Fiction, Reviews

Break In, by Dick Francis

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Reviewing a Dick Francis book seems almost a redundancy, unless you’re reviewing one of his misfires. Which is unfair, because the misfires are very rare. So I’ll go ahead and tell you about Break In, one of the master’s best.

Kit Fielding is a champion steeplechase jockey who rides for some prominent owners, including a European princess whose charming niece shows up to provide romantic interest. But there’s trouble in Kit’s family. His twin sister Holly – with whom he shares a moderate psychic link – has been rash enough to marry Bobby Allardeck, scion of a racing family with which the Fieldings have been feuding – sometimes to the point of bloodshed – for centuries. Bobby has been disinherited by his millionaire father, and Holly has been disowned by the grandfather who raised her and Kit. Now stories have started appearing in a London tabloid, reporting that Bobby’s horse training business is in financial trouble, and that his father has refused to help. Tradesmen are starting to demand payment, and the stories could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Kit begins to investigate the source of these stories, he comes under attack not only by mysterious thugs, but occasionally by Bobby himself, because old feuds die hard, and overcoming a lifetime’s social conditioning is no easy matter.

The plot is rather convoluted, but Francis’ prose and storytelling are like a fine race horse, perfectly coordinated and rippling with muscle under the skin. I enjoyed Break In very much, and recommend it. Cautions for pre-marital sex and relatively mild bad language.

Fiction, Reviews

The Girl Who Cried Wolf, by Robert Ferrigno

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A lot of people have praised Robert Ferrigno’s Assassin books to me, but I’ve always resisted reading them. The books are (if you haven’t heard of them) set in a near future in which Islam has become dominant in the United States. Since I figure there’s a good chance this will actually happen in my lifetime, I see no reason to experience it sooner than necessary, even vicariously.

But when the non-Assassin book The Girl Who Cried Wolf (available as an e-book only) showed up for three bucks for Kindle, I thought I’d give it a chance. Maybe I’d be so impressed I’d be motivated to tackle Ferrigno’s magnum opus.

Alas, I don’t think that will happen. I find myself in a strange position here. I have no serious criticisms to make of the book. The writing is professional, the characters interesting, the plot full of suspense. And yet I didn’t enjoy it much, and was glad to be done with it.

The plot is simple on the surface. A group of eco-terrorists decide to kidnap attorney Remy Brandt, daughter of an investment tycoon. The plan calls for one of them to murder Remy’s boyfriend, a policeman named Mack Armitage, but he fails in that, only the first in a series of errors that will prove fatal in the end.

Reviews gave me the impression that this book would be lighter than it is, that there’d be a sort of “Ransom of Red Chief” quality to it. There’s some of that, but I never found it very amusing or satisfying. Mack is an adequate hero, but of course he can’t be allowed to be too heroic, because just rescuing Remy would be unfashionably patriarchal.

Author Ferrigno has a reputation as “the most un-PC author in America,” but I didn’t see much of that here. The eco-terrorists are depicted as being in the wrong, but most of them are well-meaning and merely the dupes of masterminds whose motives have nothing to do with Mother Earth. The vilest person in the story is someone every leftist will be happy to hate. So I didn’t see much here that was subversive of mainstream prejudices.

And when it comes down to it, I guess I just don’t like stories about hostages and prisoners. That’s purely a personal reaction, based on my own history. You may like The Girl Who Cried Wolf more than I did.

Authors

Vince Flynn dead at 47

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Minnesota author Vince Flynn, famous for his Mitch Rapp novels, died today of prostate cancer in a St. Paul hospital. He passed away surrounded by relatives and friends who prayed the Rosary.

Flynn was supporting himself by bartending when he self-published his first novel, “Term Limits,” in 1997 after getting more than 60 rejection letters. After it became a local best-seller, Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal — and “Term Limits” became a New York Times best-seller in paperback.

The St. Paul-based author also sold millions of books in the international market and averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counterterrorism operative. His 14th novel, “The Last Man,” was published last year.

R. I. P.

Fiction, Reviews

Let Christ Pay Your Sin: Brideshead Revisited

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“Praise the grace whose threats alarmed thee,

Roused thee from thy fatal ease.”

These words from the old Key/Wilcox hymn adequately summarize the theme of Brideshead Revisited. Perhaps they even spoil the plot a bit, but this isn’t a plot-driven story. It’s relationship-driven—maybe faith-driven. Waugh draws out the fatal ease of his characters so that we can see what God’s grace does to them in the end.

Madresfield House

(Madresfield Court, the home of the Lygon family, Worcestershire.)

