Fiction, Reviews

‘With a Mind to Kill,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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The nights are never kind to Moscow. With nowhere to go, the traffic disappears and the streets seem to parade themselves, mile upon mile of empty concrete glinting uselessly in the flare of the sodium lights. The great monuments and buildings, no matter how proud of themselves in the day, stand there like old men in the darkness, their windows black, their doors bolted fast. No lovers meet. No revellers make their way home from jazz clubs or restaurants. The best you will hope to see are clusters of soldiers or policemen, muttering to themselves as they make their presence known because the population needs to be watched and guarded even when everyone is asleep. Otherwise, nothing moves. The entire city takes on the psychopathy of the graveyard; pleased with itself because it will be there for ever, unaware that it is actually already dead.

This guy Anthony Horowitz is a first-class writer; I’m ashamed I’d never heard of him till recently. Aside from writing early seasons of Midsomer Murders, he’s written a series of young adult thrillers, the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, and three authorized James Bond novels. I’ve reviewed the first already, and I picked up this final one the other day on a deal. I’ll have to catch the middle book at some point. As I mentioned previously, I don’t much care for Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but I like the way Horowitz does them.

With a Mind to Kill fits into the chronology just after The Man With the Golden Gun. James Bond is in Jamaica, still recuperating from brainwashing by the Russians, and having been shot in the last book. But he’s called back to London by his superiors, who have a daunting assignment for him. They want him to return to Soviet Russia, pretending to still be under the Communists’ control. He’s to present himself to his former captors, who will either kill him or put him to work on some very secretive project they’ve got going, one British Intelligence wants very much to learn more about. Bond can expect to be tortured when he returns, but the experts believe he’s back in control of himself.

Bond wants very much to get revenge on the people who nearly erased his personality and turned him into a traitorous living weapon. He expects the beatings, the tortures, and the mind games they’ll subject him to. He does not expect the woman who’ll find her way into his heart, one whom he’ll never be sure he can trust…

In Horowitz’s hands, James Bond (I think) takes on greater depth than we’re used to. This James Bond is feeling his age and his many wounds, and is pondering retirement once this job is finished – if he survives.

I thoroughly enjoyed With a Mind to Kill. It’s expertly written. Recommended.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

The Scotch-Irish Led the Colonies to Freedom

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While Lars is off celebrating the history of one people, let me offer you some history of another people. One tenth of American colonists were from Scottish families who had moved to northern Ireland as pioneer farmers under the British Crown, an effort to quell “the wild Irish.” That effort worked, and Scottish Presbyterians found a measure of freedom and productivity they enjoyed. Then, as Britain has a tendency to do, the ruling class ruined it by raising taxes and trying to quell the Irish even more. The pioneer farmers felt the pressure from these measures and came to America, a place that many were told was free and like paradise.

They came to Pennsylvania first and later to all of the colonies, coloring the culture everywhere. Dr. James G. Leyburn writes, “In many ways the Scotch-Irish pioneers were indeed an augury of Americans-to-be. They were probably the first settlers to identify themselves as Americans—not as Pennsylvanians or Virginians” or any ethnic group. As such, these were colonists most vigorously in favor of rebelling against the British Crown.

“A Hessian captain wrote in 1778, ‘Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.’ King George was reported to have characterized the Revolution as ‘a Presbyterian war’ …” Leyburn says. These British officials saw the American Revolution as a Scottish Presbyterian uprising, which is not one of many characterizations of it, according to Leyburn. No other group of immigrants was accused of fueling the war like these Ulstermen.

Maybe these characterizations were made because it put the American conflict in familiar British terms. England had wrestled against Scottish and Irish independence for generations. Scottish Presbyterians, in particular, had been a torn beneath the crown for a long time because they wouldn’t conform to Anglican unification efforts.

But maybe Leyburn’s depiction of Scotch-Irish influence in America is accurate. He says, “Their daily experience of living on the outer fringe of settlement, of making small farms in the forests, of facing the danger of Indian attack and fighting back, called for qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity, and improvisation that Americans have ranked high as virtues. They were inaugurators of the heroic myth of the winning of the West that was to dominate our nineteenth century history.” They blended with another immigrants, pushing everyone into losing their immigrant labels and becoming simply American. Those labels would return 50-100 years later as people tried to distinguish themselves from new immigrants.

There’s a lot more to the story, which you can read in this American Heritage article taken from Leyburn’s book on the topic.

In other news . . .

Movie Adaptations: Joel Miller talks about The Children of Men as a book and a movie. “We sometimes forget how radically books and movies differ as media. Jumping from one to the other requires significant adjustment. Narration and character development must change, same with the amount of material capable of inclusion.”

YouTube Reaction: How much of YouTube content is reacting to other YouTube content, generating a new form of reality show? Call me Chato, a former TV exec, talks about it.

Make your own art: How to draw a sunset by Matthew Matthysen

Bookselling, Uncategorized

The Viking road to Brainerd

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Tomorrow (Saturday, Aug. 10) I plan to be (God willing) among the Vikings at the Crow Wing Viking Festival in Brainerd, Minnesota. More information here.

I will have books to sell, and may be persuaded to sign them for you if you ask nicely.

