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Fiction, Reviews

‘Blacklight Blue,’ by Peter May

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Blacklight Blue

I kind of cooled to Peter May’s Enzo Macleod mystery series after the last volume I reviewed. But I picked the thread up again with Blacklight Blue. I’m pleased to report that some of the quirks that annoyed me in previous books have been moderated, and I enjoyed the book well enough.

This time out, Enzo has just gotten a diagnosis of terminal cancer from a doctor, when (in short succession) one of his daughters is nearly killed by a bomb, his other daughter’s boyfriend’s business is burned down, and all his credit cards are stopped.

It all seems to relate to the latest in his cold case investigations. A former forensic scientist, Enzo has made it his crusade, based on a bet, to clear up a number of unsolved French murders (though Scottish-Italian, Enzo lives in Paris). His investigation of the murder of a “rent boy” takes him (along with his usual entourage – his daughters, their boyfriends, and his female assistant) to the Auvergne region of France, where he faces a relentless enemy and a deadly confrontation on a mountainside.

I was pleased that the earlier, half-comic theme of Enzo’s devastating attractiveness to every women he meets has been downplayed. This time out he limits himself to a sympathetic female ski instructor who provides his party with a convenient hideout.

My enjoyment of these books is reduced by the fact that I don’t actually find Enzo a very appealing character. Yet I keep reading the books, so it can’t be that bad. Peter May is a good writer.

Recommended. Cautions for the usual stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Since We Fell,’ by Dennis Lehane

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Since We Fell

“Who was your father?” She turned her chair toward him. “Your real father.”

“Jamie Alden,” he said brightly. “People called him Lefty.”

“Because he was left-handed?”

He shook his head. “Because he never met a place or a person he wouldn’t leave….”

This one, it seems to me, is a bit of a departure for Dennis Lehane. Not in the sense of being less dark than his other work, but Since We Fell has the form of something like a light romance/caper novel. Except in a very minor key. Because this is Lehane, after all.

Rachel Childs got off to an insecure start in life. Her single mother, briefly famous as a pop psychologist, controlled her daughter through manipulation. One of her chief manipulations was her refusal to tell Rachel who her real father was. After her mother’s death, Rachel tried to solve that mystery (there is, I think some existentialist subtext here), with disappointing results.

Her promising career as a television journalist crashes and burns one day when, while reporting on a disaster in Haiti, she has a full-blown psychological meltdown on camera. After that she sinks into agoraphobia and sees no hope for the future.

And then Brian Delacroix, a past acquaintance, re-enters her life. He is charming and cheerful, infinitely patient with her, and genuinely devoted. With his help, she begins to find the courage to face the world.

And that’s when everything starts going south in serious ways.

I won’t tell you more about the plot, because I don’t want to spoil the fun. Since We Fell is a weirdly compelling novel which mixes romance with stark realism, and offers some major surprises (a few of them fairly improbable). I thought it was a great read, but also thought it morally questionable.

Cautions for adult situations, violence, cynicism, and language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dragon Tears,’ by Dean Koontz

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Dragon Tears

Another Dean Koontz book downloaded to my Kindle because it didn’t seem familiar. I had read it before, of course, but I’d forgotten so much that all the surprises were still surprising (one of the side benefits of growing old, I guess).

Dragon Tears is both terrifying and sweet. The protagonists, a small group of people led by a male-female police team (who fall in love as we watch), are menaced by a truly horrifying villain – a man of no maturity at all who has nevertheless developed god-like powers, powers that grow every day. His ultimate goal is to make all humanity his slaves (he will reduce their numbers for environmental purposes). But for today he’s selected a small group – a mother and son living in their car, a homeless alcoholic, and the aforementioned pair of cops. The villain confronts them by means of avatars constructed of animated soil, warning them that he will kill them all – horribly – by dawn the next day. The cops take the initiative in trying to find a way to stop this guy, and they find assistance where they never looked for it.

Scary, charming, and a lot of fun, Dragon Tears is excellent entertainment. Cautions for intense situations and some rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Silent Corner,’ by Dean Koontz

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The Silent Corner

There had been corruption in every civilization since time immemorial. If the corruption was of the heart, the culture could think its way to health with great effort. If the corruption was of the mind, it was more difficult to feel a way toward recovery, for the heart was a deceiver. If both mind and heart were riddled with malignancies—what then?

One of my few gripes with Dean Koontz is that he has bought 100% into the “butt-kicking female heroine” meme, in which tiny little women who look like models serve as action characters. The Silent Corner is premised on a character of this kind, but I must say Koontz makes it work here.

Jane Hawk, the heroine, is an FBI agent on leave following the suicide of her beloved husband. He was a happy, successful military officer, bound for a political career, when she found him dead in his bathtub one day, having left behind a note that made no sense.

