Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

The Pendragon Cycle: Taliesin Episodes

3 Comments

DailyWire+ has released its beautiful, 7-episode series The Rise of the Merlin, based on The Pendragon Cycle, Stephen Lawhead’s six book series, to regular members last Thursday. The first two eps are up along with a podcast that explains some of the details.

The first episode introduces Charis of Atlantis and the destruction her civilization. It’s an impressive scene in a Greek-style arena. Charis is the head of a seven-person team, male and female, who summersault over running bulls (see the photo of a Minoan fresco above). It isn’t just sport. It’s ritual for the bull god, Bel, to whom Charis is praying when we first see her.

The Atlanteans speak a language invented for the show by Spencer Klavan. It has a great, authentic sound. I picked up notes of Indo-European and Phaffinnic intonations under a clear faux-Latin influence. (I say this as a guy who can spot the subtle flavors in a Hersey’s, so I know what I’m talking about. Don’t get me started on peanut butter blends.)

Twenty years after their home is destroyed, the Atlanteans have established a kingdom in southern Britain, where the Cymry find them, having fled their land to escape barbarian raiders. Taliesin, a bard, is the adopted son of King Elphin. On the first evening, we hear him sing for King Avallach, Charis, and the other Atlanteans a moving song about the Welsh king Pwyll meeting the fairie lord of Annwn in the forest. It’s the first of two songs Taliesin sings in these episodes, and I like them, though they aren’t 4th century ballads. (I assume Lawhead wrote them.) This one in particular has been stuck in my ear for days.

The theme of this part of the series is the move from paganism to Christianity. Both main characters reject offers to sell themselves completely to their pagan gods, and at the end of episode one, the Lord catches Taliesin by surprise. “Look upon me then, Shining Brow!” It’s marvelous.

I love the look of this series so far. The actors are wonderful. (James Arden looks and sounds great as Taliesin.) Dialogue is strong. My one criticism is that a few scenes feel clipped. A dramatic scene at the start of episode two could use a few more minutes of explanation. Or maybe it lacks a foundation. They do explain why everyone is angry in that moment after the scene, but I could use three more minutes of talking it over—maybe hearing the offer put on the table and hearing it rejected before tempers flare.

Episodes drop every Thursday. I’ll try to review the next ones as they come out.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Early Lives of St Dunstan’

Leave a comment

I don’t expect this review will sell many copies of The Early Lives of St Dunstan, edited and translated by Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge. The book is expensive (I got it as a gift from a generous friend), and it’s pretty specialist stuff. Invaluable for me, though, as I am thinking out my coming book on King Haakon the Good of Norway.

The calculation goes like this: Haakon was raised at the court of King Athelstan of England. Athelstan was a patron of Glastonbury Abbey, a major center of learning at the time. So it makes sense that he would have sent Haakon, along with several other princes he fostered, to Glastonbury for training (I’m assuming Haakon was literate). Dunstan was known to have been trained at Glastonbury around the same time. Ergo, it’s artistically plausible that they were schoolmates. Glastonbury’s reputation as a center of spiritual power and mystery adds a numinous atmosphere, irresistible to the fantasy writer.

The Early Lives of St Dunstan consists of two translations of Latin hagiographies (saints’ lives) of Dunstan, from the late 10th and early 11th centuries, along with extensive notes and explanatory information. Such books were commonly written in the Middle Ages, for liturgical use in church during the saints’ festivals.

Being early hagiographies, written within living memory of the subject himself, these two “Lives” are surprisingly prosaic compared to what one might expect. There are many legends about St. Dunstan, but the miracles in these accounts are relatively prosaic. Both describe what sounds like an incident of somnambulism during his boyhood, in which he left his bed and climbed onto the church roof, then came down unhurt, without any memory of what he’d done. There are stories of his harp (he was a noted musician) playing by itself as it hung on a wall. Various accounts of prophetic dreams and visions and answered prayers. Falling stones that just missed him. Not a lot of healings.

