Happy Thanksgiving, Brandywinians. I wish there were more good hymns of thanks. Though there are probably ones that have slipped my mind.
In any case, this is the hymn of thanks they liked best at my church when I was a kid. “Thanks to God for My Redeemer,” by August Ludvig Storm (1862-1914), a Swedish Salvation Army officer.
I always found it a little disappointing, because the translation is weak. Still, my dad and my grandparents would have loved to hear it.
For some years I’ve been a fan of Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, one of the oddest sites on the internet. Well, just look at it. The humor is the driest of the dry; the sort of thing you either get or you don’t. I don’t always get it, but I enjoy checking to see what’s new each day.
Dr. Boli writes books too. I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of them, so I figured I’d try his newest, The Emperor. It’s rather different from the others.
When I was in college, I encountered a couple of old novels (Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas comes to mind) in which older writer/philosophers told fantastic stories of princes in old times and distant lands as a means to comment on their own times and politics. The Emperor seemed like that kind of story to me at first, but I think I was wrong. Maybe.
The Emperor is a young man, orphaned as a boy, who has lived under the guidance of the Consul and the Tribune most of his life. The empire he rules seems to be Roman, in an alternate world where Rome never fell. The geography doesn’t match our world, but the Christian religion seems to be pretty much the same. They have been at war with an enemy for hundreds of years, and the Sultan (who worships Apollyon and dwells just across the strait) is their most faithful vassal.
The young Emperor is beginning to chafe at the many restrictions that hedge his life around. Every moment of his day is scheduled, every action choreographed. He is never alone. His future is determined – he will marry a princess who was sired by the Sultan expressly for that purpose, once she grows old enough. Any suggestion he makes that it might be a good idea to visit his domains or oversee the war is argued down. The Emperor, it is explained, needs to keep the Empire stable through performing his regular duties in the safety of the Palace.
His only escape (or so he thinks) is at night, when the orchestra that serenades him finally leaves – because he pretends to sleep – and he slips out a window to visit an ancient ruin. One night he gets lost and wanders into an unfamiliar part of the palace grounds. There he meets a young servant woman named Pulchrea, scrubbing a floor. The Emperor immediately falls in love with her, and the rest of the story involves him testing his strength of will against those of the Consul and the Tribune, in order to win the freedom to do what he really wants.
But only at the very end does he learn the Big Secret.
I’m not sure what to say about The Emperor. It started slow – the author indulged himself too long in setting the scene; his character’s constrained life and discontent could have been established much more efficiently. Modern readers won’t generally put up with too much stage-setting. The story was interesting once it finally got going. I’m not sure what to think of the ending.
I’m of two minds about The Emperor. You might try it out if it sounds interesting to you; it’s not expensive in Kindle format.
I had run out of bargain books that I’d picked up through online deals, and noticed a Harry Bauer book by Blake Banner. And I thought, “I haven’t read a Banner for a while. I wonder why I stopped following him?” A check of my past reviews gave no clue, so I bought LA: Wild Justice, the 7th installment in the series. It proved entertaining in a popcorn movie way, but I also was reminded why I’d given Harry a rest.
Harry Bauer is a professional assassin working for an ultra-secret agency called Cobra. His bosses call him in for an assignment: they want him to kill a saint. The saint in question is Sen. Charles Cavendish, a billionaire who famously bankrolls a number of much-needed relief organizations around the Third World. He feeds the hungry, provides clean water, cares for the sick, etc.
In fact, according to Harry’s bosses, he operates those charities only as a blind. The entrée he gets to many corrupt countries permits him to sell drugs, arms, and chemical weapons to some of the world’s worst actors – including Harry’s worst enemy in the world.
But Harry has hardly begun his job when one of his bosses is kidnapped. Now it’s a race against time to complete the sanction and rescue his friend.
Harry is a hero very much in the James Bond mold – and I mean the movie Bond, not the one in the Fleming books. He effortlessly subdues very formidable enemies, even in groups – until the plot points call for a dramatic setback. He suffers traumatic injuries and just fights on. Pain barely slows him.
LA: Wild Justice was fun, mindless entertainment. What annoyed me – and this is probably why I dropped the series before – is that the author likes to leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. That just annoys me. Stand-alone books should wrap up the main plot. There can be larger, ongoing plots over a series of books, but you owe it to the reader tie up the threads on the main problem in the volume in hand.
Still, an entertaining book. Moderately recommended. I’m likely to read the next eventually.
A friend gave me a copy of Cat Jarman’s River Kings out of the blue, and I read it with great interest. I wasn’t always comfortable with the book, but it does very well in the job the author (a Scandinavian-English archaeologist) sets out to do. I believe its sales have been successful, and it deserves them.
