Fiction, Reviews

‘I’ll Keep You Safe,’ by Peter May

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It had an atmosphere all of its own, that place. Sometimes mired in the mist that would drift in off the water on a still morning, or lost in the smirr that dropped down from the moor. I came into the loch once on a boat just as the sun was coming up, and mist like smoke rose up all around the lodge in the early-morning light, moving wraithlike among the trees. The water itself was alive with salmon breaking the still surface as they headed in from the sea on their journey upriver, and otters played around the stone slipway. It was magical.

I had not gotten far into reading Peter May’s I’ll Keep You Safe before I realized I’d read it before – even though I had just bought it on Amazon for the first time. Perhaps my previous reading was through a free giveaway, or perhaps I bought the paper version; all I know is I’ve reviewed it already, way back in 2018. Still, I’d forgotten how it came out, so I read on. With considerable pleasure.

Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane run a small tweed knitting company on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. It’s not the famous Harris Tweed, but a more refined fabric derived from it. They’ve made it through hard times to become big successes in the fashion world – some of the foremost designers in the business use their product. And they’re still very much in love.

They’re in Paris for an exhibition when Niamh gets an anonymous e-mail telling her Ruairidh is having an affair. She confronts him, and he walks away without explanation. A few minutes later, he’s dead. Niamh is devastated, lost and betrayed. The French police consider her a suspect.

When she’s allowed to take Ruaridh’s remains back home, she faces a hostile world. Both sets of their parents have always opposed their marriage. Lifelong friends turn against her. A French police woman is sent out to investigate her affairs. And she has a sense that someone is stalking her.

I note from my first review that I figured out whodunnit quite early on. Which amuses me, because I didn’t do that on this second reading. The story is told in a complex, non-sequential manner, with varying viewpoint characters, which is just confusing enough to keep the reader intrigued.

As always, one of Peter May’s greatest strengths is his scenic descriptions. One gets a vivid sense of the place – of the geology, the changeable, dangerous weather, the plants and wildlife. I greatly appreciate that quality, very much like taking a brief holiday in the islands.

Cautions are in order for language and some drug use, but I was intrigued to note (on this reading) that the book actually takes some very traditional moral views. That surprised me. Probably unintentional on the author’s part, but appreciated.

I highly recommend I’ll Keep You Safe – again. Women and men alike will enjoy it.

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Birgitta Wallace, 1934-2025

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I recently learned that the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace has died, aged 91. (She is featured in the Canadian video above, which is in English with French subtitles.)

Birgitta Wallace is memorable to the world for her outstanding work as chief archaeologist at the Viking site at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland (which I have visited, he mentioned casually).

She was the successor there to Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, the original discoverers of Viking artifacts at the site. Helge Ingstad was adamant throughout his career that the Vinland (“Wineland the Good”) of the sagas was the place he’d found in Newfoundland and nowhere else. He insisted – for some reason – that it was impossible that the Vikings could have gone anywhere else. “Stop looking. This is all there is,” was his message. The fact that no grapes have ever grown at that latitude did not trouble him – he considered the wine story pure fantasy.

Birgitta Wallace was less convinced. She noted that butternut shells were found in the excavations at L’Anse Aux Meadows, and butternuts also do not grow at that latitude. But they do grow at latitudes where grapes grow. She believed (and most historians today agree) that other Viking settlements very likely did exist in America. We just haven’t found them yet. We may never find them.

For me, Birgitta Wallace had the distinction of being about the most famous person I ever met personally. She spoke at the Chicago seminar on Vinland organized by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad back in 2010, which I attended. I walked up to her and told her I would like to be able to tell my friends I’d met her. We shook hands (very delicately; she was quite frail). It never occurred to me to take a selfie – I’m not in fact sure whether I even owned a phone with a camera in those days.

R.I.P. Birgitta Wallace.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Going Home In the Dark,’ by Dean Koontz

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…all in all, his condition was so pitiable that an extraordinary and inadvisable number of semicolons were required to connect the closely associated clauses describing it.