Later on, his legend grew. Traditionally, he’s been remembered as the bishop who caught the devil’s nose in a pair of tongs (he was a blacksmith too). The poem (which I lift from Wikipedia) runs:

St Dunstan, as the story goes, 
Once pull'd the devil by the nose 
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

Another legend says that the devil once came to his smithy to have his cloven hoof re-shod. Dunstan nailed on a plain horse’s shoe, which hurt the devil badly. He only agreed to remove the shoe when the devil promised to never again enter a building with a horseshoe nailed over the door – which is, supposedly, the origin of the lucky horseshoe superstition.

I cannot say the two lives of Dunstan were great entertainment. You know how annoying it can be in Christian books, when the writer lapses into preaching? These authors had no storytelling purpose at all; preaching was their sole purpose. It gets pretty sanctimonious.

But useful for my purposes. For instance, Dunstan seems to have had a lot of trouble with slanderous enemies throughout his lifetime, which got him repeatedly expelled from bishoprics. I think I can assume from this that the man may have had a small problem with tact. I can use that.

Below is a famous picture from an old manuscript, believed by many to have been painted by Dunstan himself, as a book illustration. The large figure is Christ, but the kneeling monk in the lower right-hand corner appears to be Dunstan. A self-portrait. All the stories say he could draw.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Friend of the Family,’ by Dean Koontz

Leave a comment

The world of her fiction was our world in every respect, but it was made better and more interesting by her perspective on it. There was much honest sentiment in her work but no sentimentality, compassion without the indignity of pity, forgiveness that required penitence, righteous indignation but not acidic anger regarding those who were foolish or ignorant.

The passage above, from Dean Koontz’s The Friend of the Family, just released, describes the work of a character in the story, but applies pretty well to this book too. I wonder how many other people experience Koontz the way I do. If a man can’t (as the philosopher said) enter the same river twice, certainly no two men ever enter the same river at all, and no two people ever read the same book. All Koontz’s books don’t work the same way for me. The books he writes that deal with abused children are the ones that really get me – because that’s a subject he knows personally, and I share that knowledge. Maybe these books don’t touch more fortunate people the same way.

In any case, The Friend of the Family is that kind of book, and I found it not only moving but heartbreakingly beautiful. This is one of my favorites of his works – right up there with the Odd Thomas novels – and I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again.

Addie is a “freak” in a sideshow act. She feels rather fortunate in her manager, or owner, or whatever he is, because he feeds her, doesn’t beat her, and steals books for her to read. But he subjects her to daily humiliation through displaying her nearly naked to crowds, showcasing her deformities (which are not actually described till late in the story).

Then one day Franklin and Loretta Fairchild show up to rescue her. Frank and Loretta are a couple of the decent people in Hollywood (such creatures do exist). They live in a mansion, and already have three children. But Addie is welcomed to join them as a full family member, and Frank and Loretta adopt her. She enters into a magical life, full of love and fun and creativity.

But all along, Addie is having prophetic dreams. They warn her of a dark enemy approaching to threaten her and these people she loves. A housemaid’s warning sticks with Addie – to enjoy her life, but to “stay alert.”

I was, frankly, expecting more darkness and violence than actually showed up in The Friend of the Family. The darkness and violence were there, but most of this story is about the magical life of a blissfully happy family. I wish it were 300 pages longer.

I give The Friend of the Family my highest recommendation. It made me laugh and cry. Kudos to Dean Koontz.

Fiction, Reviews

‘House of Cards,’ by Stanley Ellin

Leave a comment

Reno Davis, hero of Stanley Ellin’s House of Cards, is an expatriate American in Paris. He was a boxer for a while, and now works as a bouncer at a nightclub. One night he handles a bad situation with considerable tact, and as a result gets offered a kind of dream job. He’s to be a tutor for a young boy, scion of one of France’s most prestigious families. The boy’s father was a war hero. His mother recently got out of a mental hospital, but she’s also stunningly beautiful. The job seems too good to be true, which – of course – it is.

Reno likes the boy, a sensitive child who’s been through a lot and mostly needs a little toughening up. But he soon realizes that almost everything he’s been told about the boy’s family is a lie. Only with time will he learn that there are lies beneath the lies, sinister and dangerous lies that threaten not only the boy and his mother, but Reno himself and even the post-war political status quo.

