The third of postmodernism’s triumvirate of stooges, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), focuses his indignation on common sense because it carries “the tyranny of goodwill, the obligation to think ‘in common’ with others, the domination of a pedagogical model, and most importantly—the exclusion of stupidity.”
If like me you’ve read Francis Schaeffer and Allan Bloom, and if you’ve pondered C.S. Lewis’s “The Poison of Subjectivism,” you’re aware that the central intellectual battle of our time rages around Reason. Does reason give us a window on reality, something conccrete on which we can fully rest our weight, or is everything “subjective”; is one person’s world entirely different from another’s? Is thinking worth anything, or must passion rule all things?
My friend Mark Goldblatt, novelist, columnist, and educator, provides a useful guide in his recent book, I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism. The book offers a short historical overview of how the Enlightenment came to enshrine Reason, and then how a rising tide of Subjectivism gradually infiltrated our institutions of higher education, turning the culture of the mind into streams of thought that must ultimately run dry.
He examines Critical Race Theory, showing how it employs Subjectivist philosophy to exalt feeling over fact, turning the quest for knowledge into a quest for raw power (because once reason is dead, we can’t have a discussion. All that’s left is a shouting match. And after shouting come fists). He goes on to outline how the Me-Too movement corrupted its honorable ideals by abandoning objective standards of justice, and how more and more people, in the spirit of transgenderist dogmatism, are now destroying their own bodies.
He ends by suggesting some means by which our schools of liberal arts, having become divinity schools of Woke religion, might be amputated and allowed to wither, before they can poison the whole body.
This book is only six months old, but it might possibly already be too late. The schools of the STEM disciplines, in which the author places much hope, seem to be already in the process of corruption, embracing Woke mathematics and physics (Want to fly in an airplane designed according to Woke math principles? You first; I’ll wait).
Still, I Feel, Therefore I Am is a worthwhile introduction for the thoughtful reader desiring some points of reference in the churning sea of Relativist culture. I enjoyed it and recommend it. Cautions for some rough language.
He was overcome by the poignancy of the situation. Here was a girl who had frankly admitted that in her opinion he was Prince Charming galloping up on his white horse and would have liked nothing better than to be folded in his embrace and hugged till her ribs squeaked, and here was he all eagerness to do the folding and hugging, and no chance of business resulting because the honour of the Bodkins said it mustn’t. Beat that for irony, he thought as he rubbed his shin. It was the sort of thing Thomas Hardy would have got a three-volume novel out of.
Having intensely enjoyed, and positively reviewed, The Luck of the Bodkins the other day, I thought I might as well go right ahead and review the sequel, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin. (Monty also figures largely in a previous book, Heavy Weather, a Blandings story. I’ll have to be getting on to that one too, though it will be out of sequence.)
PG & MB redresses one of the few niggling problems that exist with TLOtB, otherwise a near-perfect confection. The sensitive reader can’t avoid the nagging sense that in getting engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, All England field hockey player, Monty has made a blunder. Monty is much like Bertie Wooster – except that he wants to be married – and one can hear Jeeves saying, if Bertie had ever found himself handcuffed to La Butterwick, “The young lady is undoubtedly healthy and vigorous, sir. But might I suggest that a person with her record of breaking multiple engagements might conceivably be a touch too volatile in temperament for the establishment of a felicitous domestic partnership?”
In short, the reader wants Monty to be happy, and under Gertrude’s thumb he’s likely to sink to the level of a third-rate power. Monty requires a woman a little more cheerful. A little more trusting. A woman less subservient to the commands of her blighted, vegetarian father.
So when Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin opens, one year to the day from the close of the previous novel –
[At this point I need to break off and blather a moment about the question of time in Wodehouse. The Luck of the Bodkins was published in 1935, and somewhere in the last couple pages it’s mentioned that Prohibition was recently repealed in the US. Monty’s deal with Gertrude’s father calls for him to hold a paying job for one year before they can be married. At the beginning of PG & MB, we’re told that that year has now passed. But PG & MB was published in 1972, nearly forty years later. One of its first pages mentions TV studio audiences. In the dreary world you and I inhabit, there was no point in history at which the first thing could have been separated by a single year from the second. But this is Wodehouse world, that foretaste of Paradise in which time exists only for the purposes of the story, and the world never changes much.]
