Fiction, Reviews

‘Gates of Fire,’ by Steven Pressfield

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“Listen to me, boy. Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city. Most piteous of all states under heaven is that a man alone, bereft of the gods of his home and his polis. A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery….”

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt has a custom, whenever he interviews a new guest, of catechizing them on books they might have read. One he always asks about is Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, a fictionalized account of the Battle of Thermopylae. So when a deal on the book showed up, I decided to buy it, though Greek antiquity is outside my usual field of interest.

What I encountered was a story of astonishing intensity. There were enough incidental resemblances to my own recently finished Erling Skjalgsson saga that I’m glad I waited till now to read it, so I can say without any doubt that I wasn’t influenced by it any way. (Though my books are not nearly so hard-barked.)

In the aftermath of the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans died in a heroic last stand against the invading forces of the Persian Empire, one severely wounded Greek is discovered on the battlefield, and brought before the victorious King Xerxes, who wishes to know what sort of men these were who stood so valiantly.

The Greek, whose name is Xeones, explains that he is not properly a Spartan, but a servant, a squire to one of the officers. He is happy, even proud, to tell the story of his life and of how he came to know the Spartans and their ways, and how they bore themselves up through that last terrible massacre.

Gates of Fire is a harrowing book, one that dives deep into the warrior ethos in its most purified form, not sparing the horrific details of what happens during a battle. I read it with both horror and fascination, as I imagine most readers will. This is not a book for the faint of heart.

Historically, from my own reading, I know that in spite of all this, author Pressfield has done a little covering up. The Spartans, whose courage is unquestioned, were in fact one of the cruelest cultures we know of in history. There are only hints in this novel of the pederasty that was taken for granted in their military training of boys, and the actual condition of the slaves is softened here – among other cruelties, the Spartan ritual of manhood involved hunting down and murdering a slave.

For all that, Gates of Fire is without question a monument of historical fiction. Author Pressfield dares to stare far more directly into the face of battle that I ever have in my own writing.

Highly recommended, for the strong-minded reader.

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A kind of a defense of Rachel Zegler

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Tolkien and Lewis didn’t like this Snow White, but they’d have liked it better than the new one.

Just to show my vigorous independence of mind, I’m going to confess before the world that I think Rachel Zegler is very pretty. There have been a lot of jokes about how no character played by Gal Gadot (admittedly a knockout) needs to fear that poor Rachel would be a threat to her status as “fairest of them all.” Several commenters have disparaged Ms. Zegler’s looks. But she appeals to me. The delicate-figure and-big-eyes look works, as far as I’m concerned. Kind of like a… what comes to mind? A Disney princess.

But it’s not just Rachel’s appearance that I feel I need to defend. Granted, she has certainly earned (at least) a lot of the ridicule that’s been heaped on her, for her public condescension and tone-deafness. She has become the poster girl for Woke arrogance – and she’s earned it.

And yet, I don’t think she’s entirely to blame.

In a real sense, I think, she’s been trying to play it by the book. Only she’s been using the wrong book.

She has relentlessly said the wrong thing in almost every situation. First she insulted her audience, and then she doubled down on the insults. Apparently the studio people tried to rein her in, to explain that you can’t alienate half your potential audience and then expect them to want to see you sing and dance. But she didn’t seem to get the message.

This, I think, was not because she didn’t care about the Disney enterprise. I think she did it because she believes deeply in the Disney enterprise, in a different way.

She believes in what the Disney movies say.

And what do the Disney movies say?

The Disney movies, especially the recent ones, tell young women like Rachel, “You go, girl! You speak your truth! Don’t let anybody – especially any man – tell you what to do! You are a strong woman, and if you only stand your ground and never compromise, you must triumph in the end!”

And that’s how she’s played it. She hasn’t listened to anybody who told her she was off course – even if they paid her salary. Because she has to be true to the truth of her heart. In the end everyone will be forced to admit that they were wrong, and that she – the Princess, the Girl Boss – was right all along. And everyone will love her.

That didn’t exactly work out.

Instead, she now finds herself out of work and a public laughingstock.

The cognitive dissonance must be horrific. Her goddess has failed her. The promise of the Disney Princess came up snake eyes; she wished upon a star and her wish didn’t come true.

I feel sorry for her at this place in her life. It must be very lonely.

