Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: A Fatherless Child

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The third episode of Jeremy Boreing’s The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin continues in the series’ strengths. Tom Sharp as Merlin (shown above) brings appropriate gravity to the role of a 75-year-old mage who has been an established legend for many years, according to all the people who meet him.

It begins with Merlin in the wilderness and a voiceover telling us what people say about him — that he was mad, that he was a king of renown, a bard, a prophet, and a slayer of hundreds. A figure and voice reminiscent of the old man who confronted Taliesin charges him to “go back the way you came.” And so, our man with falcon eyes returns to the land of the living.

The easiest way for me to review each episode would be to simply recap what happens. I don’t want to do that. I want you to enjoy the show yourself, whether it be on DailyWire+ or on another method of release (surely they will sell DVDs). Still, I’ll share what I can.

Merlin delivers the episode’s theme when telling Aurellius, “First, there is a sword, a sword of Britain and the sword is Britain.” Aurellius is of Roman decent and aims to reclaim his father’s land from the Saxons (or Saecsens, as the show spells it). One historical account says he was the one who directed the building of Stonehenge, which would be an impressive real-world tie-in. Right now, he is avenging his father’s murder and rallying other warlords to his banner.

Aurellius’s brother is Uther Pendragon, who appears as his more pessimistic partner in the fight. The story makes it clear Aurellius is in charge, but Uther looks to be his equal in many ways.

This series isn’t going to put the cookies on a low shelf. Viewers may ask if they are supposed to know who someone is or how to read Welsh, and if you’ve taken a course in Arthurian legend, then yeah, you should know. The rest of us will need to get comfortable with ignorance. I haven’t felt lost yet, and most of my knowledge of Camelot comes from the musical.

I love what they’ve done with magic, so far. Episode one got gritty with the pagan stuff, but when our leading men exercise power, it’s natural and sometimes marvelous.

And there’s a scene in this one that is a bit more thrilling for its close resemblance to the hobbits hiding from the Black Riders. I almost stopped it to stare at the tree roots. It’s not the same forest, but when you see it, you’ll know what I’m saying.

Fiction, Reviews

The Pendragon Cycle: Taliesin Episodes

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DailyWire+ has released its beautiful, 7-episode series The Rise of the Merlin, based on The Pendragon Cycle, Stephen Lawhead’s six book series, to regular members last Thursday. The first two eps are up along with a podcast that explains some of the details.

The first episode introduces Charis of Atlantis and the destruction her civilization. It’s an impressive scene in a Greek-style arena. Charis is the head of a seven-person team, male and female, who summersault over running bulls (see the photo of a Minoan fresco above). It isn’t just sport. It’s ritual for the bull god, Bel, to whom Charis is praying when we first see her.

The Atlanteans speak a language invented for the show by Spencer Klavan. It has a great, authentic sound. I picked up notes of Indo-European and Phaffinnic intonations under a clear faux-Latin influence. (I say this as a guy who can spot the subtle flavors in a Hersey’s, so I know what I’m talking about. Don’t get me started on peanut butter blends.)

Twenty years after their home is destroyed, the Atlanteans have established a kingdom in southern Britain, where the Cymry find them, having fled their land to escape barbarian raiders. Taliesin, a bard, is the adopted son of King Elphin. On the first evening, we hear him sing for King Avallach, Charis, and the other Atlanteans a moving song about the Welsh king Pwyll meeting the fairie lord of Annwn in the forest. It’s the first of two songs Taliesin sings in these episodes, and I like them, though they aren’t 4th century ballads. (I assume Lawhead wrote them.) This one in particular has been stuck in my ear for days.

The theme of this part of the series is the move from paganism to Christianity. Both main characters reject offers to sell themselves completely to their pagan gods, and at the end of episode one, the Lord catches Taliesin by surprise. “Look upon me then, Shining Brow!” It’s marvelous.

I love the look of this series so far. The actors are wonderful. (James Arden looks and sounds great as Taliesin.) Dialogue is strong. My one criticism is that a few scenes feel clipped. A dramatic scene at the start of episode two could use a few more minutes of explanation. Or maybe it lacks a foundation. They do explain why everyone is angry in that moment after the scene, but I could use three more minutes of talking it over—maybe hearing the offer put on the table and hearing it rejected before tempers flare.

