Mary J. Moerbe continues reviewing my novels with a glowing review of Blood and Judgment:
But then Blood and Judgment adds a few more layers, as weak men must choose between courage and complacency, humanity and survival. A few Norse Old Ones pop up. Doors between worlds are opened and closed. Viking Hamlet, Amlodd, cannot feign madness and so agrees to gain a feigning mind, effectively switching bodies with one of the actors! Oh, it was delightful!
I think she liked it. Read it all here.
Lutheran writer Mary J. Moerbe (who happens to be the daughter of Dr. Gene Edward Veith) has reviewed my novel, The Year of the Warrior at her blog, Meet, Write, & Salutary:
The descriptions hit me very powerfully. I mean, normally we would talk about world-building in a piece of fantasy, but this book may have made me even more engaged into my own world, allowing me to see it through re-opened eyes and a broadened perspective.
Read it all here. Thanks, Mary.
We hardly lack for prose in this online age. Digital entertainments aside, English- language genre fiction has blossomed into a startling new maturity. Popular biography conveys lessons the novel once delivered — as do popularly presented sociology and ‘New Journalism’, which uses techniques of novel-writing for essay-length reporting. Still, the novel is moribund. Its failure signals an end of confidence about the past values and future goals of what conceived itself as Western culture. The signs of a weakened, diffident and timid culture are written in the dust on the unread books of our library shelves.
Joseph Bottum writes about the decline of the novel in a book by the same name, excerpted in this month’s Spectator. He doesn’t appear to go in the direction you may expect, so read the whole thing. As I read it, I kept wondering if his point is simply a bit beyond my grasp as an ignorant student or is he measuring by a standard I don’t value as much. (via Prufrock)
I’m reading a greater variety of authors these days, as I follow bargain offers on Amazon. This brings me into contact with more poorly written books (which I endure with greater patience than in my palmier days), but now and then I encounter something interesting.
This one, for instance. It isn’t often I encounter a book I consider a genuine original. But Silent Retribution Man by J. Sato was unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s not without flaws, but it was a fascinating exercise.
The Amazon review says the narrator’s name is Lionel Seaver, so I suppose that name must have cropped up somewhere in the text. But mostly he calls himself Silent Retribution Man. Once an ordinary lawyer and family man, his life got demolished in a day. He then found his “purpose in life” (quoting Steve Martin in “The Jerk.” He can barely express himself without quoting movies and TV shows) in getting revenge on the creeps of the world. Not the ordinary run of rude and obnoxious people, but those egregious types who take pleasure in cruelty, or ruin others’ lives for personal gain. Silent Retribution Man finds simple ways to give them a taste of their own medicine. Sometimes his activities are rather pleasant to observe, sometimes shocking. But always effective.
Until the day it goes wrong.
He tells his story to a journalist. There’s a reason why he’s seeking this publicity, and I did guess that reason before it was officially revealed. But the details were fascinating, and the ending something of a surprise.
The book had flaws. There were spelling problems, as is so often the case in novels today. And the whole story is morally problematic – but that’s kind of the point. We’re forced to confront our assumptions about what’s fair and right and just. There are no easy answers.
I enjoyed Silent Retribution Man, and recommend it for adults. Worth your time.
Erik (teacher): Why is it of particular interest to talk about the old Norse gods? Especially right here in Edda? Gry?
Gry: Because was Edda was the last town in Norway to become Christian. Ah, and to give up faith in the Norse gods.
Erik: Yes, that is correct. One could say it all happened right here. Ragnarok. The end of the world. The final clash between the gods and the giants.
If I had seen the promotional tagline you see on the poster above, “This is where it all begins,” I might have watched Ragnarok, Netflix’s new six-episode series, in anticipation of an open, unfinished story — a part one. The series does have good character arcs and bring things together at the end, but it doesn’t wrap them up nearly as I was expecting. I kept thinking our hero would have to really lower the hammer in the next episode, but the final showdown isn’t, you know, the end of the world.
Norse myth fans will easily recognize names and characters as they appear: Odin and Frigg, Thor and Loki are represented in the old man with an eyepatch with the oddly serene, oddly prophetic wife, the mischievous brother, and the kind, justice-minded son. And the villain is named Vidar (Lars can tell us what that means).
Ragnarok is set in Edda, another nod to the myths, but it moves as methodically as any high-school superhero origin story might. Magne arrives with his family in this new town, which is his hometown but they had moved away after his father’s death several years ago; his mother’s new job at the undefined industry that supports Edda has brought them back. He befriends the “greenpeace” girl, Isolde, and learns that official accounts of the pristine nature of their town and country don’t fit the evidence they draw from the river.
