Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben

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Oh my goodness, Gone For Good is a splendid novel.

I hate to blaspheme Andrew Klavan by calling it the best suspense novel I’ve ever read, but I’ll go so far as to say I’ve never read a better one.

Will Klein, the hero and narrator, is a do-gooder. He works in New York City for Covenant House a (real-life) humanitarian organization that tries to reach out to street kids and (when they’re lucky) help a few of them escape that world before they’re irreparably damaged (which doesn’t take long).

He lives with his girlfriend, Sheila. She’s his “soul-mate,” and he’s planning to propose soon. The only reason he put it off was because his mother died of cancer recently, and life got complicated.

It didn’t help that, shortly before her death, his mother told him his older brother Ken was still alive. Obviously she was just raving.

Ken had been Will’s hero as a boy, up until the day his girlfriend (Will’s former girlfriend) was found murdered, and Ken disappeared. The official assumption has been that Ken killed her and ran.

Believing his brother innocent, Will has always assumed he was also murdered, his body never found.

Then Sheila receives a mysterious phone call, leaves a note saying, “Love you always,” and vanishes completely.

Will has always been a passive guy (I identified with him heavily). But now, the weight of personal loss becomes too heavy to endure, and he sets out (with the help of his friend “Squares,” a millionaire yoga guru) to find the woman he loves. Quickly he learns that it has something to do with his brother’s disappearance. And we are given just enough glimpses (in Hitchcockian fashion) of the plans and deliberations of his enemies to understood the extreme danger he’s walking into. Very powerful, very ruthless people are interested in the whereabouts of Ken Klein. But even this information leaves plenty of surprises along the way. The twists come relentlessly, right up to a jaw-dropping revelation at the end.

What I loved about Gone For Good was that the plot and the surprises all rose from believable, complex characters. Coben understands Solzhenyitsin’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Every character in this book is flawed, but also well-meaning (by his own lights). The wide disparity between the things that individuals consider right and necessary is almost a part of the background scenery, like the Grand Canyon.

Outstanding. Recommended highly for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor

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I was trying to figure out why I feel so depressed today, and then I remembered that Al Franken is going to be my new senator.

In related news, the official Minnesota State Accessory is now the red rubber clown nose.



I decided to try reading a mystery by Steven Saylor on the recommendation of James Lileks (not, I probably ought to add, a personal recommendation, but one heard on the Hugh Hewitt Show). I’m glad I did, and I’ll be reading more. But they’re odd books.

The hero of The Venus Throw is Gordianus the Finder, an established private detective in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar. This story takes place in the year 56 BC, and is based on actual events.

Gordianus is visited, unexpectedly, by an acquaintance from the past, an old Egyptian philosopher named Dio, with whom he used to have informal dialogues when he lived as a young man in Alexandria. Dio explains that he is part of a delegation from Egypt which has come to petition the Roman Senate. One by one or in groups, most of the original 100 emissaries have been murdered or scared off. Dio asks Gordianus for just one favor—to do a sort of security check on the house where he is staying, so that he can eat the food without fearing poison.

Gordianus, very regretfully, has to refuse. Not only does the case involve political risks, but he is leaving on a trip to visit his oldest stepson (a soldier of Caesar’s in Gaul) the next day.

On his return from Gaul, Gordianus learns that Dio was murdered that very night. Continue reading The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor →

Fiction, Reading

50 Manly Fiction Options

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This just in: The Essential Man’s Library: 50 Fictional Adventure Books Edition. Hey, where’s G.A. Henty on that list? And I have to say up front, She and Ayesha are just not going to make my read-in-this-lifetime list. Maybe I’m missing out, but I think I’d rather read Patrick O’Brian and Wodehouse again.

Hey! Where’s O’Brian on that list?

Fiction

Have You Seen “District 9” Trailer?

