Here’s the scenario: Jim, an Australian man, purchases a very old house in an out-of-the-way corner of Sidney. While doing renovations, he notices a basement concealed and sealed off beneath the floor of one room. He assumes this feature might have historical significance, so he notifies the government, which sends an assessor, a young woman, to look at it. To his astonishment, Jim discovers that this woman is his long-lost daughter, with whom his wife ran off long ago. Though he searched for them, he never found them, until now.
On top of that, they soon realize that the house he has purchased was built by an ancestor neither of them ever guessed they had.
If all this sounds a little far-fetched, I entirely agree. But it’s a tribute to the storytelling skills of Graham Wilson, author of The Mysteries, that I was entirely swept up in the book and overlooked its gross improbabilities.
We learn about Jim’s life and his struggles to rise from poverty. We learn of his ancestor Michael, who built the house – how he was transported as a convict from Ireland, served his time at hard labor, and built a semi-legal fortune along with his stone house. As his descendants discover his story, the reader learns it too.
I thought the story slowed somewhat toward the end, and perhaps too many details about Michael’s life come to light. But I read The Mysteries all the way through, and quite enjoyed it.
There were orthographic errors – word confusions, and sometimes quotation marks missing at the start of a paragraph. But I’ve seen far worse.
Sexual morality here is conventional contemporary, and attitudes toward Christianity tend to be critical, though few in number. Still, the storytelling was top-notch, and the book had undeniable charm. I do recommend it.
I got a deal offer on Jeffrey Archer’s latest novel, Traitors Gate. I figured that since I’d never read any of his books, I might as well give one a chance.
Verdict: I can understand why Archer is a popular author. But Traitors Gate never really gripped me.
William Warwick is a high-ranking officer with the London police force. Among his duties is serving as part of the security detail that transports the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace on state occasions. Another member of the detail is Ross Hogan, his best friend. A further thing they share is a common enemy – a high society con man named Miles Faulkner. Warwick and Hogan have stopped Faulkner’s schemes before, and early in this story they foil him in an attempted art theft. Faulkner vows revenge and hits on a plan to steal the Crown Jewels – not to sell them, but simply to publicly humiliate Warwick and Hogan, and ruin their careers.
Traitors Gate was technically impeccable. It delivered the kind of thriller excitement advertised on the cover. But for this reader, it all seemed pretty superficial. I didn’t really believe in the characters, and it all seemed kind of overprocessed, like white bread.
This book is part of an ongoing series. One challenge series authors always face is whether to describe characters who’ve been described in previous volumes. It’s always been my practice to assume the reader has started with this book, and provide new descriptions. It doesn’t take long, and it’s not hard to make it natural. But Archer doesn’t bother with that. Only new characters get descriptions, and even attributes like racial identity – not entirely irrelevant to this story – may be withheld until half-way through the book.
So, I’d say all in all Traitors Gate is a good airport book, one that will keep you entertained and not bother you at all with any deeper themes or moral challenges.
I got a deal on Dead In the Dark, which proved to be the 17th volume of an 18-book police series by Stephen Booth. The series, as best I can discern, centers on the relationship between Inspector Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, but at this point she’s been reassigned to a sort of major crimes unit in a different area (they both live and work in Devonshire, England). There seems to be some friction between them at this stage.
Ten years ago, a man named Reece Bower was accused of murdering his wife, who had disappeared without a trace. The police were ready to arrest him on circumstantial evidence when a plausible witness reported seeing the victim alive. The case went no further, but public opinion condemned Bower. Now he too has disappeared, equally inexplicably.
Meanwhile, DS Fry is part of a team investigating the murder of a Polish immigrant, found dead in his flat after being stabbed in an alley. Suspicions naturally turn to nationalist groups resentful of immigrants.
I think my unfamiliarity with the series left me at a disadvantage in reading Dead In the Dark. The characters seemed somewhat unfocused in my mind. The story seemed kind of wide-ranging and scattered, and the ultimate solution of Bower’s disappearance struck me as implausible.
