All posts by Lars Walker

Reviews

Film review: ’13 Hours’

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Is it a political movie? Absolutely not.

Does it raise political questions? No way it couldn’t.

13 Hours is a harrowing (144 minutes) film, perhaps (I speak, of course, as someone whose entire battle experience has been with blunt weapons) as realistic a picture of combat as you’re likely to encounter in civilian life. The central character is Jack Silva (John Krasinski), whom we follow as he arrives in Benghazi and gets to know the security team at the “secret” CIA facility. We get a look at what you might call the Warrior Culture, the brotherhood of men who’ve developed a taste for living with danger, doing a job they believe makes a difference. Civilian life seems stale to them.

They’ll get all the action they want on September 11.

There are no speeches about the administration in this movie. When the guys talk, it’s mostly either talking trash – guy talk – or (sometimes in a weary, private moment) meditating on the meaning of it all. The question of where’s the cavalry, and whether the team can hold out long enough to get relief, is discussed in practical, immediate terms. Questions of final responsibility are conspicuous by their absence.

13 Hours is not for the faint of heart. The violence is graphic, the language often foul.

More than anything else, the film is a memorial to the dead. It’s deeply felt, and serious, and well worth your time if you can handle it.

Uncategorized

The father, the son, and the cliff

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I came up with a parable today. The only problem is, I don’t know how it ends.

Goes like this.

There was a father and son who lived in a house by a cliff. The father loved his son very much. The day the son was born, he swore to him, “I love you so much, I will never say no to you.”

When the child grew older, he wanted to play outside, and of course his father said yes. “But don’t play too near the cliff,” he said.

But every day the boy played a little closer to the cliff, testing the limits.

“I don’t think you should play so close to the cliff,” the father said.

“Are you saying I can’t play by the cliff?” the son demanded. “Are you saying no to me?”

“No, I’m not saying no,” the father replied hurriedly. “You may play wherever you like.”

After a while, the boy came to his father and said, “I want to play right at the edge of the cliff.”

His father did not say no.

That day the boy slipped, and plunged to his death on the rocks below.

Now here’s where I don’t know where to take the story. I’m not going to tell you what the parable means, because I think you can guess.

What I wonder is, what did the father do then? Did he feel he’d done right, and fate was to blame? Did he blame God? Did he feel he’d failed his son?

I don’t know. I don’t know what he did next.

But if the parable means what I think it means, I guess we’ll find out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bulldog Drummond,’ by H. C. McNeile

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In my ongoing quest to live in the past, turning a blind eye to the harsh truths of the modern world, I’ve been experimenting with reading some of the old classics in the mystery and adventure fields. I’ve long been a fan of John Buchan. I tried E.C. Bentley and Marjorie Allingham, and wasn’t overwhelmed. I thought I’d sample the Bulldog Drummond series, by H. C. (Sapper) McNeile, and I bought this inexpensive Kindle collection.

It’s pretty much what you’d expect. Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is a big, unhandsome, wealthy Englishman, bored with civilian life after surviving World War I. One day he takes out an ad in the Times, offering to do any job as long as it’s dangerous. He has no objection to breaking the law in a good cause.

One of the numerous replies he receives stands out. A young woman, Phyllis Benton, asks him to investigate the group of men with whom her father has gotten involved. She fears that they’re dangerous, and are getting him into something illegal. Drummond promptly falls in love with the girl, and quickly starts interfering with the criminals (as indeed they prove to be) in various clever and annoying ways. He gradually comes to understand that it is no ordinary crime being planned by this international group, but an act of sabotage on a national scale.

It’s interesting that Drummond falls in love in this, the very first book in the series, and stays with the same girl through all the sequels. In our time that would probably seen as a drawback, limiting the hero’s sexual options. But in 1920, when the book came out, standards were different, and it probably served as a sign that while there would be violence to come, erotic hijinks would not be on the menu.

The book was entertaining in a sort of schoolboy way, but I found it a little naïve. Perhaps my tastes have been corrupted by modern mystery stories, but I like a little more complexity in my heroes. Hugh Drummond talks piffle quite in the same vein as Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Sayers does it better, and Lord Peter has a deeper heart.

Still, it was a ripping enough yarn for the sort of thing it is. Mindless entertainment, competently delivered. Nothing particularly objectionable on the moral side.

Fiction, Reviews

The ‘Rosinante’ novels, by Alexis A. Gilliland

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Long, long ago, when I first began writing short stories (and before I pretty much gave up writing short stories), my one regular market was Amazing Stories Magazine, under the editorship of George Scithers and Darrel Schweitzer. One of the writers who also appeared often in those pages (rather more than I did) was Alexis A. Gilliland. I went on to novelistic obscurity in fantasy, while Gilliland became a prize-winning science fiction author. After several successful novels, he seems to have given it up and turned to cartooning, as best as I can tell from an internet search.