A Lutheran pastor appears as a villain in Dean Koontz’s latest novel, Going Home In the Dark. I think I can be confident that that pastor is a member of the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, because he’s committed to the extinction of the human race. (I don’t think that’s too big a spoiler. The guy isn’t the main villain.)

Dean Koontz likes to mix it up, style-wise. He can be dark and tragic; he can be deeply creepy and scary. He can even be funny, and he’s often quite good at that. He’s mostly going for funny (in a scary way) in Going Home In the Dark, and it works, I think… by and large.

The friends who call themselves the Four Amigos grew up as nerds and social outcasts in the midwestern town of Maple Grove (not the one just up the road from me, in Minnesota, I’m pretty sure). They all went on to be rich and famous – Rebecca is a movie star; Bobby is a bestselling novelist; Spencer is a renowned painter, and Ernie writes hit Country songs. Only Ernie still lives in town, near his cold and intimidating mother.

When Ernie is hospitalized in a coma, his friends rush to visit him – but are informed by his mother that he has died, just before their arrival.

Nevertheless, they are all convinced – irrationally but with certainty – that Ernie is not really dead. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. So they conspire to sneak his body out of the hospital and hide it so no one can embalm it before they figure out what’s going on.

Because something is going on. All three of them are suddenly recalling – all at the same time – strange events that happened when they were teenagers, memories they have suppressed until now. Why was the Lutheran pastor concealing half-formed, humanoid creatures in the church basement? Who was the monstrous giant they saw eating a man’s head in the park pavilion on Halloween? Also, why is Maple Grove – a town where the streets have names like Cunningham, Cleaver and Capra, so relentlessly friendly and utterly crime-free?

In spite of its horrific subject matter, the story is presented in a comic, self-parodying style. The unnamed narrator is always explaining why he tells us some things and ignores other things, undermining his stylistic effects by pointing them out. I did find it funny, and laughed more than once, though I thought Koontz was working it a little too hard this time.

However, the book’s conclusion did move me, which is the most important thing.

Not Koontz at his best, Going Home In the Dark is nevertheless a very entertaining book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Safe,’ by George Prior

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James had just returned from the crime scene, and he had the extremely tense look that he got when he was far behind in admin tasks—which he would be after spending the day at a scene. Tense but dead still, like ten pounds of springs in a five-pound spring can.

The basic idea of George Prior’s Casey Stafford novels, of which Dead Safe is the second, strikes me as remarkably similar to John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport books – millionaire cop who drives fast cars, dresses well, and fights crime essentially for fun. But I’d say (based on reading this book) that accusations of copycat-ism would be unfair. Casey Stafford, who works in Los Angeles, is a fully realized character in his own right. (For one thing, he’s free to pursue women, which Lucas Davenport gave up when he married some time back.) Also the writing here is very strong, and the story is pretty original.

There’s a private security vault in Beverly Hills where anyone who can afford it can store anything at all, without any fuss about identification. Obviously a business like that will cater to criminals, though it’s technically legal.

A group of young men who run a YouTube channel where they demonstrate “jackass” stunts has fallen on hard times, and needs an infusion of cash. They figure out how to disguise themselves digitally from the security cameras, and they clear out a number of safe deposit boxes, collecting a lot more money than they ever dreamed.

They’re clever and tech-savvy, but they lack the imagination to guess that the kind of man who hides that kind of money is not likely to be either philosophical or forgiving about loss. Before long the young YouTube stars are dying in horrible ways. And our hero Casey Stafford, along with his female partner Banchet Suwan, are several steps behind, following a digitally erased trail after criminals unknown to the police. In the end it will become a three-way game between Casey, the murderer, and the last, resourceful survivor of the YouTube gang.

