Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Busman’s Honeymoon,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

Leave a comment

Dorothy L. Sayers initially intended to end her Lord Peter Wimsey series of mystery novels with Gaudy Night, in which Harriet Vane finally succumbs to Peter’s charm and agrees to marry him. But later she collaborated with Muriel St. Clare Byrne on a Wimsey play, called Busman’s Honeymoon. In the play, the honeymoon is interrupted by the discovery of a murdered body, to the couple’s frustration and some interesting character revelation.

Later Sayers turned the play into a novel. It’s not considered one of the best of the series, but it has virtues that make it well worth reading.

The story opens with a series of letters written by various characters, describing the wedding and its initial aftermath. Harriet has confided to Peter’s mother that she always wanted to live in a particular house she used to visit as a child, in a village in Hertfordshire. Peter has delightedly bought it for her, and he and his man Bunter have arranged for the house to be ready for their occupation when they show up on the wedding night.

However, they find the house locked and uninhabited, and none of the servants were expecting them. At last they get in, make shift to set up in spite of inconveniences like blocked chimneys, and consummate their marriage. The next morning the missing former owner is found – bludgeoned to death in the cellar.

The local police superintendent takes to Wimsey immediately, being, like him, devoted to collecting literary allusions for insertion into conversation. Lord Peter can’t resist involving himself in the mystery. They will encounter a collection of local eccentrics, all with various motives for wanting the victim dead, but with either insufficient motivations or solid alibis. The final solution will prove to involve a genuine scoundrel and a baffling murder weapon.

The story gets slow in some stretches, especially in what I assume (it’s been a while since I read it) the added scenes not found in the play. The great virtue of the book, in my opinion, is the section at the end where Peter suffers a PTSD reaction as the murderer’s execution hour approaches, and Harriet comforts him.

Recommended. I also think some Christian college ought to stage the original play some time. I wish I’d gotten the chance to play Lord Peter when I was young and thin.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Beast,’ by Paul Kingsnorth

Leave a comment

I want to like Paul Kingsnorth, the critically acclaimed English author who has recently converted to Romanian Orthodox Christianity. So I have read and reviewed the first novel of his trilogy, The Wake. And I have now read Beast, the second book. I’ll be honest – it’s a challenge.

In my not-critically-acclaimed novel, Troll Valley, I created (and killed off) a pretentious young novelist who insisted on reading aloud his manuscript, in which the main character describes being in darkness and silence, doing nothing, for pages on end. I was reminded of that character as I read Beast. I’ll admit more happened here than in my parody story, but still it was a challenge for a middle-brow reader.

This book, unlike the first of the trilogy, is set in the present (apparently). The main character, who we learn is named Edward Buckmaster (thus probably a descendent of Buccmaster, the hero of The Wake), has apparently run away from his wife and daughter to spend time living in a shack in the wilderness, pursuing a spiritual quest for meaning.

A storm damages the hut and leaves Edward with amnesia. And probably delusional. Through a stream of consciousness narrative, we follow him trying to find out where he is and who he is, and hunting for the only other living thing he can find in his world, a black panther.

I have some vague idea what this book is about, but I couldn’t really say for sure. I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

I’m going to finish the third book of the trilogy, Alexandria. Maybe it will illuminate its forerunners. If not, I’ll admire Kingsnorth as one of those authors who’s too smart for me.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Great Clippers,’ by Jane D. Lyon

Leave a comment

During the early 19th Century, a class of ships called packets sailed all over the world, carrying goods and passengers at ever faster speeds. Eventually, ship designers made discoveries in hull configuration and rigging that made it possible to carry larger cargoes faster than anyone had thought possible. Thus were the clippers born, first with the special purpose of facilitating the tea trade to China, later servicing the gold fields of California and Australia. British and American ship builders competed in improving this technology, but the Americans always dominated. Their black hulled ships with snowy white clouds of sails were familiar sights all over the globe, until the steam ship inevitably replaced them.

Jane D. Lyon has produced an excellent introduction to the age of the clippers in The Great Clippers. It’s almost perfect of its type – not too long and very well-written. I learned things from this book and enjoyed reading it.

The Great Clippers requires no long review. I’m glad I bought it. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Echo from the Past,’ by Hervey Copeland

Leave a comment

I figured I’d need to download at least one extra book so I’d have reading material during my Norway trip. As it was, I didn’t have a lot of time for reading, and the book I was on, The Wake (reviewed yesterday) was pretty slow going. But I got to The Echo from the Past on my trip home. It was nice to read a book that featured places I’d visited just days before. But beyond that, this was a disappointing read.

