Getting free book offers for my Kindle has expanded my opportunities for writing snarky reviews. Take No More by Seb Kirby is far from being the worst written e-book I’ve read, but I can hardly recommend it.
James Blake, a London radio executive, comes home to his apartment one day and finds his wife dying just inside the door, shot in the head. Not only can he not imagine why anyone would have killed her, but he didn’t even know she was in town. She was supposed to be in Florence, looking for lost art masterpieces.
Naturally he comes under police suspicion, but he manages to flee to Florence where he discovers that his wife has crossed immensely powerful people, and he soon becomes a target himself.
I’d say the problem with Take No More is that the author is an OK storymaker, but an amateur storyteller. He often commits the sin of having his narrator inform us what other people are thinking, something he can’t know for sure. And the prose is… maddeningly pedestrian. There’s plenty of danger and action, but the words don’t serve the story. It occurred to me that the book read like a second-rate translation – all the words are right, but the music is absent. One of the reviewers on Amazon actually said something about it being originally written in another language, but “Kirby” sounds like an English-speaking name to me.
There was one trick employed for losing a tail that did impress me, though.
Cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing radical. If you can get it free like I did, you might care to give it a try if this sort of thing interests you. Otherwise, I’d say pass.
The Book Haven writes: “The elder Irish poet said, ‘He devoted years to collaborating with me on a book I needed to write but one that, without Dennis as interviewer, might never have got written.’ He called O’Driscoll ‘my hero.'”
So here’s the trailer for the upcoming History Channel series, Vikings.
On the basis of this trailer, and what I’ve read, I’m not as sad as I have been that I don’t have cable and won’t be able to watch it. I suppose I’m hypercritical. The first thing reenactors look for is always costumes, and these seem… weird. Instead of dressing people as we’re pretty sure they actually dressed, they’ve allowed their costumers to get “creative,” especially with leather. And what’s with the guy (I think he’s the star, playing the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok) with the sides of his head shaved?
Also they have a woman warrior. You know how I feel about this. I don’t deny that Viking women could fight. But I’ve never seen any account, from sagas or the chronicles of the Vikings’ victims, that mention women being a regular part of armies.
Maybe it’ll be OK. But I won’t order cable to see it. Maybe it’ll show up on Netflix.
Anyway, I think the people who made the trailer borrowed ideas from my book trailer.
Addendum: Re:the filth. One of the things we know for sure about the Vikings is that they were notably fastidious for the times. We have an Anglo-Saxon document complaining that the Vikings were stealing all the English women through their effeminate habit of bathing once a week.
I’m generally a few months behind in my reading of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, so I only got to the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue yesterday. The front page story is “The Riddle of Gollum: A Speculative Meditation on Tolkien’s Sources,” by Woodrow and Susan Wendling. As the authors examined the origins of both the character and his name, they mentioned a poem Tolkien wrote around 1928. It’s called “Glip,” and comes from a collection called Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay. Here’s Glip’s description:
Glip is his name, as blind as a mole
In his two round eyes
While daylight lasts; but when night falls
With a pale gleam they shine
Like green jelly, and out he crawls
All long and wet with slime….
Glip is a scavenger. He lives near a mermaid who lures sailors onto the rocks with her songs, and scavenges their bones for his meals.
The name “Glip” intrigued me. Tolkien, of course, was a master linguist concentrating on northern European languages. I know that there’s a Norwegian word, “glipp,” which means to blink. However, there’s also a verb phrase, “å gå glipp av,” which means to lose or mislay something. I’m not qualified to say, but that form may be related to the Old Norse word “glepja,” which means to confuse or beguile. (I don’t read Old Norse, but I have access to an online dictionary here. And now so do you. Thanks to Kelsey Patton for the link.)
If Glip was an early version of Gollum, could the original name have suggested to Tolkien the idea of a creature who mislays something important to him? The conjecture’s a little weak, as Tolkien rejected the name Glip and moved on to Gollum. But I thought I’d mention the possible connection. The tangle of associations in an author’s mind can be extremely complex.
“Cognitive dissonance” is a useful term, especially in my life. I first learned it – it will surprise none of you to learn – from a counselor, and he wasn’t talking about himself. But during this winter of our discontent, I find myself even more dissonant than is my wont.