There were political elements too. I think author Booth made some effort to be evenhanded, but in the usual English style he tends to equate the right wing with racism.
Still, the writing was good. Dead In the Dark wasn’t a bad novel, but it might be better to start reading the series closer to the beginning.
In the Faroes you’re overshadowed by mountains wherever you go, and now – in their absence – I realized I’d got used to their overbearing presence, like a stern father, always looking on disapprovingly.
I’ve raved about the previous two novels in Chris Ould’s Faroes series, and I’m happy to report that The Fire Pit is just as good. Maybe better. It is unclear whether the series is intended to go on from here, as most of the unresolved plot threads from the previous books get tied up here. But I hope there will be more.
Suspended English detective Jan Reyna is still in the Faroes when The Fire Pit begins, but he’s preparing to leave. He needs to go home and settle his problems on the job, one way or the other. But first he’s stopping off in Denmark, to see the place where his mother committed suicide when he was 5 years old, and see if he can spark any memories. While he’s there, his autistic Danish researcher will discover that his mother worked at a secretive mental institution, which she fled suddenly just before her death.
Meanwhile, his Faroese detective friend Hjalti Hentze must investigate the apparent suicide of a reclusive man. Then he’s called to the site of an abandoned hippie commune from the 1970s. There two skeletons have been discovered in secret graves – an adult woman and a female child. This is the same commune where Jan’s mother lived for a while – and before long Hjalti will be joining Jan in Denmark, their mysteries having merged.
The Fire Pit (and all the Faroes mysteries) are exactly the kind of detective novels I like best. Although there is action and suspense, the emphasis is on character and motive. There’s even a moment of Christian wisdom (though provided, sadly, by a woman pastor).
I was also pleased that Horsens, Denmark, where my Danish ancestors hailed from, gets a couple mentions.
I highly recommend The Fire Pit along with its predecessors. Top-notch Scandinavian Noir, unmarred by nihilism.
13th Century illustration of the Battle of Stamford Bridge from Matthew Paris. It looked nothing like this.
I’m still slogging through a Very Long Book (a good book, but comprehensive), so tonight I’ll report on another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This is the last story in Volume I, which means I’ll be coming to longer sagas again in the next one. I’m not sure what I’ll do to vamp while I’m reading future long books.
To my delight, this tale turned out have considerable personal interest. It involves Erling Skjalgsson’s grandson, Eystein Orre (son of Erling’s daughter Ragnhild and Thorberg Arnesson – you may remember the story of Thorberg’s courtship from King of Rogaland). Eystein had a sister named Thora who would, in time, become concubine (or wife, sources differ) to King Harald Hardrada, and would die with him following a legendary charge at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England.
Our tale is the Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-Beak. Thorvard is a wealthy Icelandic merchant. He sails to Norway where he speaks to King Harald, inviting him to come down to his ship and accept the gift of a sail. (According to this article from the Viking Herald, the manufacture of one sail for a Viking ship could take as long as fifty years [!] Perhaps they mean 50 years in man-hours).
I’ve mentioned previously that King Harald appears uncharacteristically genial in most of these saga tales. But in this one we see him in his usual temper. He tells Thorvard, curtly, that he got an Icelandic sail once before, and it tore apart under wind pressure. So he’s not interested in another such gift.
However, Thorvard then offers the sail to Eystein Orre, the king’s best friend, and Eystein, on examining it, recognizes it as an excellent specimen. He accepts it with thanks and invites Thorvard to stop and see him at his own home when he sails back to Iceland. When Thorvard does so, Eystein gives him generous gifts.
And to cap it we are told that, on a later occasion, Eystein’s ship outsails the king’s. And when the king asks where he got this fine sail, Eystein tells him it’s one he had turned down. A nice final note for the storyteller – it could even be true.
