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Fiction, Reading, Reviews

The Counterproductive Dream

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It was on Facebook or Twitter, just today, that somebody mentioned the movie, “The Shootist.” I commented that it was a very faithful adaptation of the novel, except that the final action (altered on John Wayne’s insistence) changed the entire point of the story.

Much the same could be said about “Man of La Mancha,” the blockbuster Broadway production inspired by (not based on, as the writers insisted) Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

I’ve never actually seen the musical, but I heard the songs multiple times, as my college roommate (confined today to a mental institution, I kid you not) was a Broadway musical nut. He especially loved “Man of La Mancha,” which was appropriate, because he never quite found a place in the real world.

“Man of La Mancha” takes the form of a play within a play. We find Miguel de Cervantes in prison, awaiting trial before the Spanish Inquisition (I don’t think that ever actually happened to him). The other prisoners try to steal his trunk of possessions, but their leader agrees to give him a “trial.” He is permitted to present a defense of his writing, and he makes it in the form of a play based on his novel. All the prisoners then act out the story.

The play includes the song, “The Impossible Dream” (performed above by the great Richard Kiley, who created the role) which became one of the monster hits of the second half of the 20th Century. I remember when it was new. It’s a splendid song, one of Broadway’s jewels. It’s also the precise opposite of Cervantes’ meaning.

Cervantes was delivering a warning against becoming so idealistic that you lose contact with reality. As a Christian, he understood that the body as well as the spirit must become sanctified. Don Quixote doesn’t only make a fool of himself. He injures people – and might have killed some of them if he’d been a little more accurate with his lance. He does kill a man’s sheep. He damages an innkeeper’s property and is too lofty-minded to even pay his bill.

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Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Thinking about Don Quixote

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“…and to put the whole thing in a nutshell, I persuade myself that all I say is as I say, neither more nor less, and I picture her in my imagination as I would have her to be, as well in beauty as in condition….”

I am now about a third of the way through Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It’s quite a trek, and it offers ample fodder for thought. This thought, of course, I propose to dump in your lap.

It would be easy to call Don Quixote an attack on “chivalry.” It is that, in the sense that it parodies a literary genre called “Chivalrous Romance.” However, it’s far from an attack on the concept itself. Considering the general (low) character displayed by so many of the world’s great writers, Cervantes stands as something like a paragon. He fought bravely for his king in the Mediterranean wars against Islam, suffering a permanently crippled left hand (or arm) at the Battle of Lepanto. He was captured by Barbary pirates and enslaved for five years, leading several escape attempts, which all failed. In each case, he endured torture and refused to name any of his partners – in one instance nearly being executed. (Eventually he was ransomed.) He did father an illegitimate daughter, but he acknowledged her and saw to her upbringing.

What Cervantes seems to recognize in the Chivalrous Romance genre is, first of all, its poor quality. He was himself a great writer, and had no patience for shoddy work. But he seems to particularly object to the unreality of the stories. As a disabled veteran, he knew the real face of war. He must have found many of the Romances contemptible, just as a genuine secret agent might sneer at a James Bond movie from the Roger Moore era.

He sees even more, though. Don Quixote, through excessive reading of such pop literature, has lost touch with reality. He has entered a virtual world, walking around like a gamer in Google glasses, stumbling over actual physical objects in his path.

Andrew Klavan says that one of the most common objections he hears from Christians in regard to his fiction is, “But fiction isn’t real!”

Good fiction is real, in a profound sense (related to subcreation as Lewis and Tolkien understood it). But trash literature, written to amuse the reader through catering to his predilections and sugar-coating life’s tragedies, does interfere with serious, moral thought. (Straight farce, as in Wodehouse, I would insist, is another matter.)

Or so it seems to me.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Errant in La Mancha

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A further counsel bear in mind:
If that thy roof be made of glass, 
It shows small wit to pick up stones 
To pelt the people as they pass.

“Sir, one solitary swallow does not make the summer….”

“…for it is my great familiarity with thee that has bred this contempt.”

I’ll need to beg your forbearance for a few days – or weeks. I feel I must cut back on my book-buying for a while, so I made up my mind to tackle one of those big, classic books that I’ve been putting off. Therefore I chose Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. This project must inevitably take a long, long time, because it’s a long, long book.