On the macro level, I see no hope at all. I can’t conceive a scenario by which conservatives and Christians, and conservative Christians, can possibly come back from the losses we’ve suffered. I fear the future, not only because I see persecution (if relatively light by global standards), but because I love my country. I have this crazy idea that you can’t sow scoundrelism and reap integrity, and that you can’t borrow your way out of debt.
I know that God is in charge. I’ll stipulate to that. He was also in charge during the Diocletian persecution.
So that gets me down.
On the other hand, it’s beginning to look very much as if 2013 may be the year when things turn around for me personally. I’ve got the translation work, and there’s some publishing news coming up, and things look pretty good from here. I’m particularly pleased that it should happen in a year ending in “13,” as I decry all forms of divination, and telling the future by numbers counts as that.
I can imagine Noah having a neighbor who came over his house yelling, “Hey! Good news! My big deal came through! What do you mean boat ride? I haven’t got time for a boat ride –”
“I’ve always thought that beautiful art was a great apologetic resource,” Myers says. Beauty is the chief attribute of God, said Jonathan (not Bob) Edwards. “Beauty points to a Creator.” Yet the church, Myers says, “capitulates more and more to the culture of entertainment.”
“It’s a way of keeping market share. But they’re digging their own grave. There’s a short-term benefit, but in the long term the kinds of cultural resources they need to be faithful to the Gospel won’t be there.”
This recalls the MHA Journal (#114) interview with Gerald McDermott who said Jonathan Edwards has been marginalized by Modernists (if I remember correctly) who successfully made the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards’ signature work. By doing so, they hid their students from the beauty and glory of God which Edwards often discussed.
It’s always nice to discover a new hard-boiled detective writer (and character) who’s worth reading. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with Chris Orcutt’s first Dakota Stevens mystery, A Real Piece of Work.
Dakota Stevens, the hero and narrator, is a former FBI agent who’s set himself up as a New York P.I. He mentions appreciating the classic detectives Marlowe and Spenser, which is a good sign. He leans more to the Spenser side, I think, being essentially an optimist. And he has plenty to be optimistic about, having for his partner not some dull John Watson but the sexy Svetlana Krüsh, a long-legged Russian-born chess master.
The plot involves the art world (oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of books involving art forgery lately), Middle Eastern terrorists, and Nazis (who make for pretty old villains by now, but I suppose you can wring a few more plots out of them).
The best thing about the story was the writing. Orcutt is an excellent wordsmith. The dialogue is good, the characters generally believable (except for the unusual percentage of gorgeous women in Dakota’s world, almost every one of whom throws herself into his arms. Perhaps this is an homage to the old days of the sexy paperback detective, like Shell Scott). My main complaint is with the plotting. One major plot point in particular was so obvious they might as well have perched a raven over one character’s door.
Cautions for language and adult situation. There’s lots of sex, but thankfully it’s not as explicit as I’ve seen in other novels recently. All in all a pretty good piece of work.
“I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express on the small of the back.” (The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923)
“Like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” (Summer Moonshine, 1938)
I ran across it just now while reading about what little we know of P.G. Wodehouse’s meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in New York in the 1920s. Both were successful authors and shared a literary agent. Both lived in Great Neck on Long Island. Wodehouse saw “Scott” on the bus once and wrote a letter about it, but then the curtain falls. (via Books, Inq.)
Today I was reminded, for some reason, of my first introduction to The Lord of the Rings. The image above is the same edition I got, back around 1966 (the publication page says that was the year of the printing). I would have been about 16 years old at the time. The trilogy was offered by Scholastic Books, a major force in my life in those days. There was no bookstore within practical distance of my home. I had never been in a bookstore in my life – bookstores were distant Rivendell to me. So those periodic (Monthly? Quarterly? I don’t remember) Scholastic catalogs were to me what the wandering peddler was to my ancestors.
I’d never heard of The Lord of the Rings or Tolkien in my life (I knew C. S. Lewis, but had no “inkling” of his friendship with Tolkien). The catalog descriptions were intriguing. But the books cost ninety-five cents apiece – more than three bucks for the trilogy with postage figured in. That was not the kind of money I spent casually in those days. Fortunately I mentioned the books to my brother, and he was interested too. So we went in together. The only drawback was that he demanded first dibs. I had to wait for him to finish The Fellowship of the Ring before I got my chance at it. I chafed as he worked through the long book, saying things like, “This is really good. You’ll like this a lot.”