I was surprised to see “Eystein Orre” translated as “Eystein Grouse” here. Orre does mean grouse, even in modern Norwegian, but I’m sure I read somewhere that Eystein got his nickname from Orre farm in Jaeder. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the farm’s name. If Eystein lived there, it would likely have been due to inheritance from Erling.
The Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-beak is one of the more plausible stories in the collection, just trivial enough to believe.
Heljarayga was a small, natural cove no more than a hundred yards wide at its midpoint. Beyond that I couldn’t see much. The mist hung like a damp dust-sheet over the headlands and above the almost mirror-smooth water it appeared to ebb and flow slightly, gossamer fine. The stillness made you want to hold your breath. Nothing and nobody moved.
I knew a few things about the Faeroes before I started reading Chris Ould’s mystery novels. One of my Norwegian cousins (gone now) was married to a Faeroese woman (still around). The hymn, Tiðin rennur, which Sissel sings so beautifully, comes from there…
And they still hold an annual whale hunt in the old Norse tradition. The old Norse tradition was to herd whales into a bay or inlet and beach them in the shallows, then kill them there. It was an important element of survival in a subsistence economy. (My own ancestral home in Norway is a farm called Kvalavåg, which means “whale bay” or “whale inlet.”) But the custom has been abandoned in most places. In the Faeroes it still continues, stubbornly maintained as a central element of local culture. This has not entirely escaped the notice of anti-whaling organizations, and that fact generates the central conflict of The Killing Bay, second of Ould’s Faeroes mysteries.
Our hero, Jan Reyna, is still in the Faeroes. He’s an English police detective (born in the Faeroes but raised in England) currently on suspension, not sure if he even wants to go home. He rather likes the Faeroes, and most of the relations he’s met there, but he doesn’t really feel at home.
The female cousin who’s hosting him brings him along to witness the grindadráp, the whale hunt. He’s not enthusiastic about the thing, but doesn’t feel qualified to judge. While there he meets Erla Sivertsen, a female Faeroese native who’s working as a photographer for an environmental protest group, documenting the kill. While there Erla clashes with Finn Sólsker, a local fisherman, but violence is averted.
Not long after, Erla is discovered murdered, and the local investigators, led by Jan’s new friend Hjalti Hentze, have it as their first job to check whether Finn has an alibi. (This is awkward because Finn happens to be his son-in-law.) When Erla’s coat and hat are discovered hidden in Finn’s fishing hut, Hjalti is forced to arrest him, but he’s not convinced of his guilt. In addition, why is he getting pressure from his superiors to close the case before he’s examined all possible leads?
The mystery in The Killing Bay was well-constructed and solid, but it was the setting that really riveted me, as it did with the previous book, The Blood Strand. Author Ould does a masterful job of evoking the setting and atmosphere of the islands. I felt like I’d been there.
Highly recommended. Cautions for language and mature themes. Environmental politics are treated with an even hand.
Good characters do a lot to make a book work. But now that I’ve finished You’ll Get Yours, by Gerald Hansen, I think it’s possible to overdo it.
In the city of Derry, Ireland, a middle-aged woman’s body is found, dressed only in sexy underwear, on top of a cannon on the old city wall, her thumb superglued inside her mouth. As Detective Inspector Liam McLaughlin begins investigating, they find the woman hard to identify. No one seems to have known her. And when she finally is identified, as a woman who worked as a stocker at a nearby supermarket, it turns out she’s still a bit of a mystery. She seems to have no family, and there’s no record of her existence prior to four years ago.
In time it’s revealed that she’s been living under a false identity. She was once – briefly – famous, as a member of a Spice Girls-type girl band that had a few hits in the ‘90s. None of the other old group members are living in hiding, though, so what was she afraid of?
And the cops’ work won’t be made any easier by the almost universal hatred for the police that lingers in Derry, a residue from “the Troubles” of the old IRA years. In the end the solution will take them back to an old crime that time can’t bury and no one could possibly guess.
