“What Laugharne really needs is a play about well-known Laugharne characters – and get them all to play themselves.”
So Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood to capture the Welsh voices of this Welsh town. You can hear the beginning of it in Richard Burton’s wonderful tones from BBC4. More about Under Milk Wood here.
He had forgotten, too, the pain of this [writing] – the pain of dragging this thing out of oneself, the birth of a reluctant child that would much rather go on growing inside than be forced out screaming into the light of day and the fear of examination. He had forgotten the monstrous ego that was needed to push the creation out into the world, with all its mess and suffering. He had forgotten.
I’ve been praising Peter Grainger’s DC Smith novels in this space. On noodling around for further information about the author (who seems to wish to be a man of mystery), I discovered that “Peter Grainger” is a pen name. More than that, the author had earlier written (under the name Robert Partridge) some literary novels, one of which – Afon – starred a character named Peter Grainger, who was a novelist.
Messing with our heads, in other words.
So I bought Afon. It’s pretty good. Not my cuppa tea, but a well-written novel.
Peter Grainger is in his 40s. Long ago he wrote a first novel that got a lot of recognition, and then he lost his nerve and wrote no more. Now he’s quit a teaching job, which he hated. He has some money left from a divorce settlement, so he decides to take a lease on a cottage on an estate called Afon, in a remote valley in Wales. He will try and write another novel. If he fails, at least he’ll know he made the attempt.
He meets the elderly landowner and his much younger wife. He learns to fly fish. He makes an enemy of the estate’s brutal gamekeeper, agonizes over his feelings for two different women (both married), and after a struggle produces a new book.
Afon abounds in lovely descriptions of the natural beauty of Wales, and in perceptive dramatizations of the writing process. The ending is kind of ambiguous, the sort of thing you expect in a literary novel – which is one of the reasons I generally avoid literary novels.
But it’s pretty good. Not much obscenity here, though the bonds of marriage take a beating. Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.
Urban fantasy is not a genre I generally favor. However, when I saw Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot, an urban fantasy involving police detective work, I thought it was worth a try. I liked what I found. It’s sort of Harry Potter goes to Scotland Yard, as you’d expect, but it has special (outstanding) qualities of its own.
London Probationary Constable Peter Grant is about to receive his first assignment. He dreams of working in CID, solving homicides. His superior, however, thinks he’d be a better fit in the Case Progression Unit, a unit devoted to paperwork. Peter sees a rather dull future ahead of him.
But one cold night he’s assigned to perimeter duty, guarding a crime scene in Covent Garden. The unfortunate victim has had his head knocked clean off. A witness appears and tells Peter how the crime was committed. But there’s a problem. The witness, dressed in Victorian clothes, is (and admits to being) a ghost. When a certain Inspector Thomas Nightingale happens by later, Peter tells him, almost as a joke, that he’s been interrogating a ghost. To his surprise, Nightingale listens to him seriously. The next day, instead of going to CPU, Peter finds himself assigned to assist Nightingale, who is the one-man staff of a special (secret) unit devoted to solving supernatural crimes.
Peter moves into the large manor which is Nightingale’s headquarters and begins his apprenticeship in wizardry. They soon find that they’re not dealing with a single crime, but a spectral serial killing spree, in which some unidentified power is possessing ordinary people, changing their appearances, and using them to kill other innocent people, somehow identified by the murderer (who is apparently quite mad) as his personal enemies.
What takes Midnight Riot above the level of most modern fantasies is the narrating voice of Peter Grant, who is at once naïve, cynical, and witty. I enjoyed the narrative, and had a good time reading a well-told story in which the stakes ratchet up rapidly and fearsomely.
Cautions for language and occult themes. Religious matters are studiously avoided, which is all to the good as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be reading more Peter Grant books, at least until the author decides to offend me (which I expect he’ll do before long).
Desk Sergeant Charlie Hills was by nature a two-fingered typist, but sometimes, when the muse was upon him and there were words to be produced that contained a lot of a’s, e’s, and s’s, the middle finger of his left hand would join the party. He typed ‘assessment’ with some panache, therefore, but then had to stop and count the s’s, undoing any gains he had made in the time taken.
