I’m looking forward to reading Athol Dickson’s next book, Lost Mission.
Category Archives: Fiction
On Fairy Tales
Chesterton on the Benefit of Fairy Tales for Children. The world is not nice, and the monsters must meet their just ends.
Sea-ing the grove for the trees
I meant to do a number of things this weekend, and accomplished a few of them, mostly shopping- and computer-related. But I’m only firing on a couple cylinders. Either my cold is still hanging on, or I’m in the process of succumbing to a second malady, possibly H1N1 or the King’s Evil. I hope that’s not the case, because I’d hate to cancel my appearance for the Chesterton Society in Fargo on Saturday.
I just picked up some Airborne®, which some of the Vikings recommend. Just like the Fizzies we used to enjoy when I was a kid, except less sweet and they’re supposed to be good for you.
Again I spent Sunday at home (I was beginning to fear I was contagious), and I ended the day as has been my custom recently, watching one of the Inspector Lewis mysteries on PBS.
Inspector Lewis (as all Mystery aficionados know), is the former Sergeant Lewis who played sidekick for so many years to Inspector Morse in the splendid series based on Colin Dexter’s whodunits. Lewis has had an interesting character arc. In the original mystery in the series, as written in the book Last Bus to Woodstock, Inspector Morse had two sergeants assisting him. One was named Lewis, and was described as short and stocky. The other (whose name I’ve forgotten) was tall and thin. When the series was televised, the producers conflated the two sergeants and gave us a tall, thin officer named Lewis. In the books that followed, the author just rode the wave. He made Lewis the regular assistant, and never (as far as I noticed) described him again, so the reader was free to think of him as looking like Kevin Whately, who still portrays him on television.
There’s an interesting religious subtext in the new Inspector Lewis series (Dexter killed off Inspector Morse with a heart attack in The Remorseful Day in 1999). Lewis had been (though inconsistently) portrayed as a churchgoer in the Inspector Morse stories. Now we’re told that his wife has been killed in a senseless traffic accident, and that he has become an atheist. His assisting sergeant, however, is a former seminarian who still believes to some extent. The question of God’s existence intrudes regularly in the stories, as it did in this week’s episode, which involved an Oxford don who writes bestselling books, Richard Dawkins-style, about atheism.
But what struck me most in this episode was the presence of the actress Jenny Seagrove. My heart knew a nameless dread when I saw her name on the credits at the beginning. “What have the years done to Jenny?” I asked myself. “Will she be a skin-tightened, botoxed android, like so many other actresses her age?” Continue reading Sea-ing the grove for the trees
True Detectives, by Jonathan Kellerman
Writing a successful series character can (or so they tell me) be a trial (albeit a profitable one) for an author. There’s an inherent problem with series characters. Generally in fiction, one of an author’s chief purposes is to dramatize personal change. A character grows through his experiences in the story. He makes difficult and costly choices and grows a bit as a human being. This gives the story a point, and satisfies the reader.
But series characters can’t have life-changing experiences with every story. Nobody changes that much in their lifetime, and if they did, they’d soon cease to be the characters readers have fallen in love with.
So series authors like to stretch themselves now and then. Sometimes they’ll write one-offs. And sometimes they’ll create new series characters.
Jonathan Kellerman, author of the Alex Delaware psychological mysteries, has chosen the second course with his latest in paperback, True Detectives. He’s taken two characters he introduced in his last Alex Delaware book and given them their own story. In my opinion, they’re worth the trouble. Continue reading True Detectives, by Jonathan Kellerman
“I do not drink… wine”
Patrick Archbold at Creative Minority Report meditates on vampires and zombies, and the differences between traditional monsters and modern ones.
Come to think of it, even the original zombies show signs of the secularization of our culture. Vampires sought to drink blood, what was then regarded as the life force. Zombies want to eat brains. I think that science and secularization is changing what is craved – in more spiritual times monsters craved blood for its life force – now they crave brains as animals crave meat. As a result they are less scary and more pathetic. Lions and tigers and bears are scary because they can eat you, but they can’t destroy your soul. Secular monsters are boring. I mean vampires aren’t even afraid of holy water and crucifixes anymore. They are clingy and misunderstood. If I want clingy and misunderstood, I will watch a Woody Allen movie. Come to think of it, Woody Allen is scarier than these vampires.
(Tip: View from the Foothills)
I’ve talked about the legend of the vampire before here. The traditional vampire (before the novelists got hold of him) was a miserable, vicious creature, barely sentient, dressed in rags, stinking of corruption, driven by hunger. He resembled a zombie a lot more than Bela Lugosi or Tom Cruise.
The novels and movies changed that. Vampires acquired style and status, the charm of the Exotic Foreigner. With time, they’ve become so cool they’re not even scary anymore (see “Twilight”). So it was necessary to import zombies to do the work vampires wouldn’t do.
But the difference as (Archbold notes) is also spiritual. Both traditional and fictional vampires had an essentially spiritual disorder. Sure, they craved a physical substance–blood–but that was a perversion of the Christian eucharist, like a Black Mass. That’s why crucifixes scared them. Modern vampires (I think Ann Rice who, ironically, is now a Catholic, pioneered this) laugh at crucifixes. Once you reach that level of materialization of the monstrous, the distinction between vampire and zombie is reduced to food preferences and fashion choices.
Today’s monsters are not damned souls, but merely consistent materialists. Scary, yes, but not very exotic.
Modern man looks for the most frightening thing he can imagine, and it turns out to be himself.
Review from “Darwin’s Evolutions”
I don’t think I ever linked to Darwin Garrison’s review of West Oversea, over at Darwin’s Evolutions. Thanks for the great notice, Darwin, and I apologize for forgetting to link to it before!
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I stated in the Comments on Andrew Klavan’s review (he didn’t like it a lot) that I had a bet with myself that the most conservative, religious character in the book would prove to be the murderer.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that I was wrong. I feel morally obligated to post that for the record. Continue reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
Reason for Reading Dan Brown?
Adam Gopnik says maybe the reason so many want to read Dan Brown’s books is their niceness. Ancient conspiracies, secrets which must be kept in the dark, crazies with bad skin, and safe plots with modern conclusions. Gopnik writes:
Much of it is bogus, to be sure—though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past, it was an Enlightenment club, whose greatest product was “The Magic Flute,” and which was about as sinister, and secretly controlled about as many governments, as the Royal Order of Raccoons in “The Honeymooners.” But Brown is having fun. And the book is full of activities; there’s more to do with a pencil and safety scissors than in any Highlights for Children.
Happy Birthday to H.G.Wells
Today in 1866, H.G. Wells, who said, “I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea,” who said, “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,” was born. Wells had little imagination for submarines and also for hell. He said, “Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.” I suppose he was returning his eyewitness report from hell when we said that. Otherwise, how could he know?
For his birthday, here’s a collection of book covers for War of the Worlds.
“Perelandra turned my life upside down”
Jeanne Damoff writes about Lewis’ gift for telling the truth in fiction:
Lewis does a great job of portraying the woman as intelligent but entirely pure. She entertains the Un-man’s ideas because she’s never had a reason not to listen to anything being said to her. Though Ransom tries to counter all the lies, the woman has no reason to trust one of them over the other. She’s never encountered debate, never required discernment. But occasionally the Un-man pushes too far. When he invites her to “make a story” about living on the Fixed Island–to imagine herself doing the forbidden thing–she says, “If I try to make a story about living on the Fixed Island, I do not know how to make it about Maleldil. For if I make it that He has changed His command, that will not do. And if I make it that we are living there against His command, that is like making the sky all black and the water so that we cannot drink it and the air so that we cannot breathe it. But also, I do not see what is the pleasure of trying to make these things.”
She follows up this post with another called “The post I do not want to write.”