The emphasis in You’ll Get Yours is vivid characterization, and frankly I thought it was a little overdone. DI McLaughlin is a slob who’s always getting interrupted in the middle of eating a sandwich. His subordinates include a feminist detective with OCD, a fashion-plate womanizer, an over-eager rookie detective, and a female computer nerd. I think I was supposed to be amused by their interactions and frictions, but I found it all a little overdone and unconvincing.
The book wasn’t really that bad, plot-wise, and the solution was horrific and moving. But I couldn’t help being annoying by the comic book characterizations.
I should note, however, that references to religion were mostly respectful, and the author took trouble to avoid cursing.
I spent the day balancing the pains in my ribs, shoulder and head with painkillers and doing a passable impression of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the sofa.
I knew nothing of Chris Ould or his Faeroes mystery series before I bought The Blood Strand. But I got a deal on it, and it was set in the Faeroes, a Nordic community I’d never visited fictionally (or in real life) before. I’m used to being depressed by Scandinavian Noir stories, but this one turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
Jan Reyna is an English police detective. He was born in the Faeroes, but his mother divorced his father and took him away when he was very young. Then she died, leaving him to be raised by relatives in England. He only met his father once, and then they got into a fistfight. But now the old man is hospitalized in the Faeroes following an accident and a stroke, and Jan succumbs to his aunt’s pressure to go and see his father while he’s still alive.
Arriving in the Faeroes, whose language he’s entirely forgotten, he finds his father (who turns out to be rich) unable to communicate. He meets his two half-brothers, one openly hostile, the other friendly. He also meets a local detective, Hjalte Hentze, who’s trying to figure out why Jan’s father was found in his car with a shotgun in the footwell, blood on the door, and a briefcase full of money in the trunk. That curiosity only increases when a young man’s body is found washed up on the shore with shotgun wounds. When he asks Jan to help out, Jan has nothing better to do… except for trying to find out why his mother left his father all those years ago.
I liked Jan Reyna and the other characters in The Blood Strand. The descriptions of Faeroese culture and scenery were interesting, and the unfolding mystery kept me fascinated. Though set in a historically Scandinavian setting, this book was not actually written by a Scandinavian, which may explain why it didn’t try to depress me to death. I had a good time reading it, and I look forward to the sequels.
Recommended. Not much offensive content either. References to Christianity (the Faeroese seem to be pretty religious) were mostly respectful.
King Olaf Trygvesson, as painted by my friend (okay, my acquaintance) Anders Kvaale Rue. I’ve never asked him why he pictures Olaf with a haircut documented as being popular with Danes.
Tonight, three more tales from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Oddly, they’re all about guys named Thorstein. Perhaps the name was a statistical favorite among Icelanders. Or perhaps the name was becoming a go-to for storytellers, like “Jack” in so many British folk tales.
First, there’s “The Tale of Thorstein of the East Fjords.” We’re told that he was “young and fleet of foot,” though those qualities don’t really figure in the story. He is on a pilgrimage to Rome, and while traveling through Norway he comes upon a richly dressed young man defending himself against four attackers. Thorstein decides to intervene and kills three of the attackers. The young man he rescued tells him that once he gets back from Rome, he should go to King Magnus’s (Magnus the Good, I assume) court and see him. Just ask for Styrbjorn. (Styrbjorn was the name of a famous Swedish hero. I don’t know of more than one man who bore that name, and he was long dead by this time.)
One assumes that Thorstein goes to Rome and returns to Norway, though the saga writer fails to mention that. The next scene shows Thorstein showing up at the king’s hall, where he sends a message in, asking for Styrbjorn. All the kings’ men have a good laugh at somebody asking for Styrbjorn (like somebody today asking for Eliot Ness or Frank Sinatra, I suppose), but eventually the king himself silences them, explaining that he himself is this “Styrbjorn.” Thorstein ends up going home to Iceland with a lot of money.
