Category Archives: Fiction

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

June 26, 2009 Lars Walker Leave a comment

(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

June 23, 2009 Lars Walker Leave a comment

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

June 23, 2009 Phil Leave a comment

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

June 17, 2009 Lars Walker Leave a comment

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.

Fiction

Lawhead’s Return to Robin Hood

June 12, 2009 Phil Leave a comment

Patrol has a review of Stephen Lawhead’s trilogy on Robin Hood.

Fiction, Reviews

Winter Haven, by Athol Dickson

June 9, 2009 Lars Walker Leave a comment

I raised a small controversy in this space a little while back, when I gave a less than enthusiastic (though positive) review to Athol Dickson’s The Cure.

I liked his Winter Haven considerably better, though I still have a couple reservations.

I criticized The Cure for offering a weak sister protagonist for whom I found it hard to root. No such problem with Winter Haven. The protagonist here is Vera Gamble, a Texas accountant whose nearly obsessive-compulsive passion for numerical balance drives her to go to any lengths to rectify the imbalances in her own life. She has lost her mother (to cancer) and her autistic brother (he just disappeared one day), and finally her father, whose abusive religious teachings drove her to never, never, never ask God why He let anything happen. Now she’s received word that her brother’s body has washed up on a beach on the Maine island of Winter Haven. When she makes her way there to take him home, she discovers that, although thirteen years have passed since his disappearance, he looks precisely the age he was when he ran away.

The story unfolds in the classic manner of a Gothic novel (and a good one). The island residents seem oddly hostile, and they are greatly disturbed when their (unwritten and unexplained) rules about where she may go and what she may do are transgressed. A handsome sea captain who lives alone in a crumbling mansion is the one who discovered her brother’s body. He has recently announced the discovery of Viking artifacts, which (trust me on this), if verified as being discovered on this island, would mean a huge historical breakthrough. But is his story true? Why won’t he show anyone where he found them? What is he hiding? And what is the strange, inhuman voice that Vera hears everywhere, speaking almost-intelligible words?

I found the mystery fascinating. Winter Haven is a genuine page-turner.

Maybe it’s just me, but I thought Dickson tied everything up a little too neatly at the end. The theme of answered questions, and mysteries explained, is central to the book, but I (personally) find too much resolution a little unbelievable. In my own books, I like to leave a few threads untied, because life’s like that.

But that’s my only quibble. I recommend Winter Haven.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Re-reading Lewis and Narnia

June 9, 2009 Phil Leave a comment

Mr. Holtsberry has a review of Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.

Brandywine Books

Category Archives: Fiction

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

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My campaign of misinformation

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Giveaway: The Vanishing Sculptor

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The Last Thing I Remember, by Andrew Klavan

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Lawhead’s Return to Robin Hood

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Winter Haven, by Athol Dickson

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Re-reading Lewis and Narnia

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Book Reviews, Creative Culture

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