So, as I was saying, this book starts one year after we left off. Monty has been toiling away, doing unspecified tasks, as a technical advisor at Superba-Llewellyn Studios in Hollywood. His secretary, Sandy Miller, has fallen head-over-espadrilles in love with him, but she knows his heart belongs to Gertrude. And now, he announces, he’s headed back to England to claim his bride.
However, when he arrives, Monty finds old Mr. Butterwick unwilling to close the deal. He has learned, he tells Monty, that Monty acquired his job with Superba-Llewellyn through blackmail (which is true), and so it doesn’t count. Monty finally persuades the old blighter to give him one more year.
Then Sandy shows up, to his surprise. She’s in England with her boss, Ivor Llewellyn, who has taken a country house for an extended sojourn. He has done this at the bidding of his imperious wife Grayce, who wants him to write a history of his studio. In fact, he needs a secretary to help him with the book. The perfect job for Monty!
The action switches to the country house at that point, and comes to focus on a valuable pearl necklace currently belonging to Grayce, a gift from Ivor. Ivor confesses to Monty that, because Grayce has him on a strict budget, he pawned the necklace some time back and replaced it with cultured pearls. Now their daughter is getting married, and the necklace is supposed to go to her. Ivor will pay Monty handsomely to steal the necklace and drop it in the water somewhere. They are unaware that there are three actual jewel thieves also staying in the house, plotting to relieve him of the job.
In terms of classic Wodehouse prose, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin stands equal to any other work in his corpus, despite the fact that he was over 90 when it was published. Plot-wise, I’d have to say he’d slipped a little. The book seems to wrap up prematurely, with a lot of possible plot twists passed over. There are long stretches where Monty really has no problems at all, and just seems unaware of it.
Still, a very amusing book, and it’s great to see Monty settle with a suitable girl.
One morning Karlsefni’s men saw something shiny above a clearing in the trees, and they called out. It moved and proved to be a one-legged creature which darted down to where the ship lay tied. Thorvald, Eirik the Red’s son, was at the helm and the one-legged man shot an arrow into his intestine. Thorvald drew the arrow out and spoke: “Fat paunch that was. We’ve found a land of fine resources, though we’ll hardly enjoy much of them.” Thorvald died from the wound shortly after. The one-legged man then ran off back north. They pursued him and caught glimpses of him now and then. He then fled into a cove and they turned back. (Eirik the Red’s Saga)
I hope I don’t cause any embarrassment when I publicly thank my friend (and our frequent commenter) Dale Nelson, formerly of Mayville State University in North Dakota, for these books. Along with his wife Dorothea, Dale has gifted me – entirely to my surprise – with the full, boxed set of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. It’s published by Leifur Eiriksson Publishing in Reykjavik, and is a collection of brand-new scholarly translations, carefully selected and edited by a team of scholars.
When you read the title, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, you’ll probably assume, as I did, that this is a collection of all the Icelandic sagas. Once I’d read the introductions (there are several) I realized that that would involve a very large collection indeed. It would have to include legendary sagas of pre-historic legends, as well as later sagas about bishops, saints and courtly love. What the editors here mean by “the sagas of Icelanders” is in fact the classic sagas – the tales of the Icelandic settlers, heroes, and feuding in the Viking Age.
Just my meat, in fact. I have a good number of saga translations in my library already, but this collection gives me a set of uniformly high-quality translations living up to the latest standards of criticism. I’m delighted to have it.
In this post I’ll review the first two translations in the first volume – Eirik the Red’s Saga and The Saga of the Greenlanders.
These two sagas are (as the editors freely confess) not the best, considered purely as texts. What we have is two different accounts based on the same original events, but developed into two highly divergent narratives. (This is embarrassing, I must admit, for someone like me who spends a lot of time defending the use of sagas as historical sources. But nobody’s saying the saga texts didn’t suffer alteration with time – only that they contain useful information, which certainly remains true even of the Vinland sagas. We’ve got an archaeological dig in Newfoundland to prove it.)
Generalizing a great deal, I can say that Eirik the Red’s Saga (I should mention that the editors here have chosen a different manuscript source from most previous translations, so this version is a little different from other published editions) describes Leif Eiriksson discovering Vinland (America) by accident, blown off course in a storm while sailing to Greenland from Norway. Later the focus switches to Thorfinn Karlsefni the Icelander, and his wife Gudrid.
