessed less of it, and lived in greater fear of failing in creativity, than Hollywood, I can’t imagine what it could have been.
I’ve always been leery of step-by-step templates. Partly because I’m too lazy to count pages. For years I’ve written on the basis of a simple, general formula – Hero has problem. Tries to solve it. Fails, making things worse. Tries again. Fails again. Makes things even worse. Repeat until he either succeeds or fails in some way that’s significant.
Call me, Paramount. We’ll do lunch.
Deeply Odd, by Dean Koontz
In such a short time, Mrs. Fischer and I had achieved a degree of friendship that allowed periods of silence without awkwardness. I felt comfortable with her. I was reasonably sure that she would never shoot me or stab me, or set me on fire, or throw acid in my face, or lock me in a room with a hungry crocodile, or dump me in a lake after chaining me to two dead men. Such confidence in a new acquaintance is more rare these days than it once was.
As I read Deeply Odd, Dean Koontz’ latest Odd Thomas adventure, I thought to myself, “This feeling, which I always get from the Odd Thomas books – and more than usual in this one – must be the feeling women get from those romance novels they love.” A story that satisfies a very deep emotional need. In the case of an Odd Thomas story, that emotional need is for a picture of a world in which real evil exists, but in which good is also potent, not to mention more fun.
This time out, Odd, who is traveling California with a ghost dog, an enigmatic pregnant woman, and a boy without a family, takes a walk downtown one day to buy some new clothes, but ends up stealing a Ford Explorer in order to follow a semi truck driver who’s carrying out some unknown – but certainly evil – task. As he follows the man, he learns that the trucker is connected to the kidnapping of four children marked for a cruel, sacrificial death. But he also finds friends to help him, including an old lady who never sleeps, driving a Mercedes limousine, the world’s best protected and wisest survivalists, and the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.
For me, Deeply Odd was just a delight from front to back. It may be my favorite Odd Thomas book to date, which is saying a great deal. Cautions for very disturbing subject matter, but no obscene language (Odd is much too polite to use such words). My highest recommendation.
The Mountain of Gold, by J. D. Davies
There’s no real reason why novels about the British navy of the Age of Sail must always concern the Napoleonic wars. The British navy has a long history, and stories about an institution finding its feet can be as intrinsically interesting as stories of it at its zenith. J. D. Davies, a historian and an expert on the subject, delivers an extremely entertaining novel in The Mountain of Gold, a sequel to a novel I haven’t read (but need to seek out) called Gentleman Captain.
Matthew Quinton may or may not be the heir to the earldom of Ravensden, depending on whether his older brother ever produces an heir, which seems… unlikely. Then, in a move that shocks everyone, the older brother’s friend, King Charles II, arranges a marriage for him to a beautiful woman of mysterious antecedents. Meanwhile Matthew has returned from a voyage with a prisoner, a brash Irishman who converted to Islam and joined the “Sallee Rovers.” He swears he knows where to find a mountain of gold in Africa, and King Charles, desperately in need of money, sends Matthew on a voyage to find that mountain (and incidentally to start a war with the Dutch). But Matthew has an implacable enemy, in the person of a French commander of the Knights of Malta, who is skillful, relentless, and ruthless. There are also wheels within political wheels, and plots intersecting with plots, and nothing is exactly what its name declares.
The Mountain of Gold was simply a lot of fun to read, an unpretentious, old-fashioned adventure story featuring a sympathetic hero and an interesting cast of characters. I was particularly pleased with its treatment of Christianity. There are Puritans and Cavaliers here, all still smarting from the injuries of the Civil War, but author Davies treats them all with respect.
Highly recommended.
The Commoditized Social Life
What elements of your life have economic value? Your family photos? Your casual thoughts? The video you took of a stranger making a shameful fool of herself?
Our new social networks allow us to attempt to market everything in our lives for audience or follower consumption. Tim Challies applies an old analogy to it: when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Some experiences are too full to distill to 140 characters and too rich to capture in a photo,” he reflects. “Sharing such experiences through social media serves only to cheapen them. Do not allow yourself to ruin a beautiful moment by seeing it primarily as an opportunity to share it with strangers.”
The Oddity of Dean Koontz
Odd is self-consciously one of Burke’s good men: determined to do something rather than nothing in the face of evil. In Odd Hours, he contemplates Burke’s dictum and adds that it is essential “that good men and women not be propagandized into believing that real evil is a myth” and that all malevolent behavior is simply the result of poor socialization or bad economic theory. But this awareness of responsibility comes with a price. Again from Odd Hours: “to do what you feel sure is right and in the aid of justice, you sometimes have to do things that, when recalled on lonely nights, make you wonder if in fact you are the good man that you like to believe you are.”
Our friend Hunter Baker writes about Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas in the current issue of Touchstone.
Remembering That Black Boy in Birmingham
They weren’t his people, and they wanted to make sure he knew that. Or maybe they were afraid of him, though they wouldn’t have admitted it. Alan Jacobs has written a story about a childhood experience in Birmingham in which he and his friends picked up stones to assault a black boy who walked through their neighborhood. Alan didn’t throw a stone or yell at this Other Person, but he did stand with his friends as the boy’s enemy.