Now, if Rachel’s life were a film script, I know what I’d do in Act II.

I’d have her meet a Big Guy. A guy with broad shoulders, a farmer or a trucker or a plumber or something. Some plot contrivance would throw them together, and she would hate him at first sight. It would be like dog and cat. Everything he did would be seen as an insult, a male chauvinist provocation. She would harangue him about his privilege and scream about how he was oppressing her just by existing.

Finally, in a rage, she’d attack him with her fists. He’d grab her wrists until she stopped struggling. Then he’d kiss her hard. And her insides would turn to goo.

And then they’d get married, move to a small town, and have lots of babies.

Of course, such a heretical story could never get filmed today.

But I’ll bet it would sell tickets.

Unlike some other films I could mention.

Writing

Thoughts on writing: On being cool

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It will surely not surprise you that I was never cool. Not even close. Like all young men (and old men, to be honest), I longed to be effortlessly effective and gracefully dangerous. The kind of guy that women wanted, as they say, and men wanted to be.

When I was entering my teen years (the horror! The horror!), there was abroad in the world a clear and universal ideal of coolness, one that will also not surprise you – James Bond, played by Sean Connery. Now, make no mistake. Young prig that I was, I strenuously disapproved of James Bond. All I heard of the books and movies offended me. Sexual promiscuity plus a license to kill. One article I read somewhere described the stories as “a moral holiday.” I made tsk-tsk noises and bragged that I’d never seen any of the movies, which I imagined tantamount to porn.

But for all that, I was not immune to the mystique. The tall, dark, handsome physical form. The tailored suits and tuxedos. Even the graceful lighting of a cigarette. If I never watched a James Bond movie, I watched a score of his substitutes on TV – Patrick McNee as John Steed, Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson. When those guys walked down the street, they never stumbled. They never walked into things. They never dropped anything and had to bend down and pick it up again.

As years passed, I came to realize that (though it’s undoubtable that these guys – like almost every guy on the planet – were cooler than I am) even they weren’t as cool as they looked on the screen. They had one advantage none of us mere real-life humans have.

They had re-takes.

When a movie is shot, they ordinarily film a scene over and over. Even Sean Connery stumbled and tripped from time to time, I’m pretty sure. Forgot to zip his fly up. Dribbled sauce on his shirt.

When it’s a movie, it’s no problem. Go back to the beginning, change shirts if necessary, and the director yells, “Take two! Action!”

The result – the perfect illusion of Coolness.

Secondary, unintended result – an illusion of inferiority among audience members.

There’s something similar that goes on in writing. So many aspiring writers feel paralyzed by the illusion that they’re expected to get it right the first time. They look at their first draft, and they’re unhappy with it, and their spirits plunge. “I’m a failure!” they scream.

(I am, by the way, experiencing the same reaction myself, in my fledgling efforts at producing audiobooks. I permit myself to be discouraged by failed first attempts at recording. Every new challenge, it seems, brings identical emotional reactions. Nothing new under the skull.)

As writers, we enjoy the same advantage Sean Connery had in the James Bond movies. We don’t have to get it right the first time. We can shoot as many takes as we want. In fact, we have it better than Connery, who was working with expensive film. With word processing, we don’t even have to pay for cheap typing paper. We can revise our work into oblivion.

Which is another, different temptation, but one I’ve never personally had a problem with.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Thou Shalt Kill,’ by John Dean

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I guess John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris novels must be growing on me, because I keep reading them. Thou Shalt Kill faced one of my most difficult tests, that of dealing with religious issues. And it didn’t handle the challenge too badly.

St. Cuthbert’s Church, in the town of Levton Bridge, where Inspector Howard works, has been disturbed by the arrival in town of an “evangelical” group (“evangelical” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing in England as it does in the US) which wishes to involve itself in the congregation’s life. But the church’s old guard wants nothing to do with their enthusiasm. The ineffectual vicar isn’t much use as a mediator.

There’s also conflict in the local “allotments,” the patches of municipal ground rented to locals for growing vegetables. The boundary disputes in the allotments can get surprisingly sharp. But nobody expected murder to be done there – until a body is found, crucified to a shed door, killed by a spike in the skull. The victim is a stranger, and his identification is false.

Then a familiar local man is found crucified in the same way, in a copse of trees near the town.