The story begins with a nice narrative “hook” – a carnelian bead found in excavations at a Viking burial site in Repton, England. Carnelian is a semi-precious stone that was popular among the Vikings (especially with Viking women) and was imported from India. That is a long road to come by, and Dr. Jarman follows that road – through known evidence and speculation – to show how the great Viking trade system passed through England to the Baltic, down through Russia to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea region, eventually linking up with sources of carnelian. At each step along the way she describes how people and objects moved, how the world worked, and what social and economic forces impelled trade. She has the professional ability to provide many fascinating details of Viking Age life, and I benefited from reading this book.
My sole real quibble is purely a subjective one. As a woman of the 21st Century, the author looks everywhere for evidence of women’s activity and influence, as well as for signs of what we call today “cultural diversity.” She finds them and emphasizes them.
This is perfectly fair. I do the same in my own studies, though I’m looking for different things. If I disagree with her on some points, she’s the one with the credentials, so the burden’s on me. And I have to admit, she provided evidence I wasn’t aware of on the touchy subject of women warriors. I’m still skeptical about them, but the other side’s argument is stronger than I thought.
I recommend River Kings. It is informative, interesting, and well-written.
When I really like a book, I like to post a snippet of good prose from the text up above my reviews, just to give the reader a taste. Oddly, I didn’t find any snippets in Racing the Light, Robert Crais’s 19th Elvis Cole novel, though I was much impressed with the writing. I guess what I appreciated was the effectiveness of the narrative, its efficiency and power, rather than any storyteller’s flourishes.
Elvis Cole, Los Angeles private eye, contemporary Philip Marlowe in a Hawaiian shirt, gets a drop-in visitor in his office. It’s an elderly woman named Adele Schumacher. She wears very inexpensive clothes, but on the other hand she has two armed security guards escorting her.
As best as Elvis can figure out, the woman’s a crackpot. She raves about government wiretapping, and drone surveillance, and aliens at Area 51. But she has a big envelope full of cash, and she offers Elvis whatever he wants to locate her son Josh, who has disappeared.
Elvis is ambivalent, but he agrees to at least look into it. He finds that Josh is the host of a podcast. Most of the time his subject matter is UFOs and that sort of thing, but lately he’s been talking to a porn star who claims to have explosive information about the real estate shenanigans of a number of city council members. And they, in turn, have connections to Chinese criminals. It appears that Josh was wise to drop out of sight. But he’s in way over his head, and he’s going to need a friend to protect him.
Meanwhile, Elvis has gotten a call from Lucy Chenier, the love of his life, who left him a few books back to return to Baton Rouge with her son. Life with Elvis was too dangerous, she said. She had her boy to protect. But now she wants to talk. Elvis dares to hope, but is prepared for disappointment.
What I liked best about Racing the Light was the characters and relationships. There was a lot of wisdom here about families and friends, and learning to trust and take risks.
Highly recommended. Elvis’ dangerous friend Joe Pike is around too, which is always fun.
The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this—into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.
Another deal on a Travis McGee e-novel by John D. MacDonald pops up, and it is for me but the work of a moment to seize on it and make it my own. This one is Dress Her in Indigo, one of the most memorable installments, I think, in that memorable hard-boiled series. It poses certain challenges for me in reviewing it in this space. This is one of the books, in a series where sex is not infrequent, in which sex is particularly central. The book is an interesting artifact in that it arises from that moment in social history when the Swingin’ Sixties were morphing into the Hippie Era, and will be useful to future historians, if only as an expression of its time.
In general, Travis McGee, “salvage specialist,” makes his living finding lost money and property for people. But this job is different. His best friend, the ursine, affable economist known only as Meyer, asks him to help him do a favor for another friend.
T. Harlan Bowie is an investment counselor who grew very rich almost inadvertently, and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife died not long ago, leaving him with an adult daughter he barely knew. The girl, “Bix,” was extremely beautiful and a very lost soul. A while back she headed off to Mexico with some friends in a camper, and now word has come that she died in an auto accident on a mountain road. All T. Harlan wants is to find out is what her life was like down there. Was she happy? Did she have good friends?
McGee has a bad feeling about this job from the outset, but he and Meyer set out for Oaxaca, her last known address. What they discover leaves them wondering whether they should just lie to the old man. Because Bix’s circle of friends were not nice people at all. They were involved in drug dealing and drug smuggling, and some pretty kinky sex games too. And murder, in the end.
But wait, it gets worse. The big secret is yet to be discovered, and when it is, McGee will be faced with one of the most difficult moral decisions he’ll ever have to make.
But back to the sex. Travis McGee is very far from being a role model, especially for the Christian reader. And one of the most interesting aspects of this book is a stark – comic in places – contrast that’s set up between his experiences in the sack (well-written without being explicit) with one woman who is extremely seductive and experienced, and another woman who is relatively innocent (at least by comparison). Spoiler alert: the innocent one comes out way ahead. If one were to think this out to the end, it might lead to possible arguments for lifetime monogamy, but of course no such argument is made here. Let the reader understand.
Anyway, Dress Her in Indigo is one of MacDonald’s best. Recommended, with cautions as noted above.
A deal came up for a Louis L’Amour book on Kindle, and I thought, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read L’Amour. I really dug him, way back when I was in radio. Let’s see how he holds up.”
Sadly, for this reader, Monument Rock didn’t stack up all that well.
The book is actually a collection – six short stories plus the novel, Monument Rock, which is the final installment in the “Kilkenny” series. This volume is billed as the final published collection of previously unpublished L’Amour western stories.
I was a bit disappointed. My first complaint was the seemingly formulaic quality of the stories. Each of them (at least in memory) was built on the same basic plot – a mysterious, dangerous stranger rides into town (or onto the ranch), where bad guys are doing bad things. Often a woman is threatened. Often the stranger has a secret connection to the place, to be revealed at the end. The stranger (who is exactly like all the other stranger heroes in all the stories) is dangerous and fast with a gun, and can’t be intimidated. The climax is a shootout, where he triumphs.
Of course, there’s a reason narrative formulas exist. They work. It’s just that when you clump them all together like this, the upholstery looks a little threadbare.
Also, the writing wasn’t as good as I hoped. L’Amour was a great storyteller, but he wasn’t a top wordsmith. (I suppose I’ve become a literary snob in my old age.)
The final novel, Monument Rock, pleased me more than the stories. The longer form provided scope for some narrative variety.
There’s nothing really wrong with Monument Rock. L’Amour fans will enjoy it.
As Northumbria’s lord, Eric Håkonsson continued to use the Norse title of jarl, and this was the first time the title was used in England. It eventually came to replace the Anglo-Saxon title of ealdorman, and continues to be used in England today in its current form—“earl”.
It’s amazing to me that just when I’m mapping out my epic novel about Erling Skjalgsson and Saint Olaf Haraldsson, an invaluable book on this very subject shows up. Divine appointment? Maybe, but I try to confine my personal grandiosity to self-mockery. However it is, Tore Skeie’s book, The Wolf Age, is just what I was looking for, not to mention being an excellent popular historical work in its own right.
The epistemological elephant in the room in any book dealing with the North Sea region in the period under discussion (in particular the reigns of Aethelred the Unready, Svein Forkbeard, and Knut the Great in England, and the two Olafs in Norway) is the question of the reliability of the Icelandic sagas, our sole source of information for much of Norwegian history at the time. Author Skeie tries not to trust the sagas too much, yet the story doesn’t veer far from them either. The book actually begins by talking about Snorri Sturlusson, author of Heimskringla, the sagas of the Norse kings, in order to provide perspective.
Much has been written over the years about the dramatic events leading up to the Norman conquest in 1066. But the tale of the Knut Sveinsson’s Danish conquest is equally fascinating, and arguably more dramatic. It teems with interesting, enigmatic, maddening characters, fateful accidents, and tragic decisions. I suppose it’s only because the Danish dynasty didn’t last that attention has turned away from it.
I was surprised to note that King (later saint) Olaf Haraldsson, about whom we don’t know a lot for certain (especially if you exclude the sagas), still comes off as the most intriguing character in the book. This is similar to my own experience in research.
The book is full of useful information that will be of great benefit to me. But anyone interested in Viking Age history will also learn much. There are details I might disagree with. The author states categorically that the men who rowed Viking ships wore rowing gloves – I’m not sure how he knows that for sure. He states that infant baptism wasn’t generally practiced in Norway in Olaf Trygvesson’s time – I find that dubious. He suggests Erling Skjalgsson wasn’t even present at the battle of Nesjar. I doubt that too.
But all in all, The Wolf Age is a treasure trove. It was a relatively fast read, and well translated. I highly recommend it.
She made a movement then—just a small one, very subtle. A little nod of the head while her hand tugged gently at the edge of her skirt. That was all. But to Winter it was clearly suggestive of a curtsey, a gesture so ladylike and anachronistic that it seemed to strike clean through him like a saber thrust. When she returned to her table to gather her overcoat and her purse, he felt as if she had left a jagged hole of loneliness at the center of him, front to back.
The paragraph above is as good a description of a certain male experience (one of our nobler ones) as I’ve ever read. Which is just the kind of writer Andrew Klavan is. He’s the best at what he does. We American conservatives (and Christians) aren’t worthy of his talent.
But be that as it may, we are the happy recipients of another book in Klavan’s Cameron Winter series, which is cause for rejoicing. The first Cameron Winter book, When Christmas Comes, was released around this time last year, and it floored me. I prayed there’d be more, and A Strange Habit of Mind, just released, is my Christmas miracle for 2022.
Cameron Winter, you may recall, is an English professor at a college in an unnamed midwestern state. (I was pretty sure it was Indiana while reading the last book, but we learn now that it borders Minnesota, so I’m guessing Wisconsin.) He’s independently wealthy and working at a job he loves, but he’s also lonely and depressed.
So he sees a psychologist, an older woman. To her he confides the causes of his depression and isolation. Partly they come from his tragic childhood, but much of it is due to his previous career. He used to work for an organization called the Division, which trained him to be an assassin. Not like in the movies. Their methods were far more subtle than the silenced pistol or the garotte in the dark. They knew ways to destroy people by exploiting their personal hungers and weaknesses, and to kill them in ways that looked like natural death, or accidents.
Cam recently got a text from a former student who’s been living in San Francisco. Just two words – “Help me.” Cam called back immediately, but got no reply.
Later he learns that the young man threw himself off the roof of his apartment building shortly after sending the text. Cam is troubled and looks into it. The young man had left school under a cloud, and his subsequent history said little for his character. A drug dealer. A girlfriend abuser. Really, he was no loss to the world.
But Cam can’t let it go, for some reason. He has, as he tells his counselor, “a strange habit of mind,” a gift that was useful to him in his work for the Division. When he ponders an event, his mind unconsciously reorganizes data, enabling him often to discern underlying crimes. And as he looks into the student’s world, he finds that the girlfriend he beat up just happens to be a sister to Molly Byrne, “the Cinderella girl,” the woman who married Gerald Byrne, the richest, most powerful man in the world. (Think Jeff Zuckerberg, but crazier and with more power.)
That leads him into Byrne’s personal history, and a pattern begins to emerge. People who hurt people Byrne cares about tend to have bad accidents. Not only that, but people who oppose Byrne’s social and political causes tend to suffer similar fates.
And something else is plain to Cam. These are exactly the kind of “accidents” he and his colleagues in the Division used to orchestrate. And now, with a few more strategic deaths, nothing will stand in the way of Byrne fundamentally transforming the global order.
So the showdown is inevitable – Cameron Winter vs. the Most Powerful Man in the World.
There wasn’t a moment of slack in this plot. I was riveted from the first page to the last. Not only that, but the bare act of reading was a pleasure, because the prose was so perfect, so evocative and satisfying, like a delicious meal. I may read it again soon, just to savor it.
I recommend A Strange Habit of Mind as highly as is humanly possible. Thanks, Andrew Klavan.
My relationship with the Nordic Noir genre, as you may recall, is troubled. Though I’m generally a Scandinavian booster, I have my pet hatreds (Ibsen and Stieg Larsson, to name a couple), and I’m cold to Nordic mysteries overall (except for Jørn Lier Horst’s Wisting, probably because I worked on two seasons of the TV miniseries). I’ve read one of Kjell Ola Dahl’s Oslo Detectives books before, and didn’t care for it a lot. I found it depressing and distasteful. But I bought Little Drummer on a whim (it was on sale), and I liked this one a little better.
Lise Fagernes is an Oslo newspaper reporter. She finds herself, to her shock, part of a news story herself when she discovers a woman’s body in a car in a parking garage. The police consider the death an accidental overdose, as the fatal needle is right there. But one of the brass, on a hostile whim, assigns the case to his enemy, Inspector Gunnarstranda. And Gunnarstranda, on a hunch, asks for a toxicology test. Turns out it wasn’t an accidental overdose after all. The woman was chloroformed before being injected.
Together with his partner, Frank Frøhlich, Gunnarstranda starts looking into the woman’s background. Turns out she was friends with a student from Kenya who has just been reported missing. When he proves to have fled the country, Frøhlich will have to travel to Africa. There he encounters Lise, who’s still on the story. They circle each other warily before forming a temporary alliance – both in business and personal terms.
The case will lead to international medical conglomerates, African relief, and the general fecklessness and corruption of Western aid to the Third World.
About the highest praise I can give to a Nordic Noir novel is that it didn’t make me want to kill myself. Little Drummer was better than most in that regard. But it was hardly cheery, and I suspect the political underpinnings are anti-capitalist.
Still, not bad, and the translation is good. Cautions for the usual.