Episodes drop every Thursday. I’ll try to review the next ones as they come out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Friend of the Family,’ by Dean Koontz

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The world of her fiction was our world in every respect, but it was made better and more interesting by her perspective on it. There was much honest sentiment in her work but no sentimentality, compassion without the indignity of pity, forgiveness that required penitence, righteous indignation but not acidic anger regarding those who were foolish or ignorant.

The passage above, from Dean Koontz’s The Friend of the Family, just released, describes the work of a character in the story, but applies pretty well to this book too. I wonder how many other people experience Koontz the way I do. If a man can’t (as the philosopher said) enter the same river twice, certainly no two men ever enter the same river at all, and no two people ever read the same book. All Koontz’s books don’t work the same way for me. The books he writes that deal with abused children are the ones that really get me – because that’s a subject he knows personally, and I share that knowledge. Maybe these books don’t touch more fortunate people the same way.

In any case, The Friend of the Family is that kind of book, and I found it not only moving but heartbreakingly beautiful. This is one of my favorites of his works – right up there with the Odd Thomas novels – and I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again.

Addie is a “freak” in a sideshow act. She feels rather fortunate in her manager, or owner, or whatever he is, because he feeds her, doesn’t beat her, and steals books for her to read. But he subjects her to daily humiliation through displaying her nearly naked to crowds, showcasing her deformities (which are not actually described till late in the story).

Then one day Franklin and Loretta Fairchild show up to rescue her. Frank and Loretta are a couple of the decent people in Hollywood (such creatures do exist). They live in a mansion, and already have three children. But Addie is welcomed to join them as a full family member, and Frank and Loretta adopt her. She enters into a magical life, full of love and fun and creativity.

But all along, Addie is having prophetic dreams. They warn her of a dark enemy approaching to threaten her and these people she loves. A housemaid’s warning sticks with Addie – to enjoy her life, but to “stay alert.”

I was, frankly, expecting more darkness and violence than actually showed up in The Friend of the Family. The darkness and violence were there, but most of this story is about the magical life of a blissfully happy family. I wish it were 300 pages longer.

I give The Friend of the Family my highest recommendation. It made me laugh and cry. Kudos to Dean Koontz.

Fiction, Reviews

‘House of Cards,’ by Stanley Ellin

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Reno Davis, hero of Stanley Ellin’s House of Cards, is an expatriate American in Paris. He was a boxer for a while, and now works as a bouncer at a nightclub. One night he handles a bad situation with considerable tact, and as a result gets offered a kind of dream job. He’s to be a tutor for a young boy, scion of one of France’s most prestigious families. The boy’s father was a war hero. His mother recently got out of a mental hospital, but she’s also stunningly beautiful. The job seems too good to be true, which – of course – it is.

Reno likes the boy, a sensitive child who’s been through a lot and mostly needs a little toughening up. But he soon realizes that almost everything he’s been told about the boy’s family is a lie. Only with time will he learn that there are lies beneath the lies, sinister and dangerous lies that threaten not only the boy and his mother, but Reno himself and even the post-war political status quo.

Robert Mitchum would have been a good choice to play Reno Davis in a movie of House of Cards. Reno’s a good character – most of the other characters didn’t impress me as particularly original. There was plenty of dramatic tension and a fair amount of violence, but I thought the book a little slow and implausible, and it could have been shorter. Also, it showcased the standard assumption that all political danger springs from the right. I was ready for the book to be over long before it actually ended, but I did see it through to the conclusion.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Key to Nicholas Street,’ by Stanley Ellin

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“The fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It’s a subtle point, but if you strain you’ll begin to get it. She’s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself is the big thing. She’s an accepted artist who’s doing good and will do better, and she can say, ‘I’m big, and therefore I have these things,’ not, ‘I have these things, and therefore I’m big.’ It’s only little people without any real meat to them who have to say, ‘Don’t look at me, look at what I own.’”

I’ve enjoyed Stanley Ellin’s novels recently, but I wasn’t really prepared for The Key to Nicholas Street (set in 1951). Dorothy Sayers called Gaudy Night “a love story with detective interruptions,” and Nicholas Street is a sort of domestic drama with detective interruptions. It’s also kind of a Rashomon story, where we observe events from various points of view.