The second tale is “The Tale of Thorstein the Curious.” This Thorstein went to Norway and joined the court of King Harald (Hardrada, I suppose). One day the king assigns him to watch his clothing while he’s taking a bath, and Thorstein can’t resist looking into his bag. There he sees a couple knife handles made from a strange, golden wood. When the king comes out of the bath, he intuits that Thorstein has peeked. Displeased, he demands that Thorstein fulfill a quest or lose his favor. He must fetch the king two more knife handles of the same wood – but he won’t give him a clue as to where such trees grow (considering Harald Hardrada’s history, it might have been anywhere in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Scandinavia). Thorstein eventually fulfills the quest, but only by way of escaping a giant serpent. In an oddly prosaic epilogue, we’re informed that this Thorstein died with Harald in England.
Finally we encounter “The Tale of Thorstein Shiver.” This Thorstein has joined the household of King Olaf (at first I assumed this would be Saint Olaf, but by the end it’s clear that it’s Olaf Trygvesson). One night the king gives a command (for no apparent reason) that no man is to go out to the privy without a buddy. Thorstein wakes in the middle of the night and is reluctant to wake anyone else, so he sneaks out alone. In the privy he encounters a demon. Then follows a sequence in which he asks the demon three times about which damned souls scream the loudest in Hell. The demon tells him about three famous Nordic heroes, describing their sufferings in the fires of perdition, and (at Thorstein’s request) each time screaming in imitation of that hero. Meanwhile, with each question the demon inches closer to Thorstein. But just before the demon can grab him, the church bells start ringing, and the demon flees back where he came from.
In the morning, the king asks how everyone slept. Thorstein confesses his disobedience, but King Olaf isn’t much bothered over that. He explains that he heard the diabolical screaming, and therefore ordered the bells rung, saving Thorstein from Hell.
There’s an interesting addendum. The king asks Thorstein if he felt frightened at any point, and Thorstein says he doesn’t know what fear feels like, though he shivered a little during the demon’s final scream.
This seems to anticipate a motif we find in several Scandinavian folk tales catalogued in the 19th Century – “The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear.” It seems to me that what we’re observing in these stories is a stage in the evolution of the folk tale – the point where stories are still connected to actual historical figures (likely the storytellers’ ancestors), but are growing increasingly extravagant and fabulous in the process of retelling.
In this news recently, we heard from students and presumably responsible adults tout the fictional premises such as supporting Hamas is a human rights cause and Israel has never had a claim to land in the Middle East. News outlets dedicated to printing “the truth” have printed and aired reports from Hamas-approved spokesmen who could pose as objective reporters by the simple fact that they were in American media. Today, a commentator said that people hold to this fiction is not really different from those who hold to some of the other political conspiracy theories we’ve heard from the last presidential election. The facts don’t support their belief, and yet they refuse to change their minds.
I’ve often said this was a matter of trust. Different people trust different sources and voices without much comparison to reality. Maybe a better answer is that they trust their own unexamined conclusions most of all.
From the first section of Pascal’s Pensées, his ninth and tenth thoughts are these:
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Even if what they’ve discovered is ridiculous, they will likely hold to it better than they will an answer we give them, because it’s their idea. They drew their own conclusion or believe they did. I’ve heard a couple pastors tells stories about one of their children coming to them with a remarkable truth they had discovered in the Word and repeat some of their own words back to them. That’s how it works. Most of us aren’t original thinkers, but we should all learn to think for ourselves.
Now, to our Features Desk for today’s links.
Lost in the Cosmos:“Percy’s philosophy and storytelling both aim at restoring our ability to see ourselves rightly and to make the ineffable curiousness of our consciousness visible once more. He ends this peculiar book with a pair of interconnected science fiction stories—both brief choose-your-own adventures with tragicomic twists. In these tales, he confronts readers with the possibility that the help we really need has already arrived.”
Moral Imagination: In 1997, Justice Scalia said that while remembering the Holocaust is important, “you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.”