I’m not unacquainted with Don Quixote, since I read an edited version back when I was in high school. But I recall a college professor saying that shortened versions omit some of the most delightful parts. I’m curious to see what those delightful parts are, because – to tell the truth – what I’ve read of the book to date has never given me a lot of pleasure.

[At the top of this post I list a few common aphorisms I found in the text. Whether Cervantes coined them or borrowed them, I have no idea.]

I think of Don Quixote as “the book that, when they wanted to make a successful musical out of it, they had to turn its meaning completely on its head.”

Which brings me back to my old do-it-yourself psychological diagnosis – you can figure out any person’s neurosis through discovering what they don’t find funny. When we neurotics recognize ourselves in a joke, the humor drops abruptly through the floor.

I, for instance, am not much amused by stories about deluded bookworms who make fools of themselves in the world, and get laughed at behind their backs.

Anyway, I’m still less than a quarter through in my reading, and I’ve come up with one thought that may or may be of value: Don Quixote is the ancestor of the modern college graduate, who has been force-fed so much otherworldly theory that he can’t see reality at all. The liberal who observes a city sidewalk covered with homeless tents and human excrement, and calls it “vibrant,” is brother to Knight of the Doleful Countenance, who thought windmills were giants and country inns castles. The liberal who sees a tattooed thug beating up an old woman to steal her purse, and calls him a victim of racism, was foreshadowed when Don Quixote liberated a group of convicts on their way to the galleys, only to be pelted with stones by them.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at Midsomar Manor,’ by Bruce Beckham

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I’ve always enjoyed Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill mysteries. They’re far from my favorite detective books, but they’re amusing and pretty consistent in quality. Also, they don’t work hard to offend me.

Murder at Midsomar Manor, number 27 in the series, was not one of the best. It short-changed me, I thought, in my favorite character (Skelgill himself), and offered way too much of my least-favorite character.

Judging by the book’s title, one might guess that this was some kind of riff on the popular “Midsomer Murders” TV series. However, though it does deal with television, it’s the reality TV genre that’s portrayed (and satirized) here.

Everyone at the police station is excited that the popular series, “Friend or Foe,” is being filmed at a neighborhood spot – the remote Midsomar Manor, which is located on a local lake with which Inspector Skelgill (great fisherman that he is) is quite familiar. He is fascinated by a legend of a gigantic prize pike that lives in the lake (and which will come to figure in the plot).

The program’s competition involves 12 celebrities, 3 of whom are arbitrarily and secretly designated as “foes.” Each night one competitor will be voted out by the others, as being most likely to be a foe. And each day one of them will be “murdered” (eliminated). The hope is that all the foes will be eliminated before they can “kill off” the rest of the players.

But when one of the celebrities, a very unpopular public figure, is actually murdered, the police must take charge. Unfortunately, the case is given to Detective Inspector Smart, Skelgill’s great rival and a thoroughgoing ass (who also happens to be stupidly star-struck). To her own alarm, Skelgill’s female subordinate, DS Jones, is assigned to assist him, which involves putting off his frequent sexual advances.

DI Smart is proven wrong again and again, but arrogantly manages to blame Jones each time. Fortunately, Inspector Skelgill is just off stage, out on the lake in his fishing boat, ready to step in and set things right in the end.

The first thing that annoyed me about Murder at Midsomar Manor was that the cameras (and there are a lot of them in this story) are pointed so much at DI Smart and DS Jones. It passes plausibility that any male in today’s Britain could hold an inspector’s post while being as blatantly sexist as Smart is (setting aside the fact that he’s an idiot). Smart’s egregious behavior becomes genuinely tiresome, even for a known sexist like me.

Also, the solution, which comes by way of Skelgill toward the end, hangs on a pretty implausible coincidence. Uncomfortably close to a deus ex machina.

And just as a note, the author misuses the phrase, “begs the question” and mistakes “flaunt” for “flout.”

Murder at Midsomar Manor was entertaining, as is the whole series. But this one reached too far for farce, and lacked plausibility.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cutler’s Bargain,’ by Colin Conway

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I think I’m done with Colin Conway’s John Cutler books.