Robert Mitchum would have been a good choice to play Reno Davis in a movie of House of Cards. Reno’s a good character – most of the other characters didn’t impress me as particularly original. There was plenty of dramatic tension and a fair amount of violence, but I thought the book a little slow and implausible, and it could have been shorter. Also, it showcased the standard assumption that all political danger springs from the right. I was ready for the book to be over long before it actually ended, but I did see it through to the conclusion.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Key to Nicholas Street,’ by Stanley Ellin

Leave a comment

“The fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It’s a subtle point, but if you strain you’ll begin to get it. She’s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself is the big thing. She’s an accepted artist who’s doing good and will do better, and she can say, ‘I’m big, and therefore I have these things,’ not, ‘I have these things, and therefore I’m big.’ It’s only little people without any real meat to them who have to say, ‘Don’t look at me, look at what I own.’”

I’ve enjoyed Stanley Ellin’s novels recently, but I wasn’t really prepared for The Key to Nicholas Street (set in 1951). Dorothy Sayers called Gaudy Night “a love story with detective interruptions,” and Nicholas Street is a sort of domestic drama with detective interruptions. It’s also kind of a Rashomon story, where we observe events from various points of view.

The story is set in a fictional, wealthy neighborhood in one of those communities where professionals commute to New York City. We see it first through the (pretty superficial) eyes of the housemaid, who sees everything in movie and magazine terms. She’s the one who discovers the body of the neighbor – a successful, beautiful commercial artist – at the bottom of the cellar steps in her home.

Then we get the perspective of her employer, an autocratic matron who’s been disappointed by the business failures of the rich man she married. She is a judgmental woman, obsessed with social status. She strongly disapproved of the late neighbor, and makes a plausible murder suspect.

But everybody’s a plausible suspect. There’s the matron’s husband, a man without much character, who’s having an affair. Her daughter, who’s dating a man her mother doesn’t approve of, a man who has been involved with the victim and might have been jealous. Also the son, going through an awkward adolescence.

I thought at one point that this was the kind of book that justifies adultery, but it’s more complicated than that. In the end, we find a surprising hero and a strong affirmation of moral truths.

I have to say I figured out whodunnit, but only for authorial structural reasons, not because I deduced it from the clues.

The Key to Nicholas Street wasn’t exactly my kind of book, but it was pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Vengeance,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Leave a comment

The Round-Up was one of the many odd-ball restaurants in Sarasota, a town known more for its well-heeled tourists and wealthy retirees who lived on the offshore Keys than its cuisine. There are some good restaurants and there is a h*ll of a lot of variety, including the Round-Up, which boasted a red-on-white sign in the window, “The Best Chinese Tex-Mex in Florida.” Few challenged this claim, especially not the homeless who wandered past every day.

Revisiting an old favorite, one of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lew Fonesca mysteries. My fondness for these books rests largely (in my perception) on the degree to which I identify with the hero, so I was astounded, on this second reading, to realize what a very good book Vengeance is – and what a dynamite twist ending it features.

Lew Fonesca is a process server living in Sarasota, Florida. He settled here when his car broke down. Three years ago, he was a district attorney’s investigator in Chicago, but his wife’s death in an auto accident put him into a tailspin, leading to his despairing drive south. Now he rents a small office and lives in a little room behind it. He gets around town by bicycle, and reads books or watches old movies on VHS for entertainment. He’s a small man, balding, middle-aged, and depressed. He has one friend, old cowboy Ames McKinney, whom he once helped to locate his old partner, who’d stolen a fortune from him. It ended in a classic six-gun showdown.

Lew isn’t a private eye, but people are starting to come to him to find people for them. In Vengeance, he’s first visited by Beryl Tree, a middle-aged woman from Kansas whose 14-year-old daughter has run off. Beryl is pretty sure she’s in Sarasota with her father. She’s also pretty sure he’s molesting her.

He also has a second client, a wealthy man whose trophy wife has disappeared, after cleaning out their bank accounts. The man swears he just wants Lew to give her a message, an offer of reconciliation. Lew finds the man a little fishy, and is less interested in this case.

The Lew Fonesca books aren’t exactly hard-boiled, but they’re certainly not cozies either. Perhaps they should be called over easy. Lew isn’t a tough guy (he’s lucky to have gun-toting Ames to back him up), but he’s tough in his own way – just because he doesn’t give a rip. Death doesn’t mean much to him anymore.

