Frank is talking about rereading books you used to love. Do you still love them? I should reread The Count of Monte Cristo to see if I still enjoy it.
Category Archives: Reading
The sub-saga of Saul
In the comments on my post yesterday, I was reminded of the story of King Saul of Israel. And I thought I’d talk a little about him as an example of a story antagonist.
“Antagonist” is the right word for the role played by Saul in the Saga of David. Saul isn’t a villain. In fact, for a large part of the story, he’s a hero. But he fails where David succeeds, and his choices put him on a collision course with his former protégé. Like a character in a Greek tragedy, he’s brought down by his fatal flaw, but throughout the story he continues to have his sympathetic moments. Continue reading The sub-saga of Saul
Heroic fiction: Building bridges
Here’s something I meant to include in my recent review of Poul Anderson’s Mother of Kings, but left out because the thing was long enough. This way I can make another whole post out of it, which saves me thinking up a new idea.
(By the way, it just occurred to me, how come it’s “Poul Anderson” and not “Poul Andersen?” He was Danish, and the standard ending for Danish patronymics is “sen.” I suppose it can be traced back to some culturally insensitive immigration official, like the one who made the Kvalevaags into Walkers).
Anyway, I wrote that I found Mother of Kings kind of dull. I gave a couple reasons, but left one out. It involves what I consider a common problem in novels about Vikings and in heroic fantasy in general.
The book was clunky. Continue reading Heroic fiction: Building bridges
Koontz on stories
Today is Sissel Kyrkjebø’s birthday.
And no, I didn’t send her a present. She didn’t send me anything last year, and I do have some pride.
I’m currently reading Dean Koontz’ Mr. Murder, which I’m finding even more excruciatingly suspenseful than his usual stuff. Koontz has adopted the wise policy in recent books of making his heroes blue-collar workers, a tactic that’s both fresh and realistic, and I salute it. In this older book, though, he falls back on the conventional author’s timesaver of making the main character a fellow author (saves research). But it gives him the opportunity to make some dramatically appropriate comments on the idea of Story Itself. Here the hero, Martin Stillwater, talks about it with his wife:
He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because… because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”
“Medicine?”
“Life is so d*mned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naïve, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”
What Are You Reading This Summer?
With summer reading lists about and everyone–I mean, everyone–talking about vampire romances, tell us what you’re reading or planning to read this summer. I’ve got No Man’s Land coming up, which should be colorful non-fiction. I haven’t finished Code of the Woosters, because I’ve been wasting my time reading blogs. Or something.
What are you reading?
Mother of Kings by Poul Anderson
I approached the late Poul Anderson’s Mother of Kings with some trepidation. I wanted to read it because a) it’s a Viking historical fantasy, and b) I’m thinking out a book of my own in which one of the main characters in this one plays a part. But in a book about Gunnhild, wife of Norway’s King Eirik Bloodax and mother of King Harald Greyfell (and his brothers—they ruled jointly) I imagined I’d be dealing with a Marion Zimmer Bradley-esque feminist fantasy, all about what oppressors men are, how smothering Christianity is, and how real freedom is found in the worship of some Mother-goddess or other. I expected visceral, existential feminine rage.
Having read the book, I almost wish it had been like that. It would at least have had some fire to it.
Gunnhild is a character of mystery in Viking history and lore. Historians believe she was probably a Danish princess, conventionally married to Eirik Bloodax, son and heir of Harald Fairhair, who is remembered as the uniter of Norway. (Anderson seems unaware—or doesn’t care—that historians today doubt that Harald was really more than a regional overlord in the west, who may have begun the process of unification. For the purposes of this story he treats the account found in Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla, the Sagas of the Norwegian Kings, as literally true. I’ll admit I do the same thing in The Year Of the Warrior, but I claim in my own defense that the theory was new back then, and I hadn’t heard of it).
In the sagas and legends, though, Gunnhild is a very different character—the daughter of a Finnish (“Lapp” or Sami) wizard, a witch of fearsome power, terrible in her hatreds, lascivious in her morals, and bloody in her vengeances.