The Saga of the Greenlanders, on the other hand, attributes the first sighting of land in Vinland to Bjarni Herjolfsson, who is similarly blown off course, but never touches land. Leif later buys his ship and makes a voyage of exploration, followed by two of his brothers, and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and finally his sanguine sister Freydis.
When I was young, most historians considered The Saga of the Greenlanders earlier and more reliable than Eirik the Red’s Saga. Today I’m given to understand that historians consider both of them useful in parts. Both, it must be admitted, are also garbled in places, and contain preposterous elements.
What they have in common, it seems to me, is the fact that the story of Vinland is in a way secondary. The discovery is recounted, not primarily for its importance as a watershed historical event, but as a family achievement.
What lies behind both versions (it seems to this reader) is the fact that it was written by, and for, the descendants of the married couple Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid the Far-Traveled. Both narratives mention (as briefly as possible) the fact that Gudrid was descended from slaves. This was embarrassing in that culture – though pretty common in Icelandic society, many of whose Norse pioneers had married slave women. Great pains are taken in both versions to explain to the reader that, in spite of her low birth, Gudrid was recognized as a remarkable person very early in her life. Then we are told of her many adventures, culminating in her pilgrimage to Rome late in life and her death as an anchoress, a highly respected woman.
This professional translator finds no fault in the translation here. I’m not qualified to judge how well the Icelandic text is interpreted, but I know a clunky translation when I see one, and these two are very good, very smooth. I might also mention that the physical volumes are sturdily bound in signatures between handsome leather-covered boards, and the text, printed on heavy, acid-free paper, is in a highly readable font.
(One point that amused me is that, though the publisher uses Icelandic spelling in calling itself Leifur Eiriksson Publishing, the translators chose to use the more familiar form of “Leif” in the text.)
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is an expensive set, but if you can afford it, I recommend it highly.
‘…Why not take a chance? You would like Hollywood, you know. Everybody does. Girdled by the everlasting hills, bathed in eternal sunshine. Honest, it kind of gets to you. What I mean, there’s something going on there all the time. Malibu. Catalina. Aqua Caliente. And if you aren’t getting divorced yourself, there’s always one of your friends is, and that gives you something to chat about in the long evenings. And it isn’t half such a crazy place as they make out. I know two-three people in Hollywood that are part sane.’
Monty Bodkin, hero of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins, is a fairly unassuming chap. Decent looking, and rich to boot. All he wants is to marry Gertrude Butterwick, stalwart member of the All England Women’s Field Hockey team. But Gertrude, for all her charms, has a lamentable inclination to jealousy. While they were at Cannes, she noticed Monty appreciating the on-screen beauty of movie star Lotus Blossom, and she promptly broke their engagement. Now she’s about to board the ship SS Atlantic, steaming off to America with her teammates.
So Monty books passage himself. On the same ship, as luck (and the plot) would have it, sails none other but Lotus “Lottie” Blossom herself, along with her fiancé, Monty’s old school chum Ambrose Tennyson, whom Lottie’s boss, movie tycoon Ivor Llewellyn (also aboard), has hired as a screen writer (under the misapprehension that he’s the Tennyson who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). Ivor is suffering internal torments, having been commanded by his masterful wife to smuggle a pearl necklace into New York for her. Also aboard is Ambrose’s brother Reggie, off to take an unwanted job in Canada on the orders of his family. He’d rather marry Ivor’s assistant Mabel, but can’t afford it.
So what we’ve got is three young couples, two of whom are desperately trying, as fortunes alter, to find angles by which to manipulate Ivor into giving the guy a cushy Hollywood job. Except for Monty, who neither wants nor needs a job, but Gertrude’s father expects him to hold one as a demonstration of character. As all this intrigue swirls around the dyspeptic movie tycoon, everyone’s calculations are advanced and frustrated, in turn, by Albert Peasemarch, the well-meaning but not terribly bright room steward, sort of a Jeeves without the intellect.
I first read The Luck of the Bodkins back in the 1970s, and remembered it as one of my favorites. I am pleased to report that age has not dimmed, nor custom staled, its infinite variety. This particular novel is especially rich in Wodehouse Girls – those mercurial, impulsive, implacable creatures who rule their men absolutely and are clearly well on their ways to becoming those formidable Aunts who infest Bertie Wooster’s adventures. Lottie Blossom is a prime example, and one of my personal favorites.
Highly, highly recommended. I laughed out loud, at frequent intervals.
