This book showed up as a freebie, and I figured I’d read it before going back to The Lord of the Rings.The Anatomy Lesson, by Robert I. Katz, wasn’t bad at all.
Our hero is Richard Kurtz, a young New York surgeon whose sideline (and a useful one) is martial arts. The Anatomy Lesson is the second book in which he assists police detective Lew Barent in an investigation. The first time constituted the first book in the series.
The mystery starts with what looks like a grotesque practical joke. At a Halloween party for medical students, somebody substitutes genuine cadaver parts for plastic ones that had been set out as decorations. The body parts turn out to come from medical school dissection specimens, but it’s hard to figure out who could have stolen them.
Barent asks Kurtz to inquire into the matter, and one of the people he talks to is Rod Mahoney, a lecturer at the medical school. When Mahoney is murdered in a grotesque manner shortly after that, the motives remain impossible to guess, but soon there is talk of a drug connection.
The story has lots of twists and red herrings; it was challenging. I certainly didn’t figure it out. On top of that, Kurtz and Barent make an interesting team – Barent is the jaded cop who’s seen everything, while Kurtz is young and full of vinegar, and quite enjoys the opportunity to fight bad guys off now and then. Barent is always telling him to stay out of the investigation, but then doesn’t hesitate to call on him when he needs an entrée into the medical world. They’re believable and amusing.
My main problem with this book – and it was purely personal opinion – is that the cause of drug legalization keeps coming up, and the author leaves no question what he thinks. He may even be right – maybe legalization is the only way to mitigate the social disaster – but I’ve never been able to shake the idea that legalizing drugs is a marker of societal surrender and imminent death.
But that’s my opinion. The Anatomy Lesson was an enjoyable read with enjoyable characters. Cautions for the usual.
Tonight, insight into the creative process. Or rather, my creative process.
Because other novelists work very differently from me. They amaze me. Some author friends on Facebook will say, “Well, I only got 1,000 words down tonight. Had the flu and my mother died, but that’s no excuse. Got to punch those numbers up tomorrow.”
Me, at this point I get in about one scene a night. Often only a few paragraphs. After that I haven’t got a clue what comes next, and I won’t know until the next day – maybe. It may take a couple days or a week before I figure out how to coax my characters into going where I need them to go.
It should get better as I get deeper into the plot. Then things will move by themselves. I’m setting up my shots at this point.
Anyway, this is what I’ve been working through recently:
There’s a story (only one) about Erling Skjalgsson that’s not included in Heimskringla. You find it in Flatey Book. I’ve mentioned it here before. It’s the Tale of Erling and Eindridi.
Eindridi was the son of the famous chieftain Einar Tambarskjelve, a very important man. I won’t outline the story tonight, but basically it’s about how young Eindridi gets into a compromising situation with Erling’s daughter Sigrid. Erling is furious, and Eindridi has to undergo the Iron Ordeal (you may recall that ceremony from The Year of the Warrior) to prove that he hasn’t dishonored her. Then old Einar, Eindridi’s father, nearly goes to war against Erling over the insult to his son. But the business is resolved through the two young people getting married.
It’s been my intention from the beginning to include that story in my current Erling book. But there were points I wondered about.
For one thing, another story mentions Eindridi’s wife, and she’s not Sigrid Erlingsdatter. I forget her name, but she’s somebody else.
Now that doesn’t invalidate the story by itself. Wives were a tragically perishable commodity in those days. Childbirth often carried them off. Rich men frequently went through several wives. Still, I found it odd that the connection wasn’t mentioned anywhere else (as far as I know; might have missed something).
Also, I saw Erling and Einar as fairly friendly. Just an assumption on my part, but call it an artist’s instinct.
On the other hand, there is a well-attested marriage alliance that I thought required more explanation. We know that Erling had a daughter named Ragnhild who married Thorberg Arnesson of Giske, son of the powerful Arne Arnmodsson, and one of a group of brothers who swung a lot of weight in the time of King (St.) Olaf Haradsson and his successors.
The Arnesssons were a family divided in Olaf’s time. Some of them supported the king, others opposed him. At the Battle of Stiklestad, where Olaf died, there were Arnesson on both sides.
But Thorberg was one of the pro-Olaf Arnessons. He even went into exile in Russia with Olaf. So why would he marry the daughter of Olaf’s greatest domestic enemy, Erling Skjalgsson?
