Reading, Uncategorized, Writing

Early spring ruminations

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Photo credit: nyegi. Unsplash license

We’re at the dirty end of spring right now. It was cold for a couple days, but we got up near 50 (Fahrenheit) today, and the whole week is supposed to be mild. (Thank Providence, I defrosted my freezer last week.) Most of the snow is gone now; just some crusty edges left – which doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow. We probably will. But that will be short-lived. The ground made visible now is unlovely – dead grass and black dirt. A monochrome, frostbit world.

This week is for me a wild social whirl, which means I had/have two things going on. Or three, if you call a doctor’s visit a social event. That was Monday. I had to see my clinic’s Diabetic Educator. As it says somewhere in Job, “The thing I have greatly feared has come upon me.” (Norman Vincent Peale quotes that repeatedly in his Positive Thinking books.) It actually wasn’t as bad as I feared. The nice lady didn’t put me on a diet. I’ve got some documents I need to get around to reading, but what I took away was mostly that I needed to consume fewer carbs and more fiber. Fiber, apparently, can buffer the carbs in your digestive system, reducing insulin spikes. Good to know.

(Note: I don’t have full-blown diabetes. But I am On the Road. Enough to make lifestyle changes advisable.)

The day before, Sunday, when I was still ignorant of this wisdom, I attended a Swedish Meatball Supper in a church basement. Meatballs for protein, and green beans for fiber to counteract the mashed potatoes. Could be worse. We were fed by Swedes, and it’s always pleasant for a Norwegian to be served by Swedes, after the humiliation of the Outrageous Union of 1814, which we have never yet forgiven.

I was impressed that they served us off china plates. I’ve eaten many a church basement meal, but I think it’s been a decade at least since I last ate in a church basement off anything but paper or Styrofoam. I cannot but salute the diligence of the organizers, who took the extra trouble to wash dishes afterward.

I must also salute my friends, Mark and Renae, who invited me along.

Friday is going to be less pleasant. I’ll be attending the funeral of one the guys from my men’s Bible study. A fine guy who loved the Lord. He used to wear bowties to church, so several of us from the study will be wearing them in his honor. I had to order one from Amazon, but I got next-day delivery, and it’s here now.

Reading notes: The book I’m reading right now (I’ll review it soon; maybe tomorrow) did something that pleased me a lot. A small thing, but it delighted me.

One point I’ve thought about occasionally, over my many years as a reader and writer, was a very trivial issue – the lack of same-name characters in fiction.

This is what I mean – in real life, people with the same first name often show up in the same circles. My Bible study group, for instance, though numbering only eight men on a good night, has two Toms and two Daves in it.

But in fiction, this rarely happens. The reason is obvious, and entirely sensible – it confuses the reader. Unless a plot point requires it, it’s so much easier to just give two characters different names. And since the author is the god of the fictional world, that’s his prerogative.

But in this book, there’s a scene where somebody says, “I was talking to Kate and Kate….” This wasn’t confusing to the reader, because Kate and Kate are throwaway bit characters who never appear again. But the line adds just a half-millimeter of verisimilitude, since we all know that such things happen not infrequently in real life.

That’s a nice literary touch. Wish I’d thought of it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fortunate Harbor,’ by Davis Bunn

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Davis Bunn is, I believe, a Christian novelist, though his novel Fortunate Harbor is not explicitly evangelical. What it is, is a clean mystery/romance. It’s actually pretty good, but this reader is not its intended audience.

Rae Alden grew up in the town of Fortunate Harbor, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She loves the place and wants to live nowhere else, which is why, after graduating law school, she turned down generous offers from big firms to set up office back home. She loves the life, but the work is not usually very interesting.

That changes when Curtis Gage comes back to town. He and Rae were sweethearts as teenagers, but his family moved away and they lost touch. Now he works as a manager and troubleshooter for an international corporation based in India. The corporation has just acquired a failed local hotel project which has garnered considerable public opposition. Curtis wants Rae to help him turn the project around, show good faith, and gain community support.

As part of their project, Curtis acquires a large house in a desirable location, wrecked by the last hurricane. Rae represented the old owner, but he disappeared years ago and the money has long run out. But why are federal agents nosing around the property?

Also, can the spark between Rae and Curtis be rekindled? Or will he marry his beautiful boss?

There was nothing wrong with Fortunate Harbor. It’s a well-written romantic mystery about appealing characters. But it’s clearly written for the female market – the emphasis is on romance. This is a wise business move on Bunn’s part – women buy a lot more books than men do.

It just wasn’t my kind of story.

So you might want to check it out, especially if you’re a woman.