Continue reading Ragnarok: Where It All Begins
Sometimes, even in my reading life, I come across something that reminds me I’m a native of another century. Green Light by Tom Barber is such a book. Rousing, but for me it skipped over the interesting parts.
Sam Archer, hero of the series of novels of which this one is the seventh, is an Englishman working in the New York City Police Department. (The author is clearly English, as he has his Americans employing English colloquial expressions, and the spelling and orthography are uniformly English.) Think Chris Hemsworth for Sam, which is probably what the author has in mind, because if any book was ever written with an eye to making an action movie, it’s this one.
Following a high-octane chase and shootout, Detective Archer and his colleague/girlfriend, Alice Vargas, stop to pick up food at a convenience store. In the parking lot, they observe a young woman being attacked by two thugs. They rush to help, but the thugs pull guns, kill the girl, and shoot both cops who, though caught unprepared, are wearing their ballistic vests. Sam gets away with bruises, but Alice is wounded and rushed to the hospital.
Sam then gets sandbagged, suspended, and even arrested thanks to a police superior who hates him. But he’s gotten a whiff of a conspiracy involving human traffickers and high-level blackmail, and he won’t let up until he finds the men who shot Alice. He’ll have to tangle with more powerful criminals than them, though, before he gets to the heart of the conspiracy. Thankfully, he has friends in the department who’ll go the extra mile for him.
My problem with Green Light was that it was 90% action and 10% character stuff. I like to take time over the course of a story to get to know the people. The human interactions here, when we were allowed to observe them, were perfectly fine. I liked the characters. But they rarely got a minute to rest. And I can’t help thinking (old horse that I am) that even strong young people can’t handle that level of violence indefinitely.
You may like Green Light more than I did, especially if you’re a young reader. Cautions for violence and language.
When we Americans pick up a British mystery or police novel, we generally expect something a tad more refined than our own domestic product. Great Britain, after all, is a society that takes pride in being disarmed, in not having either criminals or cops running around the streets with guns.
Forget all that when you pick up London Large: Blood On the Streets, by the writing team of brothers G. and R. Robson.
Harry “H” Hawkins is a London police detective, and a proud dinosaur. He has no time for sociological policing, and little comprehension of online resources. (He leaves such matters to his partner, a young ethnic Indian woman named Amisha, whose talents he has gradually learned to appreciate.)
But for H, policing is still mostly a matter of wearing out shoe leather, barging in on suspects unannounced, physically threatening them when necessary, and occasionally jogging their memories with a good beating.
H is a veteran of the Falklands War and suffers from PTSD, which he self-medicates with alcohol.
When he’s called to the scene of the murder of two upper class women in fashionable St. James Park, he can barely keep himself together. One of the victims is the wife of his best friend, Ronnie, who saved his life in the war and is now a successful businessman. The brass won’t let him work the case, but that means nothing to H. Not even suspension from the force will keep him from doing whatever it takes to identify the killer and stop a vicious and perverted conspiracy at the highest level. In the end it will be just him and Ronnie at war again, and woe to anyone foolish enough to stand in their way.
The purpose of the London Large series (this is the first volume of it) would seem to be to show us Americans that the English can write books as violent and bloody as ours. The body count is certainly all you could ask in a Jack Reacher or Mitch Rapp novel, and H seems to have little trouble getting his hands on all the firearms he wants, even if he has to go to illegal sources. Nor is he hesitant to use them.
For me, however, the book was kind of ham-fisted. The writing was often clumsy, and the violence seemed to be the product of people who don’t understand weapons very well – in one scene, for instance, a thrown knife pierces someone’s forehead – I’m pretty sure that’s not possible.
On the other hand, character development was surprisingly good – certain characters exhibited unexpected strengths, something I always like in a story.
All in all, though, I found London Large: Blood On the Streets a little much. Over-violent, awkwardly written, and – oh yes – lots of profanity.
Not only was he less sure now of the difference between their crimes, but there was also this other side to it, the love these people here in Lisbon felt for a man who the world viewed, with good reason, as a monster. Who would speak for Wes in such a way? One person, maybe, and she had died for it.
I’ve become a fan of Kevin Wignall’s novels, but I’ve never liked one of them as much as I like his latest, The Names of the Dead. Other readers are likely to have different opinions, but this one worked for me.
