Nathan James Norman reviews Death’s Doors here. It appears that I achieved the effects I was going for, with at least one reader.
I found myself highlighting numerous passages in the book. Like C.S. Lewis I find Lars Walker quite quotable. Typically, I don’t go out of my way to notate fiction. I marked twenty-nine passages in this book.
Years ago, while going through a period of tight finances (come to think of it, I still am), I took to borrowing light reading from the library, which is often a challenge when you’re as picky a reader as I am. I happened on a couple of English mysteries that pleased me very much, but neither the author nor the titles stuck in my memory. But recently, employing my hard-won new skills as an Information Professional, I did some hunting and found the books. Even better, some of them are available for Kindle. And so I offer, for your consideration, Deliver Us From Evil, by Peter Turnbull, one of the Hennessey and Yellich mysteries.
Hennessey and Yellich are police detectives in the ancient city of York, England, a place of great interest to Viking enthusiasts, though Vikings are rarely mentioned in my reading so far. Hennessey is an older cop, a widower who carries on a quiet affair with the female medical examiner. Yellich is younger and a family man, the father of a boy with Down’s Syndrome. There are also a couple more members on their team at this point in the series, each well drawn and having their own story.
The book begins with a beautifully written scene in which an early morning walker, on a frigid spring morning, discovers a woman sitting near the edge of a canal. Discovering that she is dead, he contacts the police. Forensic examination shows that she froze to death, but was probably strangled first. The strangling apparently failed, she revived, but then she succumbed to the cold.
Inquiry into her past reveals a dark story – this is a woman who has cheated and stolen all her life, and who may have done worse things. The question is not who had motive to kill her, but who among many she has hurt actually did it.
The story runs along logical, police procedural lines, and involves a trip to Canada by some of the team. There are no car chases, no gunfights, not even a fist fight. Just patient inquiry into human memories, deceptions, and motivations. I love this kind of book. I wish there were more of them.
A strange affectation of author Turnbull’s is that he opens each chapter with an old-fashioned synopsis:
Wednesday, March twenty-fifth, 15.43 hours – 22.30 hours in which more is learned of the deceased and Mr and Mrs Yellich are at home to the gracious reader.
A little precious, perhaps, but amusing as long as other writers don’t copy it.
Highly recommended.
The book under consideration here is an example of a type of novel I like very much. It’s a “small” mystery, localized and character-driven. No international conspiracies; no shadowy government agents. An End to a Silence is the sort of mystery that’s produced more in England than in America nowadays, and as it happens the author is English, though the story is set in America, in a small town in Montana, and seems right at home.
Detective Newton is a burnt-out case, a cop whose career stalled long ago. Now he’s just marking time until retirement. But he’s called to a local nursing home, where an old man’s death has been identified as murder. When Newton sees the victim, he’s suddenly galvanized. This man, Bill O’Donnell, is a suspect in 25 year old case, the disappearance of O’Donnell’s own grandson. Newton is certain that O’Donnell killed the boy and hid the body, despite the fact that he was a kindly man, loved in the community and active in his church.
A new policeman has come to help. His name is Ward (he never explains whether it’s his first or last name), and he’s straight out of a Hollywood western. He’s from Texas, he’s tall and lean and taciturn, he wears a cowboy hat, and he has secrets. Along with investigating the murder, he gets involved in protecting a local woman from her abusive, junkie ex-husband.
The story is all about secrets, and what people do to protect themselves and those they love. There’s a surprising reversal at the end, giving us a resolution that’s not entirely satisfying, but true to life as we know it.
I enjoyed An End to a Silence very much, and regret that this is the author’s first novel. I fear I’ll forget his name before there’s another. Sex, language, and violence are relatively mild, and on top of that the Christians in the book are treated respectfully.
Recommended.
I must admit that Stephen Lawhead almost lost me at one point, but I carried on with the last two books of the Bright Empires pentalogy, and came out a fan again.
If you’ve followed my reviews of the previous books, The Skin Map, The Bone House, and The Spirit Well (or if you’ve read the books; some people prefer to do it that way), you know the series involves a group of people who have learned the secrets of “ley travel,” using particular geographical formations in the earth at sunrise or sunset to travel to other times, places, and dimensions. The earlier books involve a sort of race between the good guys and the villainous Lord Burleigh to locate the “Skin Map,” the tanned skin of the discoverer of the ley lines, who had their locations tattooed on his body.
My temporary problems with the story occurred in the fourth book, The Shadow Lamp. I feared, for a while, that author Lawhead had succumbed to “Game of Thrones Disease” – not in terms of perversion, I hasten to add, but just in the sense of producing a story so complex and sprawling that he loses control of it. The characters seemed to be running around chasing each other through time and space, without advancing the story line much. But in the second half of the book things sharpen up. The focus shifts when the characters become aware that thoughtless ley traveling has caused a disruption in the very fabric of the cosmos. The quest becomes one to return to timeless Spirit Well and undo a thoughtless act. That quest continues in the final book, The Fatal Tree. By the time I got into that one I was back with the story all the way, and I found the resolution entirely satisfactory, nay, moving.