[One question troubled me: There’s a scene where Rae, and Curtis’s beautiful boss, having just met, and both being attracted (Rae reluctantly) to Curtis, suddenly find a common chord and become fast friends. My impression (and Heaven knows I know nothing about women) is that women just don’t do that sort of thing.]

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Truth Will Out,’ by Steve Higgs

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Steve Higgs’s cold case trilogy featuring Inspector Tony Heaton concludes with The Truth Will Out. The trilogy seems to have sold quite well, and it pleased a lot of readers. I myself didn’t hate the books, but I was less than delighted with them.

To recap: Tony Heaton is a police detective in the English county of Kent, placidly approaching retirement in a fairly quiet part of the country. Then he is assigned to assist a hotshot young detective in examining old “cold” cases.

That ought to be fairly low-drama work, though it hasn’t proven so in the previous two books, and it doesn’t in this one. People involved in the crimes are still alive, and some of them will go to extremes to keep the dead past dead.

But more than that, Tony has his own secrets to protect. His partner is itching to look into a particular crime that Tony very much wants left alone. He’s beginning to think he might have to kill the young man.

This reader has trouble sympathizing with a main character who’s making that kind of plan.

And the final resolution left me (personally) unsatisfied.

But plenty of readers enjoyed it, so maybe I’m tone-deaf. The suspense certainly ran high. Author Higgs writes pretty well, but there are occasional typos in the text. And he has an annoying problem with misplacing modifiers.

There was no especially objectionable material in this trilogy that I recall. I recommend it moderately.

Music, Religion

‘Built On a Rock, the Church Shall Stand’

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I thought to myself, “Hey! I haven’t posted “Built On the Rock the Church Shall Stand” yet. That’s an important Scandinavian hymn I haven’t done here before!”

Checked our search utility. No, I posted about it – and as recently as last year.

Chalk it up to old age. Old men tell the same stories over and over, and old bloggers blog the same material under and under.

I’ll post it anyway, because I’ve got nothing else.

The lyrics were composed by Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig, the eccentric Danish clergyman who made the first translation of Beowulf into a modern language and started the Folk High School movement.

My people (the Norwegian Haugeans) did not like Grundtvig much, but we sang his hymn. This rendition is done by the Luther College Cathedral Choir, Decorah, Iowa. My people didn’t like Luther College much either, and the one year I spent studying there didn’t leave me with a lot of good memories. The arrangement is by F. Melius Christiansen, who conducted the choir of St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota – which I never attended, but still dislike on principle.

The English translation is pretty faithful, but the opening line takes an interesting tack. The original Danish says, “The church, it is an ancient house,” but goes on to say that it keeps standing anyway, upheld by God. Our English version, as you’ll notice, kicks off in a more upbeat, defiant vein.

Danes, generally speaking, don’t do audacity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Avalon,’ by Anya Seton

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Anya Seton (1904-1990) is famous as the author of several historical novels, some of which are still considered classics. Avalon, published in 1965, is not among that group. It is pretty readable, but this reader found it rather far-fetched, in two different senses – it has a very wide stage of action, and the plot is a tad implausible.

The story starts with Prince Rumon, a 10th Century Provencal prince related to the English royal family, getting shipwrecked on the Cornish coast on his way to see King Edgar. There he comes upon a dying woman, who places her daughter Merewyn his care and asks him to convey her to her aunt, a nun. Rumon is somewhat annoyed at the obligation, but he’s given his word. He does not tell Merewyn the secret her mother confided – that she is not, as she has been told, the daughter of a Cornish nobleman, a descendant of King Arthur. She is in fact the issue of rape by a Viking raider.

Merewyn promptly falls in love with the handsome Rumon, but he does not reciprocate. His mind is not on women, but on his dream of finding the mysterious, legendary Isle of Avalon. After unloading Merewyn with her aunt in the convent, he goes on to the king’s court, where he falls under the spell of Alfrida, Queen of England. Under that manipulative woman’s spell, Rumon makes some disastrous decisions, even as he and Merewyn, whenever they encounter one another, carry on a ping-pong affair of the heart, each one hot when the other is cold. The story then goes on to concentrate on Merewyn, whose path takes her as far as Iceland and Greenland.

Avalon almost works as a great story, I think, but not quite. It starts out seeming to center on Rumon’s search for Avalon, and on his and Merewyn’s convulsive love affair. But although those themes are never entirely forgotten, other concerns upstage them. The book’s conclusion attempts to bring it all together, in a Sigrid Undset-like scene of confession and reconciliation, but it left this reader feeling a bit let down. (Actually, it was too much like real life, as opposed to romance, I suppose.)