At last I got my turn and opened the pages onto a whole new world. It was better than I hoped (Lewis himself described it as “good beyond hope”) and gave me satisfactions I’d never known a book could offer.
I still have all three books in those original editions. They’re not actually falling apart (I’ve always been pretty gentle with my books), but they’re so battered that I replaced them with a new set a few years back, for actual reading. These copies are personal relics. When I touch them as I do now (the Fellowship is at my elbow as I write) it brings me back to a moment in my life when new possibilities opened up. And believe me, I needed new possibilities just then.
I finally got to read Overstreet’s The Ale Boy’s Feast, and I loved it. The story that appears to be about a magical rebellion to small, oppressive rulers in the first book becomes an adventure about radical reconciliation by the fourth book. It asks big questions: Can the great curse be revoked? Can a traitor return to his kingdom or be accepted in a new one? Can criminals build a new place of law and order? And more than these questions are the ones driving the narrative behind the scenes: Does the glorious beauty we see in this world point to a glorious otherworldly source? Is that beauty sewn together with love, peace, joy, and hope? Is life (in the land of these books) about rejoicing in the hope of beauty, both natural and crafted?
Of course, this weaves cleanly and smoothly into the biblical theology of this world, because our goodness is defined by the Lord and peace on earth will be to those on whom God’s favor rests, but that doesn’t appear to be the central thrust. Wonder and beauty as they pull us back to God appears to be what this adventure is all about. (Blue flowers are signs that magically refreshing water is nearby.)
In the third book, we learn explosive details about Overstreet’s world. The real enemies are revealed. Plots and deceptions are discovered. A new threat, a pervasive weed that lives on blood, is tunneling from its Cent Regus heart throughout the country. Cal-raven is running for his life as well as trying to discover a new home for his people, the House Abascar which is ruined in the first book. At one point, he is compelled to rescue prisoners in House Cent Regus and is broken by what he learns there and in its aftermath.
In this book, Cal-raven begins to wander, despairing of ever answering his life-long questions. In the meantime, his loyal men attempt to follow his plans for establishing a new house without him. As they go, something seems to be poisoning everything around them. This book is the fourth of a rich, complicated series, so begin with book one. There’s no other way.
In fact, the story may be too complicated.
The conclusion of Raven’s Ladder changes everything, and the end The Ale Boy’s Feast changes it all again. Many minor characters have their hours in the spotlight, and while the story always moves forward—yes, there’s always a reward for the detour—I wonder if these books would be stronger with a bit more simplicity. A few critical details in this installment come up short for me.
Among the complexities I love is the development of The Keeper, and I don’t want to spoil it. The idea introduced in the first book which led me to speculate that this mysterious dragon was a god-figure expands to a dramatic crash at the end of book three. The explanation revealed in this book is wonderfully fantastic. This is not the least of all the things to love in these multi-layered stories.
About that which I did not like, I’ll say two things.
In one late chapter, two main characters argue about the larger story being revealed. They talk of lies, liars, and which historic records are true. Perhaps I should have understood by this point that one of these men had a problematic perspective, but I didn’t. I thought these two were on the same page at this point. In their argument, they seem to circle each other, not even holding to one firm perspective. It’s as if they are floating theories to fit all the facts. This argument proves to be a major revelation, both of character and story, and I believe I understand it now, but I didn’t while in the thick of it. My confusion led to frustration when one of these men takes action later on.
Part of this adventure’s conclusion feels a bit forced. It’s like a murder mystery being resolved by cuffing a character introduced in the last chapter. I see a poetic quality in it, a balance of images, but it doesn’t feel organic like so many other threads enjoyed in this series.
I’ll close with a beautiful thought from that chapter I criticized a few lines up. One man says, “It saddens me that you cannot imagine a life without someone to serve.” The other replies, “It saddens me that you think joy comes any other way” (pg 340).
In the end, Auralia’s radiant colors cannot be exploited for commercial or selfish gain. They are a service to others as well as a thing to be served. They “lure people out of the dark, away from all they thought they owned, and show them something grander” (pg 249).