Partly to relieve her pain, Jane started doing research on suicide. She discovered that suicide rates have been rising steadily for the past few years, and that a surprising number of promising, idealistic, and apparently happy people have stunned their families by killing themselves. One day she got a visit from a strange man – she thinks of it as a “courtesy call” – who told her that if she didn’t lay off, “they” would kill her and do worse than killing to her young son.

Jane doesn’t have it in her to quit. She hides her son with people she trusts, who have no traceable link to her, and embarks on a dangerous investigation. She doesn’t have much hope of success as she gradually learns the wealth and power she’s going up against, as well as the horrific plans these people have for all of humanity. But better to die trying than do nothing. These people will eventually kill her and her boy, she calculates, even if she leaves them alone.

One generally expects a supernatural element in a Dean Koontz novel, but The Silent Corner is pure dystopian science fiction. It’s fast and sharp and scary and touching, written with grace. It’s the first book in a series, and I look forward to the next one, The Whispering Room.

Recommended, with mild cautions.

Non-fiction, Reviews, Writing

‘Bandersnatch,’ by Diana Pavlac Glyer

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Bandersnatch

Lewis’s writing process was quite different from Tolkien’s. While Tolkien wrote things out in order to discover what he wanted to say, Lewis tended to mull things over before committing anything to paper.

According to a well-known anecdote, C. S. Lewis never read newspapers. “If anything really important happens,” he said, “someone is bound to tell you about it.”

I have a similar attitude to books about C. S. Lewis and the Inklings. I’ve read several, but far from all of them, and I feel no obligation to. If someone writes a new book with fresh information, somebody is pretty likely to tell me about it, in a discussion group or in a review in the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society.

So I didn’t learn a lot of new things from Diana Pavlac Glyer’s Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. But this book wasn’t really intended to convey biographical information (though it’s as good an introduction as any for the curious). Its purpose is to analyze the ways in which the Inklings group, which lasted 17 years (quite an achievement for any writers’ group) served as a catalyst for its members’ creativity. She follows the Inklings’ history from its beginning when Tolkien – very shyly and with trepidation – showed a poem to his new friend Jack, taking a chance that he’d be the kind of person who’d appreciate it. Jack Lewis did – with great enthusiasm – and gradually they gathered about them a small community of fellow writers of like mind. They read their work to each other and boldly critiqued it, in a cloud of tobacco smoke in Lewis’ shabby rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford (the famous Tuesday meetings at the Eagle and Child pub were purely social, and guests were permitted, which was not true of the Thursday nights at Magdalen. I was amused to read that Tolkien made the mistake of bringing along the historian Gwyn Jones [a famous name to Viking buffs] one evening, and it got a little awkward, though Jones proved acceptable).

Author Glyer has done a tremendous job going carefully through old manuscripts and notes in various collections, looking for evidences of revision, and correlating them with reports of the Inklings meetings. It was a gargantuan task, and the result is a book that will be valuable to everyone interested in artistic mutual support groups – not just to writers, but to anyone who creates art. I recommend Bandersnatch.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Vikings and Their Enemies,’ by Philip Line

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The Vikings and Their Enemies

Some books are a chore to read, even if the subject interests you, but a necessary chore. Like textbooks when you’re in school. For me, Philip Line’s The Vikings and Their Enemies: Warfare in Northern Europe, 750-1100 was that kind of book. It contained information I needed and from which I profited, but I thought it would never end.

Casual readers will probably find it long and daunting, as the Amazon reviews indicate. First of all, though “Vikings” is in the title, that word here indicates the time period, not the main subject. Most of the material does not focus on the Vikings themselves. The main reason for this is that the author, like so many historians, is skeptical about the Icelandic sagas as sources, and so uses them only lightly. That leaves him with limited source materials about Scandinavians. Most of the ink is devoted to the Vikings’ enemies, the British, the Irish, the French, the Germans, and a few others. For them we have a certain amount of documentary evidence (though Line handles that evidence with caution too).

The practical upshot is that he spends a lot of time telling us that popular histories are wrong about many, many things that have entered the general information pool. Which is the mark of a rigorous historian. But it does not make for an exciting narrative.

However, the book contained, in particular, some information on Viking naval tactics that I needed for the book I am writing. So the work I put in reading The Vikings and Their Enemies was well worth it to me.

The normal reader will probably find other books on the period more interesting and easier to consume. I recommend this one only for its appropriate audience.

Fiction, Reviews

Redshirts by John Scalzi

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via GIPHY Warning posted: “Watch for Exploding Rocks.”