Except that he’s just met a woman – a social worker – who sparked his interest for the first time since his wife’s death. Fortunately, he has a good psychologist to talk these matters over with.

I loved this book. The Lew Fonesca series is my favorite section of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s considerable literary portfolio. Highly recommended, with cautions for very dark, mature themes.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Man and Wife,’ by Andrew Klavan

Leave a comment

And that’s how we really expose ourselves. Not in what we say but in the imagination we lay over the face of things. Because we can choose our words, strike our poses, but our delusions—no, these are wallpapered to our souls.

Andrew Klavan informs us in his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, that he once wrote a novel about Jesus. He’s not very proud of it; it was the sort of sophomoric story that young agnostics are prone to tell, once they’ve “figured everything out.”

But he wrote another novel about Jesus – in a sense. Man and Wife is not a Christian book, but its central character is a very evident Christ figure. And while the author did not quite understand yet when he wrote the book, you can tell he was asking the right questions.

Cal Bradley, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, chief administrator of a private mental facility in Connecticut which was originally endowed by his wealthy family. He’s good at what he does, but the real joys of his life are his wife and children.

His wife Marie came out of nowhere, it seemed, a simple-hearted, uneducated former waitress. She’s beautiful and she’s devoted to her husband, her children, and her church, joyfully serving them all. As far as Cal is concerned, she’s a miracle.

Then, one day while hiking near a local waterfall, Cal spies a woman who looks like Marie down in the gorge, talking to a strange man who seems oddly intimate with her. When he asks her about it, she cheerfully denies being anywhere near the place.

Meanwhile, Cal has admitted a 19-year-old man named Peter Blue to his facility. Peter is charged with striking his girlfriend, setting fire to a church, and assaulting a police officer. But the priest of the church begs Cal to help this boy. There’s something astonishing about his spirit, he says.

And Peter Blue does indeed seem remarkable. Not only is he a cooperative counseling subject, he exerts a healthy influence on the other patients. They follow him like disciples, and their symptoms are improving.

Only Peter Blue turns out to be connected to that same strange man Cal thought he saw with Marie at the waterfall. And Cal starts receiving threats, which he’s sure come from that same man. Is it possible Marie has been lying to him all these years? Can love and untruth exist together?

From a Christian point of view, Man and Wife offers a number of serious problems. But it should be remembered that author Klavan was working his way to faith when he wrote the book. The story is suspenseful and exciting and challenging; also moving and heartbreaking. I recommend it for thoughtful adults. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dead Don’t Lie,’ by Blake Banner

Leave a comment

On checking my old reviews, I find that I have reviewed at least one book in Blake Banner’s “Dead Cold Mysteries” series before. The book I just read, The Dead Don’t Lie, is a prequel to that series – but it was published just last month, and it actually tells how the Cold Case squad began.

However, I have a suspicion (and all such guesses, it should be remembered, are flimsy things) that this book was originally written for a very different character in another time frame, but was re-written to shoehorn it into the Dead Cold Mysteries template.

John Stone, we are told, is a police detective in a New York precinct. Which makes it rather strange when a sultry dame walks into his office and asks to hire him to deliver blackmail money for her. (The author’s rationalization is that this woman is so alluring that Stone falls for her right off and is putty in her hands.)

She’s lying to him, of course. Soon John Stone is approached again, by a mysterious foreign man who claims to be working for the Vatican, who wants his help in recovering a stolen artifact. As the story goes on, there will be killing and kidnapping, and Stone will work generally without backup or keeping his superiors updated.

If all this sounds like a strange way for a working police detective to operate, I entirely agree. I had a strong feeling that this book had originally been written as a private eye novel, set (probably) in the 1950s (there are no cell phones in view, and at one point our hero uses a pay phone). Also, in one scene, John Stone is addressed as “Mr. Lackland.” That, I would guess, is a failure of the “find and replace” function in the author’s word processing software.

I keep going back to Blake Banner, because I vaguely recall him as an author I like. But in fact, I wearied of him a while back because of the over-the-top improbability of his action scenes. Also, he’s prone to cliff-hangers, though that sin is not committed in this book.

I finished The Dead Don’t Lie, but I can’t really recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Free Fall In Crimson,’ by John D. MacDonald

2 Comments

“I woke up this morning feeling great. Absolutely great. Busting with energy. Know something? I want to get involved in the life and times of Esterland and son. I want to go out and con the people. I want to have to bust a couple of heads here and there and have somebody try to bust mine for me. Why should I feel a little bit guilty about feeling like that, Meyer?”

My life takes me into the state of Iowa fairly frequently, and back in the 1970s and 80s, a frequent feature of my drives down there was the sight of hot air balloons traversing the broad heavens. Iowa was a center for the sport of ballooning back in those days. Since that time, I’m informed, the activity has moved to the southwest. But that period remains memorialized in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel, Free Fall In Crimson, originally published in 1981.

In sequence, this novel follows The Green Ripper, in which McGee lost a woman he loved and hoped to make a future with. So he’s pretty low at the beginning. He’s losing weight, and even pondering dropping his “salvage” business, to become a boat salesman or something. His friend Meyer worries about him.

Then he’s contacted by Ron Esterland, a newly successful artist from New York. Ron explains that he’s troubled by the circumstances of his father’s death. His father was a successful Florida businessman, married several times, once to a movie star. He was dying of cancer when he was attacked in a highway rest area and beaten to death, more than a year ago. Ron had been estranged from his father, and doesn’t care about his money, but the timing seems suspicious. Could his father have been killed by someone connected to the actress ex-wife, for the inheritance?

McGee agrees to check it out, without great enthusiasm. But when he meets Anne Renzetti, manager of a hotel that Esterland had owned, his interest is piqued and his enthusiasm for life rekindled.

The investigation will take him back to Hollywood, to that snake pit from which he barely escaped alive back in the adventure of The Quick Red Fox. Once again he’ll encounter Lysa Dean, the gorgeous, calculating movie queen to whom he once delivered a rare rejection. She’ll connect him with the ex-wife’s boyfriend, a Hollywood director who’s shooting a movie about ballooning in Iowa. And that will lead him into a confrontation with a psycho motorcycle outlaw who’ll unleash a whole lot of reckless violence and death on a lot of people before the final showdown.

I’d read Free Fall In Crimson before, of course. But I hadn’t remembered much about it except for the balloon ride. I found it to be a very well-written and serious book, and I recommend it highly – with cautions for adult themes and a whole lot of innocent bloodshed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Day You’ll Burn,’ by Joseph Schneider

Leave a comment

G. K. Chesterton wrote, somewhere, that there are two different meanings for the word “good.” “For example, if a man could shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

In a similar (not identical) way, a book can be good in terms of its writing, while not being much good for my personal purposes.

Which brings me to One Day You’ll Burn, an interesting cop novel by Joseph Schneider. Its hero is Los Angeles police detective Tully Jarsdel, an improbable policeman who abandoned the pursuit of a Ph.D. (to the despair of his two “gay” fathers) to become a cop, out of a spiritual resolution to make the world a better place. Promoted prematurely to the homicide squad by way of an experimental department program, he hasn’t yet earned the confidence of the veteran detectives, especially his own partner.

One day a body is found in the entrance to a shop in LA’s Thai Town, in front of a statue of Brahma. The body has been roasted like a Thanksgiving turkey, destroying both fingerprints and almost all DNA, which makes identification difficult. Tully’s partner “graciously” lets him take the lead in the case, assuming it will go unsolved and be a black mark on his record.

But Tully is methodical, and gradually he puts a few clues together, leading him into the bizarre world of Hollywood fandom and memorabilia collectors. And to a hideous killing scheme and a criminal so evil as to be (frankly) a little implausible.

The story was interesting, if a bit over the top. But what put me off, as a bigoted Christian, was that Tully sees himself as on a spiritual quest – a sort of undefined, New Age, semi-Zoroastrian crusade to serve Brahma by helping the world achieve its destined perfection. The world, as he sees it, is getting constantly better (I fail to see much evidence for that myself), and every crime he solves is a step to ultimate justice and peace.

I should say in the author’s defense, though, that he makes a point of the proper use of the term “begs the question.” I was very grateful for that. Also for a scene in which he denounces the corruption that permeates contemporary academia. In that, he was right on the money.

So, bottom line, I thought One Day You’ll Burn a pretty good book in its own right, but not for me.