All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

Take No More, by Seb Kirby

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Getting free book offers for my Kindle has expanded my opportunities for writing snarky reviews. Take No More by Seb Kirby is far from being the worst written e-book I’ve read, but I can hardly recommend it.

James Blake, a London radio executive, comes home to his apartment one day and finds his wife dying just inside the door, shot in the head. Not only can he not imagine why anyone would have killed her, but he didn’t even know she was in town. She was supposed to be in Florence, looking for lost art masterpieces.

Naturally he comes under police suspicion, but he manages to flee to Florence where he discovers that his wife has crossed immensely powerful people, and he soon becomes a target himself.

I’d say the problem with Take No More is that the author is an OK storymaker, but an amateur storyteller. He often commits the sin of having his narrator inform us what other people are thinking, something he can’t know for sure. And the prose is… maddeningly pedestrian. There’s plenty of danger and action, but the words don’t serve the story. It occurred to me that the book read like a second-rate translation – all the words are right, but the music is absent. One of the reviewers on Amazon actually said something about it being originally written in another language, but “Kirby” sounds like an English-speaking name to me.

There was one trick employed for losing a tail that did impress me, though.

Cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing radical. If you can get it free like I did, you might care to give it a try if this sort of thing interests you. Otherwise, I’d say pass.

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Video Vikings

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So here’s the trailer for the upcoming History Channel series, Vikings.

On the basis of this trailer, and what I’ve read, I’m not as sad as I have been that I don’t have cable and won’t be able to watch it. I suppose I’m hypercritical. The first thing reenactors look for is always costumes, and these seem… weird. Instead of dressing people as we’re pretty sure they actually dressed, they’ve allowed their costumers to get “creative,” especially with leather. And what’s with the guy (I think he’s the star, playing the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok) with the sides of his head shaved?

Also they have a woman warrior. You know how I feel about this. I don’t deny that Viking women could fight. But I’ve never seen any account, from sagas or the chronicles of the Vikings’ victims, that mention women being a regular part of armies.

Maybe it’ll be OK. But I won’t order cable to see it. Maybe it’ll show up on Netflix.

Anyway, I think the people who made the trailer borrowed ideas from my book trailer.

Addendum: Re:the filth. One of the things we know for sure about the Vikings is that they were notably fastidious for the times. We have an Anglo-Saxon document complaining that the Vikings were stealing all the English women through their effeminate habit of bathing once a week.

Authors

In which I play philologist. Badly.

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

I’m generally a few months behind in my reading of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, so I only got to the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue yesterday. The front page story is “The Riddle of Gollum: A Speculative Meditation on Tolkien’s Sources,” by Woodrow and Susan Wendling. As the authors examined the origins of both the character and his name, they mentioned a poem Tolkien wrote around 1928. It’s called “Glip,” and comes from a collection called Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay. Here’s Glip’s description:

Glip is his name, as blind as a mole

In his two round eyes

While daylight lasts; but when night falls

With a pale gleam they shine

Like green jelly, and out he crawls

All long and wet with slime….

Glip is a scavenger. He lives near a mermaid who lures sailors onto the rocks with her songs, and scavenges their bones for his meals.

The name “Glip” intrigued me. Tolkien, of course, was a master linguist concentrating on northern European languages. I know that there’s a Norwegian word, “glipp,” which means to blink. However, there’s also a verb phrase, “å gå glipp av,” which means to lose or mislay something. I’m not qualified to say, but that form may be related to the Old Norse word “glepja,” which means to confuse or beguile. (I don’t read Old Norse, but I have access to an online dictionary here. And now so do you. Thanks to Kelsey Patton for the link.)

If Glip was an early version of Gollum, could the original name have suggested to Tolkien the idea of a creature who mislays something important to him? The conjecture’s a little weak, as Tolkien rejected the name Glip and moved on to Gollum. But I thought I’d mention the possible connection. The tangle of associations in an author’s mind can be extremely complex.

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Lucky 13. Or not.

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“Cognitive dissonance” is a useful term, especially in my life. I first learned it – it will surprise none of you to learn – from a counselor, and he wasn’t talking about himself. But during this winter of our discontent, I find myself even more dissonant than is my wont.

On the macro level, I see no hope at all. I can’t conceive a scenario by which conservatives and Christians, and conservative Christians, can possibly come back from the losses we’ve suffered. I fear the future, not only because I see persecution (if relatively light by global standards), but because I love my country. I have this crazy idea that you can’t sow scoundrelism and reap integrity, and that you can’t borrow your way out of debt.

I know that God is in charge. I’ll stipulate to that. He was also in charge during the Diocletian persecution.

So that gets me down.