James “Wes” Wesley is a former CIA agent, abandoned by the agency and now languishing in a French prison for war criminals. He’s not quite innocent, but not as guilty as the world thinks. His best friend is Patrice, an African and former commander of God’s Own Army, a very real and vicious (ostensibly Christian) terrorist group. Patrice is repentant, and spends much of his time studying the Bible. He shares his wisdom with Wes, but Wes remains skeptical.
Then news comes that Wes’s ex-wife has been murdered. Also, their son (whom Wes didn’t know about) has gone missing. Wes gets compassionate early release. His former CIA colleagues try to kill him, but he manages to escape. Then he’s rescued, more or less, by a young woman. She is Mia, the granddaughter of one of Wes’s fellow prisoners, recently deceased, a Croatian war criminal. Mia is on the autism spectrum and doesn’t care to be touched, so there’s no question of romance. But she has nowhere to go and likes to drive (stopping frequently to visit cathedrals), so they form an unlikely team as they travel across Spain, Portugal, France, and on into the Balkans.
Wes’s plan is simple and limited – he will find the men who framed him, and kill them. Then he will find his son.
But on the way, guided by the Bible Patrice gave him as a going-away present, Wes will learn to see himself in new ways. And in the end he will make the hardest decision of his life – and the most right.
I have no knowledge of author Wignall’s faith or lack of it, and it would be wrong to call The Names of the Dead a Christian novel. But it’s a book that takes Scripture seriously, and in a positive way. The questions Wes struggles with – about human connections, personal choices, and moral good – resonated for this reader. I recommend The Names of the Dead highly.
I’ve read and appreciated a couple of Frank H. Spearman’s classic westerns (he wrote Whispering Smith, most famously), and thought I’d try another. The Mountain Divide is somewhat different from my previous choices. It has the feel of a boy’s book, a genre which was big at one time. That’s mainly because the main character is a 17-year-old boy, and due to the lack of a romantic element in the plot. The book is also different from the others in not being set in the author’s contemporary time, but several decades back in history. It’s about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, just after the Civil War.
We first meet Bucks, our hero, as a newly hired telegrapher in the track town of Medicine Bend. Faced with a mob of angry customers, he handles himself with coolness and good sense, gaining the favor of his bosses and senior employees. Important among them is Bob Scott, the action hero of the book, who – interestingly enough – is a “half-breed.”
The story proceeds with Bucks advancing in his career, and clashing again and again with the outlaw element that accompanies the progress of the track laying. In the end it will come to open war between the railroad men and the lawless elements. Hostile Indians are also a constant threat. Bucks and Bob Scott will nearly lose their lives before their final triumph.
I should probably mention that, to the best of my knowledge, author Spearman gives a false impression of the legal situation. The recent miniseries Hell On Wheels, which I gave up watching, more realistically portrayed the arrangement – the saloons and gambling dens and houses of ill fame went west with the construction, and were tolerated – or facilitated – by the railroad companies. In this story, the two groups are mortal enemies.
As you’d expect for a book written around the turn of the 20th Century and aimed at boys, The Mountain Divide is a pretty straightforward adventure story, easily enjoyed. I consider Spearman a superior stylist to most of his contemporaries, and I liked this book.
“How many weapons do I have?” Helmer asked. Picket took a quick inventory, though he thought Helmer might be concealing some.
“Two. Your knife and the sword,” Picket said.
Helmer responded with an immediate attack. He hit Picket, kicked him, took off his jacket and struck him with it over and over, then threw rocks at him. Picket scrambled around, trying to dodge rocks, block blows, and escape the whirlwind of whipping coat. . . .
“Lesson. Number. One,” Helmer said evenly. “Everything is a weapon.”
The Green Ember is the first of several fantasies by S.D. Smith, in which brave rabbits with swords and bows fight the hoard of wolves and raptors that has overwhelmed their land. Youngsters Heather and Pickett begin the novel playing in the fields near their country home. They have loving parents, a baby brother, and a happy, innocent life.
But this isn’t Little House on the Prairie.
Soon, enemies they hadn’t known are charging at them with torches, bows, and spears. They escape by the skin of their teeth with a bit of help, but Pickett won’t take up living to fight another. His mistakes and lack of strength during their escape weigh him to the ground. Plus, some hero rabbit, who looked about as old as Pickett, displays incredible skill, strength, and general swagger in their escape, all of which Pickett hates. He has no reason to be jealous of him, so, of course, he is.
The Green Ember is written for young readers, not very young, but this isn’t YA either. Smith assumes his readers will need a little help to understand. When characters use sarcasm, the narrator explains it clearly. It’s a fun adventure, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of them. My kids have loved them for years, and my youngest just reread all of the books in anticipation of the fourth one, Ember’s End, coming in March.