Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chaos Agent,’ by Mark Greaney

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I think I’m getting too old for thrillers. I find (somewhat to my horror) that I want more from my reading than explosions and gunfights and chases. Next thing I know I’ll be reading Trollope and Thackery. Shoot me now.

Anyway, Mark Greaney’s The Chaos Agent wasn’t actually that bad, compared to most of the competition. There were lots of fights and murders and our heroes took some damage, but it wasn’t the kind of unbelievable action where the hero suffers broken bones and a concussion, rips the IV tubes out of his arm, and stomps back out to carry on the fight and absorb yet more damage. This book was big and loud without being wholly unbelievable.

In fact, its believability is the most disturbing thing about it.

In The Chaos Agent, Greaney’s continuing hero, Court Gentry, the Gray Man, free-lance operative, is living under an assumed name with his girlfriend, defected Russian agent Zoya Zakharova, in Central America, determined to keep a low profile. But Zoya gets contacted by an old friend, a mentor to whom she owes a favor. He needs her help – a number of computer geniuses around the world have been assassinated recently, and he’s trying to get a Russian genius to safety. Court agrees to help with the operation, but it all goes sideways – they barely survive.

Soon the pair is hip-deep in a deep-cover US operation to find and eliminate the assassin. Only it’s not an ordinary assassin. It’s a coordinated operation by killer robots – drones and armed four-legged machines. What’s worse, the robots’ actions and reactions indicate they are not being controlled electronically, but are actually thinking for themselves. This is high level, untethered Artificial Intelligence, faster and more deadly than any human.

The Chaos Agent is really quite a thoughtful book, underneath all the fight scenes and heroics. Serious questions are asked about the implications of AI, what kind of controls we need – and what kind of controls may even be possible. It’s all pretty scary.

The Chaos Agent is a good book. A good entry in one of the best action series out there. Cautions for violence and language, I hardly need add.

My main complaint is the length. I don’t think a thriller needs to be this long. Keep it snappy, authors.

Fiction, Poetry, Reviews

Sir Gawain: What It Means to Be a Real Man

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I didn’t realize Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was set at Christmastime when I picked it up several days ago, so reading it during the Christmas break was seasonal as well as enriching. It could be the poem for modern men today. It’s focus on chastity in the face of strong seduction would make modern readers heads spin.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a striking man walking into King Arthur’s court.

“For all men marvelled what it might mean
That a horseman and his horse should have such a colour
As to grow green as grass . . .”

He says he’s looking for sport, which is the feeling of everyone in the court already. Arthur loved hearing the exploits of his men. The green knight offered a challenge: Any man could strike him with a fierce blow if he would agree to seek him out in one year’s time to receive a blow in kind from him. Even though everyone thought such a challenge was madness, they also couldn’t refuse it.

“‘By heaven,’ then said Arthur, ‘What you ask is foolish,
But as you firmly seek folly, find it you shall.'”

Sir Gawain, who is the greatest of Arthur’s knights (in the early tales) and his nephew, is the one to suggest to the king someone else accept the challenge in case it goes the way everyone suspects. No need to lose the king to a jolly green giant.

This is the part of the story you’ve likely heard. What follows is another regular year until All Saints Day when Gawain leaves to find the Green Chapel, because “Why falter I or fear? What should man do but dare?” He searched without any prospects until Christmastime. Then he prays and then comes across “the comeliest castle” that “shimmered and shone through the shining oaks.”

He stays there several nights enjoying great and chivalrous hospitality, and that’s when things get weird. The host and all of his men intend to spend the next day hunting, but he urges Gawain to continue resting at the castle, and he proposes this “bargain”: whatever gains they earn in the woods or in the castle will be exchanged. Gawain thinks it’s a great deal.

I found this bargain very strange. What could Gawain possibly achieve within the castle? Spoiler alert: It’s his good host’s wife!

Part three describes three temptations or seductions paired with the exploits of the hunting party. Readers and listeners are meant understand the hunting party illustrates the Gawain’s seduction. That’s the reason I say young men ought to read and talk about this poem. If a woman boldly invited you into adultery, how would you handle it? For Gawain, chivalric manners are high virtue, so he can’t just turn her away. In fact, he seems to agree with her proposal, “but Sir Gawain was on guard in a gracious manner.”

The text seems to say Gawain would not indulge this woman because he is his imminent death at the hand of the Green Knight (line 1285). Maybe that is one motivator, the other and primary one being Christian morality, and if it is factor, doesn’t that strike sparks against modern men who would likely argue the other way. Believing they were about to die, why not take the host’s wife?