I like author Conway’s 509 series, which is a sequence of police procedurals involving a rotating cast of Washington state cops. He’s also written a series about “the Flip-flop Detective,” which is supposed to be light in tone. The John Cutler books, on the other hand, are contemporary Noir. John Cutler’s world is grim and shadowed, full of betrayal and moral compromise. I thought things might lighten up as the character developed, but I’ve finally concluded that that’s not the intention.

In Cutler’s Bargain, book 5 in the series, John gets an offer from a client willing to pay well. She’s a wholesome-looking woman who grows marijuana in a cellar underneath a strip mall she owns. She had been keeping the operation secret, but now somebody has broken in through a window and tried (though they failed) to get downstairs into the “grow.” She wants to know who leaked the information.

John isn’t eager to get involved with illegal drugs (this book was written before legalization), but the problem is interesting and she promises to pay double. Meanwhile, a friend has asked John to talk to a boy and try to steer him away from gang involvement – something he approaches without much confidence.

Cutler’s Bargain kept my interest all through, but – as with all these books – the final result was disappointing. The story ends on a highly ambivalent note, with Cutler negotiating a resolution that merely balances one evil against another.

The writing is good (in spite of the misuse of the word “flaunt”), but I’m tired of the depressing endings. Your mileage may vary.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cutler’s Friend,’ by Colin Conway

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I like Colin Conway as a writer. One of the things I like about his work is that he generally keeps the politics low-key.

That is not true, however, of Cutler’s Friend, the third volume in his John Cutler series. The author published those first three books early in the 2000s, and the era may be part of the problem. This book is (in my opinion) more suited to the zeitgeist of that decade than to the present.

At the beginning of Cutler’s Friend, John has stabilized his life somewhat. He is now a licensed private investigator in Spokane, and he has a regular girlfriend.

He gets a visit from Mike, his former partner on the Seattle police force. Mike has, John discovers, become a pretty nasty racist, largely because his wife Tina left him for a black professional athlete. John wouldn’t care to do a favor for Mike at this point, but it’s Tina who needs help. Her new husband has been murdered, and she’s been arrested for it. Mike wants John to prove she’s innocent.

As John begins the investigation, the job raises tension with his girlfriend Erika, who is black. She starts discussing racial issues with John, and distancing herself from him. He finally realizes that he has to choose between helping an innocent woman and keeping his girlfriend.

This book pushed all my buttons – negatively. It started with a scene where John is dealing with a guy in a wig and a dress, in which he keeps condemning himself for “prejudice” when he forgets to use “her” preferred pronouns. Then we go on to the scenes with Erika, where the point seems to be that, as a miserable white man, there’s nothing John is allowed to do but kneel in repentance and apologize forever.

This bothered me a lot. Because if that’s the way the races have to relate to one another, it will always be impossible for us love each other, or even to be friends. It’s a formula for eternal racial segregation. I have to believe there’s some better way.

If I weren’t already fond of the series, I’d have dropped it with Cutler’s Friend. But I’m reading on. People learn and grow, and I see no signs of this kind of self-conscious political correctness in Colin Conway’s later work.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Weans,’ by Robert Nathan

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The currency of the Weans consisted of the grand, the fin, the buck, the bit, and the payola.

Ever read a book about archaeology, and wonder how accurate the scholars’ guesses, based on very partial information, are? Robert Nathan had fun with that question in his 1960 short novel, The Weans.

The idea of The Weans is that it’s a book written thousands of years in the future, about what archaeologists have learned in “the Salt Continent” (North America) based on meager findings from their archaeological digs.

Much of the humor rises from the archaeologists’ assumptions. Too many artifacts are assumed to have religious significance, for instance. The book also includes a number of puzzles for the reader, which said reader only figures out gradually (I may have missed a couple, I fear): we wonder why the Americans are known to history as “Weans.” Or why our capitol city is remembered as “Pound-Laundry.”

An amusing book. It contains one gag about underage sex that didn’t age well. But all in all, fun to read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cutler’s Chase,’ by Colin Conway

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“What?” I asked.

“You used to be a cop.”

“And?”

“You seem to hate them.”

“I don’t hate them.” I stood. “But I hate who I became while I was one of them. That’s a truth I will never escape.”