I usually top a book review with a picture of the book’s cover, but the Kindle version of the book I’m dealing with tonight is a generic free book design. So instead, I present you a picture of the gigantic statue of Frithiof the Bold that overlooks the Sognefjord in Norway. I’ve seen it, but only from a distance, as I cruised in a ship on the fjord. This statue was erected by none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who was a huge fan of Frithiof’s Saga, which I’ll be reviewing tonight. I figured it had been a while since I’d reviewed a saga, and Frithiof’s, though a legendary one, has many points of interest, not least for its reception in fairly modern times. I’ve written about it before, a number of years ago, but I have more to say now. I read The Story of Frithiof the Bold in Eirikr Magnusson’s and William Morris’ classic translation.
Frithiof (or Fridtjof, there are variable spellings) is the son of a minor Viking chieftain. His family lives on one side of the Sognefjord in Norway, while King Beri lives on the other. The king and Frithiof’s father are good friends, but their sons don’t get along. Frithiof is (of course) tall, handsome, strong, and bold – everything a Viking should be. The king’s sons seem capable enough, but Frithiof always outshines them, and they hate him for it. Their sister Ingibiorg, however, likes Frithiof very well, and they make personal vows to each other. At one point, when the king and the brothers are away, Frithiof dallies with Ingibiorg in the god Baldur’s sacred precincts, where such carryings-on are forbidden.
So when King Beri dies, the kings’ sons send Frithiof on a diplomatic mission, to collect tribute in Orkney. While he’s gone, they burn down his farm and marry Ingibiorg off to old King Ring of Ringerike in eastern Norway.
After many adventures, Frithiof comes to serve (under an alias) in King Ring’s court. In that capacity, he becomes the king’s protector. He gets the chance to kill him, but resists the temptation. This leads ultimately to that rarest of elements in a saga – a happy ending.
If you’d lived most anywhere in western Europe in the early to mid-19th Century, you’d have probably been familiar with Frithiof’s Saga. It went viral while most of the sagas were still largely unknown. This was because a Swedish poet, Esaias Tegnér, discovered it and translated it in verse form. His poem was in turn translated into many other languages. Readers responded to its heroic tone, and also to its (apparent) elements of forgiveness and reconciliation. These made it more accessible to the Victorian, Christian reader than such sagas as Njal’s or Egil’s.
My own reading (even in Magnusson’s and Morris’ very Victorian translation) suggests that this interpretation is not entirely correct. Frithiof is admirable, indeed, in not killing the king who had married the girl he loved. But for the saga audience, his virtue lies not so much in forgiveness and finding a peaceful solution (the name Frithiof actually means “peace-thief”), but in his living up to the ethos of his culture, at some personal cost. Frithiof’s enemies are Ingibiorg’s brothers, not King Ring, who has acted honorably throughout. On top of that, he was a good and brave king, deserving of honor. Frithiof has sworn oaths to protect Ring, so protect him he does. His treatment of Ingibiorg’s brothers will be rather different. They’ve treated him treacherously, and can expect little mercy from him.
Reading The Story of Frithiof the Bold from my own perspective, as a lifelong student of Erling Skjalgsson of Sola, I discovered certain parallels to Erling’s own saga, as preserved in Heimskringla. They’re intriguing and (I must admit) a little troubling.
For instance, at one point Frithiof is offered the title of king, but refuses it because none of his ancestors were kings. Erling does that very thing, as you may recall from The Year of the Warrior. (Though Frithiof does accept a kingship at the end of the story.) Also, there’s an objection to Frithiof’s marrying Ingibiorg, because he doesn’t have high enough rank. Similar, again, to Erling’s story. Also, the line from the poem Bjarkamál, “Breast to breast the eagles will claw each other,” is quoted in both tales.
Then we’re told that Frithiof eventually came to rule Hordaland, the homeland of Erling’s own family. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Frithiof was one of Erling’s ancestors. It may well be that Snorri had Frithiof in mind when he wrote about Erling.
The Story of Frithiof the Bold is worth reading, though I’m not a great fan of the antique diction Magnusson and Morris employ. (I have to admit, though, that that gimmick allows them to use actual Old Norse words as archaisms from time to time.) Certainly, as in the 19th Century, it remains one of the most accessible saga tales.
“I don’t know. It’s a college in Minnesota. One of the boys I met on my trip to France is going there.”