On the other hand, it’s beginning to look very much as if 2013 may be the year when things turn around for me personally. I’ve got the translation work, and there’s some publishing news coming up, and things look pretty good from here. I’m particularly pleased that it should happen in a year ending in “13,” as I decry all forms of divination, and telling the future by numbers counts as that.

I can imagine Noah having a neighbor who came over his house yelling, “Hey! Good news! My big deal came through! What do you mean boat ride? I haven’t got time for a boat ride –”

Fiction, Reviews

A Real Piece of Work, by Chris Orcutt

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It’s always nice to discover a new hard-boiled detective writer (and character) who’s worth reading. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with Chris Orcutt’s first Dakota Stevens mystery, A Real Piece of Work.

Dakota Stevens, the hero and narrator, is a former FBI agent who’s set himself up as a New York P.I. He mentions appreciating the classic detectives Marlowe and Spenser, which is a good sign. He leans more to the Spenser side, I think, being essentially an optimist. And he has plenty to be optimistic about, having for his partner not some dull John Watson but the sexy Svetlana Krüsh, a long-legged Russian-born chess master.

The plot involves the art world (oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of books involving art forgery lately), Middle Eastern terrorists, and Nazis (who make for pretty old villains by now, but I suppose you can wring a few more plots out of them).

The best thing about the story was the writing. Orcutt is an excellent wordsmith. The dialogue is good, the characters generally believable (except for the unusual percentage of gorgeous women in Dakota’s world, almost every one of whom throws herself into his arms. Perhaps this is an homage to the old days of the sexy paperback detective, like Shell Scott). My main complaint is with the plotting. One major plot point in particular was so obvious they might as well have perched a raven over one character’s door.

Cautions for language and adult situation. There’s lots of sex, but thankfully it’s not as explicit as I’ve seen in other novels recently. All in all a pretty good piece of work.

Reading

“Ringing” through the years

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Today I was reminded, for some reason, of my first introduction to The Lord of the Rings. The image above is the same edition I got, back around 1966 (the publication page says that was the year of the printing). I would have been about 16 years old at the time. The trilogy was offered by Scholastic Books, a major force in my life in those days. There was no bookstore within practical distance of my home. I had never been in a bookstore in my life – bookstores were distant Rivendell to me. So those periodic (Monthly? Quarterly? I don’t remember) Scholastic catalogs were to me what the wandering peddler was to my ancestors.

I’d never heard of The Lord of the Rings or Tolkien in my life (I knew C. S. Lewis, but had no “inkling” of his friendship with Tolkien). The catalog descriptions were intriguing. But the books cost ninety-five cents apiece – more than three bucks for the trilogy with postage figured in. That was not the kind of money I spent casually in those days. Fortunately I mentioned the books to my brother, and he was interested too. So we went in together. The only drawback was that he demanded first dibs. I had to wait for him to finish The Fellowship of the Ring before I got my chance at it. I chafed as he worked through the long book, saying things like, “This is really good. You’ll like this a lot.”

At last I got my turn and opened the pages onto a whole new world. It was better than I hoped (Lewis himself described it as “good beyond hope”) and gave me satisfactions I’d never known a book could offer.

I still have all three books in those original editions. They’re not actually falling apart (I’ve always been pretty gentle with my books), but they’re so battered that I replaced them with a new set a few years back, for actual reading. These copies are personal relics. When I touch them as I do now (the Fellowship is at my elbow as I write) it brings me back to a moment in my life when new possibilities opened up. And believe me, I needed new possibilities just then.

Religion

“Obfuscatory pseudo-intellection”

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Theodore Dalrymple, in my opinion one of the most interesting writers today, writes over at City Journal about two separate books written about famous English serial murderers. Though the authors were born only a decade apart, they write as if from different worlds. Dalrymple contrasts the two accounts in order to highlight how western culture has changed within living memory.

But the woman of lesser education and humbler occupation displays in her book a much higher level of intellectual sophistication and moral intelligence than her more educated junior. Where one is modest, self-effacing, and straightforward, the other is grandiose and egotistical, her capacity to see clearly clouded by a combination of self-importance and obfuscatory pseudo-intellection. I believe that this contrast results not only from individual differences between the two women but from the different cultural environments in which they grew up and subsequently wrote. A week, said Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics; and it seems that ten years is a long time in the history of a culture.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with Dalrymple’s analysis of the Christian virtue of forgiveness. But I do agree with him that the concept has been entirely corrupted in modern times. I sometimes think that although western culture proudly regards itself as having cast off the shackles of Christianity, it has in fact only sunk into Christian heresy, with the labels switched to confuse the rubes. The theological act of forgiveness has been transformed into a vague principle that we are all morally obligated to forgive everything – even the most horrific crimes – because in fact they’re not crimes at all and there’s nothing to forgive. Our enemy, our tormenter, our murderer, is not a heinous malefactor but merely a fellow victim, the object of forces over which he had no control.