Anya Seton was admired for her research, and I was generally impressed in that regard – although she gave Vikings horned helmets (!). I know historians knew better by 1965, so there’s really no excuse for that. Her portrayal of King Ethelred the Unready is (it seems to me) a little unjust. She treats him as cowardly, not very bright, and sexually ambiguous. I believe he was a fairly capable king (he had a very long reign, something hard for fools to carry out in those days) in an impossible situation. The only character in this book who also appears in one of my books (Queen Emma, wife of Ethelred) is very different from the way I portrayed her – though I can’t claim any scholarly authority on the issue.

Avalon is a very long novel, and worth reading for those who (like me) are interested in the period. But it’s not a great epic romance. The Christian elements were handled pretty well, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Hidden Treasure of Glaston,’ by Eleanore M. Jewett

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I was a teenager when I read The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Eleanore M. Jewett. I remember enjoying it quite a lot. I re-read it now as part of my research for my Haakon book, and am delighted to report that it holds up pretty well.

The book is set in England in the 12th Century. The hero is a teenaged boy named Hugh, son of a disgraced nobleman. On his way into exile, Hugh’s father leaves him with the monks at Glastonbury Abbey, as the boy was born lame and can never hope to be a knight.

Hugh is bereft at first, but soon finds that the monks are kindly – especially Brother John, the librarian, who begins teaching him the work of a scribe, for which he proves to have an aptitude. He also finds a friend, Dickon, an oblate (a boy given to the monastery by his parents), who swears him to blood brotherhood and shows him his secrets – the hidden passages under the monastery that he has found, and his “treasures,” ecclesiastical items left behind in the passages when they were being used for shelter and escape from Viking attacks in the old days.

They also meet Bleheris, an old hermit who tells them stories of the legends of Glastonbury – of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. His great dream is to find the Grail himself.

What Hugh does not tell the old man is that among Dickon’s treasures he has found lost pages from an incomplete history of the Grail that is one of the abbey’s treasures. The boys’ adventures will lead them to the discovery of Arthur’s grave, to the king’s court, through fire, and finally to miracles.

The Hidden Treasure of Glaston was published in 1946. I’m not sure if they knew back then, as they do now, that the name of Joseph of Arimathea was never associated with Glastonbury before the time when this story is set. But if you’re just looking for a fun story, a medieval adventure meant (especially) for boys, uncontaminated by Game of Thrones cynicism and perversion (and with Christian values), The Hidden Treasure of Glaston works pretty well. The view of God is more Catholic than Protestant, but not in a way to put Protestants off greatly.

I liked it a lot, and recommend it.

Reading, Religion, Writing

Chronicle of a writer’s day

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“Daffodils and Glastonbury Tor.” Photo credit: Glastomichelle. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license.

What’s on tonight? Hey, how about a pointless account of my day? What could be more fun than that?

Last night my men’s Bible study group re-convened after several weeks of preemptions. I continue to be astonished how much these meetings nourish and uplift me. I feel an actual physical easing. I’ve been a solitary for so many years, getting by without close Christian fellowship. I knew that was the wrong way to do it, but I was hemmed in by… well, fear, to be honest.

I don’t think these guys will ever realize what they’re doing for me.

This morning I drove to the gym, and while I was inside, beavering away at my Sysiphian labors, a freezing rain came down, which covered my car windows in a matrix of icy pearls and made the road treacherous going home.

I worried about driving this afternoon, as I had a doctor’s appointment. But by the time I had to pull out again, the moisture had all melted and (mostly) dried off. I was able to reassure a technician, who took samples of my blood, on that point.

(No big deal on the doctor’s appointment, by the way. I wanted him to check something out, and he ordered tests, but didn’t seem greatly concerned. This stuff is just S.O.P. when you achieve venerability.)

Right now I’m re-reading two different books I read as a teenager, both of which deal with medieval Glastonbury. Because I’m writing a book about King Haakon the Good, and he grew up in England, and there’s good reason to think he might have spent time at that ancient site of monasticism and pilgrimage.

The first book is The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Eleanore M. Jewett. This is a book aimed at teenagers, and I remember that it surprised me when I read it (as a teenager), since I had known nothing about Glastonbury or the grave of King Arthur up to then. So far, I think it stands up pretty well. Entirely credulous about the legends, but well done withal. I’ll review it when I finish it.

The other book is Avalon, by Anya Seton, which I’ll also review. I read this as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book (remember those?) back when it was new. It was quite a thrill for me, back in 1965 or 66, to discover any novel involving Vikings. I’m enjoying this book too, though I detect some historical errors. It’s set slightly before my Erling books.

What do I envy most in other historical writers’ works? The ability to describe geography, plants, and wildlife. I struggle with that stuff. “What kind of flowers would be blooming in an English marsh in Somerset in April, 980 AD, and how would they smell?” Would it be the same varieties they have now? How much have things changed in a thousand years? How much guessing do the authors do? Sigrid Undset was great at that stuff, but she was an amateur expert in botany.