Anyway, our friend Ori Pomerantz sent me Gilliland’s Rosinante trilogy novels, The Revolution From Rosinante, Long Shot For Rosinante, and The Pirates From Rosinante. I’m grateful for his generosity.

Rosinante is a space station built for mining activities on an asteroid. About the time Charles Cantrell, the manager in charge of constructing the station, is completing the project, developments on earth leave him and his workers more or less abandoned. So, unwillingly, he sets up a local government, aided by his chief subordinates, a brilliant Israeli woman and a sentient computer called Skaskash who has an odd predilection for metaphysics. This allows author Gilliland to do some Heinleinian experimentation with questions of government, freedom, and religion.

These books were written in the 1980s, and are set a couple decades from today, so it’s interesting to note how the future has changed. The great environmental disaster affecting space travel here is ozone depletion (remember that?), and the foremost world power challenging the North American Union (the United States is called the “Old Regime” and is gone, and most people claim they don’t miss it) is Japan.

These novels are what’s known as “hard” science fiction. There’s no interstellar travel here, and most problems are solved through the application of scientific principles which seem (to a scientific illiterate like me) highly plausible.

The issue of religion was problematic for me. The great villains of the first two books are a group called “Creationists,” who rose up as a powerful movement and helped to destroy the Old Regime. These people seem to be nominally Christian, but either the author didn’t know any real Creationists, or he made the effort to differentiate his Creationists from the real ones, in order to avoid giving offense. These Creationists seem to have no devotional or church lives, drink immoderately, employ prostitutes, and swear like sailors. Their great cause is preventing genetic manipulation, and they’re willing to abort the children born from such procedures, or even to murder them once born.

The religious problems go even deeper. The declaration is made, as if self-evident, that earth religion could not possibly apply off the planet. Therefore one of the computers invents a new, improved religion which sweeps through the space stations and space vessels.

Well written, for those of you who like this kind of story. Not really my cup of tea. Cautions for adult themes, though not extreme.

Authors

The Saga of Tormod

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Tormod Torfæus (1636-1719) was accustomed to more comfortable lodgings. An Icelander who had lived many years in Norway, he was an officer of the king and used to being treated with respect. But this old Danish inn offered nothing but cheap beer and food, and a room he had to share. He was bone-tired and wanted his sleep, but another Icelander kept blundering into the room and trying to turn him out of his bed.

The year was 1671. Tormod had sailed home to Iceland to clear up some estate matters following the death of his brother. He decided to return home by way of Copenhagen, but his ship was wrecked near Skagen, though the passengers all survived. They had to make a long foot march to get passage on another ship, and then bad weather forced the new ship to seek harbor on Samsø Island. And that was how Tormod came to be overnighting in this miserable hostelry.

Every time he began to fall asleep, the door would open, and a drunken Icelander, Sigurd, would come barging in and try to push him out of his bed. Then they would fight, and the landlord would come and tell Tormod to go back to bed. Finally Tormod begged the landlady to give him a different room. She complied, and he lay down with some hope of a few hours’ sleep. But he’d grown suspicious of this establishment, and lay his rapier on the table, near at hand. Continue reading The Saga of Tormod →

Religion, Uncategorized

Heathen? Thank a Christian.

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A page from the Flatey Book.

Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.
–G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse”

It’s pretty well known that Norse mythology is far better preserved than any other European pre-Christian mythology. This is largely because the great saga-writer and poet Snorri Sturlusson, a Christian, persuaded Icelandic churchmen that the old Norse Eddaic poetry was worth preserving, and that a knowledge of the old myths was necessary to preserve it.

In my translation work on the brochure I’m doing for the Flatey Book publication project, I learned about a further debt that Icelandic culture (including modern, reconstituted heathen culture) owes to the church.

Here’s an excerpt from Prof. Titlestad’s essay in the brochure:

In the farthest north of Iceland, at Hólar in Skagafjord, dwelt the mathematician, cartographer, culture-builder and bishop Guðbrandur Þorlaksson (1541-1627). He was the first to draw a good map of Iceland. He had a printing press at his disposal and published/edited 80 books. A graduate of the University of Copenhagen, he was the first to publish extracts of the Bible in Icelandic. In this way he established a more secure basis for a national language than Norwegians possessed – they had to get along for centuries in Danish.

It’s often stated that modern Icelandic is the same language spoken by the Vikings. That’s only approximately true — the language has changed a little. But it’s close enough for general purposes. If Jarl Haakon, who time-travels to the 21st Century in my novel Death’s Doors, showed up instead in Reykjavik, he’d get along fine making himself understood.

But the reason that old language was preserved in its early form, as we see above, is because a Christian bishop wanted to have portions of the Bible printed in Icelandic.