The story is set in a fictional, wealthy neighborhood in one of those communities where professionals commute to New York City. We see it first through the (pretty superficial) eyes of the housemaid, who sees everything in movie and magazine terms. She’s the one who discovers the body of the neighbor – a successful, beautiful commercial artist – at the bottom of the cellar steps in her home.

Then we get the perspective of her employer, an autocratic matron who’s been disappointed by the business failures of the rich man she married. She is a judgmental woman, obsessed with social status. She strongly disapproved of the late neighbor, and makes a plausible murder suspect.

But everybody’s a plausible suspect. There’s the matron’s husband, a man without much character, who’s having an affair. Her daughter, who’s dating a man her mother doesn’t approve of, a man who has been involved with the victim and might have been jealous. Also the son, going through an awkward adolescence.

I thought at one point that this was the kind of book that justifies adultery, but it’s more complicated than that. In the end, we find a surprising hero and a strong affirmation of moral truths.

I have to say I figured out whodunnit, but only for authorial structural reasons, not because I deduced it from the clues.

The Key to Nicholas Street wasn’t exactly my kind of book, but it was pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Vengeance,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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The Round-Up was one of the many odd-ball restaurants in Sarasota, a town known more for its well-heeled tourists and wealthy retirees who lived on the offshore Keys than its cuisine. There are some good restaurants and there is a h*ll of a lot of variety, including the Round-Up, which boasted a red-on-white sign in the window, “The Best Chinese Tex-Mex in Florida.” Few challenged this claim, especially not the homeless who wandered past every day.

Revisiting an old favorite, one of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lew Fonesca mysteries. My fondness for these books rests largely (in my perception) on the degree to which I identify with the hero, so I was astounded, on this second reading, to realize what a very good book Vengeance is – and what a dynamite twist ending it features.

Lew Fonesca is a process server living in Sarasota, Florida. He settled here when his car broke down. Three years ago, he was a district attorney’s investigator in Chicago, but his wife’s death in an auto accident put him into a tailspin, leading to his despairing drive south. Now he rents a small office and lives in a little room behind it. He gets around town by bicycle, and reads books or watches old movies on VHS for entertainment. He’s a small man, balding, middle-aged, and depressed. He has one friend, old cowboy Ames McKinney, whom he once helped to locate his old partner, who’d stolen a fortune from him. It ended in a classic six-gun showdown.

Lew isn’t a private eye, but people are starting to come to him to find people for them. In Vengeance, he’s first visited by Beryl Tree, a middle-aged woman from Kansas whose 14-year-old daughter has run off. Beryl is pretty sure she’s in Sarasota with her father. She’s also pretty sure he’s molesting her.

He also has a second client, a wealthy man whose trophy wife has disappeared, after cleaning out their bank accounts. The man swears he just wants Lew to give her a message, an offer of reconciliation. Lew finds the man a little fishy, and is less interested in this case.

The Lew Fonesca books aren’t exactly hard-boiled, but they’re certainly not cozies either. Perhaps they should be called over easy. Lew isn’t a tough guy (he’s lucky to have gun-toting Ames to back him up), but he’s tough in his own way – just because he doesn’t give a rip. Death doesn’t mean much to him anymore.

Except that he’s just met a woman – a social worker – who sparked his interest for the first time since his wife’s death. Fortunately, he has a good psychologist to talk these matters over with.

I loved this book. The Lew Fonesca series is my favorite section of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s considerable literary portfolio. Highly recommended, with cautions for very dark, mature themes.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Man and Wife,’ by Andrew Klavan

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And that’s how we really expose ourselves. Not in what we say but in the imagination we lay over the face of things. Because we can choose our words, strike our poses, but our delusions—no, these are wallpapered to our souls.

Andrew Klavan informs us in his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, that he once wrote a novel about Jesus. He’s not very proud of it; it was the sort of sophomoric story that young agnostics are prone to tell, once they’ve “figured everything out.”

But he wrote another novel about Jesus – in a sense. Man and Wife is not a Christian book, but its central character is a very evident Christ figure. And while the author did not quite understand yet when he wrote the book, you can tell he was asking the right questions.