I was very impressed with the writing in Dead Safe. It was smooth, elegant and expressive. The dialogue snapped and the characters – of which there were many – were well drawn. I particularly liked a gunfight scene where things went wrong in a highly plausible manner. No overt politics came up, though I thought I saw some subtle hints of conservative ideas (could easily be wrong).

My only real objection was that I thought a scene of a home invasion was unnecessarily graphic (I prefer to enter such stories after the violence is over, when the cops are viewing the crime scene). Plenty of cautions are in order for violence, sex and profanity. (The cop banter here is pretty good; perhaps just a notch below John Sandford’s. But I still don’t buy the women cops’ good-humored participation.)

All things considered, Dead Safe was an excellent detective thriller. This reader was impressed.

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My big cinematic weekend

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In the world of this movie, the Vanir gods have pointy ears, and the Aesir have regular ears. I think I carry the Vanir look off pretty well, don’t you?

Who’d have thought it? I had an adventurous weekend, by my standards.

Memorial Day is a solemn day, and I spent it solemnly, in part out of reverence, but to some extent because I was recovering from Saturday’s and Sunday’s exertions.

On Saturday I helped make a movie – hence the elfin photo above.

There’s a young man I met through my Viking reenactment group who told me, sometime last year, that he was involved in making small independent movies. I told him that I have acting experience, and am generally available. He said he might have a part for me in the one he was working on.

Some time later, he sent me a script – or a piece of a script. My part would involve three scenes out of a longer production. I would be playing the Norse god Njord. A small role, but as we old troopers like to say, “There are no small roles, only small… paychecks.” The production is described by the writer/director as “Star Trek meets Norse mythology.” I would wear my regular Viking outfit.

Then there was a long pause. A filming day was proposed a couple months back, but got cancelled because of somebody’s car trouble. Finally we were all able to get together this past Saturday, in a basement in South St. Paul. I’d been told we’d be working in front of a green screen, which shouldn’t mean a lot of hassle.

But once I arrived, and been issued pointed ears (a surprise) and met the (very pretty) young woman who’d be playing my daughter, the goddess Freya, the director said, “You know, it’s always better to shoot on location.” What location could stand in for the halls of Asgard? After a few minutes we were all in a car, headed off to the state capitol.

The state capitol.

I’ll tell you the truth – it would never have occurred to me that you could just march into the capitol building (after a three-block trudge from our parking spot – in costume, of course) and shoot a film. Surely there’d be security. Surely there’d be rules.

Well, there was security, but they ignored us. And if there are rules, nobody seemed to care. (Continued on next page.)

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Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chill,’ by Scott Carson

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The day was dull and gray but the leaves were a brilliant assortment of orange, yellow, and red. A long, lovely summer with its throat cut.

Long ago, the town of Galesburg, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, was taken by eminent domain and drowned under what became the Chilewaukee Reservoir (popularly known as “The Chill”). The purpose was to provide backup water for the City of New York. The residents, fiercely superstitious folk, had warned the planners and engineers that the land there was dangerous, and they had sealed their warnings with violence and fire. But the dam was built and has stood ever since.

Gillian Mathers is a descendant of the Galesburg folk. She was raised by her grandmother near the reservoir, but her father fetched her to the city after the grandmother’s disappearance. Somehow Gillian felt compelled to come back, though, and now she’s on the water authority police force, guarding the man-made lake where her ancestors are buried.

Aaron Ellsworth is the son of the county sheriff. He once set his heart on being on a Coast Guard rescue crew, but he washed out in training. Now he’s a ne’er-do-well, shiftless, on the road to criminal life. Until the day he accidentally kills a man at the dam, but then the same man reappears out of the water, apparently uninjured.

Old prophecies are beginning to come true. Unseen, unknown forces are at work under the earth. And Gillian is feeling the pull of her grandmother’s earliest lessons – of the old faith of Galesburg, and the sacrifices it demands. Meanwhile, the rain falls, threatening to overwhelm the old dam, and the people downstream have no idea what danger they’re in.