The narrator, Charles Ryder, is in the British army when the book opens. His unit relocates to the Bridehead estate, which provokes the sad memories of the rest of the novel. They don’t seem sad at first. When Charles begins his studies at Oxford, he meets Sebastian Flyte, a very friendly young man whose eccentricities seem only to endear him to almost everyone near him, especially Charles, who falls in love with him. Sebastian, a year ahead of Charles, has collected a handful of homosexually inclined friends, the worst of whom is Anthony Blanche.

While Blanche is brazenly queer (I can’t recall that he described himself with that term, but I’m confident he would have approved of it), the others are not, and Ryder suggests to his readers that we are sufficiently worldly enough to understand these relationships without delving into them. Much later in the book, he describes a monk as being naïve to not see the nature of companionship Sebastian held with a young German loaf, but all of this is subtle, perhaps because homosexuality was against the law. (Here’s a remarkable article on the autobiographical nature of Waugh’s novel, which mentions high society’s attitude on sexual matters.)

What isn’t subtle is the Catholicism of Lady Marchmain, Sebastian’s mother. The entire Flyte/Brideshead family is at least nominally Catholic. Half the family hates it; the other half embraces it. Sebastian hates his mother apparently for her ardent faith. In fact, she seems to be a representation of the Catholic Church as a whole, certainly flawed but honest and devout. You might see each of the faithful Catholics of the Flyte family as different categories of the church: Lady Marchmain representing the institution, Brideshead, the elder brother, representing typical laity, and Cordelia, the younger sister, representing the missionary. Each of them is disliked to some degree. Cordelia gives us a reason on page 221 of my edition:

“[Lady Marchmain] was saintly, but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him, and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.”

So some of the characters distain God, regardless what they say of Him, and Waugh intends to show us how God responds. He shows us unmerited favor and lifelong mercy. Christ ignored the grief and insult of our sin, taking it to the cross for atonement once for all. Christ offers us grace, having paid for our hatred personally. Without Him, we live in sin. Waugh draws out a picture of this with one character (pg 287):

“Living with sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time…”

Without Christ, we have our sin, no matter how we dress it up. If we do not let Him pay for it, we will. If we do not end our lives as holy (“no one is ever holy without suffering”), we will end them in torment, having succumbed to life’s fatal ease.

Fiction, Reviews

The Ian Fleming Files: Operation Armada, by Damian Stevenson

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I thought I’d give this one a try because the Kindle price was only ninety-nine cents, and the concept was so promising that I wanted it to be good.

Sadly, a good concept does not a good novel make. Good writing is also required. Some of the writing in The Ian Fleming Files: Operation Armada is good enough, but the author’s pallet is limited, and his reach exceeds his grasp.

Here’s the concept: Most of us know that Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, was himself a British agent during World War II, and much of the procedures he describes were based on his experience. Certain characters in the fictional stories are also based on real people.

Damian Stevenson makes the creative jump of presenting Fleming as the original Bond, and telling a story of one of his assignments as if he were writing a Bond script. Continue reading The Ian Fleming Files: Operation Armada, by Damian Stevenson →

Bookselling

Be all that you Canby

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Saturday I was up early to join Ragnar and his wife, who took me along to Canby, Minnesota, in the western part of the state, for the annual “Hat Day” celebration. I inquired discreetly at one point what Hat Day was actually in honor of, and learned that they just wanted to have a celebration, and were looking for a theme. They finally settled on those giveaway caps all the farmers wear (which, I have to say as a hat purist, are not strictly hats but caps).

The weather threatened and grumbled as we drove out and set up in the park, but the skies cleared and it turned out to be one of the nicest days of the year so far. The local Sons of Norway lodge, which sponsored us, was very gracious, and the people were all nice. I sold a sufficient number of books to feel that the day had been well spent. No fighting, since we were just a skeleton crew. Thanks to the citizens of Canby, and to Ragnar and his better half.

Speaking of selling books, I haven’t mentioned for a while that I have this e-book for sale, Hailstone Mountain. High adventure, low price. Read it now, before it becomes a cultural phenomenon, and you’ll be able to condescend to your friends!

Religion

In which I come to the aid of the Roman Catholic Church

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Photo credit: Bowling United Industries



I went to a funeral today, for the mother of an old friend. It was a sad occasion, but not the worst kind of funeral, because it was the kind where the departed was old and full of days, and the event not unexpected. They’d asked me to read the Scripture in the service, something I was happy to do. I enjoy reading in public, and a favor is none the worse for being a pleasure.