Cal Bradley, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, chief administrator of a private mental facility in Connecticut which was originally endowed by his wealthy family. He’s good at what he does, but the real joys of his life are his wife and children.

His wife Marie came out of nowhere, it seemed, a simple-hearted, uneducated former waitress. She’s beautiful and she’s devoted to her husband, her children, and her church, joyfully serving them all. As far as Cal is concerned, she’s a miracle.

Then, one day while hiking near a local waterfall, Cal spies a woman who looks like Marie down in the gorge, talking to a strange man who seems oddly intimate with her. When he asks her about it, she cheerfully denies being anywhere near the place.

Meanwhile, Cal has admitted a 19-year-old man named Peter Blue to his facility. Peter is charged with striking his girlfriend, setting fire to a church, and assaulting a police officer. But the priest of the church begs Cal to help this boy. There’s something astonishing about his spirit, he says.

And Peter Blue does indeed seem remarkable. Not only is he a cooperative counseling subject, he exerts a healthy influence on the other patients. They follow him like disciples, and their symptoms are improving.

Only Peter Blue turns out to be connected to that same strange man Cal thought he saw with Marie at the waterfall. And Cal starts receiving threats, which he’s sure come from that same man. Is it possible Marie has been lying to him all these years? Can love and untruth exist together?

From a Christian point of view, Man and Wife offers a number of serious problems. But it should be remembered that author Klavan was working his way to faith when he wrote the book. The story is suspenseful and exciting and challenging; also moving and heartbreaking. I recommend it for thoughtful adults. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dead Don’t Lie,’ by Blake Banner

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On checking my old reviews, I find that I have reviewed at least one book in Blake Banner’s “Dead Cold Mysteries” series before. The book I just read, The Dead Don’t Lie, is a prequel to that series – but it was published just last month, and it actually tells how the Cold Case squad began.

However, I have a suspicion (and all such guesses, it should be remembered, are flimsy things) that this book was originally written for a very different character in another time frame, but was re-written to shoehorn it into the Dead Cold Mysteries template.

John Stone, we are told, is a police detective in a New York precinct. Which makes it rather strange when a sultry dame walks into his office and asks to hire him to deliver blackmail money for her. (The author’s rationalization is that this woman is so alluring that Stone falls for her right off and is putty in her hands.)

She’s lying to him, of course. Soon John Stone is approached again, by a mysterious foreign man who claims to be working for the Vatican, who wants his help in recovering a stolen artifact. As the story goes on, there will be killing and kidnapping, and Stone will work generally without backup or keeping his superiors updated.

If all this sounds like a strange way for a working police detective to operate, I entirely agree. I had a strong feeling that this book had originally been written as a private eye novel, set (probably) in the 1950s (there are no cell phones in view, and at one point our hero uses a pay phone). Also, in one scene, John Stone is addressed as “Mr. Lackland.” That, I would guess, is a failure of the “find and replace” function in the author’s word processing software.

I keep going back to Blake Banner, because I vaguely recall him as an author I like. But in fact, I wearied of him a while back because of the over-the-top improbability of his action scenes. Also, he’s prone to cliff-hangers, though that sin is not committed in this book.

I finished The Dead Don’t Lie, but I can’t really recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reading

Reading report #4: ‘Njal’s Saga’

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Kari Solmundarsson

“Bare is the back of a brotherless man.” (Kari Solmundarsson)

This is to publicly certify that I have completed another re-reading of Njal’s Saga, from the Complete Sagas of the Icelanders collection. My chief take-away is that I didn’t remember it as well as I thought I did.

My faulty recollection revealed itself mostly in the fact that I forgot how complicated the whole thing was. In my first reading report, I named Hallgerd Long-legs as the chief villain. But she actually disappears about half-way through the story, after her husband Gunnar is killed. Two further major sections follow, with at least one further villain.

The first villain is the very strange character of Mord Valgardsson. He remains a figure of loathing in Iceland to this day; I read somewhere that one of the worst insults to an Icelander is to call him a “murderous Mord.” Mord delights in manipulating people into murder, playing both sides against the other. His motive for this behavior seems obscure. He’s just a bad guy.

