“The largest indoor photo in the world as of March 2011” is of the Strahov Philosophical Library. This photo is allows you to pan 360 degrees and zoom in incredibly close. Note the “Show Details” link in the lower left corner. It will take you around the room a bit. It’s beautiful, and I’ve been looking at many very ugly photos lately, so this one is refreshing today.
Category Archives: Fiction
Flashman On the March, by George MacDonald Fraser
This must perforce be the last Flashman book by George MacDonald Fraser, as the author died in 2009. (I wonder if there’s been any talk of another writer taking up the mantle. I wonder if another writer could do it properly. We’ve all been waiting a long time for Flashman’s Civil War adventures, which in terms of pure chronology would almost immediately precede this story.)
When we join Sir Harry Paget Flashman at the beginning of Flashman On the March, he’s desperately attempting to get out of Trieste, where he recently arrived as a refugee following a stint as an officer of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (poor Maximilian!). He runs into an old acquaintance, a British diplomat who is trying to find someone to protect a shipment of silver to Suez, for delivery to Gen. Robert Napier. Napier is buying support from various African tribes against King Theodore of Abyssinia (today known as Ethiopia). Theodore, who Flashman will come to describe as the maddest monarch he ever met—which is saying a great deal–has kidnapped a number of Europeans, and Napier is leading a relief force. Continue reading Flashman On the March, by George MacDonald Fraser
Sloth, by Mark Goldblatt
One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle.
Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth
You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here?
Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and fairly low humor).
The unnamed hero’s initial challenge is to convince a girl he’s never met—a girl he knows only through the television screen—that he’s not insane. A resident of a Manhattan apartment, he’s fallen in love with Holly Servant, a model/exercise instructor on a cable TV show out of California. He writes her erudite, impassioned love letters, not really expecting a response, but desperately hoping she’ll at least read them and bestow on his passion the dignity of her recognition.
When she eventually does reply, he attempts to impress her by assuming the Mark Goldblatt (fictional in two senses) identity.
“But since you’ve inquired, I will confess that I am in fact a journalist. It’s a point of considerable humiliation for me. For what is a journalist except a liar in denial? Truth is the single greatest threat to my livelihood, the sword poised eternally overhead, for if ever the reader asks himself, Should I trust the words? then I am lost.”
Meanwhile, the narrator comes under suspicion in the murder of a male prostitute in his neighborhood, and is questioned by a detective named Lacuna (I kid you not).
And his friend Zezel (their relationship just skirts the edges of homoeroticism, but this may be because the narrator actually is Zezel. Or perhaps he does exist, and the narrator doesn’t. Zezel sometimes sneaks into the narrator’s apartment, turns on his computer, and enters falsehoods [or are they?] into the manuscript, another layer of uncertainty in the narrative) is having an affair, and his spurned wife throws herself at the narrator.
Sloth is a wickedly funny, challenging and brilliantly written novel by an author of rare wit and creativity. Great fun for sophisticated readers (hey, I enjoyed it, so you don’t have to be all that sophisticated). Cautions for language and sexual situations.
The road has two shoulders
Two stories tonight, whose common thread is authors who do non-admirable things.
First of all, First Thoughts directs us to a Salon.com article by a woman who tells “How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood.”
My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn’t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn’t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn’t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father’s one true love: Ayn Rand.
I was hoping for a story about how the author found her way back to faith, but she says nothing more about that. Mostly it’s the story of how her father used Objectivist principles as an excuse to neglect his children.
Then, from Instapundit, a link to a Reason article by a fellow who set about re-tracing John Steinbeck’s route in his book, Travels With Charlie (which was very big back when I was in high school). His conclusion is that most of what Steinbeck reports is impossible, or is contradicted by the record.
It’s possible Steinbeck and Charley stopped to have lunch by the Maple River on October 12 as they raced across North Dakota. But unless the author was able to be at both ends of the state at the same time—or able to push his pickup truck/camper shell “Rocinante” to supersonic speeds—Steinbeck didn’t camp overnight anywhere near Alice 50 years ago. In the real world, the nonfiction world, Steinbeck spent that night 326 miles farther west, in the Badlands, staying in a motel in the town of Beach, taking a hot bath. We know this is true because Steinbeck wrote about the motel in a letter dated October 12 that he sent from Beach to his wife, Elaine, in New York.
Two writers, one from the far right, the other from the left. Both weighed and found wanting, by at least one reader, but for very different reasons. These are the besetting sins of liberals and conservatives.
I, of course, occupy the exact Middle. I look on both sides with condescension. The extent to which some people see me as partisan is precisely the extent to which the values of our society are warped. (Ahem.)
I expect most people feel that way, wherever they sit on the political/philosophical spectrum. Do the real extremists do the same? Did Stalin ever look at anyone and say, “Boy, he’s taking this Marxist dialectic a little too far”? Did Torquemada ever look at somebody else and say, “Hey, brother, you need to apply a little grace!”?
A Viking's Story, by John Andrews
A Viking’s Story is a privately published novel by a Wisconsin resident (under a pseudonym), available inexpensively in electronic formats only. I bought it in the first flush of Kindle enthusiasm (order a book, have it ready to read in about five seconds!), and I’m not sorry I bought it.
It’s the story of Harald Fairhair (also known as Harald Finehair), traditionally the first king of a united Norway. Andrews combines the traditional story of Harald, as recorded in the sagas, and weaves into it the findings of modern historical scholarship and archeology. The result is a generally coherent fictional memoir, as Harald himself dictates his life story to an English priest never mentioned in the actual historical record.
The result hangs together pretty well. I think this book would be a good introduction to the Viking Age for a general reader looking to learn more about that period. In my opinion, the author underestimates the superstition of a real Viking. Also, he falls into the rookie error of trying to convey emotion with exclamation points! But these are minor errors, and all in all the book was enjoyable.
The issue of Christianity does come up, and I have to give Andrews credit for evenhandedness in that department. The priest/amanuensis, to the extent that we come to know him, is relatively tolerant and reasonable. Harald himself, of course, scorns the religion (though he does admire its bureaucracy), which is entirely consistent with what we know of him.
A Viking’s Story is not a great Viking novel, but it’s pretty good, and has the special advantage of copious and up-to-date research (mostly. I found some things to quibble about, but I could be wrong about some of them myself).
Suitable for teens and up.
The Gray and Guilty Sea, by Jack Nolte
It was a shrewd marketing move for author Jack Nolte to entitle his first mystery novel The Gray and Guilty Sea. It makes it nearly irresistible for an old John D. MacDonald fan like me, still suffering the Aching Purple Bereavement of going a quarter century without another color-coded Travis McGee novel.
On the other hand, he set a high bar for himself through the implied comparison. Many fictional detectives have been touted as “the new Travis McGee” since MacDonald’s death, but (in my opinion) none of them has quite lived up to that standard.
Nolte’s detective, Garrison Gage, doesn’t, either.
But he’s still pretty good. Continue reading The Gray and Guilty Sea, by Jack Nolte
The People Of the Mist, by H. Rider Haggard
Michael Palin, formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, pretty much ruined the term “ripping yarn” with a satirical TV series he did, years back. In spite of him, though, there is such a thing as a ripping yarn, and The People Of The Mist
As I read The People of the Mist, the thought that kept recurring to me was, “Why hasn’t this book ever been made into a movie?” The author’s most famous work, King Solomon’s Mines, has been filmed numerous times, but TPOTM contains pretty much all the elements that made KSM so exciting, with the addition of a girl in the original story (movie versions of KSM generally insert one). Not only that, her relationship with the hero is one of those love/hate, “you make me so mad I could kiss you” affairs that filmmakers love. Plus there’s spectacle aplenty. Continue reading The People Of the Mist, by H. Rider Haggard
The Danger, by Dick Francis
I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the last Dick Francis novel I reviewed, The Edge, so in justice I want to report on reading his 1984 novel, The Danger
The hero of The Danger is Andrew Douglas, an agent for a low-profile English enterprise called Liberty Market. Liberty Market is in the business of assisting the families of kidnap victims. They use their agents’ paramilitary skills to rescue the victims if possible; otherwise they do everything they can to make the ransom process as secure as possible.
At the beginning of this story, that process has broken down for Andrew. He is supervising, in collaboration with the police, the ransoming of an Italian heiress who is also a celebrity jockey, Alessia Cenci. Some of the police try to arrest the kidnappers prematurely, leading to a hostage situation and imminent danger to Alessia. Andrew, however, is able to negotiate the tensions down, and Alessia is finally released.
Because of his hard-won understanding of her post-traumatic stress, Alessia bonds with Andrew as she goes through the recovery process. When she goes to stay with a friend in England, she and Andrew are able to see more of each other, and she ends up helping him when he’s called on to rescue the toddler son of the owner of a champion race horse. Andrew suspects that a very intelligent, ruthless criminal is targeting members of the racing community for kidnapping, and that suspicion is validated when the chairman of the British Jockey Club is kidnapped in Washington, DC.
Andrew is the kind of hero you expect from a Dick Francis novel—brave, competent, decent and self-reliant. What sets this book apart, in my view, is the work the author clearly did on understanding the psychology of kidnap victims, and the stages of recovery. The section where Andrew helps to draw the horse owner’s rescued little boy out of his prison of fear is genuinely moving.
Highly recommended. Cautions for some adult language and mild adult situations.
If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr
Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.
Such delightful passages as this show up pretty regularly in Philip Kerr’s novels, and (in my opinion) If the Dead Rise Not
Of course I have to be cautious in saying that. I knew a man once who saw God, not only in every leaf and flower, but in every book he read and movie he saw. All the writers, he was convinced, must be Christians, because he saw Christian messages in all their stories, and it wasn’t possible they’d meant something else altogether and he’d taken it wrong.
But still there’s something here… I think. Continue reading If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr
"Deposed Crime Kings"
Over at The American Culture, where my byline can occasionally be seen, scholar Curt Evans has posted two essays on the “Golden Age” of English mystery writing, refuting the common view that a few female authors are all you need to know about the period. He has posted a two-part essay, here and here, entitled “The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings”:
All four of the Crime Queens have been in print in paperback every decade since, while most of their male Golden Age contemporaries languished after their deaths.
It makes sense, then, that the idea of four Crime Queens has solidified over the last sixty years. Even so, this notion is chronologically ahistorical. Not until the very tail end of the Golden Age, or even just after, about 1938-1941, can all four Crime Queens truly have been said to have risen to dominance in the world of British crime fiction. Even Christie and Sayers, who appeared earlier on the mystery scene, in 1920 and 1923 respectively, really only began to tower over most of their male contemporaries in the 1930s, say 1930 to 1935.
There are some good reading suggestions here, if you can find the books.