One theme we can draw from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a common question that brings out bucket lists: If you knew you were going to die in a year, what would you do? The greatest knight in Camelot not only sought out the man he believed would kill him but also sought every virtue he could recognize.

Why would anyone choose to throw all morality in the bin because he believed he would die in a year? We’re all going to die–this winter or next, this decade or next. Does believing you can see your finish line approaching mean virtue no longer has value? Wouldn’t that argue that you believe virtue has no real value for you now, while your death is still hidden from you?

Music

‘Soria Moria’

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Happy Friday.

Tonight, another Sissel video. I knew the song well, but had not seen the video before — and it’s quite lovely.

“Soria Moria” comes from “Soria Moria Castle,” a Norwegian fairy tale in Asbjørnsen’s and Moe’s famous collection. I think it’s included in Dasent’s East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, but I’m not entirely sure and too lazy to consult my copy (which is in the basement).

This particular song was, according to the liner notes on the original album (which were easier to find), written by Svein Gundersen and Stig Nielsen, and the music was first composed for a musical play called ‘Isfront.’

There’s a couple of pretty amazing high notes in this number, along with some cool scenery.

Authors

Lewis on Williams

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I’m having an attack of obsession with my translation work tonight — coming up on a milestone and eager to get to it. So you’ll have to settle for a message from better writer than me — C. S. Lewis talking about the books of his friend, Charles Williams.

It does not hurt that he’s defending the precise kind of fiction I write. I think it’s fair to say that posterity has justified Lewis’ position.

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A stereoscopic look at a burger

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Not a 50s Grill burger, but you get the idea. Photo credit: Anita Austvika. Unsplash license.

Your fears have been realized. I have nothing to write about tonight except for my day. Which makes it a post about nothing. And I’m no Seinfeld. My apologies in advance.

Today I ventured out into the world, after several days spent at home on purpose. I looked over the instructions for my recovery (from surgery for a detached retina, as you may recall) and discovered I shouldn’t have been driving at all these last couple weeks. Maybe not even now. But I feel like I’m ready – except for night driving, which I think I’ll avoid for a while, because of glare. (I drove at night once, and decided it was a very bad idea.)

But now I have 3D vision again. It’s a great relief.

What they did during surgery (among other things, I have no doubt) was to inject a bubble (nitrogen, if I recall correctly) into my eyeball so everything would be held in place while it healed up. At first that bubble covered most of my field of vision, which is why I took to wearing an eye patch a lot of the time. Having one working eye was preferable to looking through that annoying opaque bubble.

But the bubble is diminishing, as they promised. Now it’s perceptually about the size of my little fingernail, and it bobbles around at the bottom of my sight like a bubble in a carpenter’s level. Almost amusing. Almost.

But anyway, the rest of my field of vision is clear. Sadly, it’s not clear in the sense of clear vision – my sight is fuzzy in that eye, and will be for a while, I’m told.

But I’ve got stereoscopic vision again, and my accustomed peripheral vision. And that makes driving a lot better. And safer, for myself and (as the saying goes) others.

So I went out for lunch today.

I went to one of the best nearby places that’s survived the Great Sorting of the pandemic. It’s called 50s Grill, and its gimmick is that the waitresses wear poodle skirts and the walls are decorated with movie posters from the 1950s. And they play oldies over the speakers. And, just incidentally, the food is really good. Like you remember, if you’re old enough to remember the ‘50s. There’s no ashtrays or ambient cigarette smoke, but you can’t have everything.

I had the hamburger. They do a great hamburger at the 50s Grill, the best I know in this area.

Now I have to add a caveat here. There are all kinds of tastes in burgers, and I know I am not one of the majority.

Most Americans’ idea of a good burger involves cheese. It’s gotten to the point (and I complain about this a lot) that you have to specify if you don’t want cheese when you order. Many places just assume the cheese unless you inform them elsewise. (I suppose I should appreciate their intentions. They mean well. “You say you want a burger? Why don’t I enhance the experience for you, just out of the goodness of my heart!”)

But I don’t like cheese.

The American model nowadays tends to involve a lot of lettuce and tomato slices and pickles and sauces, etc. And, of course, that ubiquitous cheese. The whole Big Mac/Whopper scenario.

For me, a good burger is meat and bread. I’ll add ketchup on my own. Onions are good, because they enhance the meat flavor. (Sautéed is best, except that kind is hard to find. You can get sautéed at Hooters – don’t ask me how I know. But it’s embarrassing to go to Hooters. Especially when you’re an old man alone. Or so I’ve heard.)