“Minnesota,” he repeated, incredulous. “Please pass me a scone.”
“I’d like to see more of the world,” she said.
The exchange above is from a conversation between Tubby Dubonnet, hero of Shelter from the Storm, fourth book in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series, and one of his daughters. It’s typical of the droll quality of the dialogue in these books, though I mainly chose it because it’s a rare reference to Minnesota and a Norwegian-American school.
By the way, it’s “St. Olaf,” not “St. Olaf’s.” A typically Catholic mistake.
Anyway, in Shelter From the Storm, a Texas outlaw named LaRue has hired some local criminals in New Orleans to help him crack a bank safe deposit vault during Mardi Gras, when he figures no one will be paying a lot of attention. (He is correct in this.)
What he doesn’t expect is rain – not just ordinary rain, but a torrential monsoon that cancels parades and floods the streets and knocks out power in the city. When things go wrong, LaRue has a tendency to shoot people. One of the people he shoots happens to be a new legal client of Tubby Dubonnet’s, and Tubby takes that seriously. He can’t call the police because the phones are out and they’re kind of busy rescuing people, but he’ll chase the miscreants on his own. Even if it means neglecting the new girlfriend he’s met.
If that seems a little over the top, well, Tubby can surprise you sometimes. He’s a fairly lazy fellow, but he has spirit. These books are rich in quirky characters – a little too quirky for my taste sometimes, though amusing.
As I’ve said before, I don’t love the Tubby Dubonnet books, but I don’t hate them either. I have a fairly low threshold for quirkiness, and New Orleans isn’t really my kind of town.
I must also complain that Shelter from the Storm ended with a sort of a cliff-hanger, which is an offense in my code.
I’ve skipped a few episodes in Colin Conway’s excellent The 509 series of police procedurals. That was because The Only Death That Matters became available free. But they’re stand-alones, so it was all right. I enjoyed this book just as much as its predecessors.
Ray Christy is a police volunteer. He’s 72 and an army vet. Every day he visits his wife, who’s in a care facility for memory loss. His only son became a cop and died in the line of duty; Ray volunteered to help the Spokane police in an effort to understand his son’s commitment. He doesn’t carry a badge or a gun; he does routine work to take pressure off the real cops. It fills his time and gives his days a purpose.
One day he’s called to pick up a “found” item, a woman’s wallet found in a parking lot. On a whim, he decides to take it back to the owner, at the address on the ID. But when he gets there, he learns the woman is dead, drowned in a bathtub. This is a group home for the elderly, and the owner treats him rudely. Surprisingly, that owner is a cop.
Ray is immediately suspicious. He starts doing research on the man and his business dealings. And then everything blows up…
The 509 series, set in eastern Washington state, is a top-rank mystery series, in this reader’s view. Emphasis is heavily on character. The people in the story are faceted and relatable; I wanted to see how things worked out for them. Detectives Quinn and Burkett are here again, welcome like old friends.
The Only Death That Matters is highly recommended.
The other day I reviewed Machinations of a Murderer, by Peter Zander-Howell, a straight-up serious English police procedural mystery set in the 1940s. I enjoyed it immensely, and straightaway bought the first book in the series, The Bedroom Window Murder.
We meet our hero, Inspector Philip Bryce, as he drives to a country house in Hampshire along with his new partner, Sergeant Haig. In the classic tradition of British fiction, these two Scotland Yard detectives have been dispatched from London to investigate a baffling murder out of town. The justification for this official trip (which I understand never happens in real life), is that the victim, Sir Francis Sherwood, was a friend of their boss.
Sir Francis was found dead at his bedroom window, shot in the head by a .22 bullet. The problem that baffles the police is that there seems to be no one in the world – nobody – who hated Sir Francis. He was famously good to his employees, and as a magistrate he was notoriously lenient in sentencing. Everyone who knew him appears genuinely distraught at his death. A rifle found abandoned on the lawn appears to be the murder weapon, but to whom did it belong?
Solving that problem will involve a process of elimination – excluding the impossible, though (as Bryce emphasizes) identifying the impossible is often harder than Sherlock Holmes stories suggest. It will also give Inspector Bryce the opportunity to meet an attractive, available woman – who is, alas, also a suspect. The final resolution presented a moral problem for this reader, but a twist at the end made even that ambiguous.