Lawhead (as I read him) has been endeavoring for some time to figure out a way to write epic fantasy without big battles. The Bright Empires series is his most successful effort so far.
Highly recommended.
You can read the premise of the fauxpocalypse and more from the eleven contributing writers on their website. Briefly stated, a scientist predicted the path of an enormous comet would hit the earth on July 15 of this year, and it really looked as if it would hit us. But no. What do you do when almost everyone in the world believe this time it really isn’t a test? Dip into the book
I like the idea of the book, but perhaps gathering stories around the theme of something big that didn’t happen will only get you middling results, especially when the story begins with the anticlimax. As one story says it, “Either way, the world had not ended, so it was time for chores.”
I heard of this book through a writer friend, Dave Higgins. He contributes two stories, and you may find that his contributions are worth the price of the whole, though I also liked Alexandrina Brant’s exploration of faith in her story of a college student who attends what could be Oxford’s last chapel service.
Like many people, I recently watched Season Four of the “Longmire” TV series, broadcast first on the A&E Network, and now produced by Netflix. The series, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a crime series centering on a laconic modern day Wyoming sheriff. Australian actor Robert Taylor (not to be confused with the American actor Robert Taylor, who was unavailable for the role due to being dead) plays Sheriff Walt Longmire, and the supporting cast includes Lou Diamond Philipps as his Indian friend Henry Standing Bear and Katee Sackhoff as Deputy Vic Moretti. The series is well done and scenic (though shot in New Mexico instead of Wyoming, which has to lose something in translation), and it has a large and faithful following (A&E reportedly dropped it because it the viewers were too old. Right up my alley).
So I thought I’d check out the first of the original Longmire novels, by Craig Johnson. It’s called The Cold Dish (points if you know the Cervantes reference), and introduces the characters (or some of them; several are unrecognizable). The first thing to strike the reader is the substantial differences between the TV series and the books. The Longmire of the series is a sort of Gary Cooper character, slow talking and depressed over the death of his much-loved wife. The Longmire of the books is older, fatter, and more easygoing. He’s lonely, but he admits he never loved his late wife all that much, nor she him. He’s inclined to be a joker.
In this book he investigates a series of sniper murders. All the victims are young white men who got off easily a couple years before after their conviction for the rape of a mentally challenged Cheyenne girl. The girl is a niece of Henry’s (this makes Henry a suspect, which is awkward). The murder weapon appears to be a relic of the Old West, an antique Sharps rifle. It all works out pretty tragically.
The book was very well written, and I enjoyed it. I had some trouble with the treatment of Native American spirituality; it’s presented as pretty obviously true and effective. But taken on its own terms, The Cold Dish is a good book.
Cautions for the usual things.
It is the thesis of this book that the heroic narrative is not simply our way of telling ourselves comforting fairy tales about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, but an implanted moral compass that guides even the least religious among us.
In a book at once learned, insightful, inspirational, and maddening, Michael Walsh, former Time Magazine associate editor and current New York Post columnist, finds a useful lens through which to examine the culture wars of our time. The conflict goes beyond religion vs. atheism, or left vs. right, he tells us in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. It’s about stories. It’s about the basic narrative through which we view history.
This, of course, is a point of view that pleases me immensely.
All human cultures, Walsh argues, have told their stories in the basic three-act form, the “ur-Narrative” – something is lost, a battle is fought, and the lost thing (or something better) is regained.
Against this, the modern left sets its own narrative of history, based on deconstruction, adopted from the poisonous thinkers of the Frankfurt School of philosophy who fled to America from Hitler in the 1930, took up residence, accepted the freedom and plenty of the country, and immediately began to plot to bring it all down in flames. Because they believe in destroying the good, to make way for their perfect dream of the socialist society.
I appreciated Walsh’s well-informed critique of the Frankfurt School thinkers and their influence. I was less enamored of his depiction of the “ur-Narrative.” He writes frankly from a Christian (Catholic) point of view, but his depiction of Christian theology is pretty idiosyncratic. It helps to remember that he bases his view of the narrative of the Fall of Man, not actually on Genesis, but on Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost.” And even in that, he stretches the text a bit to make a non-Miltonian, semi-Catholic point.
But I still found The Devil’s Pleasure Palace immensely fascinating and informative. Walsh has hope for the future of our culture. I’m not sure I share it. But I’m glad I read the book. Recommended, with cautions.