That’s not what Christian forgiveness means. Christianity grants to the sinner the dignity of responsibility. It has been argued that the doctrine of hell is the greatest compliment Christian theology ever paid to the human race. To say that someone is responsible, and to hold them responsible, is to attribute to them the dignity of free agency, declaring them a person capable of choice, rather than just an object subject to blind manipulation.

As in so many cases, it all comes down to what you think human beings are.

Authors, Writing

The Professor. And me. In that order.

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Today is the birthday of Prof. J. R. R. Tolkien, who needs no introduction here. As usual, Tolkien fans around the world are participating in a birthday toast, at 9:00 p.m. local time, wherever they happen to be. The formula is to raise your beverage of choice and say, “THE PROFESSOR!”

Tolkien did a bit of translation in his time, being one of the world’s great language scholars. I suppose it’s a stretch to try to use that as a bridge to the subject of my own ongoing translation work. I’m around ¾ of the way through the first draft now, which is a little ahead of my estimates, I think.

The New Year’s holiday gave me the unspeakable gift of two full, unscheduled days to devote to the project. I did 5,000 words each day, and was a little alarmed to realize something I’d never known before. Translating can be addictive. A Facebook friend who’s also a translator told me I wasn’t out of line to compare it to obsessive computer gaming, since he’s done both.

Translating involves its own special challenges and headaches, but it has the advantage of entirely lacking one great roadblock of ordinary writing – you never have to figure out what’s coming next. Figuring out what comes next has always been the hardest part of writing for me.

Of course it helps to be working on a project you find fascinating in its own right.

Fiction, Reviews

Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman

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Among the many pleasures of the reading life, one of the rarest is the unassuming but excellent novel. That was what I found, to my delight, in Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman.

Hell Around the Horn has no grand pretensions. It does not try to be a romance, or a mystery, or a political tract. It is what its manifest states – a straightforward account, fictionalized, of a memorable voyage by a windjammer and her crew in the year 1905.

The windjammer, if you’re not familiar with the term, was the last stage in the age of commercial sail. Like the clipper ships before them the windjammers drove under a cloud of sails, but they were generally steel- or iron-built, and bulkier in the hull to accommodate more cargo. Although a seeming anachronism, windjammer commerce endured as late as 1957.

The story is told through the eyes of four main characters on board the vessel Lady Rachel – Capt. James Barker, a young captain keen to make a profit on his first voyage as a partner, Apprentice William Jones, a teenager just learning the ropes (literally), Able Seaman Fred Smythe, an American sailor with a little education, and Mary Barker, the captain’s wife, who has come along bringing their two children. Continue reading Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman →

Poetry

The Earth’s Vigil, by G. K. Chesterton

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(It has been my custom to post a poem by Chesterton every Christmas. But I didn’t do that this year. I thought of posting a New Year’s poem tonight, but it looks as if Chesterton didn’t write any. This, however, is close. Happy New Year.)

The old earth keepeth her watch the same,

Alone in a voiceless void doth stand,

Her orange flowers in her bosom flame,

Her gold ring in her hand,

The surfs of the long gold-crested morns

Break evermore at her great robe’s hem,

And evermore come the bleak moon-horns,

But she keepeth not watch for them.

She keepeth her watch through the aeons,

But the heart of her groweth not old,

For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,

And the tale she once was told.

The nations shock and the cities reel,

The empires travail and rive and rend,

And she looks on havoc and smoke and steel,

And knoweth it is not the end.

The faiths may choke and the powers despair,

The powers re-arise and the faiths renew,

She is only a maiden, waiting there,

For the love whose word is true.

She keepeth her watch through the aeons,

But the heart of her groweth not old,

For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,

And the tale she once was told.

Through the cornfield’s gleam and the cottage shade,

They wait unwearied, the young and old,

Mother for child and man for maid,

For a love that once was told.

The hair grows grey under thatch or slates,

The eyes grow dim behind lattice panes,

The earth-race wait as the old earth waits,

And the hope in the heart remains.

She keepeth her watch through the aeons,

But the heart of her groweth not old,

For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,

And the tale she once was told.

God’s gold ring on her hand is bound,

She fires with blossom the grey hill-sides,

Her fields are quickened, her forests crowned,

While the love of her heart abides,

And we from the fears that fret and mar,

Look up in hours and behold a while

Her face, colossal, mid star on star,

Still looking forth with a smile.

She keepeth her watch through the aeons,

But the heart of her groweth not old,

For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,

And the tale she once was told.