I didn’t enjoy The Bedroom Window Murder quite as much as the Machinations book, but that’s because this is a classic country house mystery, and lacks the originality of MoaM. But it’s very good of its kind. It plays no modernist games and is faithful to its time and place.
For me, one educational benefit of this book was learning about a landscaping feature called a “ha-ha,” of which I’d never heard before. It’s a wall behind a recess in the earth, intended to block entry to a flower garden without cutting off the view.
A little while back I reviewed Cost of Arrogance, by H. Mitchell Caldwell. I found that novel delightful. It was a legal thriller composed with the authority of actual courtroom experience. Highly educational, and well-written to boot.
Could author Caldwell keep that standard up for a second novel, Cost of Deceit? We shall see.
Our hero, Jake Clearwater, teaches courtroom law at a small California university. Before that he was a successful prosecuting attorney. In the last book he was enticed out of the classroom to work the other side of the street – to defend a client on death row.
Now he gets an invitation to do a prosecution again. Lieutenant Cort, a sheriff’s officer, has been tried once already for the murder of his wife. He is known to be angry and brutal, and confesses to striking his wife at least once. According to the wife’s sister, he explicitly threatened her life. Then she disappeared, and no one has heard from her since. The prosecutors can work out a timeline for how Cort could have killed her. No one questions his capacity to kill her. But no body has been found. It’s notoriously difficult to get a conviction in a murder case in the absence of a corpse, so there was a hung jury. The county has decided to hold another trial, and they want Jake to prosecute. It will be during summer break, so he has time, and he can’t resist the challenge. Also, he watched the trial closely, and he wants to see this guy put away.
Over the course of the trial, Jake will come to care very much about the victim’s family, especially her distraught sister, but even about the hapless stripper Cort wants to use as an alibi. Their lives may be in danger if a way can’t be found to get this very dangerous man out of circulation.
I wish I could say Cost of Deceit was as good as the first book. But alas, no.
The first book did an excellent job of incorporating legal information into a well-realized story. Cost of Deceit is less successful. From time to time I got the feeling I was in the middle of one of those industrial training films, where people ask rote questions in such a way that the instructor can give the right answers at the proper place in the lesson plan. The prose was awkward in places too, this time out.
On the plus side, I was anticipating a big, overblown cinematic finale, but the climax was pretty realistic. I appreciated that.
Informational, but written with less care than the last book. Cautions for the usual stuff.
Another film project on which I worked as a script translator is now available in the US. War Sailor, a Norwegian film released last year (the most expensive movie ever made in Norway, I’m informed), has been expanded into a three-part miniseries for Netflix. I binged it last night and wish to recommend it to you.
After an opening set in Singapore after World War II, we go back to 1939 and observe our two main characters, Alfred (“Freddie”) and Sigbjørn (“Wally”). Freddie is a hard-working family man in Bergen, and Wally is his bachelor friend. Jobs are hard to find, and Wally encourages Freddie to join him in signing on to a merchant ship. Freddie’s wife Cecilia is concerned about the danger, as the war is going on, but Wally reassures her that they’re only going to New York. As both Norway and the US are neutral there’s minimal danger, he reasons. Anyway, he promises to keep Freddie safe.
By the time they reach New York, Germany has invaded and Norway is at war. The Norwegian government has nationalized the country’s merchant shipping (one of their major industries) and put it all at the disposal of the allies for carrying war munitions and supplies. The sailors are suddenly de facto members of the Navy (albeit unarmed), without the privilege of resigning.
What follows is a season in Hell. German U-boats are taking a desperate toll on the Norwegian ships (fully half of them were sunk over the course of the war) and casualties are high. Freddie takes an underaged sailor under his wing as a sort of surrogate son, and gives up a chance to escape from the service in order to protect the young man. When their ship is torpedoed, Freddie and Wally find themselves sharing a raft with a dying man and a madman.
Meanwhile, Freddie’s family at home is struggling to make ends meet, is worried sick about him, and is facing dangers of their own from Allied bombers. It all culminates in one of those bureaucratic snafus that start in mixed signals and end in ravaged lives.
It’s tempting to call the story a tragedy, but in fact it’s better described as aggravated irony. In the world of this war, virtue is never rewarded, and no good deed goes unpunished.
Brilliantly filmed, directed, and acted, War Sailor is not light entertainment. Be prepared for strong language, horrific violence, and dark themes. Not for the kids, but well worth watching for adults.