In Library and Information Science, there’s a popular concept called “faceting.” Faceting means describing a resource in more than one way, as more than one thing. The idea is that faceting makes it possible to describe an object more fully, in a way that’s more useful to more people.
William C. Davis’ Three Roads to the Alamo is a faceted historical work. Instead of a single narrative, the author takes us along with the Alamo’s three most famous defenders, Crockett, Bowie, and Travis, on their lives’ journeys, providing us not only a fuller description of each of them, but a more three-dimensional picture of America (at least the American south and southwest) during the early 19th Century.
The first subject we meet is the oldest and most famous – even in his own time – Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee. Indeed, as Davis reminds us, Crockett was the very first American media celebrity – the first American to see the newspapers and magazines create for him a separate persona, not entirely unlike him, but exaggerated and oversimplified. It must have been a bizarre life for him – in the east he dined in the finest restaurants, was feted by the rich and powerful, and spoke from the same platforms with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. When he went home, it was to a dirt-floored cabin and a mountain of debts that never seemed to diminish. He finally solved the debt problem – to a degree – by figuring out how to monetize his celebrity. He wrote his autobiography (which I reviewed here), and it became a bestseller. Continue reading ‘Three Roads to the Alamo,’ by William C. Davis
First of all, it should be made clear – and I wonder how anyone could be in doubt on this, but it’s possible – that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is not a work of imagination meant for popular entertainment. It’s a translation of an already much-translated work, intended as a teaching aid, by a major scholar in the field. If you’re unfamiliar with Beowulf, you might want to try one of the modern verse translations, like Heaney’s, but I liked this version very much.
Personally, I prefer a prose translation. Tolkien probably knew Old English poetry better than any modern man, and here he attempts to provide some sense of the original metrical form, but he is not forced to alter the text in order to make the verse scan. Any translation is always a trade-off, especially in poetry, and for my own part I prefer some approximation of the original text.
Tolkien’s translation is a lively one. I can imagine him reading it to Lewis (and we’re told Lewis did advise him on bits of it) and then ignoring, as he always did, Lewis’ suggestions.
There are many notes. Some are by Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, who is editor. Others are drawn directly from Tolkien’s own notes. Some of this material fascinated me, some seemed to me (approaching more from the historian’s than the language scholar’s perspective) pretty tall grass. It was interesting to read, for instance, that Tolkien thinks the Beowulf poem correct in crediting (in passing) the slaying of the dragon to Sigfried’s father Sigmund, rather than to Sigfried himself. The dragon-slaying fits in with Sigmund’s story, he thinks, and seems like an interpolation in the Sigfried-Brunhilde narrative.
Also in this book is a work called “The Sellic Spell,” which is Tolkien’s attempt to reconstruct how the Beowulf story might have been passed down as a folk tale, rather than as a heroic poem. He sees a separation between the “fairy tale” Beowulf and the “historical” (by which he does not mean to suggest he thinks Beowulf a real historical character) tale. Here Tolkien may be observed “reverse engineering” an imagined lost legend, something he later did in a larger, more powerful way with The Lord of the Rings.
Also appended to this book is “The Lay of Beowulf,” an attempt to reimagine story as a sort of ballad. That was pleasant to read, but the editor gives us two earlier drafts to read as well, at which point I’m afraid I lost interest in it.
I recommend Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary for people interested in the Old English poem itself. Less so for readers whose main interest is Middle Earth. I’m glad this work has come out in print, and I’m happy I read it.
It is part of the lore of the Walker family that my immigrant great-grandfather, who was farming in Iowa at the time – although famously workaholic and tight-fisted – took time and money to attend the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He must have been impressed, because he made it a practice to attend other world’s fairs whenever he could.
And he well might have been impressed, judging from the story told in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, which chronicles, for a generation which has forgotten it, the story of the Columbian Exposition. Along with a much more sordid story.
Who today knows that the construction of the Columbian Exposition involved the first use of spray paint in history? That the Pledge of Allegiance was composed for it? That the vertical file was first introduced there? That the first Ferris wheel was built for it? That Columbus Day was created in its honor? That it contained the first carnival “Midway?” That it provided the public its first taste of Juicy Fruit gum, Cracker Jacks, and Shredded Wheat? That it showcased long-distance telephone service, Edison’s moving pictures, and newfangled zippers?
The hero of the story is Daniel H. Burnham, a Chicago architect who became the chief organizer of the fair. When Chicago won the right to host it, the world scoffed. Chicago had no reputation as a cultural center, and New Yorkers (especially) laughed at the idea that such a raw, filthy, slaughterhouse town could dream of mounting an exhibition that would be anything but embarrassing compared to the previous one, which was held in Paris and stunned the world with (among other marvels) the Eiffel Tower. Continue reading ‘The Devil in the White City,’ by Erik Larson
