Category Archives: Reviews

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Fellowship,’ by Philip and Carol Zaleski

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The Fellowship

Though surpassed in poetry and prose style by the very modernists they failed to appreciate, though surpassed in technical sophistication by any number of distinguished academic philosophers and theologians, the Inklings fulfilled what many find to be a more urgent need: not simply to restore the discarded image, but to refresh it and bring it to life for the present and future.

Last night I was complaining about the length of this book, but it turned out as I speculated – about 35% of its body is end notes. Still, it’s a big book. But it’s well worth reading, if you’re interested in the social and intellectual matrix that produced some of the 20th Century’s most influential Christian writing.

The Inklings began as an Oxford student literary group in 1932, but when the students had graduated and moved on, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other friends who had been invited to join carried it on as a sort of cross between a writers’ criticism group and a social club. They met once a week in Lewis’ rooms at Magdelen College for the writing phase, and again at the Eagle and Child pub for the more social part. They carried on, with some changes in membership, until the 1960s.

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski, concentrates on the lives of the four best-known Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. Much of the material covered will already be familiar to fans, but Williams’ and Barfield’s lives are far less known, and there’s plenty of material that will be new to most readers (there certainly was for me). I did not know, for instance, the Tolkien had suffered an injury to his tongue in his youth, which caused him to mumble when speaking (this impediment disappeared when he was “performing,” as in his famous LOTR readings recorded by George Sayer). I didn’t know that Owen Barfield was baptized as an adult into the Anglican Church (though he continued to believe in reincarnation and other Anthroposophist doctrines). Remarkably, there’s even some movie trivia – one discovers connections between the Inklings and David Lean, Julie Christie, and Ava Gardner. Continue reading ‘The Fellowship,’ by Philip and Carol Zaleski →

Religion, Reviews

A grumble and a review

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I was AWOL last night again. I am keenly cognizant of this sin. But the sin isn’t mine. I blame winter. It was winter’s fault, really.

Stopped at Arby’s after work. When I’d finished and came out, a woman, who had parked next to me, said, “Your tire is flat.” I looked, and behold it was even as she had said.

So I went back inside and called AAA. If there’s a lousy time to call for road assistance, it’s the first cold night of a cold snap. I sat on hold for about 45 minutes, and then waited about an hour and a half before a young guy came around to help me. Apparently he was the special auto club Flat Tire Squad. He’d been running around changing tires for hours, and had hours to go. I pitied him, and tipped him when he left.

Today I took the car to the shop, and had to get a ride to work (and back). I’d shredded my tire. Needed to buy two new ones. But I endured. I survived. I met the Challenge of the North.

I need to get a malamute, and name him King.

Here’s a short book review:

Nailed It!

One of our readers sent me a devotional book. I’m not a great booster of devotional books, but this reader – for reasons entirely inscrutable to me – thought I might appreciate a book of sarcastic devotions. So I agreed to examine Nailed It! 365 Devotions for Angry or Worn-Out People, by Anne Kennedy.

I haven’t read it all the way through yet, but I like it. This is very much in my line. If Osteen has lost you, if Peale appalls you, if you find Schuller shallow, you’ll likely find Nailed It! a relief. The book abounds in gritty, realistic wisdom and great lines: “Anyway, don’t be so worried about offending your friends and neighbors with the good news of Jesus Christ. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone could throw a rock at your head? You’re going to die sometime anyway.” Or: “It’s the best kind of praying, this praying without enough faith.”

Anyway, I like this devotional better than any I’ve ever encountered, I think. I’m going to make it my daily devotional in 2017. Recommended. A great gift, if you have friends who are anything like me, heaven help you.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death of a Russian Priest,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Death of a Russian Priest

“You are a true believer,” she answered. “A true believer needs a cause or he will wither. It is known in the lives of the saints that a man is twice blessed who embraced the devil before he embraces God. I see it in your eyes. During the service for Father Merhum the Holy Mother found you.”

I’m kind of flying through Stuart M. Kaminsky’s series of Russian police procedurals starring Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Moscow detective. Rostnikov is a squat man whose nickname is “the Washtub.” He drags along a crippled leg, a souvenir of his teenaged service in World War II. When not solving crimes, he likes to fix his neighbors’ plumbing, read American crime novels, and lift weights. He is a man of deep compassion who approaches his cases from human understanding. Though his passion for justice has often brought him into conflict with police officials and the KGB, his native shrewdness has allowed him and his team to stay on the job. He always has to compromise somehow, the world being what it is, but he survives.