The second novel in Colin Conway’s John Cutler series is Cutler’s Chase. This book has him back in Spokane, where he’s working as a nightclub bouncer. He’s flirting with a woman who likes him, but he’s afraid to get close to her because he’s sure she’s bound to reject him in the end. And he’s found a friend in a guy in a neighboring apartment, a retired Marine.

There is a murder, and Cutler finds himself, uncharacteristically, taking on a responsibility – for the murder victim’s dog. He’s certain who the killer is, and he won’t listen to the decent detective who asks him to stand aside and let them do their job. He gets in a lot of fights. There’s a major plot twist at the end (which I have to say I saw coming).

But Cutler’s Chase was a good book, and not as dark as the first book in the series. I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bite Back,’ by George Prior

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Casey Stafford is the police detective hero of a series by George Prior. Bite Back is the third book in the series. Casey is a smart Los Angeles cop, distinguished by the nice suits he wears.

The assignment in this story is a high-profile murder. A female newspaper reporter has been stabbed to death. The killing was caught by a security camera, but the killer was wearing a motorcycle helmet and can’t be identified. The press is, naturally, paying close attention.

Casey and his woman partner check out the stories the victim has been working on, but she was mostly a human interest writer. However, when they discover she was looking into puppy mills and dog fighting, they follow that trail into a dark world of greed, cruelty, and Mexican mafia connections.

I’m not sure why I didn’t like Bite Back more than I did. Author Prior does a good job with characters and dialogue. Even his villains are faceted and human. The police procedural elements seem realistic. The story goes so far as to include a feel-good Boy and His Dog subplot (caution – there’s also a lot of very dark material about animal abuse).

But it all seemed to me kind of lightweight. That can’t be because I don’t like an optimistic detective, because I like Alan Lee’s upbeat stories very much. So I can’t reasonably defend giving this book a negative review, and I won’t. Bite Back was pretty good. You might enjoy it quite a lot, if you can handle the animal cruelty sections.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Crockett,’ by Buddy Levy

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Patience and compromise were two necessities for political success at the highest levels, and Crockett would never possess either.

I am, and will always be, I expect, fascinated by the American legend of “Davy” Crockett. The “Crockett Craze,” sparked by a three-episode series on Walt Disney’s television show, exploded on the scene just at the time when I was becoming aware of the world around me. The image of actor Fess Parker in his coonskin cap and buckskins remains etched on my mind. This memory I share with many other Baby Boomers. I think each of the several books I’ve read previously about Crockett’s life have been presented in the form of a sort of dialogue with my generation’s memories of that cultural moment.

But we Boomers are passing from the scene, and it’s time for a book that handles the life of Col. David Crockett, bear hunter and Tennessee congressman, more or less from scratch. Which is what Buddy Levy’s Crockett: The Real-Life Adventures of the Frontier Legend does. Disney does not appear on stage until the mop-up chapters at the end.

Viewed historically, the 1950s Crockett Craze was a second act. Crockett was America’s (perhaps the world’s) first celebrity in the modern sense – a person made famous by the media. A rising population of literate common people was hungry for a hero with whom they could identify. And Crockett, an unpolished, definitely not wealthy congressman from the ragged western edge of the republic, filled the bill perfectly. He had sufficient credentials as a wilderness hunter and army scout to provide the bare bones for a legend, and his rustic wit and braggadocio always made him good newspaper copy.

Author Levy has organized sometimes meager documentary evidence, presenting it along with Crockett’s own (generally pretty reliable) autobiography to recount the man’s story in a fascinating and sympathetic way. He believes (as some historians doubt) that Crockett was sincere in his opposition to Pres. Jackson’s removal of the Native American tribes – certainly prejudice (which sprang from cruel warfare on both sides) caused most of his fellow settlers to hate the tribes generally, but it’s also true that Crockett had fought alongside friendly Indians during the Creek War, and some of their race had saved his life on at least one occasion. (He does gloss over Crockett’s slave-holding, though). He affirms the traditional account of Crockett’s execution at the Alamo, though a footnote mentions that there are contrary views.

All in all, I found Crockett a very readable and fascinating account of a remarkable American life. I do recommend it.