And I had the brilliant idea – audacious by my mousy standards – of replacing Eindridi with Thorberg in the anecdote. It would achieve narrative economy while solving a problem of motivation.
So I’m doing that. And nobody can stop me.
There was one further problem, though. Last night I had a worrying thought – “Wait! For this to work, old Arne Arnmodsson (Thorberg’s father, if you lost your score card) has to be alive in 1022. But I always had the idea he must have died young.”
This was because there was another brother named Arne Arnesson. And the usual custom in the Viking Age was not to name a baby after a living relative. The old Norse believed that the soul followed the name, you see. So if you named the baby Arne after his father, Papa Arne would likely drop dead. Only one member of the nuclear family at a time was permitted the same name.
But I did some more research and learned that old Arne is believed to have lived until around 1024. So it’s cool. They must have adopted Christian naming practices in the family by the time Arne Jr. was born.
I thought I’d read something less challenging before returning to The Lord of the Rings. So I picked this up…
Victorian London offers a fascinating and atmospheric location for murder mysteries, as Conan Doyle learned to his great (if grudging) profit. Author David Field has begun a new series of mysteries starring a somewhat similar (or reminiscent) team – prominent London physician James Carlyle (nephew, we are told, of Thomas, the philosopher) and Matthew West, an impecunious young Methodist preacher serving London’s poor. We meet them in Interviewing the Dead.
Both happen to be present, out of curiosity, at a lecture given by a spiritualist. The spiritualist makes a prediction – that the spirits of medieval plague victims, whose common grave was dug up during the construction of the Aldgate Underground station, will soon be rising up to take revenge on the living, for the disturbance.
The two men strike up an acquaintance, although they are very different in outlook. Carlyle is the rationalist scientist, and can’t help tweaking Matthew for his faith, which he judges naïve. But they are both concerned – for different reasons – about the spread of superstition among the populace.
Soon reports are coming in of people being terrified by revenants encountered on the streets. Carlyle and West cooperate to apply logic to the problem, and note an interesting fact – all the ghost sightings seem to have involved people who visited pubs owned by a particular brewery. Their inquiries will lead Matthew into considerable danger, both to his personal safety and his career in the church.
I didn’t hate Interviewing the Dead. It was a fairly pleasant read. But it didn’t excite me much either. I’ll give the author credit for being able to write a grammatical English sentence, which is an improvement over a lot of writers today (though there were a couple minor homophone errors). But I found Carlyle hard to like – he’s pretty darn manipulative. Matthew West is OK, though I wasn’t sure of his theology – he hints at not believing in Hell (it’s unclear), and also declares himself in favor or women’s ordination – which I don’t think was even an issue among Methodists at the time. It’s nice, however, I must admit, to encounter a pastor in a novel who isn’t a hypocrite. In spite of all the teasing about the supernatural that goes on between them, Carlyle and West seemed to me kind of dull in their interactions.
But what really annoyed me was the character of Adelaide, Dr. Carlyle’s daughter, whom we are supposed to regard as a romantic object for Matthew. Like pretty much all female Victorian protagonists you run across today, she’s a fervent feminist. I suppose we’re meant to admire that, but honestly, the girl is a bore. She’s rude to all men on all occasions, and can’t speak two sentences without making a speech about being oppressed. I have to concede that the author strongly suggests that her prickliness has more to do with emotional frustration than with ideology, but I still found it impossible to root for the romance.
For that reason, I’m not strongly tempted to renew my acquaintance by reading the next book.
But your mileage may vary. Interviewing the Dead wasn’t bad, really. Just not to my taste.
I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring over the weekend. One can’t really review a work of this eminence. I can only write appreciations. One thing I noted was a detail I’d forgotten, one that was left out of the movies, and it’s no mystery why. It’s when Gandalf meets with Saruman at Orthanc, and learns his former master’s perfidy:
‘”For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!”
‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.
‘”I liked white better,” I said.
‘”White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”
‘”In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”’
This is an amazing passage. Saruman the White, whose white color had symbolized his supreme wisdom, has broken the white color down into its constituent prismatic hues.
He’s made it into a rainbow.
We see rainbows all the time today, in churches that believe they’ve “deconstructed” traditional morality and theology.
Was Tolkien an actual prophet? Did he foretell the future of the church?