As some of us sat in the Catholic sanctuary, waiting for the priest to show up to give us our stage directions, I looked at the little card rack on the back of the pew in front of me. You’ve probably seen such things – small wooden racks just large enough to hold Communion cards (at least that’s what they use them for in my church). It had a little round hole at either end, for those stubby pencils they use, the ones that are too short to be worth anybody walking off with. There were no pencils in the holes.

I peeked down into the card reservoir, which was also empty of cards. But I could discern, in the low light, a pencil lying down at the bottom.

“Hello,” I said to myself. “There’s a pencil, in a space too small for anyone to fish it out with their fingers. If I could get it out, I could put it into one of the holes, and do a favor for the next communicant.”

So I took my pen out of my pocket and fished down in the reservoir with it. After a while I tipped the pencil up and out.

And behold, there was another pencil in there below it.

I did my work once again, and got the second pencil out. And I saw that there was a third.

When all was done, I’d fished fully six little half-pencils out of that reservoir, not only providing pencils for future worshipers, but freeing up enough space in the reservoir for them to put cards in again next Sunday. Which I’m not sure they had room for, before my search and rescue operation.

If anyone wants to nominate me for a papal medal, I am not too stern a Protestant to accept it.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

The war over the Game

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The controversy over Andrew Klavan’s praise for Game of Thrones rumbles on, and I follow it with the fascination of a reality show fan, except for wishing both sides well.
A few days back I linked to Klavan’s column at PJ Media, “Eyes Wide Shut: Christians Against Art.” In the course of an argument – with which I generally agree – that Christians need to produce art that seriously addresses the real world, rather than some PG world we’d like to believe in, he mentions his own fondness for the HBO series, “Game of Thrones,” seeing it, apparently, as the sort of thing we ought to be trying to produce ourselves (though I’m sure he wouldn’t insist on including all the skin). In my own response, I expressed my own deep disillusionment with “Game” author George R. R. Martin’s books, a disillusionment which has prevented me from watching a single episode.
On Monday Dave Swindle, another PJ Media writer, responded to Klavan’s article in a similar vein:

You’ve known me since not long after I started editing full time. I was 25 and was only a defense hawk and fiscal conservative but still “socially liberal.” Since then, for a variety of reasons (particularly my return to belief in God), I’ve come further in my ideological shift. I’m genuinely embarrassed by some of the socially conservative positions I find myself now arguing. Never in a million years did I foresee myself as the type that would ever side with those cautioning against pornography’s downsides and the “shocking” content in art. You’ve talked in the past about how you disagree with our mutual friend Ben Shapiro about his Orthodox Judaism-inspired approach to culture and sex. I used to also — and I still disagree with Ben from time to time on issues and tactics (particularly on gay marriage. This is a theological difference deriving from an interpretation of scripture. He and I will just have to keep arguing about it). But on the fundamental issue, the social conservatism he explicates from his traditional reading of the Torah is correct: sex is sacred. It’s impossible to have “casual sex” with someone — every sexual act is transformative. I came to this understanding differently than him, though, through first-hand experience and painful mistakes.

Continue reading The war over the Game →

Reading

Reading Underaged Literature

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Apparently, schools are not challenging or helping students read at their grade level or better. NPR reports: “Anita Silvey, author of 500 Great Books for Teens, teaches graduate students in a children’s literature program, and at the beginning of the class, she asked her students — who grew up in the age of Harry Potter — about the books they like.

‘Every single person in the class said, “I don’t like realism, I don’t like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.” ‘

… But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.”

That’s what my kids will be reading. I plan to help my 9th grader through the Epic of Gilgamesh next fall, for starters.

In related news, young adult novels are finding a lot of adult readers, because they find it interesting and sophisticated. One author says, “Teenagers are more willing to let you genre bend. For them, it’s all about telling an honest story. You’re writing for really smart, really savvy readers.”

And who doesn’t love an honest story?

Fiction, Reviews

Eleventh Century Vox

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Vox Day of Vox Popoli reviews Hailstone Mountain, mostly positively. (I get the impression he’s a tough critic):

Creativity: 4 of 5. Based on it is on a history with which most readers are much less familiar than they tend to think, Hailstone Mountain is considerably more creative than the average fantasy novel. I liked how Walker mimicked the way in which saga plots tend to advance and turn abruptly, without much in the way of warning. It’s a fascinating blend of old and new, and will be a pleasure for anyone tired of the formulaic plots and predictable characters that presently infest so much of modern fantasy. Jonathan Moeller has remarked how epublishing has broadened the scope of fantasy fiction, and Hailstone Mountain is an excellent example of this phenomenon.