Publishing

The Flatoy Book

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I hope I’m not out of line quoting a paragraph from my own translation, in progress, of a promotional booklet for the Norwegian Flatøy Book project. This passage discusses the decision of the Icelandic bishop Brynjolv Sveinsson to turn the big manuscript (two volumes) over to King Fredrik III of Denmark in 1556. The original author is Prof. Torgrim Titlestad:

Brynjolv built on insight that had been developed within the Icelandic culture ever since Arngrimur’s pioneering work in the 16th Century, but he was possibly more aware than the others of the unique civilization-building impulses contained within the Norse heritage, as especially expressed in Flatøybok. Flatøybok can be understood as a kind of “Noah’s Ark” of ideas, stocked with the fundamental concepts of the Norse world in order to survive as a time capsule in a threatening future. This distinguished Flatøybok from older saga literature. The book was a “generational ship,” laden with the experiences of many people over many generations. The Norse culture had grown up outside the sphere of Roman dominion, and thus was different from European feudal culture with its comprehensive, hierarchical class structure. The Icelandic author Bergsveinn Birgisson (1971-) has expressed himself on the message of these medieval authors to the world (2015): “We had our own unique culture up here in the North, with a value of its own, which we desire to preserve for future generations.” And as his spiritual ancestor Brynjolv might have said, “And we would wish that the world would learn from it.” Brynjolv desired to send this “ark” to Copenhagen so that the book might be published and made available to European readers. Flatøybok was meant to sail out into diverse intellectual harbors and then cast off again for further voyages around the world.

Goofing

Cold comfort

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Minneapolis in January. Artist’s conception.

Thoughts thought while closing my garage door:

My back yard seems like an entirely different place in winter. Places where I could walk easily in summer are hard going — or dangerous — in winter. The contours are different. The colors are different. That muddy place I try to avoid in summer doesn’t even exist (conceptually) now.

It’s like I’ve moved.

I’ve lived in the north and I’ve lived in the south. As I’ve said many times, I hate winter with a hot hate that I only wish would warm me up.

But winter does give us the opportunity to travel, so to speak. My yard in Florida was pretty much the same all the time. My yard in winter is a foreign country.

Not a very nice foreign country, I’ll grant. But it’s a change. A poor man’s holiday. In Siberia.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Joy,’ by Abigail Santamaria

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J. R. R. Tolkien never warmed to Joy Davidman, the woman his friend C. S. Lewis fell in love with and married. Looking at it from his point of view, it’s not hard to see why.

For decades, he’d watched “Jack” Lewis live almost a slavish life, working long hours as an instructor at Oxford, then going home to wait hand and foot on a selfish, small-minded old woman, Mrs. Moore, whom he’d promised a friend, her son, he’d take care of in case of his death in World War I.

But now, in the late 1950s, Jack’s indenture was over. The old woman had died. Tolkien had improved the situation by calling in personal favors to get Jack offered the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a position that would give him three times the salary, and half the work, of his old job at Oxford. Tolkien was confident that with all this new freedom, the pent-up energy of all those years of servitude would gush forth in a flood of scholarship and creativity. Jack would finally get the recognition he truly deserved.

Instead, like an earthquake, Joy Davidman happened. She brought with her complicated domestic troubles, financial woes, two nice but active young boys, and a hint of scandal. Then, to cap it all, she brought cancer, the disease that had already scarred Jack as a young boy, when he lost his beloved mother. Continue reading ‘Joy,’ by Abigail Santamaria →

Fiction, Poetry, Reviews

‘The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien

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When I wrote yesterday that my life was “full of Viking stuff again,” I neglected to tell the whole of the tale. I was also finishing up my reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun.

I find it difficult to get enough objective distance on this book to make any guess as to how the public at large will receive it. For me, and some of my friends, this book is a gift. All our lives we’ve heard of the young scholars Tolkien and Lewis sitting in their rooms at Oxford, reading Eddaic poems to each other in the original Icelandic (this was how the famous Inklings began). Yet in their published work, both men have surprisingly little to say on the matter. Tolkien gives us echoes in The Lord of the Rings, although those elements are generally as much Anglo-Saxon as Norse. And Lewis seems to have shed his passion for Northernness along with his atheism, as if he’d put aside childish things.

But here we have a genuinely Norse work from Tolkien himself. It’s not a translation. It’s an original poem, drawing on varied sources. The original poem he’s trying to refashion, found in the Codex Regius manuscript in Iceland (where she shares honors with the Flatey Book I mentioned yesterday), is interrupted in the middle by the loss of a whole signature of pages. There are other versions of the story extant, both prose and poetry, but they vary widely in quality and consistency. Tolkien determined to do his own version, in which he’d try to work out contradictions between the traditions.

The result was very pleasing to me. Tolkien has definite views about Old Norse Eddaic poetry, and in his view it’s a very different thing from the Anglo-Saxon kind he translated in Beowulf. Continue reading ‘The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien →