Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Haymaker in Heaven,’ by Edvard Hoem

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As the midges devoured them, they hummed and sang, and worked harder. They wandered like flocks of singers on their way toward some destination. In truth, it was more a lamentation than a song because the midges bit so terribly. And you needed two hands on your scythe. As in a pilgrimage, great peace attended them when they finished.

Of all the pilgrimage paths our Lord prepared, the one that runs through hay is the most beautiful. You pace with the scythe until you reach the neighbor’s fence, then you walk back. That route is the Lord’s way. The midges are a work of the devil.

Up until now, the greatest novel about the Norwegian immigration to America has been Ole Rolvaag’s Giants In the Earth. (It used to be kind of a big deal. I don’t know if anyone reads it anymore, except for my ethnic group.) I haven’t read GITE since college, but as I recall it, it’s depressing in a very Norwegian way. Everybody is unhappy until they die.

Now there’s a new great novel in translation about what we call the Innvandring – Edvard Hoem’s Haymaker in Heaven. I’m happy to report that, on top of being lyrical and captivating, it’s also somewhat less oppressive in tone than Rolvaag’s book. Wodehouse it ain’t, but it’s a brighter journey.

Knut Hansen Nesje is a poor cotter in Norway in the second half of the 19th Century, a widower with one son. Everyone just calls him “Nesje.” His great point of pride is that he’s the head haymaker on the big estate in the neighborhood. He works hard and long and with skill, taking pride in his work. When he’s finished at the estate, he has to work his rent out for his landlord. When there’s time left over, he works on clearing the parcel he rents high up on the mountain, which he hopes – eventually – to be able to purchase.

When a widow named Serianna shows up one day looking for work, they take an interest in each other, and eventually sleep together. Marriage follows after she becomes pregnant. They have several children, and cherish great hopes of all those young hands to help with the labor in the future. But the future will not be quite as they planned…

Serianna’s sister Gjertine eventually shows up. Gjertine is a “Reader” – that is, a Haugean, a pietist, one of my people (though these are apparently a later aberration of Haugeanism, which I have trouble recognizing. Gjertine dresses in a more provocative way than most Haugeans I ever knew would approve, and we’re told that she has been taught a “spell” by them – an incantation to magically stanch bleeding. I hope the author is exercising artistic license here).

Gjertine is beautiful and has many suitors, but insists on choosing her own husband. The man she chooses seems an odd choice — “the Saddle Maker,” who has a reputation with the ladies. She demands two years of continence from him before she will accept him, and surprisingly he complies. They seem to be happy together, but the world is changing…

Things are changing in Norway. Industrialization is coming in; labor and reward are now related in new kinds of ways. And the greatest change of all is the lure of America. It’s in the back of everybody’s mind. Lots of land. Wealth to be won. A more egalitarian society. Gradually, as families and one by one, people start departing for America, and we follow their various destinies on the North Dakota prairie. (It’s interesting to contrast the reaction of the wife in Giants In the Earth, who is oppressed to the point of agoraphobia by all the open space, and Gjertine, who’s delighted by the life and the colors.)

Nesje is a man perfectly attuned to the world he was born into. He’s  not introspective; he takes life as it is. Which makes it all the harder for him to deal with a world that will never again be the way he feels it ought to be.

These are my people, of course, so Haymaker in Heaven may not speak to you as it did to me. I found it engrossing and deeply moving. Especially because Nesje, although physically very different, was almost a portrait of my father in his personality and character.

The translation by Tara Chace is good, but has some dead spots. I wish I’d had a chance to put my own hand to it.

Highly recommended. The author treats religious matters respectfully, in general, though I’m not sure he always understands. However, he doesn’t do a bad job of it either. The story, he tells us, is based on the lives of his actual ancestors. You may have trouble keeping the names straight.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fade Route,’ by David Chill

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The second book in David Chill’s Burnside series is Fade Route (I’m pretty sure all the titles come from football plays, but I’m fairly ignorant in that area). Once again he offers an engaging story about an interesting private eye looking into an intriguing mystery. Once again, some of the writing drove me nuts, but not enough to drop the book.

Burnside (no first name), briefly a pro football player, then a cop, and now a Los Angeles private eye, has time on his hands because his girlfriend is up in San Francisco studying law. So he’s taken to doing counseling work at a center for the homeless run by his friend, Wayne Fairborne. Wayne is a good guy who cares about helping street people learn skills that will make it easier for them to go back to work. He’s also running for mayor of Bay City (really Santa Monica; it’s an alias that goes back to Raymond Chandler), apparently as a Republican(!).

And then he’s murdered.

Who would want to murder Wayne Fairborne? Turns out there’s a fairly long list. His resentful brother-in-law. The string of women he’s had affairs with, or their husbands or boyfriends. And – not least – the incumbent mayor, who’s as crooked as a subdivision street.

Burnside will learn a lot about his friend Wayne, and much of it he doesn’t want to know. I followed the story with great interest, even in spite of lines like, “Dignity is a commodity that illuminates the trail.” And “Opportunities have a way of availing themselves to those who persevere.”

Recommended, as a fun read. Nothing terribly objectionable.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Post Pattern,’ by David Chill

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I am not reluctant, in my old age, to drop a book unceremoniously when I find the writing poor. Sometimes, if my sensitivities are outraged enough, I’ll tell you about it.

The case is somewhat different with Post Pattern, by David Chill. I found the writing very bad in places – especially in the area of word choice. However, I liked the character and the story enough to stick with it.

Burnside (yet another one-name private eye, in the Spenser tradition) is a Los Angeles private investigator. He was a star football player in college, and then became a cop. He was a good, by-the-book policeman until one day he gave a break to someone who didn’t deserve it. As a consequence he became a laughingstock on the force, and he quit to go private.

A wealthy young man, Norman Freeman, comes to Burnside’s office to hire him. Someone took a shot at him in his car the night before. Only he’s not sure the shot was meant for him. It could be – he’s a former pro football player who is heir apparent to a big auto dealership. He could have business enemies. But he also has a ne’er-do-well brother who hangs out with some sketchy people, and he was driving his brother’s car.

Soon there will be a real murder, and Burnside will wade into a whirlpool of personal motives, business motives, and dangerous dames. The world of ex-jocks is a major element here, which doesn’t do much for me personally, but it didn’t put me off. I liked that Burnside believes strongly in being armed at all times, and there wasn’t a lot of political correctness in view.

What author David Chill does well is create good characters. And good characters make up for a lot with me. I wish he’d had a better copy editor, but I still enjoyed Post Pattern, and went on to buy the next book in the series.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The CEO of the Sofa,’ by P. J. O’Rourke

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“Children,” says Mrs. Clinton, “are like the tiny figures at the center of the nesting dolls for which Russian folk artists are famous. The children are cradled in the family, which is primarily responsible for their passage from infancy to adulthood. But around the family are the larger settings of paid informers, secret police, corrupt bureaucracy, and a prison gulag.”

I added the last part for comic relief, something It Takes a Village doesn’t provide. Intentionally.

The late, lamented P. J. O’Rourke had something to do with my transition from liberalism to conservatism, back in the ‘80s. Not a determinative influence, but a step along the way. I would have become a conservative anyway, because liberalism was pulling its rug quietly out from under me, like Douglas Fairbanks in an old swashbuckling scene, though slower. But O’Rourke’s Give War a Chance was a book I picked up as I was coming to terms with the situation. I couldn’t buy his whole stoner-libertarian shtick, but a lot of the stuff he wrote made sense to me. And he always made me laugh, which counts for a lot.

CEO of the Sofa is a collection of his essays written around the turn of the millennium. He explains in his Acknowledgments that the title was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ classic The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and he frames the essays with imagined vignettes from his home life, in which he cross-talks with his wife, his assistant, his godson (who apparently lives with them), their babysitter, their daughter (later two daughters) and the Political Nut (who is himself), along with occasional others.

It’s been a while since the early 2000s, and some of the material hasn’t aged well. And, of course, O’Rourke is himself gone now, which is a bummer. But it’s still a fun ride, touching on a miscellany of subjects from the UN to childbirth, from Hunter S. Thompson to the indignities of middle age. I didn’t always agree with the points, but it was always funny. Great lines were everywhere – “Two hundred and fifteen dollars for your story, ‘Chewing-Mouth Dogs Bring Hope to People With Eating Disorders.’”

I wish I’d written that.

Recommended, with major cautions for obscenity, drug humor, and general bad taste.

Blogs, Socials, Reviews

Reviewing Books on the Socials, Wuthering Heights, and Disney Nightmares

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All the faults of Jane Eyre … magnified a thousand fold

from The North British Review, 1847

A reviewer for a Scottish magazine, The North British Review, used the words above to dismiss Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. He didn’t believe the work would find a broad audience, but as the Narrator says, “Little did he know.”

The Examiner called it “strange.”

We detest the affectation and effeminate frippery which is but too frequent in the modern novel, and willingly trust ourselves with an author who goes at once fearlessly into the moors and desolate places, for his heroes; but we must at the same time stipulate with him that he shall not drag into light all that he discovers, of coarse and loathsome, in his wanderings …

The Spectator seemed to think it a well-written but ugly story. “The success is not equal to the abilities of the writer; chiefly because the incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them …”

And yet Brontë’s book endures. (I found these reviews on a site dedicated to the book.)

Book reviewing takes many forms today. A few weeks ago, an executive at Barnes and Noble noted upswings in sales according to the buzz on TikTok, which they call BookTok. Some authors have linked the success of a book to single BookTok videos.

On YouTube, reviewers call themselves Booktubers. Occasionally I think about recording videos or doing a podcast in order to boost this blog, but I have yet to justify the time. Anyone can jump into the video side of social media, and I think I have a good voice for it. But it takes a certain talent and good lighting to gain attention, not to mention all the visuals and actually having something to say.

Merphy Napier appears to be doing it right. Here she talks about books that live up to their hype, a follow-up to a video about hyped books she didn’t like.

Petrick Leo asked his network to nominate overrated fantasy series, talked over five of them, and shared his own list of five.

Elliot Brooks talks about good adult fantasy series with soft magic systems and hard magic systems.

Disney Nightmares: Speaking of fantasy, Helen Freeh talks about reasons parents should have been wary of Disney long before now.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s excellent essay, “On Fairy Stories,” addresses the very problem that Disney had from its inception: the notion that fairy stories are exclusively children’s stories. They are not. They are stories allowing adults to examine the world from a new perspective to find a better way to live. Tolkien asserts that people connect “the minds of children and fairy- stories,” but “this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.”

Elsewhere in shared videos, a view of the side of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Save the Dragons,’ by Dave Freer

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He has a long, double-barreled English name, but is generally known as “Squigs.” He is very tall and thin, has big feet, and is extremely awkward with girls. He studied Alchemy at an English university, which led him, through complex circumstances, to find himself on a watery planet called Zoar, where he’s completely out of his element – and he was never all that at home even on earth. Also, his right hand is missing. He finds himself rescued by a beautiful young girl in a boat, with whom he falls immediately in love. She finds him beneath contempt. Now, Crum the Barbarian, big, blond, dumb and handsome – that’s a guy she could go for.

The girl’s big, pugnacious father is looking for help hunting poachers. Zoar is inhabited by dragons, and dragon teeth are a coveted natural resource. But unfamiliar, interstellar vehicles have been showing up recently and killing dragons way over the hunting limits. Eager to impress the girl, Squigs volunteers to help pursue the poachers. He doesn’t seem well equipped for the quest, but he has qualities nobody has ever appreciated, and he acquires a faithful friend in a fearless dwarf. And the new hand he acquires – black, with eight serpentine fingers, turns out to be useful in surprising ways.

Save the Dragons is by Dave Freer, and showcases his punning, likeable, and satirical style. Lots of fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wrong Place, Wrong Time,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

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I wasn’t impressed enough by the first Rafferty novel, by W. Glenn Duncan, that I read, to plan on reading more. But somehow I am doing so. And I’m enjoying the books, originally published in the 1980s. I actually read the first book, Rafferty’s Rules, and failed to review it recently. But it won me over, especially with a pleasant plot twist at the end.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time is the fourth book in the series. Rafferty (no first name, like Spenser) is a Dallas private eye whose business is somewhat marginal. He’s in no position to turn down fast, honest money, so when a guy comes in identifying himself as a bounty hunter, wanting backup for a quick apprehension job, he agrees. Not long later he sees his client blowing the target away with a shotgun, and then Rafferty is driving for his life as the guy pursues him, to tie up loose ends.

After extricating himself from that problem, Rafferty gets a request for help from a woman in the next office, with whom he’s been carrying on a pleasant flirtation for years through a window. Her grandfather needs protection, she explains. Local kids have been harassing him. She’s afraid they’ll hurt him, but she’s also afraid he’ll hurt them – he’s a tough old guy who’s been around the block.

As Rafferty gets to know old “Thorney,” he comes to respect and admire the guy, who’s not exactly enthusiastic about having a “nursemaid.” And when things escalate to shots fired, Rafferty can’t be sure whether the target is Thorney or himself – could his murderous client be back for another shot at him?

Wrong Place, Wrong Time was good, hard-boiled fun. What intrigues me most – and makes me a bit uncomfortable – is how male-female interactions are handled. Author Duncan gives Rafferty a raffish, flirty attitude, and women generally respond in good humor. The assumption is that, in spite of feminist rhetoric, men and women still like each other.

I’m not sure that’s true anymore in the 2020s. I don’t think you could write that way nowadays.

In any case, Wrong Place, Wrong Time was fun to read, and not very demanding. Mild cautions for language and adult themes.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Tolkien and the Great War,’ by John Garth

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Left to his own devices, it seems quite likely that Tolkien would never have finished a single book in his life. What he needed were publishers’ deadlines and a keen audience.

…C. S. Lewis stepped into the breach….

I’d heard of John Garth’s book, Tolkien and the Great War, before, and when it came up at a bargain price on Kindle I snapped it up. It kept me engrossed all through.

If you’ve read any biographies of Tolkien, like Humphrey Carpenter’s or Tom Shippey’s, you’re already familiar with the author’s war years, and the fact that they affected his creative work. What John Garth does in this book is to look at the story in detail, collating the biographical facts with the progress of Tolkien’s composition of his poetry and The Book of Lost Tales. A certain amount of guessing and supposition is inevitable, but author Garth avoids over-certainty.

As a student at Oxford, Tolkien bonded with a group of like-minded students with literary aspirations who called themselves the TCBS, the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. Together they worked out literary theories (rejecting modernism) and dreamed of future days when they’d storm the critical barricades and change the world.

The First World War ended all that. On the battlefields of France, in the midst of the mud and the blood and the poison gas, two of them died, and Tolkien and the other surviving TCBSian were never as close again. (We often say that the poor are “cannon fodder,” but that wasn’t true among the English in World War I. “Of every eight men mobilized in Britain during the First World War,” Garth writes, “one was killed. The losses from Tolkien’s team were more than double that… among former public schoolboys across Great Britain – about one in five.”)

As Garth indicates, the very nature of Tolkien’s vision and work was altered by his war experience. What had begun as a scholarly hobby – the creation of a “Gnomish” language – developed into a cycle of stories (The Book of Lost Tales) meant to re-imagine the forgotten myths of ancient England. It was while he was recovering from the Trench Fever that sent him home that Tolkien began to re-cast the story as an epic of an ancient, imagined Middle Earth.

For anyone fascinated with Tolkien’s books, Tolkien and the Great War is a fascinating and engaging read. John Garth is an excellent writer with a real flair for words (he speaks, for instance, of an early parodic poem by Tolkien featuring “boys charging around in names that are much too big for them”). I highly recommend this book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Bad Turn,’ by David J. Gatward

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It was shortly after I started reading David J. Gatward’s latest Inspector Grimm book, One Bad Turn, that I recalled my earlier decision to stop reading the series. The writing’s good, and I like Grimm and his team. But the author’s insistence on bringing God (or spirituality) into the books by way of a lesbian vicar just doesn’t work for me.

Having started the book, though, I figured I might as well carry on. Maybe my perception has been altered by my religious intolerance, but I wasn’t entirely happy with this one.

Harry Grimm, you may recall, is a former paratrooper, facially scarred by an IED. Then he became a policeman in Bristol, but now he has been transferred to bucolic Wensleydale in Yorkshire. In the great tradition of English small-town copper stories, though, the troubles of the big city follow him.

In One Bad Turn, Harry is recalled from holiday when a body is found in a house in a nearby town. Though terribly decomposed, the body shows clear signs of having been subjected to torture. And then a claymore mine concealed with the body explodes, killing two crime scene technicians. The dead woman herself is something of a mystery – beautiful, but not well known to her neighbors. Her identity, it turns out, is a false one, and her means of support unknown. Not long after, another torture murder will be discovered, and another mine will explode.

I felt, personally, that One Bad Turn was kind of predictable. It’s a story we’ve run into before, and is objectively a little far-fetched. It’s not a bad book, but I’m going to try to remember not to buy the next Harry Grimm adventure.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Nine Tailors,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“You’ve got too much imagination, Nobby,” said Parker.

“You wait, Charles,” said Lord Peter. “You wait till you get stuck on a ladder in a belfry in the dark. Bells are like cats and mirrors—they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them. Go on, Cranton.”

Dorothy L. Sayers achieved some remarkable things in her classic Lord Peter Wimsey series of mysteries. One of their impressive elements is the way she varies settings, both socially and geographically. I suspect that The Nine Tailors is one of her most beloved books, despite the fact that it spends a lot of time on the arcane English pastime of “change ringing,” in which church bells are rung in varying strings of ever-changing notes. The Nine Tailors combines a kind of epic sweep with profound human tragedy.

It’s Christmas Eve when Lord Peter and his man Bunter, speeding over the East Anglian fen country in his big Daimler car, go into a ditch, bending the axle. They are taken in by the kindly vicar of Fenchurch, a small community nearby. When the vicar announces sadly that they’re going to have to cancel their attempt to set a record ringing “Kent Treble Bob Majors” that night, because one of his ringers has fallen ill, noblesse oblige leaves Lord Peter no choice but to volunteer himself, as he has some experience as a change ringer. This involves nine hours of labor in the church tower when he could use some sleep, but everyone is very grateful. The next day Lord Peter drives away in his repaired car, assuming he’ll never return.

But some months later, the vicar calls and asks his help again. A strange thing has happened. While the sexton was opening a grave to bury a man with his recently deceased wife, a strange body was found in the grave. The face had been bashed in with a shovel and the hands removed, so it’s impossible to identify the man. Lord Peter, always keen for a mystery, quickly shows up and starts investigatin’.

It all seems to have something to do with a scandalous theft that occurred long ago, on the eve of the Great War. A guest at the local nobleman’s wedding had a valuable emerald necklace stolen. It has never been recovered. One of the house servants and an outside accomplice were arrested and sent to prison, shaming his wife, who still lives in the town, remarried after her husband escaped and died in an accident. The accomplice was still alive, though, having recently been released. The body may be his. But if so, who killed him, how did they kill him (there is no visible premortem wound), and why is he wearing French underwear?

Author Sayers turns the pealing of the bells into a kind of chorus that accompanies the drama up to its epic climax in a massive flood on the fens. The Nine Tailors is gripping and haunting. A masterpiece of the genre. Highly recommended.