I like Peter Grainger’s D.C. Smith mysteries more with each outing, and The Rags of Time did not disappoint. I have compared Essex Detective Sergeant D.C. Smith to the American character of Columbo before, but I found myself thinking of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch this time around. Though different in their environments and methods, the two detectives have much in common. Both are aging masters, and both tend to make enemies among their colleagues because they work a little harder than everybody else. Where other cops are content to connect a few dots and make a frame, these two see more dots and sometimes come out with very different results. They never forget that it’s not enough just to make a case – they need to find the truth, to do justice as much as possible.
This time out, Sergeant Smith is contemplating retirement. He’s just returned to work from medical leave, and the department is going through changes. One of his fellow detectives, Wilson, a man who’s been a personal rival and enemy, is on the point of promotion. Smith, who has no noticeable personal vanity, actually manipulates various things to make Wilson look good, and attempts to heal their differences.
All that, however, falls to pieces when a dead body is found in a rural field. The victim, a metal “detectorist,” was killed with a blunt object of some kind. Suspicion falls on his fellow detectorists, but Smith is unsatisfied with Wilson’s rush to judgment. He has to step in to correct the man’s mistakes – multiple times. The true trail seems to him to lead to the residents of a nearby friary where, in spite of holy vows, somebody is telling lies.
D.C. Smith is a fascinating character, a mystery to his co-workers, and even a bit of a mystery to the reader. I like him immensely. I liked this book immensely. I liked the prose immensely. The language is restrained (including little profanity), but often witty, and there’s really nothing to object to. Even issues of faith are treated with respect. I highly recommend The Rags of Time and the whole series.
Can novels spread awareness of mental health issues? Author C.K. Meena said, “Fiction has no purpose, if you want to spread awareness, use non-fiction.” But author Amandeep Sandhu countered with the idea that nothing we write is truly non-fiction, because we focus on or exaggerate some facts and ignore others.
Eighty-one Anglo-Saxon coffins made from the hollowed-out oak oak trees have been discovered at a site called Great Ryburgh in Norfolk, England. “‘This find is a dramatic example of how new evidence is helping to refine our knowledge of this fascinating period when Christianity and the Church were still developing on the ground,’ said Tim Pestell, curator at Norwich Castle Museum in Norfolk, where the finds from the dig will be kept.” Here are some photos.
“Exactly a century after Saki’s death on 14th November 1916, it seems remarkable that his work has survived so well. In a line-up of the wits of 20th-century English literature, Saki is usually tucked somewhere between PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.” (via Prufrock News)
Appalachian culture is often misunderstood and misrepresented, a problem the people behind Foxfire magazine hope to correct. Mountain people are “very resourceful, self-reliant, hardworking, intelligent and with an amazing sense of humor.”
A new coffee vendor in Redlands, California, And Coffee, operates a “a remodeled utility truck” next to city hall and runs on donations.
Yesterday, November 16, was, as Stephen Bullivant puts it, “the actual feast day of the actual Blessed Lucy of Narnia.” He notes that Lucy was the one who observed in The Last Battle, “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
So, if you want to visit the ancient, hillside city that gave Lewis’s magical country its name, you’ll have to go to Italy’s Umbria region and find the place presently called Narni.
Eleven years: Peck would give everything to have had those eleven years back. For one thing, he wouldn’t have messed around with those women in Indianapolis. If he’d gotten a regular doctor job, he’d be driving the big bucks now, fixing everything from Aarskog syndrome to Zika virus.
I’m fond of cop humor. Cop humor is black humor, often profane humor, the humor of people who’ve seen the worst things life can dish up, and have found ways of coping. John Sandford’s novels about Minnesota cops are full of cop humor, which is one of their charms. In comparison to his Prey novels, starring Lucas Davenport, his Virgil Flowers novels tend to lean more heavily toward slapstick. Escape Clause is perhaps the most comic of his novels to date, though there are several murders along the way.
In Escape Clause, we begin with the theft (kidnapping?) of two rare tigers from the Minnesota Zoo. There’s no mystery in this story – it’s a thriller. We know who the bad guys are (an eastern medicines doctor and a few thugs), and the suspense is in how fast the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, in the person of Virgil Flowers (the only guy they can spare because of security demands at the Minnesota State Fair during visits by presidential candidates) can figure out what’s going on and stop it.