Yet, ironically, when it comes time to prosecute the men who burned Njal and his family in their house, the injured parties pressure Mord into leading the prosecution – which he does quite effectively.

After the burning, there’s no clear villain anymore. The burners (one of them is Gunnar’s son) are painted negatively, except for their leader Flosi, an honorable man who seems remorseful and fatalistic. The great hero of this section is Kari Solmundarsson, a family friend who manages to escape the burning, and devotes himself thereafter to getting even. His attempt to prosecute ends in an epic battle at the Thing (an amusing element in that episode is one man who promises to keep his warriors on the sidelines, in order to intervene once the killings reach the limits of the plaintiffs’ ability to pay fines for them). After that, Kari takes the law into his own very capable hands, and the story proceeds to describe the experiences of some of the burners at the Battle of Clontarf, after which, eventually, both Flosi and Kari call an end to it after pilgrimages to Rome.

Among the points that struck me was a scene at the jarl’s hall in Orkney, shortly before Clontarf. Kari rushes in and kills a man before the jarl, in a scene suspiciously similar to the killing of Thore the Seal at Augvaldsness by Erling Skjalgsson’s nephew Asbjorn (which you may recall from my novel, King of Rogaland). It’s touches like this that make historians look askance at saga accounts.

I also noted with interest that in many of the fight scenes, a fighter’s weapon gets caught in a wooden shield, and the shield’s owner then twists the shield to disarm the man. This is a move much prized among Viking reenactors, and I’m happy to say that I accomplished it myself once. (Others have done it more; my reflexes aren’t very good.)

Also, the scenes of lawsuits at the Things involve a whole lot of Norse legalese, which is just as stilted and tedious as in the English/American tradition.

That covers it, I think. If I recall any more, I’ll post about it tomorrow.

Fiction, Religion

Reading report: ‘Njal’s Saga,’ part 3

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Gunnar defends his house.

Chapter 106 of Njal’s Saga relates one of those weird, disorienting tales that pop up here and there in the sagas, tales that remind us how very foreign these characters are to our modern world. It takes place three years after the Althing has voted to accept Christianity as the national religion. Njal, the saga hero, plays a major role in the deliberations.

There’s a man called Amundi the Blind. He’s an illegitimate son of Njal’s son Hoskuld, and has the misfortune to be blind. His father was murdered by a man named Lyting, and the sons of Njal prosecuted a case against him, winning substantial compensation. But Amundi the Blind was not a party to the lawsuit, and received nothing.

Amundi attends the Thingskalar Assembly, one of the regional Things, and Lyting is there. Amundi has himself conducted to Lyting’s tent, goes inside, and asks him what he’s going to pay him for his own loss. Lyting laughs at him. Amundi says “I don’t find that just before God…. And now may God settle matters between us.”

He turns to leave, but just as he reaches the tent door, his sight is suddenly restored. He rushes back into the tent and buries his axe in Lyting’s head. Then, as he passes out through the threshold again, his blindness returns forever.

This bizarre story is related by the saga writer without comment. Since it immediately follows the conversion narrative, and since Amundi appeals to God and is answered with a “miracle,” the implication would seem to be that God granted him his revenge. Yet the saga writer, writing (probably) in the 13th Century, is too smart to say something like that right out. It’s just part of the story – make of it what you will.

Which is good advice for all saga readers.

A strange atmosphere descends on the saga after the conversion. Murderers, and those getting revenge for murders, all now consider themselves Christians, but don’t seem to be quite sure how the new faith ought to impact their lives.

The sons of Njal, having been deceived, have wickedly murdered a man named Hoskuld, a family friend who was actually Njal’s foster son. As the men seeking vengeance for Hoskuld surround Njal’s house and realize they can’t beat the family in a fair fight, they make up their minds to burn them in their house. Their leader, Flosi, says, “There are two choices, and neither of them is good: one is to turn back, but that would lead to our death; the other is to bring fire and burn them inside, and that’s a great responsibility before God, for we’re Christian men.”

The question of how Christians deal with vengeance was in fact the central theme of a splendid trilogy called Bodvar’s Saga, by the Norwegian writer Vera Henriksen. Sadly, it’s never been translated into English. I once actually wrote to the publisher myself, offering to do the job, but they didn’t respond.