Now I won’t say the 50s Grill burger is the kind of austere burger I just described. It in fact involves lettuce and tomatoes and pickles and a special sauce, plus the onions I tolerate. But I can pick off the tomatoes and pickles, or ask to have them “held,” as we say. And I’ll tolerate the lettuce, because I’m a magnanimous soul.

But the meat there is great, and – wait for this – they bake their own buns fresh every day.

The bun is an underappreciated element in a really fine burger.

Of course, such a meal (especially with dessert, which is a whole other rave review) eats up all the calories on my diet for the day.

It’s worth it. I’m sitting here in the evening, still full.

And that was my day. Except for all the translating. Which I can’t tell you about.

So, The End.

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Where do legends come from?

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Robin Hood on a horse, ca. 1475. Wikimedia Commons.

As you may recall, I am peripherally involved in the world of Viking scholarship – not as a real researcher, but as a lowly translator. I am also, of course, a creator of historical fantasy, which means I’ve had to learn a few things. Not as much as I think I’ve learned, of course, but a few things. And, of course, I have ideas.

Here’s one of them.

The scholarly controversy over how the Icelandic historical sagas should be understood, as I’ve often mentioned, is about how much we can believe of what the sagas tell us. Many historians won’t use the sagas at all, because they were written after a period of oral transmission. And a lot of historians are very suspicious of oral tradition.

For instance, I often come across a statement like this: “Historians disagree whether King Harald Fairhair of Norway ever actually existed.” They mention that there are no clear mentions of him anywhere except in the sagas.

For some historians, in fact, it seems that a mention in a saga is proof of non-existence.

Which makes no sense to me.

One comes across the same argument with figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood. “There are legends about these characters,” the historians say. “Therefore, we’re sure they never existed.”

“Why?” Walker screams.

Historians seem to think that legends spring out of the human mind, ex nihilo. As atheists think the universe was created – by nobody, out of nothing.

It makes more sense to me that legends probably come from something. Perhaps something trivial, perhaps they happened to a different historical character – but they came from something.

What historians don’t seem to remember is that in this real world they write about, actual things do happen. Sometimes they’re quite exciting things. People remember them, and repeat them to others.

At the Green Bay Viking festival, a friend told me a story about building a working guillotine on commission, and nearly chopping his hand off. I’ve been retelling that story ever since.

It happened. Interesting things do happen in real life.

Why should the default explanation for a good story be that somebody just made it up?

Religion

Johnny Kongapod

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Picture credit: normanrockwell.com

It’s always dangerous when I’m between book reviews. Sometimes my thoughts coagulate, like milk in the sunshine, and in desperation I record those curds on this blog.

The problem with me (well, one of many problems) is that, like many writers, I think I’m smarter than I am. People actually read what I write, which tends to give a guy a big head, even at my low level of readership.

My thoughts today conducted me on a strange road from colonial America to the Infernal Regions. I am not at all sure that any part of that road is worth sharing. Might even do more harm than good.

But let’s see how it goes.

In my reading, I came upon a reference to the Konkapot River in Massachusetts.

This reminded me of a poem I read as a boy. I later learned that it was an epitaph written by no less a figure than Abraham Lincoln, for a Kickapoo Indian friend:

Here lies poor Johnny Kongapod;
Have mercy on him, gracious God,
As he would do if he was God 
And you were Johnny Kongapod.

I had also read references to a Native American named John Konkapot, whom I had assumed to be the man the poem was written for. But that isn’t so. The Konkapot River is named after that original John Konkapot, a Mohican of the Stockbridge tribe who converted to Christianity and was highly esteemed by the white community. The picture at the top of this post is a study by Norman Rockwell, never completed, in which John Konkapot talks with the missionary Rev. John Sargent. Sargent’s wife, who mistrusted the Native Americans, peeks around the corner in concern.

But Lincoln’s Johnny Kongapod was a different person, perhaps named after the original guy.

But that’s just the preliminaries. My actual concern tonight is Lincoln’s poem. One remembers (I reviewed a book on the subject) that Lincoln was an atheist and a free-thinker for much of his life. He had been raised in a hyper-Calvinist Baptist denomination, where they taught that most people were hopelessly damned from birth. Such a teaching did not appeal to his essentially humane, ironical cast of mind.

Why would God send Johnny Kongapod to Hell, Lincoln asks. Johnny wouldn’t do that to Him.

I could write all night on that subject. The main answer, of course, is that God is God. He knows more than Johnny Kongapod. Or Lincoln, even.