The investigation will center mainly on the religious group, delving into old crimes and hidden sins.

Whenever the contemporary English, or any Europeans, deal with Christianity, I grow uncomfortable. For most of them, religious faith is an odd fetish, like being a furry or a collector of cow creamers (Wodehouse reference). I think author Dean did a reasonable job of attempting to penetrate our peculiar world. He doesn’t get the jargon quite right, of course, and he thinks you can’t believe in the God of the Old Testament if you believe in the God of the New Testament. But all in all, the attitude didn’t seem essentially hostile (though the vicar was pretty pathetic).

So, Thou Shalt Kill wasn’t bad. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Quiller Memorandum,’ by Adam Hall

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There’s a little story behind my reading this book, extremely trivial, but I’ll tell it. Back in the mid-1970s, the big TV networks all decided to throw caution to the wind and extend their broadcast schedules late into the night, time that had mostly belonged to local stations up till then. Various experiments were made as to how to use that time – though eventually they all just settled for degenerating attempts to re-create the Johnny Carson show – and lo, these remain, even unto this day.

One show I caught on late-night TV during that period was an English series called Quiller, about a spy who was the hero of a series of novels by Adam Hall (a pseudonym for Elleston Trevor, who wrote, among other books, The Flight of the Phoenix). I remember thinking, when I saw it, “Wow, they took an American character and made him British.”

In this, as in so many things, I was wrong. I thought of Quiller as an American because I’d seen The Quiller Memorandum, a pretty good 1966 movie that starred the American actor George Segal.

But that casting decision was made by an American studio. Years later I picked up a couple of the Quiller novels, and discovered that he was in fact an Englishman.

Recently I found the Quiller TV series on YouTube, and have been watching it (I have it on at the moment, in fact). That made me curious to read the original novel, The Quiller Memorandum (first published as The Berlin Memorandum). And this is my review.

“Quiller” is a code name. The agent hero’s actual name is never given in the books. He works for a shadowy government agency called “The Bureau,” which does not officially exist. All Bureau agents are entirely deniable, and will never be rescued or exchanged. (This scenario is kind of a cliché today, but I suspect it was fresh when the author came up with it.)

Quiller is the most independent of the Bureau’s independent agents. He likes to work without a net, so to speak, keeping his contacts and support to a minimum, and he never carries a gun or any spy gadgetry. To him it’s a game of wits.

The Quiller Memorandum begins with Quiller returning from a long job, eager for a rest. Then he’s told that one of his fellow agents has been killed in Berlin. And the hook that drags him in is the information that that agent was hunting an ex-Nazi officer named Zossen. Quiller has a particular interest in Zossen, whom he witnessed performing an atrocity during World War II.

When Quiller arrives in Berlin, his presence is quickly detected by Phönix, a secret organization committed to re-establishing the Third Reich. Quiller is not surprised or dismayed by this development. His purpose is not to stay secret, but to engage in a strategic battle of wits with the Phönix leaders. They play out their moves and counter-moves like a fencing match or a game of chess, each side waiting for the other to make a fatal mistake. Quiller is a danger junkie. He lives for this.

In many ways, I found The Quiller Memorandum fascinating. The descriptions of spycraft were plausible and intriguing. There was a fair amount of violence in the story, but the bulk of the action is cerebral.

Still, I found the book annoying in several ways. In part it’s because it’s an artifact of its time – World War II was recent enough that one could get away with making broad generalizations about the essential brutality and conformity of the German race; a lot of people believed that stuff back then. Perhaps they still do, but I’m allergic to arguments for ethnic determinism.

And the psychological aspects struck me as naïve. Some of Quiller’s strategic decisions are based on his predictions of how a traumatized woman will respond to various stimuli – I’m not sure it’s that cut and dried in real life. Few things age as quickly as popular psychology.

And, on a purely petty, chauvinistic note, I was offended by the way Quiller defends his decision never to carry a gun. He argues that guns make one overconfident (fair enough, though I still think it’s poor tactics to bring a knife to a gun fight), but then he goes on to disparage Americans and all gun owners in terms of sexual compensation. That, in my opinion, is pure condescension.