Anderson splits the difference. He imagines her as the daughter of a Norse chieftain, a girl who chooses to learn magic at the feet of two Finn wizards, whom she manages to kill off at the same time that she magically summons Eirik to sail in and sweep her off her feet. This is a promising beginning from the dramatic point of view, but sadly Anderson doesn’t sustain it. Once married to her prince, Gunnhild becomes a fairly conventional wife and queen, devoted to her husband and children. She assists them all through their lives by the use of her magical powers, but is thwarted more often than not. Her successes, when they happen, aren’t terribly impressive or lasting.
The result is that it’s hard to root for Gunnhild. She’s not good enough to sympathize with much, and not powerful or evil enough to be very entertaining. She becomes an almost passive center around which the drama of 10th Century Norwegian politics plays itself out. This is a great drama, but in this work it lacks (it seems to me) the rich hues and symphonic music of real epic. Anderson does some moments of pathos well, particularly concerning the deaths of Kings Haakon the Good and Harald Greyfell, but overall I found it pretty dry.
This is a problem I’ve always had with Anderson, and with Science Fiction writers as a group (no doubt there are exceptions). Science Fiction writers by and large (and that’s what Anderson primarily was), it seems to me, have a hard time handling human emotions, dreams and aspirations. They’re more oriented toward machines and machine-like people.
I always comment on books’ theological implications and treatments of Christianity in these reviews. Mother Of Kings provides unusual problems. Anderson is neither friendly nor hostile to Christianity, so it could be worse. Historically Eirik Bloodax ruled Norway as a heathen, but converted, along with his family, to Christianity when he fled to England and became King of York. Some of his sons seem to have been genuinely zealous in their missionary work (a point that’s largely ignored in Heimskringla). Gunnhild is portrayed here (quite reasonably) as a nominal Christian, uncertain as to what religion (Norse heathendom, Christianity or Finnish pantheism) offers the most useful magic for her exploitation. Clearly she’s a heathen at heart, but her deepest inclinations seem to be pantheistic. This can’t exactly be viewed as an argument for pantheism, though, because Gunnhild isn’t admirable enough to provide one.
Perhaps I’d have found the whole thing more exciting if I hadn’t already known the basic story. But I doubt it. I can’t really recommend Mother Of Kings very highly.
Printed for the Shelf Alone
Can books be too gorgeous to read? I would say yes, but I still want to leaf through them and feel bad about not using them. A book may be too pretty to read, but ink, no matter where it’s printed, is meant to be read. So I suppose pretty books should have blank pages.
More on Reading the Bible
My cousin, blogging at The Cruciform Life, writes about reading the Bible two different ways:
In his lecture (which is well worth listening to), Keller describes two ways of reading the Bible. When we read the Bible diachronically, we read the text “along the chronos…along the timeline of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, in which case the Gospel (read diachronically) is: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration.” We might also read the Bible synchroncially that is “across the grain…you can look at it topically: what does the Bible say about God?…about sin?”…etc. If you read the Bible in this way, says Keller, “the Gospel is: God, Sin, Christ, Faith, not works.” Keller argues that “you’ve got to read the Bible both ways.”
I recently found a second confirmation of this “both/and” view in Paul David Tripp’s new book A Quest for More: Living for something bigger than you. . . .
How do you read the Bible? I keep wanting to read it through from cover to cover, and I keep failing to discipline myself to do it. Most recently, I’ve picked a book to read through, sometimes repeating parts of it. But I recognize that I need the discipline of regular Bible reading, regardless my approach.
Why He Doesn’t Care About Book Reviews
Because the book is the thing. A summary of it doesn’t cut it.
Rich Language
By way of Frank Wilson, here are a couple posts from Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence. First, he reads mostly poetry and non-fiction lately, in part because he can’t hack bad modern fiction. Second, he describes a “theology of language.”