Like all Scott Carson novels, The Chill is very well written. I thought of Dean Koontz as I read, though I guess the style and subject matter are closer to Stephen King. I don’t like horror as a genre generally, though I do like Koontz, and The Chill seems to bear some of Koontz’s essential optimism. There are even faint echoes of Christianity: “Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word. Lots of people would die for family, honey. But how many would die for a stranger?”

I enjoyed The Chill. Not as much as I liked Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane, but it’s quite good of its kind.

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‘The Mansions of the Lord’

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I never feel qualified to say a bloody thing about Memorial Day, having neither fought in a war myself nor lost a close loved one in a war. I merely carry a deep sense of indebtedness to countless people (mostly young men) who have paid the highest price you can pay in this world.

So I keep coming back to “The Mansions of the Lord,” from the 2002 movie, “We Were Soldiers,” written and directed by Randall Wallace. He wrote the song too, because the one he was looking for didn’t yet exist.

To all who made the sacrifice — thank you.

Authors, Religion

Reasonable madmen

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Now and then, ideas converge for me, which is about the best fun I have in life. And then I feel compelled to write about them here, in the sight of my guardian angel and everybody, inviting public scorn and ignominy (I believe Ignominy is a town in Wisconsin. Good fishing, they tell me).

A while back I posted about what seemed like a breakthrough in my own mental life – by way of, of all things, a dream. I found a “place” in my brain where I could take shelter from intrusive memories. I even had an idea where that “place” was located – on the right side of the brain, just above the ear. The technique of resorting to this “place” has not proved the panacea I hoped at first, but it remains a useful trick for me in regulating my thoughts, and I still use it pretty much every day.

More recently, I discovered the psychiatrist Iaian McGilchrist, initially through the conversation with Eric Metaxas embedded above. I have not yet shelled out for any of his books, because they’re kind of pricey, but I’ve watched several more videos. So far as I can grasp his thesis, I understand it thus:

We all know that the normal human brain is bilateral. Most of my life I’ve been informed that the left brain (which controls the right side of the body) is the plodding, logical, workhorse of the mind. Meanwhile, the right brain is creative and spontaneous. Back in the sixties and seventies, the hippies were always trying to access their right brains.

McGilchrist’s thesis does not contradict these distinctions, but refines them. The left brain, he says, evolved for the purpose of concentration and task completion. It learns routines, devises systems, puts things in boxes and labels them. It’s what allows us to do things automatically. Its functions are necessary to our survival. But it considers itself very smart – smarter than it is. Its true purpose is to be the servant or “emissary” of the “master” – the right brain.

The right brain is where our real intelligence lies. The right brain makes imaginative leaps. It maintains a global awareness of its surroundings. It is creative and inventive. It’s meant to be in control.

All my life, the left brain has been associated with people like me – the orthodox, the conventional. Left brain people reduce everything to set formulas and are quick to judge. Which – I can’t deny – is not far from a description of my own nature.

But McGilchrist also directs his spotlight onto other kinds of idealogues – the leftists and fascists and communists and feminists and environmentalists, etc., etc. who’ve infested our politics and history for so many decades. They’re left-brain people too, he says, and we’re beginning to get tired of them (or so he hopes).

But here’s the point of tonight’s essay. In a recent McGilchrist video I watched, he made a comment that rang a little bell for me – he said, in so many words, “The left brain is, in fact, mad.”

I immediately recalled something G. K. Chesteron wrote in Orthodoxy:

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

McGilchrist is not a Christian. By his own account, he values Christianity but is unable to believe in the miracle of the Resurrection.

Yet he has managed, after a century, to catch up to Chesterton, by the empirical rather than by the theological road.

Chesterton, I imagine, was thinking with his right brain.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Red Harvest,’ by Dashiell Hammet

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He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.

Dashiell Hammet wrote a number of stories about “the Continental Op,” a fat, nameless private detective working for a company based on the Pinkertons, as well as two Op novels. I reviewed the second Op book, The Dain Curse, not long ago, so I thought I might as well do Red Harvest (1929) too. I’d read it before, but way back in the 1970s.