Virgil is a good cop, though not a very good shot, and generally reluctant to even carry a gun. He also tends to take a lot of pratfalls in this outing. Simultaneous with this job, he gets involved with stopping some thugs, hired by a sweatshop owner to beat up his girlfriend’s sister, who’s doing sociology research on the illegal alien workers.
It’s all a lot of fun, and it’s mostly dirtbags who get killed. The climax is obvious a mile away, but no less enjoyable for that, on a visceral level.
An interesting new element in this story is the character of “Father Bill,” a Catholic priest who leads an odd life. He works as a supply pastor for the Minneapolis-St. Paul diocese nine months of the year, and is celibate then. During the summers he works at a resort and has a girlfriend. This is kind of jaw-dropping, but I suppose it’s not unthinkable in today’s church. Virgil, whose father is a Lutheran pastor, makes some small effort to talk him over to the Protestant side.
Anyway, I had a good time with Escape Clause. Cautions for lots of bad language and adult situations, also the death of an animal (almost always more traumatic than human death in a novel).
The esteemed Dr. Bruce Charlton at Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers re-posts a review of That Hideous Strength. This post, from the Toast blog, is by a woman named Felix Kent. I found it delightful, for two reasons. First, I’ve come to assume that all modern women will hate THS (which remains one of my favorite novels). Secondly, Ms. Kent gets it precisely right.
“Don’t read That Hideous Strength,” my mother said. My mother is a great C.S. Lewis fan, also a believer, in the religious sense. One of my best sources for what to read. And a woman who grew up in the Fifties and became an academic. Became, like Ransom, the trilogy’s main character, a philologist.
“Why not?” I said.
I don’t think my mother used the word “yucky” in her reply, but that was more or less what she meant. I went ahead and read the book anyway.
It was a morning of ethereal splendor – such a morning as Noah knew as he gazed from his pitchy bulwarks over limitless, sunlit waters while the dove circled and mounted and became lost in the shining heavens; such a morning as only the angels saw on the first day of that rash cosmic experiment that had resulted, at the moment, in landing Corker and Pigge here in the mud, stiff and unshaven and disconsolate.
I mentioned Evelyn Waugh on Facebook, and in the ensuing discussion was forced to admit the shameful fact that I hadn’t actually ever read any of his novels. Someone suggested Scoop, his treatment of foreign newspaper correspondence. Thus this review.
William Boot is a member of a large but declining “country” family in England. He writes a column on rural nature for a London paper, The Daily Beast. Due to a series of misunderstandings on the part of Lord Copper, owner of the paper, and his editors and sub-editors, William finds himself dispatched, much against his inclination, to report on a civil war in Ishmaelia, an African republic.
Along the way he gets acquainted with members of the real foreign press corps, all serious drinkers and savage exploiters of expense accounts, who vie with one another (mostly within the confines of the hotel bar) to discover the merest hint of news of the war (which does not exist; it was all a misunderstanding from the start) and then build those hints into fanciful news stories which they all crib from one another and send back to London by radiogram. He has to deal with the cheerfully venal family that runs the country, he rubs shoulders with foreign agents, and he gets romantically involved with a semi-German gold-digger.
The whole story is a ridiculous construction of misinformation, misperception, prejudice, lazy thinking, and cutthroat but genial competition. It could have been called “Much Ado About Nothing.” There are some elements reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse here (there’s even passing mention of a fellow named Bertie Wodehouse-Bonner), but the humor is more acerbic than “Plum’s.” It might be judged closer to Saki’s humor – but I think Saki would have taken the opportunity of a story like this to kill off a lot of people.
Scoop is a highly amusing novel that will give you a whole new (and lower) view of journalism. No problems with language or subject matter here, except for dated racial slurs. There are contemporary 1930s references that will confuse a lot of modern readers (including me sometimes).
For rent, one planet that’s lost its way in the race for development, that showed up at the stadium after all the medals had been handed out, when all that was left was the consolation prize of survival.
For rent, one planet that learned to play the economics game according to one set of rules but discovered once it started playing that the rules had been changed.
That planet in Yoss’ novel A Planet for Rent is a stand-in for 1990s Cuba. Emily A. Maguire describes the story of an unmanageable Earth. “In the interests of ‘saving Earth from itself,’ [aliens] have turned the planet, now a ‘Galactic Protectorate,’ into a vacation destination: Earth and its inhabitants exist solely to satisfy the desires of its alien visitors.” (via Prufrock News)