The series is longer than I realized, and it extends past the fall of the Soviet Union. In the unsettled times of Glasnost and Perestroika, Rostnikov’s demotion to a division with mostly ceremonial duties proves a career advantage. His successful investigations raise his division’s prestige, and its lack of political connections allows it to rise unimpeded in the political chaos.

I’m not going to review the whole series, which I haven’t finished yet, but Death of a Russian Priest stood out for me. In the new Russia, the Orthodox Church is reasserting itself, but does not stand unchallenged. Father Vasili Merhum of the village of Arkush, after performing his final mass before leaving town to lead a protest against government policies, is murdered with an ax. Porfiry Rostnikov is sent to investigate, along with a faithful member of his team, Emil Karpo. Karpo is a troubled soul. A dour, impassive man who looks like a vampire, his whole life has been spent in monk-like devotion to the Communist Party. Now his god has failed, and he operates on automatic pilot, troubled by frequent migraines. What made this book particularly interesting to me was Karpo’s reluctant attraction to what he sees in the church, the only institution that appeals for the same kind of commitment he longs to give. Continue reading ‘Death of a Russian Priest,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Private Patient,’ by P. D. James

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The Private Patient

Bestselling author P. D. James died in 2014. I was embarrassed to discover that I had thus far failed to read her final novel, The Private Patient, which was published way back in 2008. If you’ve been waiting for my review, read on.

In the later books of her Inspector Adam Dalgliesh mystery series, Baroness Phyllis adopted the strategem of setting her murders within somewhat isolated communities, in part bridging the gap between the police procedural and the traditional English “cozy” mystery. The Private Patient continued and capped that pattern. The location here is Cheverell Manor, a beautiful old estate in the county of Dorset. George Chandler-Powell, a prominent plastic surgeon, has acquired the property and set up a private clinic there, where his richest and most celebrated patients can get their tummy tucks and face-lifts in luxurious privacy.

One of his patients is Rhoda Gradwyn, a prominent investigative journalist. Rhoda carries an ugly facial scar, a souvenir of a childhood with a brutal, drunken father. Now, in her 40s, she asks to have the scar removed, telling Chandler-Powell that she “no longer has need of it.” A couple members of his live-in staff urge him not to admit the woman to Cheverell House, since they know of her work and mistrust her. Continue reading ‘The Private Patient,’ by P. D. James →

Fiction, Reviews

The ‘Rivers of London’ series, by Ben Aaronovitch

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Moon Over Soho Whispers Under Ground Broken Homes Foxglove Summer

The rolling news networks loved the idea of a shadowy network of camps. It gave them hours of talking heads and a chance to stick a body from Migration Watch or UKIP up against a government spokesman or, even better, from someone from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the hope that they would both kill and eat each other live on air.

I reviewed Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot a few inches down the page. I decided to pick up the next book in the Rivers of London Series, and before I knew it I was hopelessly caught up in these infectious books, which aren’t even in my usual line.

The hero and narrator is Peter Grant, a young London police detective. By good (or not) fortune, he has found himself attached to a shadowy unit of the Metropolitan Police whose name keeps changing, but which deals with supernatural crimes. The sole member of this unit, up until Peter’s arrival, was Inspector Nightingale (a somewhat Doctor Whovian character, which is no surprise since author Aaronovitch used to write for that BBC series). Later they are joined by Leslie May, a young female constable who trained with Peter and is his best friend. They operate out of “The Folly,” a large estate in London. Continue reading The ‘Rivers of London’ series, by Ben Aaronovitch →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Afon,’ by Robert Partridge

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Afon

He had forgotten, too, the pain of this [writing] – the pain of dragging this thing out of oneself, the birth of a reluctant child that would much rather go on growing inside than be forced out screaming into the light of day and the fear of examination. He had forgotten the monstrous ego that was needed to push the creation out into the world, with all its mess and suffering. He had forgotten.

I’ve been praising Peter Grainger’s DC Smith novels in this space. On noodling around for further information about the author (who seems to wish to be a man of mystery), I discovered that “Peter Grainger” is a pen name. More than that, the author had earlier written (under the name Robert Partridge) some literary novels, one of which – Afon – starred a character named Peter Grainger, who was a novelist.

Messing with our heads, in other words.

So I bought Afon. It’s pretty good. Not my cuppa tea, but a well-written novel.

Peter Grainger is in his 40s. Long ago he wrote a first novel that got a lot of recognition, and then he lost his nerve and wrote no more. Now he’s quit a teaching job, which he hated. He has some money left from a divorce settlement, so he decides to take a lease on a cottage on an estate called Afon, in a remote valley in Wales. He will try and write another novel. If he fails, at least he’ll know he made the attempt.

He meets the elderly landowner and his much younger wife. He learns to fly fish. He makes an enemy of the estate’s brutal gamekeeper, agonizes over his feelings for two different women (both married), and after a struggle produces a new book.

Afon abounds in lovely descriptions of the natural beauty of Wales, and in perceptive dramatizations of the writing process. The ending is kind of ambiguous, the sort of thing you expect in a literary novel – which is one of the reasons I generally avoid literary novels.

But it’s pretty good. Not much obscenity here, though the bonds of marriage take a beating. Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Midnight Riot,’ by Ben Aaronovitch

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Midnight Riot

Urban fantasy is not a genre I generally favor. However, when I saw Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot, an urban fantasy involving police detective work, I thought it was worth a try. I liked what I found. It’s sort of Harry Potter goes to Scotland Yard, as you’d expect, but it has special (outstanding) qualities of its own.

London Probationary Constable Peter Grant is about to receive his first assignment. He dreams of working in CID, solving homicides. His superior, however, thinks he’d be a better fit in the Case Progression Unit, a unit devoted to paperwork. Peter sees a rather dull future ahead of him.

But one cold night he’s assigned to perimeter duty, guarding a crime scene in Covent Garden. The unfortunate victim has had his head knocked clean off. A witness appears and tells Peter how the crime was committed. But there’s a problem. The witness, dressed in Victorian clothes, is (and admits to being) a ghost. When a certain Inspector Thomas Nightingale happens by later, Peter tells him, almost as a joke, that he’s been interrogating a ghost. To his surprise, Nightingale listens to him seriously. The next day, instead of going to CPU, Peter finds himself assigned to assist Nightingale, who is the one-man staff of a special (secret) unit devoted to solving supernatural crimes.

Peter moves into the large manor which is Nightingale’s headquarters and begins his apprenticeship in wizardry. They soon find that they’re not dealing with a single crime, but a spectral serial killing spree, in which some unidentified power is possessing ordinary people, changing their appearances, and using them to kill other innocent people, somehow identified by the murderer (who is apparently quite mad) as his personal enemies.

What takes Midnight Riot above the level of most modern fantasies is the narrating voice of Peter Grant, who is at once naïve, cynical, and witty. I enjoyed the narrative, and had a good time reading a well-told story in which the stakes ratchet up rapidly and fearsomely.

Cautions for language and occult themes. Religious matters are studiously avoided, which is all to the good as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be reading more Peter Grant books, at least until the author decides to offend me (which I expect he’ll do before long).

Reviews

Netflix Review: ‘Detectorists’

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Detectorists

It was suggested to me that I might enjoy the English TV series, “Detectorists.” I think I know why the suggestion was made. In very broad terms, it’s a picture of my life. In spite of that, I found it entertaining.

The series centers on the lives of a pair of friends who belong to a metal “detectorists’” club (it’s pure coincidence that the mystery novel I reviewed last night involved the murder of a detectorist). Lance (Toby Jones) is a small, unprepossessing man who is nevertheless quite intelligent. He works as a forklift operator in a produce warehouse, but his twin passions are his ex-wife, who exploits his affections, and metal detecting in the Essex countryside. His friend Andy (Mackenzie Crook) looks and dresses like a homeless man, but actually is nearly qualified as an archaeologist when the series starts. He lives with a girlfriend, Becky (played, I was delighted to discover, by Rachael Stirling, daughter of Diana Rigg, the great crush of my youth). Andy and Becky dream of going to Africa to do excavations, but Andy drags his feet, crippled by self-doubt. He and Lance spend a lot of time together in the fields with their detectors and in pubs, even to the point of raising mild jealousy in Becky.

They are members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, a small, struggling group of moderately obsessed social misfits. Their mortal rivals are the “Antiquisearchers,” a less principled detecting group, suspected of “Nighthawking” (detecting at night so as to take possession of their finds without properly declaring them to the authorities). The DMDC is galvanized in the first season by the appearance of a young woman named Sophie (Amy-Ffion Edwards), who attracts Andy’s attention enough to put a strain on his relationship with Becky.

The first season centers on Lance and Andy detecting on the farm of an affably crazy farmer, who constantly calls out commands to nonexistent dogs, and is suspected of having murdered his wife and buried her somewhere on his property. In the second season, a young German man shows up and asks the group’s help locating the crash site of a plane which had carried his grandfather during World War II.

“Detectorists,” written by Mackenzie Crook himself, is a well-crafted, character-based comedy which treats its cast of characters with affection. We laugh at them but also with them, and they are portrayed with pathos and compassion. Also, the scenery shots are breathtakingly lovely.

I liked it a lot. The only thing that really annoyed me was the final episode, broadcast as a Christmas special, which involved elements of superstition. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Rags of Time,’ by Peter Grainger

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The Rags of Time

Desk Sergeant Charlie Hills was by nature a two-fingered typist, but sometimes, when the muse was upon him and there were words to be produced that contained a lot of a’s, e’s, and s’s, the middle finger of his left hand would join the party. He typed ‘assessment’ with some panache, therefore, but then had to stop and count the s’s, undoing any gains he had made in the time taken.

I like Peter Grainger’s D.C. Smith mysteries more with each outing, and The Rags of Time did not disappoint. I have compared Essex Detective Sergeant D.C. Smith to the American character of Columbo before, but I found myself thinking of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch this time around. Though different in their environments and methods, the two detectives have much in common. Both are aging masters, and both tend to make enemies among their colleagues because they work a little harder than everybody else. Where other cops are content to connect a few dots and make a frame, these two see more dots and sometimes come out with very different results. They never forget that it’s not enough just to make a case – they need to find the truth, to do justice as much as possible.

This time out, Sergeant Smith is contemplating retirement. He’s just returned to work from medical leave, and the department is going through changes. One of his fellow detectives, Wilson, a man who’s been a personal rival and enemy, is on the point of promotion. Smith, who has no noticeable personal vanity, actually manipulates various things to make Wilson look good, and attempts to heal their differences.

All that, however, falls to pieces when a dead body is found in a rural field. The victim, a metal “detectorist,” was killed with a blunt object of some kind. Suspicion falls on his fellow detectorists, but Smith is unsatisfied with Wilson’s rush to judgment. He has to step in to correct the man’s mistakes – multiple times. The true trail seems to him to lead to the residents of a nearby friary where, in spite of holy vows, somebody is telling lies.

D.C. Smith is a fascinating character, a mystery to his co-workers, and even a bit of a mystery to the reader. I like him immensely. I liked this book immensely. I liked the prose immensely. The language is restrained (including little profanity), but often witty, and there’s really nothing to object to. Even issues of faith are treated with respect. I highly recommend The Rags of Time and the whole series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Escape Clause,’ by John Sandford

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Escape Clause

Eleven years: Peck would give everything to have had those eleven years back. For one thing, he wouldn’t have messed around with those women in Indianapolis. If he’d gotten a regular doctor job, he’d be driving the big bucks now, fixing everything from Aarskog syndrome to Zika virus.

I’m fond of cop humor. Cop humor is black humor, often profane humor, the humor of people who’ve seen the worst things life can dish up, and have found ways of coping. John Sandford’s novels about Minnesota cops are full of cop humor, which is one of their charms. In comparison to his Prey novels, starring Lucas Davenport, his Virgil Flowers novels tend to lean more heavily toward slapstick. Escape Clause is perhaps the most comic of his novels to date, though there are several murders along the way.

In Escape Clause, we begin with the theft (kidnapping?) of two rare tigers from the Minnesota Zoo. There’s no mystery in this story – it’s a thriller. We know who the bad guys are (an eastern medicines doctor and a few thugs), and the suspense is in how fast the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, in the person of Virgil Flowers (the only guy they can spare because of security demands at the Minnesota State Fair during visits by presidential candidates) can figure out what’s going on and stop it.

Virgil is a good cop, though not a very good shot, and generally reluctant to even carry a gun. He also tends to take a lot of pratfalls in this outing. Simultaneous with this job, he gets involved with stopping some thugs, hired by a sweatshop owner to beat up his girlfriend’s sister, who’s doing sociology research on the illegal alien workers.

It’s all a lot of fun, and it’s mostly dirtbags who get killed. The climax is obvious a mile away, but no less enjoyable for that, on a visceral level.

An interesting new element in this story is the character of “Father Bill,” a Catholic priest who leads an odd life. He works as a supply pastor for the Minneapolis-St. Paul diocese nine months of the year, and is celibate then. During the summers he works at a resort and has a girlfriend. This is kind of jaw-dropping, but I suppose it’s not unthinkable in today’s church. Virgil, whose father is a Lutheran pastor, makes some small effort to talk him over to the Protestant side.

Anyway, I had a good time with Escape Clause. Cautions for lots of bad language and adult situations, also the death of an animal (almost always more traumatic than human death in a novel).