We find the Continental Op in the western mining town of Personville, which seems to be in Utah. The town bears the nickname of “Poisonville,” and well deserves it. It used to be controlled by old Elihu Wilsson, the mine owner, but he’s allowed it to fall into the hands of various groups of criminals (these are Prohibition days, after all). Elihu’s son, Daniel, who has taken over the local newspaper, has decided to be a reformer. He’s requested a detective to come and help him ferret out corruption.

But Daniel is dead before the Op can even meet with him. The Op manages to get in to see Elihu, the old man, and eventually gets his permission to investigate his son’s murder.

Poisonville is in every way worthy of its name. The police are just as corrupt as the various criminal organizations, and as the Op stirs the waters, he finds that poison entering his own soul: “This d**ned burg’s getting to me,” he says. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” (This is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie, “Blood Simple.”)

There is no subtlety in Red Harvest. This is a story about killing, and lots of it. As in Hamlet, the stage is nearly empty at the end, most of the main characters dead, our very unromantic hero still standing, but shakily.

There is a pervasive rumor (denied by director Akira Kurosawa himself) that his classic samurai movie, “Yojimbo,” was inspired by Red Harvest. If so, it would be the grandfather of “A Fistful of Dollars” and a score of other imitators. However, Red Harvest is more complex than those movies. Instead of a scenario with two warring gangs, this novel features a complex situation. There are multiple factions, and the Op busies himself with inciting each of them against the others in various combinations, just stirring things up to see what reactions he can get, increasingly callous to the sanguine results.

When one has grown accustomed to Raymond Chandler’s prose (I can never resist the comparison), Dashiell Hammett comes off as something of a blunt instrument. But Hammett came first, and was breaking new ground, so to speak. Critics consider Red Harvest a classic and a groundbreaking literary work.

But it’s pretty grim.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Digital Barbarism,’ by Mark Helprin

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For modernity, ceaselessly mercurial, is nothing more than obsolescence yet to occur. To put one’s faith in or devote one’s attentions to it is to chase after a vapor.

Back when I was toiling through library school, one of the topics we were supposed to study was Copyright. The material they gave us to read was pretty uniformly partisan – on the side of the Creative Commons and against Copyright (or at least its extension). Much was made of the tyranny of Disney (though Disney generally holds trademarks rather than copyrights, but it’s all Intellectual Property). As a holder of copyrights myself, I found such material a little troubling, but I had no established principles on the topic in general (I hadn’t even known it was a topic), so – as I recall – I accommodated myself to the crowd, and wrote something about how copyright might be necessary for a while, but the free flow of information meant copyrights ought to end as early as reasonably possible.

Meanwhile, Mark Helprin, one of our greatest living authors, wrote (as he tells us) an op-ed for the New York Times. He thought an article about Copyright would be innocuous. He argued for its extension, so that a writer’s heirs can enjoy the fruits of their parent’s work just like the heirs of businessmen. He was astonished to discover that he had unleashed a firestorm of online comments from copyright abolitionists, who understood him to be arguing for everlasting copyright. This roused his fighting spirit, and so he came to write Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

The book is quite long. It probably could have been shorter, but Helprin clearly warmed to his topic as he labored. He regards the anti-copyright movement as a branch of Marxism, its general war against property. The world has no lack of people (generally without productive ability of their own) who believe that property is theft, and that if the greedy owners would just fork over, all the world’s problems would be fixed. Creators, it is assumed, will just continue toiling away for the love of creation itself.

As far as I can learn, Helprin’s fears haven’t come true. Copyright continues in force, and its opponents seem to be a small (if loud-voiced) group. He must also be gratified by the current resurgence in the purchase of paper books, something he does not foresee in this work.

Digital Barbarism is full of Helprin’s vivid prose, which is always worth reading. I did weary of the argument somewhat after a while, though.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture