Category Archives: Fiction

Authors, Fiction, Writing

What Christian Art Is All About

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A Christian professor of fiction published a piece “To the Christian Writer” in which he recommends good art as a thing separate from Christian faith.

He begins by saying, “there’s no such thing as Christian art.” If someone wants to be a Christian, he should pursue it wholeheartedly, but “bad art comes out when you compromise art-making with some other intent.” Some other intent like Christian morals.

“If your fiction feels like it’s veering toward a moral conclusion, stop.”

I want to understand this professor’s argument and view it charitably, and I agree moralistic fiction is often shallow and ugly. I’m sure if I ever gain the courage to pick up Sheldon’s In His Steps, the novel that gave us the question “What Would Jesus Do?” I’ll regret it. I couldn’t make it past chapter one of The Shack. But separating Christian devotion from art sounds post-modern to me in all the wrong ways. What is art if it cannot be pursued as an expression of Christian truth?

I’m not sure he’s actually saying that, because he also says, “As a Christian person, would you not say it’s a joy to follow God? So follow him through your work. Quit telling him where to stand and how to speak.” That’s good. It calls back to moralistic work which may sound Christian while being far from it. That’s not good art.

“Preconceived moralizing jacketed in fiction aims for the head and the heart. If you want to be a good writer, aim elsewhere.” What does that mean? Aim for the spleen? What is good art if it doesn’t move the heart or elevate the affections (thinking of Jonathan Edwards’s language)? What makes the work of Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Barbara Kingsolver, Haruki Murakami, Annie Proulx, or Salman Rushdie objectively good that he recommends them over Lewis, Chesterton, and O’Connor?

Could it be we’re actually wrestling over cultural respectability — that our work would find approval in the New York Times Review of Books or Harper’s Magazine?

I think art is its own virtue, like planting and tending a tree, and artistic choices are also moral choices. Some choices are going to be more accessible to the public than others. Some will require greater levels of skill to succeed. In all of these choices, the best ones (though maybe not the most popular) will be true, real, and good. Isn’t that what Christian art is all about?

Photo by Peter Ivey-Hansen on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Round,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Always reliable. That’s the great thing about Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels, set in England’s lake district, not far from the Scottish border. The setting is as is expected – the fell country where Skelgill loves to fish and run. Dan Skelgill is a police detective, assisted by his (also reliable) sergeants – transplanted Londoner Sgt. Leyton, and attractive local Sgt. Emma Jones.

One of the great traditions in their neighborhood is the Bob Graham Round, a grueling fell running race. Skelgill has come up with an idea for a new variation, one that takes the same route but incorporates lake fishing. He’s taking some vacation time to test the concept out when he learns of the death of a local runner, killed by a hit and run driver, with no witnesses. Although he can’t take an active part in the investigation because he’s on holiday, he keeps in touch with Leyton and Jones as they investigate. That’s the premise of Murder in the Round.

Skelgill is (I think I’ve said this before) almost the opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Logical deduction is not his forte. He’s more like a hominid from the hunter-gatherer period, operating mostly by his senses, getting messages from the scents in the air and the tracks on the ground.

I used to wonder how long his low-key flirtation with Sgt. Jones would go on, but I’ve come to accept that Dan Skelgill lives in one of those fictional universes where no one ever grows older. They’ll both be young and smoldering as long as author Beckham goes on writing.

Good entertainment. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross,’ by Sigrid Undset

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Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.

So it is done at last. I have completed yet another reading of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter – volume 3, The Cross. Tiina Nunnaly’s translation this time.

It’s a little like completing a long mountain hike, I guess. There’s more than one point where you pause along the path and think about how far you have to go, and sometimes you do get tired. Yet that’s just part of the experience, what you go through to enjoy the clear air and the spectacular views.

In case you’re not familiar with the story, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy begins with our young heroine, the beautiful daughter of doting parents in 14th Century Norway, rejecting the dull young man they betrothed her to, and running off with a handsome, dashing knight.

In the following two books, she has to live with the consequences. Erlend, her husband, is not a prudent man. He leaves the management of their farm to others (often to Kristin herself) to involve himself in political intrigues, which in the end lose him his ancestral estate. In this book, they have retired to Kristin’s home farm, where Erlend is resented by the neighbors. Sigrid’s chief concern is transferred to their seven sons, and she learns the torments that accompany parenthood. Meanwhile, the Hound of Heaven is always pursuing her.

There’s exquisite irony in watching Sigrid, as she passes through the stages of life, first inspired by romantic ballads, then compared to a ballad, and finally seeing her son inspire a ballad of his own through his misguided actions.

Read Kristin Lavransdatter, and you’ll come to know Kristin better than you know a lot of your friends and family. In a sense, the trilogy is a soap opera – but it’s what soap operas aspire to be; a deep, unwavering examination of the human soul in its glory and its weakness. The scenery descriptions are vivid and immersive. It’s also a paeon to the grace of God.

Not light reading, but highly recommended.

Fiction, Publishing, Writing

Gazing into the creative abyss

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Should I share negative thoughts about my own books on this blog? Is it acceptable to indulge in self-criticism, or should the tone be relentlessly rah-rah and self-promotional?

Oh heck, that ship sailed long ago.

I’m working on formatting The Ghost of the God-Tree, the second part of The Year of the Warrior, for paperback. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s got some strong stuff in it.

But I think it’s among my weakest books. There are lots of things I’d change, if I didn’t feel obligated to keep the editions relatively uniform.

And I’m pretty sure why.

I am very grateful to Baen Books, and to Jim Baen the maverick publisher, who gave me what little legitimacy in the industry I possess.

But Jim had a system. A program for his authors. And into that program I did not fit well.

Jim felt that nothing contributed more to an author’s success than having a bunch of books with his name on them all together on the shelves in the bookstores. This worked for him again and again. He knew his business. In order to achieve that shelf-space goal, he wanted several books from his new authors, quick. That’s why I got a three-book deal.

The problem is, I’m not a fast writer. I’ll admit that some of my languid output is due to laziness and inattention. Fair enough, mea culpa. But regardless of that, it just takes me a while, and many drafts, to produce decent prose. It took me years to produce Erling’s Word, the first part of the book. The Ghost of the God-Tree was written in haste, and suffers from my parental neglect.

On the other hand, judging by history, I’m probably being a little over-critical here.

And there are parts I like. I enjoyed the section where Ailill (Aillil) and Asta go to Thor’s country and meet the god himself. I thought that was kind of fun.

Fiction, Reviews

Cozy, Irish Lit: Small Things Like These

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Sheila had written the shortest letter, asking plainly for Scrabble, providing no alternative. They decided on a spinning globe of the world for Grace, who wasn’t sure what she wanted but had written out a long list. Loretta was not in two minds: if Santa would please bring Enid Blyton’s Five Go Down to the Sea or Five Run Away Together or both, she was going to leave a big slice of cake out for him and hide another behind the television.

Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, is a story about Bill Furlong, a hard-working father of five girls. He’s the man who keeps his 1980s Irish town, New Ross, warm, selling timber, coal, anthracite, and slack. It’s honest work that puts a roof over your head, though the windows may be drafty. He regularly remembers his childhood as the son of a single woman who worked for a kindly widow. Surely, he thinks, someone in town knows who his father is, if by nothing else than a strong resemblance. But no one has even suggested a possibility.

With the Christmas holidays coming and typical last-minute fuel orders to fulfill, Furlong makes a delivery that raises significant questions about his role as a man and member of the community.

I don’t know why I love Irish things. I think half of my family hails from Ulster, which probably means they were Scottish, but something provoked me as a teenager to define myself as being half-Irish (in the loose way many Americans talk about their heritage). All that to say, Keegan’s novella had cozy moments in both the Christmas atmosphere and the Irish dialogue. I found those pages nostalgic somehow. I bought the book wondering if the whole story would be that way.

No, this is a sparing, literary work that captures a few days of Bill Furlong’s life. He’s a man of few words, so a brief story like this fits him, leaving us with a good impression of him and perhaps the same questions he has. I don’t want to spoil the book by articulating those questions, but I will say they are relatively timeless and fit with the Christmas story, just as the title echoes the primary theme: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Mt 25:40 NKJV).

Photo by Dahlia E. Akhaine on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Eviction of Hope,’ ed. by Colin Conway

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I have enjoyed Colin Conway’s 509 series, detective novels set in the Spokane, Washington area. When the story collection, The Eviction of Hope, showed up, I realized I hadn’t read one of the books in a while, so I got this one.

The concept (based on a real-world situation) is that “The Hope,” a residential hotel, once a grand place but now home to transients and drug addicts, is being sold for gentrification. That means the residents, some of them hard-luck civilians, others low-level criminals, are being thrown out onto the streets. Author Conway gathered a group of established crime writers to imagine some of the stories of those dispossessed people.

I am of two minds about the stories in this book. They are well-written. Several of them grabbed me.

However, most of them are downers. One, in particular, involves a Christian woman who disappoints us morally.

All in all, The Eviction of Hope was depressing but well done.

Cautions for language and mature situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Double Barrel Bluff,’ by Lou Berney

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Why not? he thought.

Understanding, even as he thought it, that asking yourself, Why not? was usually the beginning of a bad decision, the first domino tipping over.

I like Lou Berney’s Shake Bouchon novels very much. The main problem with them is that he brings them out pretty slowly. So it was a pleasure when I saw that there was a new one available – Double Barrel Bluff. It’s an excellent, offbeat, dark comedy thriller.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, our hero, is a former wheel man for the Armenian mob in Las Vegas. But he’s now married to Gina, a former pickpocket, and they’ve gone straight. Straight to Bloomington, Indiana, where they have square jobs and live a square life. Which they love.

Until one morning Shake finds himself accosted by an old enemy, Dikran Ghazarian, an Armenian thug the size and strength of an ox, with only a little more brains. To Shake’s astonishment, Dikran – who has often promised to murder him – does not want that today. He explains (after catching Shake) that Lexy Ilandryan, the woman leader of the Armenian mob, has disappeared while on vacation in Cambodia. He needs Shake to go to Cambodia with him and find her. Shake feels some obligation to Lexy, and so they fly there, to hunt for Lexy among the slums and ancient temples.

The dark humor of Double Barrel Bluff rises in large part from Shake’s attempts to keep a rein on Dikran, whose idea of investigating is to punch people and break things. Meanwhile we also follow the team of kidnappers, also a “smart” one and a dumb one, oddly parallel to Shake and Dikran. Author Berney excels at characterization – the good guys and bad guys constantly surprise us, but never pass plausibility.

Cautions for language and extreme situations. And some psychic/Buddhist nonsense. But Double Barrel Bluff was a very exciting and amusing light thriller. I enjoyed it a lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Side of the Street,’ by Jack Higgins

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There was a time when I was a great fan of the late Jack Higgins’ books. (His real name was Henry Patterson.) In time I began finding him repetitive, and I gave up on him. But I don’t mind picking one up for old times sake, now and then, if I happen to find one I haven’t read before. Such was the case with Dark Side of the Street.

Higgins explains in a foreword that this book was one of his early ones, written with the idea of competing with the James Bond franchise. His character Paul Chavasse is a very Bond-ian British intelligence agent. In this outing, Chavasse is called in on a special assignment to help the police, based on his experience in undercover work. They want him to commit a crime, get caught, and go to prison in order to ingratiate himself with a prisoner.

The background is this: The criminal he’s supposed to befriend, Harry Youngblood, was one of three men convicted of a major theft, and the money has never been recovered. Both his partners have already been sprung from high security prisons and have utterly disappeared. What nobody knows is that these men have not been spirited off to anonymous lives in foreign countries. They were in fact murdered for their loot. When Chavasse befriends Youngblood in prison and joins him in his escape, they will both be walking into a waiting death trap.

Dark Side of the Street benefits from some decent characterization – author Higgins humanizes the ruthless Youngblood, without romanticizing his essentially selfish and brutal nature. There’s also a sad subplot involving an unattractive, lovestruck girl.

The story includes a scene involving a mortuary and the embalmment of a beautiful young woman. It seemed familiar because it was – I’ve encountered the same scene twice in other books by Higgins – one of his weaknesses was a tendency to recycle material.

The layout of the book was marred by a lack of double spacing between chapter sections – meaning the reader frequently finds himself in a new scene with new characters, with no warning. This is the sort of error that happens increasingly in e-books these days, and it’s annoying.

But otherwise, Dark Side of the Street wasn’t bad as light entertainment.

Fiction, Reviews

Phantom Thriller: Review of Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius

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Guest review by Adam H. Douglas

David Ignatius’ new novel, Phantom Orbit (2024), is like a Zen koan asking: When is a thriller not a thriller? 

Let me explain.

Those of you familiar with Mr. Ignatius know he is a renowned reporter for the Washington Post who writes a twice-weekly column there. He is also the author of several works of fiction, mostly thrillers. Personally, I wasn’t familiar with his creative writing until I picked up this new novel. 

As you might expect, his writing skills are very good. The man can craft the textures of a wide variety of global cultures and wield national idioms with a time-honed and deft ability. His professionalism shines through on every page. 

That’s the good part. 

On the flipside, this was a frustrating, meandering read that I would’ve given up on about a quarter of the way through if not for a sense of masochistic curiosity that made me wonder how long it would remain so pointless.

Three Decades of Backstory 

The story of Phantom Orbit follows three characters over three decades, from the mid-90s to the current time. 

Our first hero is Ivan Vladimirovich Volkov, a one-time student of astronomy and astrophysics at Tsinghua University (Beijing), who is feeling the effects of the dissolution of Soviet Russia. As a young man studying hard, he hooks up with a visiting American woman named Edith Ryan—our second heroine. The two have an intense romantic relationship that ends in a tearful separation. 

Ivan greatly regrets the breakup yet wonders if he might’ve dodged a bullet. After all, there were subtle indications that the young woman might’ve been a CIA operative. 

Our third character is Professor Cao Lin, a distinguished researcher and member of the Academy of Sciences who eventually becomes head of a committee on “special projects” that reports to the Central Military Commission. Essentially, he’s there to get China’s spy/intelligence space program working, including attacking the Americans by whatever means they can manage. 

Promises to Keep

Phantom Orbit commits what I consider to be one of the most grievous sins for thriller novels (or indeed any novel genre if you get right down to it): Failing to follow through on its promises. 

The book is marketed as a taut page-turning thriller that is part The Martian, part The Da Vinci Code. The dust jacket teases us with the story of a Russian student (Ivan) stumbling upon an “unsolved puzzle” contained in the writings of the famous 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Ivan brings this puzzle to a prominent scientist within China’s space program, expressing his determination to find the solution that could have “significant implications for space warfare.”

Sounds intense and dynamic, right? Moreover, the book’s prologue is practically textbook-format for attracting thriller aficionados. Here’s a summary:

Continue reading Phantom Thriller: Review of Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius →
Fiction, Publishing, Writing

A work in progress

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Photo credit: James Tarbotton. Unsplash license.

I have no idea where I’m going with tonight’s post. I just have some thoughts provoked by my paperback book project. As I’ve told you before, all my self-published Erling Skjalgsson books (except for The Baldur Game, still waiting in the wings) are now available as paperbacks, thanks to backbreaking effort on my own part.

Currently I’m working on West Oversea. Its previous publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has transferred all rights to me, and I’m currently going through the manuscript, formatting it as an e-book form. Nordskog was kind enough to provide me with the graphic files for all their neat art, and I’m embedding that stuff now. My version won’t look exactly like Nordskog’s, but it will have similarities.

Which gets me thinking about some of the stuff I sort of learned in library school… some of which I sort of remember. I’ll probably get the terms wrong.

First of all, we studied what a work is. I reviewed True Grit last night. True Grit, as conceived and written by Charles Portis, is a work. Print it in hardback, print it in paperback, make it an e-book – it’s still the same work. If you adapt it as a movie, that’s a different work, because substantial changes have been made. A comic book version is also a different work (if I remember correctly).

But the hardback, the paperback, and the ebook, though the same work, are all different editions. And when it went out of print, and then got printed again, that became a new edition.

The individual copy you hold in your hand, on the other hand, pretty much identical to all the other copies of the edition, but distinct in its individual quiddity and whatever notes you might have scribbled in the margins, that’s called an instantiation.

My new e-book of West Oversea, similar to but different in detail from Nordskog’s, will be a new edition.

This is all complicated by the question of editorial changes. As I’ve been working through the manuscript, I’ve made small corrections. Mostly in punctuation. Very rarely, I’ll change a minor word. I don’t want to go crazy – I feel I must let the chips lay where they fell, even if I could do a better polishing job now than I did back in 2009. Mostly for the sake of the people who already bought it and think they’ve read the work.

I think that makes my new edition a different iteration of the work.

But it’s the same work.

Unless I remember it wrong.