I’m told that The Quiller Memorandum is in fact the weakest book of the series, and that the later ones are better. I’ve actually read some of the later ones, and quite liked them, as I recall. But this one put me off so much that I probably won’t go on with the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘January Freeze,’ by Shane Rawley

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I enjoyed Shane Rawley’s first Peter Cobb mystery, Three Strikes You’re Out, in spite of numerous weaknesses in the writing. I went on to buy the second book in the series (for some reason they’re numbered wrong on Amazon), January Freeze.

Our hero Peter Cobb is a former professional baseball player whose career was interrupted by the Viet Nam war and PTSD (this book is set around 1980). He’s beginning to put his life together now, and thinking of trying out for the majors again. In pursuit of personal peace, he has moved to Florida for a while. But he’s soon back in Racine, to help with a family problem. A cousin of his has disappeared in New York City and gotten into prostitution. Peter goes to the Big Apple to rescue her, which of course he does, with style.

Then he’s approached by the CIA, who want him to perform a covert assassination for them.

Seriously.

If it all sounds implausible, it is. The Peter Cobb books are like a big, lolloping dog who just wants to play and cares nothing about his dignity. The writing is only passable, and the author has a tendency to forget what tense he’s writing in. One encounters the occasional unnecessary info dump. The hero is pretty much omnicompetent and seems to have no fear (in spite of his PTSD). Women throw themselves at him wherever he goes.

I can only attribute my enjoyment of these books to the plain fun involved. I like spending time with a hero who doesn’t suffer my shyness and self-doubt. I can’t take these stories seriously enough to worry much about the characters.

What I did not like about this book was a new strain of political correctness – gushing over an admirable “gay” character and little lectures about how Islam is just like Christianity.

I’m not sure if I’m going to read the next book. January Freeze was fun enough, but if the author is going to go all sensitive on me it’s not worth the price.

.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Soft Touch,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But there was nothing like what I looked at when I whipped that piece of cloth aside. Nothing. I was one man when I pried the locks loose. And I was somebody else after I looked at the money. And I knew in some crazy way that I couldn’t ever go back to being the man who pried the locks, no matter how desperately I might want to.

The classic Noir is a moral tale, when it comes down to it. Something almost like a demonstration of the doctrine of Original Sin. Some ordinary guy, one like you or me, is faced with an irresistible temptation in a moment of vulnerability, and grabs it. And in that moment the trap is sprung, his fate is sealed, though he may not know it for a while.

Jerry Jamison, the “hero” of Soft Touch, a 1958 John D. MacDonald novel, is a World War II veteran. He did honorable service in the OSS in Southeast Asia. After his service he became a builder in Florida. Then he fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a land developer, married her, and went to work for her old man.

Only gradually did he realize that the old man is an idiot and the company is headed downhill. And his beautiful wife is an alcoholic. He wants to get out, but he’s short of resources.

Then his old war buddy Vince shows up. Vince has kept busy doing shady business in South America, and he has a business proposition. He knows a way to steal a fortune being transferred by a corrupt businessman planning a military coup. Nobody will claim the money, he promises. Finders keepers. After some brief hesitation, Jerry agrees.

The job doesn’t go as smoothly as they planned, of course. But they do get the money. More money than they even imagined.

And that’s when things really start going bad…

MacDonald, smart pro that he was, did not handle this story at all as I would have, which is just fine. Jerry Jamison is a well-drawn character, easy to identify with, which makes the tragedy all the more horrific. One element that’s unusual in this story (for a MacDonald book) is the inclusion of a humble Christian character, who tries – in all innocence – to steer Jerry the right way. Whether her admonitions are meant to be taken seriously, or rather as echoes of futility, is up to the reader to determine.

Soft Touch is a very effective Noir novel. Recommended, if you like the genre.

Fiction, Reviews

Re-reading ‘A Woman Underground,’ by Andrew Klavan

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Winter, who a moment before had been truly worried he was losing his mind, was now wondering if he was the last sane man on earth. So often he struggled with the fact that he had killed people. But just now he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t killed enough of them. Maybe he should have killed them all.

It has become my custom to read each of Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels twice, as I find them peculiarly suited to my emotional world (which is not to claim that I am anything like Winter, who is, for instance, both dangerous and attractive to women). On my first reading of A Woman Underground last fall, I didn’t find it as congenial as some of the others. I liked it better on second reading. I think I missed things the first time out, for purely subjective reasons.