Craig McMillan is an unemployed English journalist and hobby sailor. He’s running out of cash, so he’s interested when an acquaintance tells him he can earn a good amount of money transporting a passenger to Norway. The passenger plans to enter the country unofficially, but Craig is assured that he’s not carrying drugs or wanted by the police. Still, anyone who’s ever watched a Noir film knows that no good can come from a deal like this.

As it turns out, the weather in the North Sea turns tempestuous, and Craig wants to turn back. At that point his passenger, who’s been affable up till now, pulls a gun on him and tells him to sail on. They barely make it to Norway, and the passenger sails away in a rubber inflatable boat. Craig plans on staying in the country for a while and sightseeing, in order to establish his cover story for the police.

But then he learns that his passenger has turned up dead, his throat cut. Then a man with a gunshot wound shows up on his deck. Craig wants to take him to the hospital, but the man says no. He needs to get out of the country as soon as possible. He tells Craig an incredible story about Nazi gold and modern corruption and betrayal.

Craig’s investigative instincts are aroused, but he will find himself up against powerful and ruthless enemies.

The problem with The Echo from the Past was amateurish writing. The author talks too much. He tries to lay everything out for the reader, not trusting their intelligence. Take a sentence like: “It meant that there wouldn’t be any prying eyes sticking their noses in things that were of no concern to them.” Aside from the mixed metaphor, that sentence could be reduced by half and be much more effective. This is a book by someone who has never learned to prune his prose.

Also I found the ending implausible. I don’t recommend The Echo from the Past.

I might mention, however, that the language was pretty subdued. Not much profanity. I’ll say that in its defense.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cocktail Time’: A Novel about the Novel ‘Cocktail Time’

1 Comment

“There’s nothing like getting married. It’s the only life, as Brigham Young and King Solomon would tell you, if they were still with us.”

When Lord Frederick Ickenham is inspired to humble his friend, barrister Sir Raymond Bastable, by knocking off his hat with a Brazil nut, he cannot know Bastable will go on to write the best-selling novel Cocktail Time in response. But then he does suggest the idea to him the next day in the vein of, “This would be the thing to do, but you could never do it, could you? Of course not.”

Bastable takes that suggestion as a gauntlet thrown and channels all of his anger about modern young men of mid-1950s English society into a novel bitterly entitled “Cocktail Time,” because that’s all today’s youth are good for. And, boy, does he put passion into it. He compares it to Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, a romance banned as pornography in fourteen U.S. states. If the voting public knew he had written a novel like this, his hopes for a political would be over, so it has to go out under a pseudonym.

As soon as you start hiding things in a Wodehouse novel, you’re in for trouble. Cocktail Time is the third of four books starring the fifth Earl of Ickenham, Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, or Pongo Twistleton’s Uncle Fred. It’s jolly fun. Will the world learn who really wrote Cocktail Time? Will Bastable’s sister Pheobe be able to do anything with her social blight of a son? Will Johnny Pearce, owner of Hammer Lodge, work out his money troubles, particularly being able to show his housekeeper the door? You’ll have to find out yourself.

It helps to have read more about Uncle Fred prior to this, because while this gently aged fellow takes up a slingshot (or “catapult” as the English say it) and knocks off the hat of a proud, old stuffed shirt he has long known in chapter one, without having read previous stories, you wouldn’t know how Uncle Fred is capable of impersonating just about any type of person alive and perhaps also parrots.

At the start of chapter eight, after introducing Carlisle, a con artist who would cause trouble for the weaker minded of the cast, Uncle Fred shares a cab with him on their way to the same residence, and I immediately felt the marvelous potential of the two professional impersonators together. The sparks flew.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wake,’ by Paul Kingsnorth

Leave a comment

now in this small holt by bacstune locan at the treows i was thincan that these frenc they wolde gif all these things other names. i was locan at an ac treow and i put my hand on its great stocc and i was thincan the ingengas will haf another name for this treow, it had seemed to me that this treow was anglisc as the ground it is grown from anglisc as we who is grown also from that ground. but if the frenc cums and tacs this land and gifs these treows sum frenc name they will not be the same treows no mor. it colde be that to erce this treow will be the same that it will haf the same leafs the same rind but to me it will be sum other thing that is not mine sum thing ingenga of what i can no longer spec

If the snippet above, from Paul Kingsnorth’s eccentric novel, The Wake, seems difficult to read, rest assured it’s supposed to be difficult. The author has made the decision to write in something like the language and orthography of an actual 11th Century document. This provides a sense of authenticity at the expense of comprehension. If you’ve studied a Germanic language, as I have, reading it will be a little easier. But I suppose any English reader can comprehend most of it with a little work.

Buccmaster of Holland (a place in England, not the Netherlands) is a stubborn and self-willed English peasant farmer at the time of the Norman conquest. He’s jealous of his status (a socman with three oxgangs), brooks no contradiction from his wife or sons, and holds tenaciously to the old, pre-Christian English heathenism.

When the wapontake is raised to recruit men to fight, first King Harald Hardrada in York, and later William the Conqueror in the south, he refuses to go himself, because he sees nothing in it for him. This leads, ultimately to the loss of everything he has. So he flees into the wilderness to be a “green man,” a rebel and an outlaw, to fight the invaders. He gathers a small group of fellow outcasts, and lords it over them as if he were the great man he believes himself to be. And all the while he is listening to the voices of the old gods, whose messages are infuriatingly vague.

Ultimately, we will learn Buccmaster’s secrets, which are ugly and tragic and make the story a rather different one from what he – and the reader – have believed it to be.

The Wake is a book that requires some wrestling, in various ways. I’m not sure if I’d go on to read the second book, but I already paid for the third one, so I guess I’d better see it through. The author has recently converted to Christianity, and it will be interesting to see what effect that pilgrimage may have had on this unusual trilogy.

Fiction, Reviews

That Hideous Strength – ‘The Educated Reader Can Be Gulled’

4 Comments

That Hideous Strength is the third of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the first two books being Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. One of my friends recommended it as a suitable stand-alone, and we read it together as a group. I have since listened to Out of the Silent Planet and understand the gist of Perelandra, but while they expand and explain That Hideous Strength, they each have somewhat self-contained stories. In fact, one of us noted you could strip this story of its fantasy gods and planetary symbolism and it would remain intact, lacking only a magical framework for the weird stuff. That framework is explored in the first two books and brought to bear in the third.

The story develops slowly to give us time to understand our central characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, both educated, progressively minded people. Mark wants to be an insider, an opinion-maker or influential voice within Bracton College. Jane wants to be her own woman–married, of course, but equal to and independent of her husband. In chapter one, we see her chafe at what her life, marriage, and career had become. Mark doesn’t begin to chafe at his circumstances until much later, when it appears his wife is a hinderance to his career as a high ranking official of the NICE (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments).

If you know anything about the story, you know something of the trouble caused by NICE. They aim to rewrite the world. They bring Mark in initially to write stories for distribution in diverse publications in order to smooth the way for them, and it takes him a while to understand the point.

PanBooks cover of "That Hideous Strength"

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

In his preface, Lewis frames his story as a “fairy tale,” and “a ‘tall story’ about devilry”–a fictional take on the thinking that went into another of his books, The Abolition of Man. If you have not read that book, taking it up before reading That Hideous Strength will likely help draw out its meaning and dramatic imagery.

You could say this book is about marriage, because that tension between Mark and Jane runs throughout. You could say it’s a book on the gloriously mythological roots of Great Britain; Arthur, Merlin, and Atlantis all figure in heavily. But the main theme begins with the quote above–that educated people will believe anything.

Experts, who may be rather immature human beings while still highly skilled in their field, can and do cause great harm to society. They acquire authority and use it for their own ends, perhaps compassionately to a point, perhaps with good intentions, but those ‘who know best’ will eventually force the best down our throats in the name of progress.

This danger could come from many sides; many people and institutions undermine the values they profess. Every one of us must seek the light while it can still be found.

Photo by Niklas Weiss on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Poor Dead Cricket,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

Leave a comment

W. Glenn Duncan’s Rafferty series, about a tough Dallas private eye back before the turn of this century, is not my favorite hard-boiled series by far. Think of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, then move him to Dallas, give him a gun-happy cowboy buddy instead of a black gangster type, and reduce his intelligence and wit by about 25%, and you’ve got Rafferty. But the books are entertaining enough to keep me interested, and refreshingly un-Woke.

In Poor Dead Cricket, Rafferty is hired by an obscure environmentalist group to investigate the death of one of their informants, Sandra “Cricket” Dawes. Cricket was apparently killed by a mugger in her apartment’s parking lot. Crime of opportunity, no arrest likely. But the environmentalists insist she was in the process of delivering secret files she stole from a nuclear power company employer, documents that could blow the lid off dangerous practices in handling fissionable materials. They think the company killed her. They also want those files, if Rafferty can find them.

Rafferty isn’t much impressed with the environmentalists, whom he considers shallow headline-chasers, and he doesn’t even like much what he learns about Cricket. But she’s dead, and nobody seems very concerned about her as a person. So Rafferty gets to work.

Lots of switches and surprises, a couple gunfights, and a pretty neat final twist. I enjoyed Poor Dead Cricket, and recommend it for light reading. Only minor cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Manual of Detection,’ by Jedediah Berry

Leave a comment

On Suspects

They will present themselves to you first as victims, as allies, as eyewitnesses. Nothing should be more suspicious to the detective than the cry for help, the helping hand, or the helpless onlooker. Only if someone has behaved suspiciously should you allow for the possibility of his innocence.

Charles Unwin, hero of The Manual of Detection, is not a detective, but a clerk. He works for a famous detective agency and has the honor of being the clerk entrusted with documenting the cases of Travis Sivart, the greatest detective in the world. Charles is fussy and punctilious, leading an utterly conventional and predictable life in an unnamed city where it’s always raining, and the historical period is ambivalent.

But recently he has changed his routine. Instead of going straight to the office in the morning, he makes a detour to the Central Station, where a young woman in a plaid coat stands every morning waiting for someone who never arrives. Charles fears the day when that person does show up, and he’ll be unable to see her anymore.

One day when he goes to work, he gets a shock. He has been promoted. Detective Sivart has disappeared, and Charles has been named his replacement. This is absurd. Charles is the least qualified person in the world to be a detective. Still, he wants Sivart to come back, so things can go back to normal. So the first case he tackles is Sivart’s disappearance.

Also, the woman in the plaid coat turns out to be his replacement as clerk. He can’t talk to her though, because detectives and clerks are not allowed to socialize.

In his feckless way, Charles will gradually uncover bizarre facts about the bizarre world in which he lives. About old crimes supposed to be closed, and the derelict carnival down by the river, and hypnotism and a criminal mastermind, about the lost final chapter of The Manual of Detection, and about the third, secret division of the detective agency.

I’m told The Manual of Detection is reminiscent of Jose Luis Borges, an author I’ve always been meaning to get around to. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, crossed with A Winter’s Tale. In any case it was inventive and amusing, and I read it with great enjoyment. Beautifully written.

Recommended.

Music, Reviews

Streaming review: ‘Runestone! A Rock Musical’

1 Comment

I went together with a friend to stream the Minnesota Historical Society’s production of Runestone! A Rock Musical on Saturday. This review will be entirely useless to you, because the show’s run is now finished, but I figured I’d report on it anyway, for the benefit of future generations. And also to fill blog space.

The production is a fairly low-budget affair, presented on a circular stage (but not theater in the round – the audience sat in front). A screen behind the actors, for most of the program, concealed the band members. Costumes and staging were minimal – the men tended to wear suspenders or vests, to suggest 19th Century clothing, and a few props were set up to suggest settings – including, oddly, a tractor to indicate the farm, though the main character died well before such vehicles became common. A small cast filled the roles, most of them playing more than one (this was exaggerated in the performance that was streamed, as a couple actors were missing. Other actors filled their parts “on book,” sometimes crossing gender lines).

The production opened with a mealy-mouthed statement from the director or somebody, which included a groveling declaration of their profound awareness of the fact that they were standing on stolen land, and declaring their commitment to the goal of “decolonization.” I’m not entirely sure what decolonization means in real life. I’m inclined to think it means genocide.

The drama goes on to portray Swedish-American farmer Olaf Ohman and his son in 1898, as they discover a carved stone buried in the roots of a tree on their farm near Kensington, Minnesota. The local banker persuades Olaf to display the stone in the bank window, and rhapsodizes about the possibility of making Kensington a tourist destination. Preliminary statements from Minnesota historians tend to support the stone’s authenticity, and spirits are high, until a Norwegian scholar dismisses the whole thing as a hoax.

At this point the actors switch to an alternate narrative, describing how Ohman, the banker, and a neighbor could have colluded to create the stone simply as an exercise in “rural humor,” meant to trick the city folks and have a laugh at their expense.

Now Ohman becomes a pariah, a subject of ridicule. He takes the stone back home with him and tries to forget it all until he’s approached by the writer Hjalmar Holand (they pronounce “Hjalmar” wrong), who takes possession of the stone (there’s some disagreement about whether Ohman sold it to him or not), and turns it into his own meal ticket, giving many lectures and writing several popular books. This leads to a final break between Ohman and Holand.

The production seems to lack any interest in making a judgment on the question of authenticity. This is fair, I suppose, and certainly prudent in a state where feelings still run high on both sides in some circles. But it’s also kind of cowardly, and makes the production more a documentary than a work of art. I might mention that the “flashback” scenes depicting the voyage of the Norsemen who may have carved the stone feature very tacky costumes including crude horned helmets. This obscures the important fact that these men (if they ever existed) were 14th Century Scandinavian Christians who’d probably have been offended to be called Vikings. If Vikings ever wore horned helmets. WHICH THEY DID NOT!

I’ve always been touchy about urban productions portraying country people (I hated the Andy Griffith Show and Green Acres back in the day). So it may mean nothing that I found the portrayals here arch and sometimes borderline insulting.

The music was not memorable. This was no Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar. None of the songs lingered in the mind. Sasha Andrews did a pretty good job portraying Ohman. But all in all, I found Runestone! A Rock Musical unimpressive.