It’s a common sci-fi truism that the guy wearing a red shirt on a new away team mission will be killed. Of the original Star Trek series, Wikipedia reports, “59 crew members killed in the series,” of which “43 (73%) were wearing red shirts.” John Scalzi asks, what if those were actual lives in a galaxy far, far away?

In his comic novel, Redshirts, Scalzi spins the tale of several minor crewmen on the Universal Union flagship Intrepid who start to ask why their teammates act strangely when senior officers are looking for away team members. One guy who has hidden himself in the bowels of the ship has a crazy theory, but when none of the sane theories pan out, you go with the crazy one.

It’s a funny book, but I didn’t start laughing until at least halfway through it, and the ending parts stretched my patience almost to the point of putting it down unfinished. There’s a point when that weird joke has been explained enough and going over it again will just kill it. Unfortunately, this joke gets run over a dozen times. But there are sweet moments in those ending parts that may be worth reading, if you’re into that sort of thing. Heh.

Reviews

Full-blown film review: ‘Viking’

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Viking film 2016

(I did a preliminary review of this movie yesterday. I’ve watched it a second time now, and am prepared to pontificate.)

Viking, a Russian film directed by Andrei Kravchuk and much anticipated by Viking buffs, arrived last winter with all the acclaim of the dog that did nothing in the nighttime. Critical response was mixed, and the film got almost no US distribution. The DVD is available, though, now, and you can own it. It’s worth viewing, but I expect you’ll agree that it’s a movie in search of an audience.

The film is based on the career of the historical Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev, the man who converted the Russians to Christianity and is revered as a saint. He did not come by his sainthood gently, though, as the film makes clear (the history here isn’t bad, considered in very broad strokes).

Vladimir (Danila Kozlovsky) is the youngest of three brothers, descendants of Vikings, and each the prince of a different Russian town, in the 10th Century. Vladimir is the least of them, not only in age but in status. He’s the son of a slave woman, and touchy on the subject. The eldest brother’s men murder the middle brother, after which Vladimir arranges the killing of the eldest. Now he’s the sole prince of all the Russ, but he has to prove himself worthy. He takes a high-born wife (Aleksandra Bortich) by force, and digs up and restores what they call “Father’s God,” a bloodthirsty idol worshiped by his late father, who was revered for his strength. Vladimir hopes to acquire that same strength, at the price of human sacrifice. Continue reading Full-blown film review: ‘Viking’ →

Reviews

Pre-review: ‘Viking’

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Viking film

(I’m calling this a “pre-review,” because I think this movie, for good or ill, requires another viewing before I pass final judgment on it.)

If you’ve been following this blog, you may have noted over time my anticipation of a Viking movie coming out of Russia. The film, simply titled “Viking,” arrived last winter, not with a bang but a whimper. It got very little distribution in the US. The other day I checked to see if it was available on DVD, and behold it was, on Amazon. So I have it at last.

And I’m bemused. It’s certainly an epic, and I think it succeeds on that level to an extent, with big battle scenes and special effects that worked for me (at least). The problematic part seems to be the (highly fictionalized) dramatization of the career of the hero, Prince Vladimir (the Great) of Kiev (Danila Kozlovsky). The real Vladimir was a pretty bloodthirsty character, who murdered his own brother in his pursuit of the throne. In this version, Vladimir is basically a nice guy, who sort of stumbles into his crimes (including raping the woman who becomes his wife, played here by the gorgeous Aleksandra Bortich), and he feels really bad after each atrocity. Eventually he finds peace for his soul when he converts to Orthodox Christianity, in what I consider a pretty successful evangelism scene in a cathedral.

And that points up the weirdness of the movie, a weirdness that may have doomed it with distributors. It’s a very Christian “message” film, one whose final scene is reminiscent of a Billy Graham production. Yet it also involves lots of gore and violence (heathenism is treated non-romantically, which I appreciated), and a couple of vigorous sex scenes with unabashed female nudity.

How do you categorize a movie like that? It deserves its R rating, and you probably won’t want to rent it for family movie night. (Wikipedia says there’s a family-friendly version, but it’s not offered on Amazon.)

In terms of authenticity – so-so. Better than the History Channel series, I’d say, but very much in that tradition, as well as the tradition of Game of Thrones, which may have been an inspiration for the whole project. As in the TV series, all the costumes involve too much leather and tend to be either brown or gray, contrary to the true Vikings’ love of bright colors. The armor tends to be leather rather than mail, even on chieftains. I’ll probably find many other mistakes on closer viewing, but that’ll do for now.

My overall (tentative) judgment is… let me watch it again. There may be qualities here I haven’t appreciated yet. I didn’t hate it, and it was actually better than I expected, after what I’d read of critical responses.