What comforts me most? Finding mistakes. If successful novelists can screw up on details, maybe I can get away with a few howlers too. Because I know they’re there, like Communists under the beds (who were also actually there, as it happened).

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lies We Tell Ourselves,’ by Steve Higgs

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I reviewed Shadow of a Lie,  the first book in Steve Higgs’s Det. Tony Heaton Trilogy, a few days ago. The second book is The Lies We Tell Ourselves.

A little orientation: Tony Heaton is a detective in English Kent. He had intended to just coast as he approached retirement, but was assigned to a new Cold Case squad headed by a hotshot young detective, Ashley Long.

Tony finds his own long-dormant passion for his job reviving as they dig into old puzzles, but that new enthusiasm is tempered by fear – fear that they will investigate one murder about which he has personal knowledge – knowledge he’s been covering up for many years.

In The Lies We Tell Ourselves, they examine a couple more cold murders, which turn out to be connected. The victories are sweet, but Tony’s guilty uneasiness is growing.

I noticed more typos in this book than in the first one. Also, one of the murder victims is a Frenchman named Michelle – except that’s the female spelling. I’m pretty sure it should have been Michel. This isn’t arcane knowledge; somebody should have noticed in the editing process.

These books are fairly well written, but Tony can be an irritating hero/narrator. Especially due to his blatant hypocrisy when he describes his contempt for people who conceal knowledge of murder, while he himself remains guilty of the same thing.

But that’s character complexity. I imagine it’s working up to a big crisis in the third book.

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: The Darkness Within

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A lot of foreshadowing preceded episode six of Rise of the Merlin. We’ve seen a woman watching Merlin and riding beside him in his imagination, and in the last episode we learned she was King Custennin’s daughter, Ganieda. But what happened to her? Why did Custennin accuse Merlin of refusing to save her?

Now we know the intense story that provoked the legendary mage to run from civilization when we first met him. After leaving his tutelage with the Hill Folk, he meets a woman who’s hunting a boar, follows her to her fortified city, and learns she’s the king’s daughter. He also learns the people are Atlantean whose boats had been separated from King Avallach and thought to be lost. Both groups thought they were the only ones to survive the ruining of Atlantis.

Did I mention Ganieda is adorable? A year later, she and Merlin are married, and they live happily ever after, which is enough to drive any man mad. (I was going to leave it at that to avoid spoiling the story, but I’ll go ahead and say it. Bad things happen, and Ganieda dies. I’ll get to Merlin’s reaction in a minute.)

Ganieda is a figure from the old Welsh stories, but she isn’t described there as Merlin’s wife. She’s his sister or even his twin. In one story, she’s the wife of a Scottish lord who battles and kills Merlin’s patron. In another account, the Scotsman and patron fight together. Either way, the patron dies and Merlin is distraught, while Ganieda is an observer either grieving or reacting to her brother. Lawhead makes this relationship more personal and so the tragedy that pushes Merlin to madness makes more sense.

At the end of episode two, we meet Merlin under a rock in the pouring rain. This was his response not only to losing his wife (who was with child) but also to his reaction to that loss. We see a moment of that reaction in the trailer. We hear about it when he returns to Maridunum the first time. In two different battles, Merlin falls into a battle trace. The first wins him the throne of Maridunum for his defense of the king and the people. The second is his merciless rage over the death of Ganieda, when the barbarian raiders return to the scene of their crime. Dozens of barbarians charge one admittedly intimidating young man and none survive. Even after they realize they’re getting slaughtered and begin to run, Merlin pulls them back to gut them. It’s this and one more outburst that drives him to renounce his life for many years to follow.

With the finale coming in two weeks, viewers have at least one question to consider, and it’s raised by Charis (in episode four, I think). Though Merlin has refused to take up Avallach’s sword for fear of his battle rage, Charis asks whether the salvation of Britain will require it. When the Saxon hoards are crushed, as surely they must be, will it be the people led by High King Aurellius or Merlin on their behalf? And what terror will Morgian accomplish?

Goofing

Grandiose Friday

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I think you’ve seen this picture before. It was taken at Norsk Høstfest in Minot several years back, when they did a promotion deal with the History Channel, and brought in some costumed models to sully our camp’s authenticity with base sex appeal.

I didn’t really mind.

Today I checked out the new AI function of Duck Duck Go, my favorite search engine. I found a utility for enhancing photos, and so I plugged that photo in and asked for the style of Frank Frazetta. Here’s the result:

Say what you will about me — that I’m old, and poor, and alone, and obscure, and ugly, and… well, there’s no dearth of material.

But I’ve had some great photos taken over the years, and some of them clean up pretty good.

Have a good weekend.