Crime novelist Martin Edwards recommends ten Golden Age mystery authors he believes should be more widely known than they are. Henry Wade, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and C. Daly King are his top three.
Our top three begins with another American, a psychiatrist whose extraordinarily convoluted puzzles are at times maddening, but occasionally breathtaking. The Curious Mr Tarrant is a famous collection of short stories, but his three ‘obelist’ novels, each with an elaborate ‘cluefinder’ at the end, highlighting the clues in the text, fascinate me most. Obelists Fly High is a book I’ve always enjoyed—so much so that I pay tribute to it in a couple of different ways in my own latest novel, Mortmain Hall, a novel which revives the concept of the ‘cluefinder’.
‘Yes sir!’ said Sam. ‘Begging your pardon, sir! But I meant no wrong to you, Mr. Frodo, nor to Mr. Gandalf for that matter. He has some sense, mind you; and when you said go alone, he said no! take someone as you can trust.’
‘But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,’ said Frodo.
Sam looked at him unhappily. ‘It all depends on what you want’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway: there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid – but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.’
No major revelations from my reading of The Fellowship of the Ring tonight. Just a thought on a subject I’ve touched on before – The Lord of the Rings as veteran’s literature.
What struck me in the scene above – which takes place at Frodo’s new house in Crickhollow, before the adventure even properly begins – is how different the tone is from what we see of the hobbits in the films. Merry and Pippin are pure comic relief in the movies – up till the moments when they’re forced to grow up.
And there’s certainly an element of that in the books too. But in this scene we see them in a different light. Here they are Frodo’s comrades – his buddies in the military sense. They’re freemen and equals, under no illusions, and loyal to their officer. There’s a time for games and laughter, but when it comes to the point, we all know what we’re here for, and we’re in to the end. Whatever the cost.
If we were privileged to have access to Tolkien’s memories, I think we’d find that this scene echoes some moment (or moments) in his wartime career. He’s memorializing men he served with – most of whom would probably have never come home. Jack Lewis would have recognized it right off.
There on the hill-brow she stood beckoning to them: her hair was flying loose, and as it caught the sun it shone and shimmered. A light like the glint of water on dewy grass flashed from under her feet as she danced.
What are we to make of Tom Bombadil? He’s a riddle inside an enigma inside a mathom, which is probably just what the author intended. The narrative of the epic can endure without him, as the movies demonstrated. But every reader knows he belongs, somehow, in Tolkien’s world. Every reader will think of Tom in his own way. I’ve stated my view before on this blog, but I’ll repeat it here:
Tom seems to me to be a representation of Adam, or at least of unfallen Man. Adam tended the Garden, and he named the animals; whatever he called the beasts, that was their name. Tom Bombadil controls all nature within his domains, and when he names the hobbits’ ponies, those are the names they answer to ever after. Tom says of himself:
“Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.”
Remember how important “subcreation” was in Tolkien’s artistic/religious vision. Man in fellowship with God becomes a kind of little god – he can’t create ex nihilo as God does, but he creates in a smaller way that brings glory to his Master. In the same way, I think, unfallen Tom Bombadil glorifies his Creator by ruling the Garden that’s been set under his stewardship.
Tom Bombadil, incidentally, began as a toy, a Dutch doll owned by Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla. She lost it down a sewer, and was distraught. Her father comforted her with tales of how Tom floated along the river and had numerous adventures, overcoming all kinds of dangers through his magical powers. Eventually he even overcomes the powerful River-woman, and marries her daughter, Goldberry (herself a rather sinister figure until Tom tames her).
Which brings us to Goldberry. Goldberry has a very special place in this reader’s heart.
The year must have been 1973; I was in college, and my roommate was an even bigger Tolkien geek than I was. We agreed that I would read the Hobbit and the Trilogy to him, one chapter a night (I love to read aloud). And we did that – straight through. It took a while.
During that same period I went out on my first date, with a girl who was very Goldberry-esque. I fell hard for that girl, and have never quite gotten over her. She’s a grandmother today, and lives far away, but to me she’ll be forever young and slender and graceful.
Whenever Tolkien tells us of a woman dancing, and how her feet tinkle on the grass (as in the case of Luthien), I’m pretty sure he’s harkening back to Edith Bratt and how she danced for him in the woods the day he fell in love with her. For my own part, I always look forward to seeing Goldberry again.