And my main response personally has always been, “Heaven is the place where we’re filled with joy in beholding the Lord face to face. If you don’t like the Lord, why would you want to go there?”

It’s conceivable that Heaven and Hell are the same place. But the Beatific Vision that makes it wonderful for God’s children makes it unbearable for those who have eyes but will not see.

And lately I’ve been contemplating the Old Testament Sheol, which is Chaos, the primordial sea over which the Spirit of God hovers at creation. Perhaps Hell isn’t fire, but water. But I’m not sure about that, and don’t know whether it heads anywhere worthwhile.

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The Fantoft Stave Church

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Happy Friday, and happy Tolkien’s birthday!

I often slough off my responsibilities on Fridays by posting videos, just as high school teachers used to wheel out the film projectors when they were too hung-over to teach that day. Tonight, for some reason, a short film about the Fantoft Stave Church, near Bergen, Norway. In winter, because it’s winter now.

This is a polite little film, clearly intended not to offend.

Because there’s a small detail the video leaves out. They tell you it burned down in 1992, and was rebuilt. True as far as it goes.

They do not tell you how it burned. It was not an accident.

A heathen burned it down, on purpose, to strike a blow against Christian oppression.

I saw the building during its reconstruction. My first trip to Norway was in 1995, along with my dad. While we were visiting a cousin in Bergen, he took us to see the building as it stood at the time.

Not much to see then. I remember black plastic sheeting covering the roof.

Anyway, it looks nice now, doesn’t it?

Authors, Writing

Thinking about Tolkien

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I was thinking, based on something I saw on Facebook, that today is J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday. Then I took the unwonted precaution of checking it, and found that it’s actually tomorrow.

Which means I can actually post this in time for you to see it soon enough to do something about it.

So if you want to prepare for the traditional Tolkien toast, that will be tomorrow. Friday.

Tolkien is (he said, in a low voice as if he was expressing something not entirely predictable) a great inspiration to me.

For years, the man toiled away at this huge project, shoehorning it into his rare free moments. With no realistic prospect of publication, ever. He had no reason in the world to believe that anyone would be interested in reading it. When his friend C. S. Lewis said he liked it, “Tollers” was delighted.

Think of the cultural phenomenon The Lord of the Rings has become since that time. The millions of copies sold in a multitude of languages. The biographies and commentaries and scholarship. The film adaptations. The fandom. The games and memorabilia and merchandising. Whole careers have been built on the back of this fantasy, which has proven a very solid, load-bearing structure indeed, for a work of the imagination.

It’s hard to believe that there was a time when the story had one (1) fan in the world, outside of Tolkien’s own family.

It’s this kind of fact that keeps delusions alive in lesser writers. I could name one in particular, but let’s not talk about … him.

All together now: “The Professor!”

Religion

New Year, and thoughts on prayer

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A new year. My… well, the number for me is over 70th… trip around the great nuclear furnace.

I was going to do a post about where I’m standing in terms of my work – that I seem to be on track with my translation (I worked a little late last night to meet a personal deadline). That I’ve been temporarily sidelined in my effort to get Troll Valley into paperback. I was going to mention that I’m recovering pretty well from my eye surgery, feeling better every day.

But that will do for that stuff.

It occurred to me to mention something I learned recently – or think I learned. (One is never sure, in matters spiritual.)

It’s about prayer.

I’ve never been very good with prayer. I’ve told you more than once that I have no stage fright (an abnormal condition). The one exception is that I hate praying in public. I hate doing that. I always feel I’m doing it wrong, that I’m sounding foolish, that I’m… embarrassing God, somehow.

It’s not quite as bad with private prayer, for me. I do that regularly. But I’ve never felt my prayers counted for much. I felt my prayers were small and weak things, set up against the great evil and sadness of the fallen world.

However, I had a thought recently that may have some relevance. Maybe it will be helpful to others.

If you recall, a while back I was rhapsodizing about how the science of physics seems (in my ignorance) to feed into theology. I actually forget the details, but it was pretty heady stuff for me. Waves and particles, and how the created universe is like a story or a song. All proclaiming the character of their Creator.

Anyway, it occurred to me to think that when I pray, I’m not there alone in front of God. I’m part of a great wave, a great song, a great dance. I’m not creating anything, I’m not composing something out of my own material. I’m just joining in. Participating in an ongoing story – or hymn. Or dance. Whatever. It’s not on me alone.

The call goes out – “Join the dance!” And I join.

I like that. It helps me relax when I pray.

Still can’t handle the public praying, though.

A blessed new year to you.