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What do you think about a new sci-fi movie called “District 9”? You can watch the trailer in several places, one of which being this blog from one of the movie aliens. You have to click a button to translate his posts into English. It looks as if the story focuses on the politics of modern day illegal aliens or undocumented workers. In fact, a YouTube video I saw in which someone shouts, “Do your part. Marry a non-human,” makes explicit the illegal aliens angle. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story or that there isn’t plenty of truth in it. Hopefully, it won’t boil down to a plea for everyone to just get along.

You can see some back-story for the movie on this official site. I have some thoughts on American’s immigration problem too. Perhaps I should write on them here. Conservatives need to raise their voice on this, b/c the opposition isn’t going to lead us anywhere healthy. Look at the rotten sewage the House passed in the name of environmental progress. Help us.

Fiction, Reviews

The Children of Hurin, by J. R. R. Tolkien

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(Yes, I finally got around to reading this book.)



The trouble with Tolkien’s Middle Earth writing, apart from The Lord of the Rings, is the acute lack of hobbits. It’s hard to carry off the high heroic tone for a modern audience without offering non-heroic, funny intermediaries with whom the modern reader can identify. The moment I came up with the character of Father Aillil for my Erling books, I understood that the books could work. Modern readers find purely heroic characters and situations kind of clunky. I say it to our shame, but there are few old-style heroes among us (I’m talking about a whole cultural ethic here, not people who do heroic things), and we experience culture shock when we encounter such characters.

I’m not saying The Children of Húrin fails for this reason. I read it with great enjoyment. But you should be prepared for a rather different experience than what you get from Tolkien’s masterwork. If you’ve read The Silmarillion, you know what I mean, and indeed you will have read this story already, in a different form.

The Children of Húrin has been compared to an Icelandic saga. That’s true, if you’re thinking of the high heroic sagas, like the Volsunga Saga, sagas about heroes of old who were larger than life in every way—braver, crueler, more passionate than you and I.

Húrin is not the hero of this book, but his story frames it. At the beginning we learn how he earns the enmity of Glaurung, the evil dragon, who curses him and his family, then forces him to sit watching on a mountain as the curse works itself out. At the end he reappears for a brief epilogue.

The central character is his son Túrin, who (as the Vikings would have put it) has every good quality except for luck. Mighty and brave in battle, devoted to his family and friends, he nevertheless takes every wrong turn. He makes disastrous choices, trusts the wrong people, is offended by his best friends and offends those who should be his allies. In the end the dragon’s curse works itself out in his personal relationships, in a manner worthy of Greek tragedy (something Tolkien imposes on the saga form here, like the recent movie, “Beowulf”). Pity and terror are here in full measure.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it wasn’t lighthearted reading.

Recommended for serious-minded readers. I think it would be all right even for younger teens, if they’re mature.

Fiction, Writing

My campaign of misinformation

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Ori, in a customarily generous comment on my previous post, spoke of the “Edutainment” value of my Viking novels, that people learn history from them. I like to think there’s some truth in that. But it got me thinking about the historical errors that I nevertheless do promulgate in my books. A few historical errors that come to mind follow:

1. In my books, Erling’s father Skjalg dies about the year 994, very close to the beginning of the story. In real life, according to the sagas, Skjalg was killed in a slave rebellion while Erling was still a young boy. How I got it wrong: This particular part of Erling’s story is not found in Heimskringla, my primary source. It comes from a reference in another saga, which I’d never heard of when I wrote Erling’s Word. I covered my tracks in The Year of the Warrior by referring to the slave rebellion, but having Skjalg survive it.

2. The traditional dates for King Olaf Trygvesson’s reign are 995 to 1000 A.D. But if you read The Year of the Warrior and pay close attention, you’ll see that only four years are reported, rather than five. How I got it wrong: I had no use for another year, so I ignored it. This is the sort of thing you can get away with in a novel, most of the time.

3. Erling tells Father Aillil that, although his father was a heathen, he himself was converted to Christianity after a raid in Ireland. In fact, historians believe that Jaeder (Erling’s original area of influence) was Christianized as far back as the reign of Haakon the Good. Heathen graves in the area disappear around that time, according to archaeologists. In all likelihood, the real Skjalg was a Christian. How I got it wrong: This was something else I didn’t learn until Erling’s Word had been published. I paper it over by mentioning that Christianity has become popular in Jaeder, and the heathen are feeling threatened. And frankly, it’s more dramatic to make Erling a rebel against his father’s religion. I might have chosen to do it that way even if I had known.

4. I speak of King Harald Finehair and his family as coming from eastern Norway, and of Olaf Trygvesson as being Harald’s descendent. Both those contentions are based on Heimskringla, and both are questioned by historians today. Historians from western Norway have been fighting hard in the last few years for the idea that Harald (traditionally the first king of a united Norway) came from the west, and that later saga writers, in order to legitimize the reigning dynasty, made him an easterner. (Apparently they’ve been having trouble with that, though, and a compromise is being hammered out.) It does seem clear that Olaf Trygvesson (and the later St. Olaf Haraldsson) were not descendants of Harald. How I got it wrong: Again, I didn’t know about these things when I wrote. But you know, I’m dealing with a national epic here. Trying to be too meticulous wouldn’t buy me much. And ten years down the road, historians will probably have changed their minds again anyway.

Fiction

Giveaway: The Vanishing Sculptor

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Mr. Holtsberry is giving away one of Donita K. Paul’s novels, The Vanishing Sculptor. Leave a comment on his post to enter. The winner will be chosen by a meeting of the minds at the U.S. Department of Treasury, that is to say, at random.

Fiction, Reviews

The Last Thing I Remember, by Andrew Klavan

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Andrew Klavan’s The Last Thing I Remember is his first young adult thriller. That doesn’t mean a grizzled old man like me can’t enjoy it, though, and I did.

Nobody sets up a grabber opening like Klavan, and it would have been hard to better this one. As the story begins, we find our hero, high school junior Charlie West, waking up strapped to a heavy metal chair, in a room full of torture instruments. He has wounds and burns that he can’t remember getting. In fact, the last thing he remembers is a fairly ordinary day of school (which turns out, on closer examination, to have been not so ordinary at all). Outside the door, he hears men talking, and the one in charge says, “Kill him.”

Now we both know they won’t succeed at that, because otherwise there’d be no book. What follows is a two-stranded story—Charlie describes his desperate escape and his attempts to get back home and avoid the police (who are hunting him), alternating with his memories of that “ordinary” last day—the karate demonstration he did for a school assembly (he has a black belt, and it’s a good thing, too), working up the nerve to talk to a pretty girl and getting her phone number, a session at the dojo and a talk with an estranged friend, work on a history paper, and bed.

The formula for a good thriller is to put your hero in an impossible situation and find ways for him to survive and reach his goals, even though the impossible situation gets even worse. Klavan hits every stop, and the story just speeds along. It seemed too short, and now I’ll have to wait a whole year to find out what comes next.

Charlie is a Christian and a patriot, and just the kind of hero you want your kids to have.

I have some minor quibbles. Charlie frequently draws strength from a quotation from Winston Churchill that he got from his karate master—“Never give in, never give in… never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense….” It gets a little didactic, but of course this is a young adult novel, and you almost have to do that if you want to teach the reader anything. Nuance doesn’t go very far with younger readers.

I found that lesson a little painful, personally. The principle’s a good one, but there are a lot of people out there—especially young people—who aren’t in a position to act as Charlie does. These people are in situations where they literally have no power, and trying to “never give in” will only make their situations worse. I know, because I was one of those kids once.

But that’s something that’s probably more significant to me than to most people. This is a book you’ll want your son or daughter to read (mild violence, no sex or bad language), and you’ll enjoy reading it too. A lot.