He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.
This quotation, concerning Frodo Baggins in the Barrow Downs, from The Fellowship of the Ring, seems to me a good epitome of what I’ve found in my current reading of the Lord of the Rings
Actually, the thought was mainly inspired (to my shame, I suppose) by watching the movies twice through recently. I’ve found them inspirational as I wrestle with my Work in Progress. It’s a remarkable thing, as I see it, that in spite of the movie industry’s well-earned notoriety for messing with original sources, the Peter Jackson movies managed – overall – to preserve the heart of the story. Even though most of the people involved must surely have been a thousand miles away from Tolkien’s beliefs.
Anyway, what struck me as I watched and read was this. It hardly needs saying that we’re in perilous times. I never thought I’d live to see a day when I worried about the breakdown of civil society and the loss of our republic, but such things don’t seem unthinkable now.
I’m not a man known for confidence and courage. I reserve heroism for my books. I know heroism when I see it, and I salute it from a safe distance. I’m pretty sure that if the day comes when I must raise my sword in defense of my rights, I’ll probably trip over the scabbard.
But it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t the end. That’s the thing about stories.
In every good story, there comes a moment when the main character thinks the tale is told – and that he’s lost. A moment when his strongest instinct is to lay his weapon down and surrender.
But that’s not really the end, in a good story. It’s only the Final Crisis. It’s the hero’s test. The climax is yet to come – and at the climax, the hero either triumphs or fails in a way that means something.
So this is my message. Not the message of a prophet, or the son of a prophet, but of a storyteller.
This isn’t the end. It’s the crisis. Hold on. Carry on doing your service, at the station where God has set you. As Sam Gamgee said:
“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
Tevildo however, himself a great and skilled liar, was so deeply versed in the lies and subtleties of all the beasts and creatures that he seldom knew whether to believe what was said to him or not, and was wont to disbelieve all things save those he wished to believe true, and so was he often deceived by the most honest.
I’ve long cherished a great fondness for Tolkien’s tale of Beren and Luthien, which impressed me long ago when I read the Silmarillion. And of course, it’s referenced often in The Lord of the Rings. So before I moved on from The Hobbit to the Trilogy, I thought I’d read the (fairly) recent book devoted to that story.
It wasn’t entirely what I expected. It’s sort of a scholarly exercise. In it, the late Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son and literary executor, traces the development of the story through various stages in the collected manuscripts, where it is altered in numerous ways. There are surprises. For instance, an early version of the story has as one of its major villains a great cat called Tevildo (see quotation above), who lives in a castle and serves the evil Melkor. In later versions, Tevildo would be replaced by a great magician who would in time become the Sauron of the Trilogy.
I think we may deduce that Prof. Tolkien was not very fond of cats.
Those who find Tolkien’s work lacking in female heroes need to read Beren and Luthien. Although Beren is a doughty hero, he also seems to be headstrong to point of stupidity. And the two great crises in the story both involve Luthien rescuing him.
I was, frankly, looking for something more like a straight narrative when I bought this book. I’m not enough of a Tolkien scholar to linger happily forever over details of composition and myth-building.
On the other hand, I’d never encountered the words “inexaggerable” and “quook” (past tense of quake) before, so the reading was not without surprises.
The tale of Beren and Luthien was a central matter in Tolkien’s life’s work. If I understand the story correctly, it went back to his attempt to immortalize the day when Edith Bratt danced for him in the woods and he fell in love forever. In a sense, he built all Middle Earth as a kind of ornate setting for the jewel of that memory.
Beren and Luthien is recommended for those who can never get enough Tolkien. If you’re looking for a less strenuous approach to the story, you might just read The Silmarillion.
Oh yes, it has Alan Lee illustrations, so it’s got that going for it.
Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Ladies of Grace Adieu, has just released a new novel, named after the Italian artist of architecture and imagination Piranesi. An example of his work is the feature image in this post.
Piranesi lives almost alone in a labyrinthian house with flooded basements, countless statues, and skeletons lying about. He moves about observing everything and occasionally talking to the one other man in the house, who isn’t as interested in the things he is.
The Idle Woman finds it thrilling. “Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited new novel transports us to an extraordinary world and poses a question: How can we understand and rationalise our world when we can’t escape it? Dream, reality and perception tremble on the brink in one of the most original novels I’ve ever read.”
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