Cameron Winter is not your average English professor. Not long ago he was a top-secret government assassin. His stories interweave his memories of his past as he confides in his psychological therapist, who is helping him work through his guilt and conflicts.

In A Woman Underground, Winter reminisces about a terrible assignment he carried out once, dealing with a human trafficker in Turkey. But his therapist, an older woman, keeps trying to turn the discussion to his old obsession with a girl he fell in love with as a child, who eventually turned into a very different person from the one he first knew. Winter tries to explain that both stories are connected. But then he discovers that this lost love made a secret visit to his apartment, though she missed him. That’s enough to put him on her trail – and soon he will realize that he’s not the only man out looking for her.

I think what made me uncomfortable in my first reading of A Woman Underground was that it hit me in areas that are sore spots in my own interior world – romantic obsession and betrayal. On my second reading I recognized better how well the story serves Winter’s character development and the overall series narrative arc. I was also happier with the darkly ironic denouement this time.

Either way, the book was utterly gripping, and I neglected things I should have been doing to read another chapter.

A Woman Underground is a superior mystery-thriller, worthy of the groundbreaking series to which it belongs.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Peter Cobb: Three Strikes You’re Out,’ by Shane Rawley

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Shane Rawley, author of Peter Cobb: Three Strikes You’re Out, is a former major league baseball player. That’s no guarantee of writing ability, but I was delighted to discover that he tells a very good story.

His hero is Peter Cobb of Racine, Wisconsin. Pete used to be a major league ball player, and was a pretty good one. But something happened to him when he was drafted for the Vietnam War (this book is set in the 1970s). Now he’s coasting through life, drinking too much, avoiding responsibility and commitment (though he works out and boxes, which will be helpful in his immediate future). He works for a used car dealer, cleaning and delivering cars.

But there’s one thing that could persuade him to disturb his peace – a redheaded girl named Ronnie, on whom he’s had a crush since his school days. Ronnie’s father is a career criminal, and she’s happy not to have heard from him in a while. But now she gets word that he was killed in a warehouse explosion in the Southwest. She asks Pete to accompany her to Phoenix, where they meet a DEA agent who tells them her father was one of their informers. He gives them a key which her father left behind for her. That key will attract a lot of attention among the criminal element, forcing Pete to demonstrate (and discover) what he’s really capable of.

Peter Cobb: Three Strikes You’re Out takes a little time getting going – but in this case I didn’t mind. Pete interested me from the start, and I wanted to see how he fit into his world. I like burned-out characters as heroes, and Pete was intriguing and believable. The writing is not the very highest quality, and the plotting’s a little loose, but it’s pretty good. Shane Rawley is a promising novelist.

Christian faith is treated with respect, which I appreciated, though (as you’d expect) premarital sex is taken for granted. So cautions for the usual grownup stuff.

But all things considered, I highly recommend Peter Cobb: Three Strikes You’re Out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Honour the Dead,’ by John Dean

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Continuing my reading of John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris series. I don’t love these books, but I guess they’re growing on me. I enjoyed To Honour the Dead.

Jack Harris is a detective in the English Pennine town of Levbridge. He is misanthropic and grumpy, but an effective cop, though a little rough in his methods. (I’m always interested when fictional British cops show aggressive and corner-cutting tendencies. Is the popularity of such stories an indication of public discontent with current real-world policing?)

Remembrance Sunday, the day for honoring the war dead, is approaching, and there’s tension in Levbridge and its neighboring communities. Most of the locals respect those who served, but there are a couple war protestors who promise to disrupt ceremonies. Also somebody has been defacing monuments. Jack Harris finds plenty of people to annoy him in these squabbles – not only the protestors but a local businessman who idolizes his father, who was decorated for service in the Falklands, and seems intent on getting the man’s name on every memorial. Jack is also irritated by a local woman whose son’s recent death was attributed by the coroner to alcohol and freezing weather, but she insists he was murdered, and won’t quit nagging the police about it.

But when a genuine hero – a Victoria Cross winner from World War II, is murdered in his home, Harris and his team soon discover plots and schemes and secrets a-plenty.

Good writing. Interesting (if sometimes annoying) characters. Author Dean is good at misdirection through lies and counterintuitive characterization. Cautions for language, but To Honour the Dead was good entertainment.