Silver, livestock and thralls will be accepted in payment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Pathways of Magic,’ by Robert Arrington

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I must have enjoyed The Ethics of Magic, the first book in Robert Arrington’s “Haunted Law Firm” series. Because I bought the second book, The Pathways of Magic, and read it in one day.

Our hero (though, oddly, he’s not part of the law firm), college instructor Mitch McCaffrey, has a surprise visit from a strange woman – a very strange woman – at his office. She wears a shirt of mesh mail and is carrying a short sword, which they use together to dispatch a werewolf that’s following her. Then the woman makes the werewolf disappear.

Her name is Alyssa McCormick, and, like Mitch, she has magical skills. She is in fact the niece of Mitch’s magical mentor, and she’d like to look at the books of magic her uncle left to Mitch. He’s happy to show them to her. It turns out they’re very rare and valuable.

In fact, they’re so valuable that both the FBI and the CIA (who employ magic in their investigations) want to get their hands on them, and are willing to break all the rules to secure them. Which only gets Mitch’s and Alyssa’s backs up, and they fight back, both with spells and lawyers (this is where the Haunted Law Firm comes in). The stakes get even higher when Monica Gilbert, Mitch’s old Woke enemy from the first book, shows up as an FBI consultant.

The story moves right along, alternating legal give-and-take with scenes of action and spell-casting. The prose remains unremarkable (with an annoying number of typos), but the storytelling worked. And the values are conservative.

I liked The Pathways of Magic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Ethics of Magic,’ by Robert Arrington

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Here’s a light, fun novel, aimed primarily at conservatives and Christians. And it works pretty well.

Mitch McCaffrey, hero of The Ethics of Magic, teaches at a community college in rural North Carolina. He enjoys his work and is dating a woman he hopes to marry.

But he has an enemy. Monica Gilbert, the Compliance Officer at the college, has it in for him. He’s a white male, in the first place, and he teaches the classics in his courses. She suspects him of holding the “wrong” opinions, something she feels must not be tolerated in higher education.

But her motivations go deeper. First of all, she once made a pass at him and he turned her down. Nobody does that. Worse, his girlfriend is a woman she knew as a girl, and hated.

But worst of all, Mitch is a magic practitioner. Monica can tell because she is one herself. She’s eager for a showdown, to awe him with her power.

When a few students make a complaint about Mitch, he’s soon facing a hearing to determine whether he’ll be dismissed. That’s when he retains the services of lawyer Kathryn Turner. All this begins the first adventure in Robert Arrington’s “Haunted Law Firm” series.

I had some quibbles with The Ethics of Magic. The prose was adequate, but there were frequent misspellings and typos. I thought the villains were painted a little broadly – they reveled in evil too much. Most people – even the Woke – honestly believe they’re doing the right thing.

And, although most of our good characters here are Christians, and attend church, Mitch and his girlfriend are sleeping together outside marriage. I suppose that sort of thing flies in some churches nowadays.

But outside of those things, I must say I enjoyed reading The Ethics of Magic very much. It was a lot of fun, sort of John Grisham meets Harry Potter.

Reviews, Writing

Netflix review and writing update: ‘The Last Kingdom’

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Harry Gilby as Aethelstan in ‘The Last Kingdom’

Okay, I’ve capped my superhuman achievement of watching the Vikings series all the way through, by watching all 5 seasons – plus the final 2-hour movie – of the Netflix series, The Last Kingdom.

As I opined in a previous post, The Last Kingdom benefits from a previous viewing of Vikings, because it looks better by that comparison. But, as is the way of this world, things deteriorated as they went on.

The first two seasons followed Bernard Cornwell’s original novels fairly well – or so I’m told. (I haven’t read the books myself.)

Starting with Season 3, one seems to discern the influence of the Vikings series. One imagines studio executives gathering the writers in a shadowy dungeon, threatening them with racks, iron maidens, and thumbscrews, and telling them, “Make it more like Vikings. Which means more like Game of Thrones. Give us more treachery. More betrayal. The shortest distance between any two points ought to be through a knife wound in the back.”

Thus (aside from the obvious – such as the hero Uhtred’s adoption of Ragnar Lothbrok’s ahistorical rooster’s comb haircut), we see characters changing their personalities abruptly, for no particular reason. They make unreasonable demands, tell lies for the fun of it, and choose suicidal policies guaranteed to make enemies out of friends. The point is not realism, but the maximum possible treachery. I said that it’s Uhtred’s idiotic life choices that propel the plot in the early seasons. Later on, Uhtred becomes the voice of reason, restraining a succession of kings from one disastrous, counterintuitive caprice after another.

I was particularly disappointed, in the later seasons and the final movie, of the treatment of King Athelstan, one of my personal favorites. I’m fond of Athelstan because he raised Norway’s King Haakon the Good at his court, and made him a Christian.

[Spoiler alert] In the final movie, Seven Kings Must Die, Athelstan, who’s been a decent fellow up to now, suddenly murders his brother treacherously (something that absolutely did not happen in real life), and is also portrayed as a homosexual.

Yeah, I should have seen that coming. Athelstan never married or fathered a child, so obviously he must have been homosexual. As you can probably understand, I take that canard personally.

Interestingly, Paul Anderson, in his novel, Mother of Kings, makes Athelstan’s foster son, Haakon, a homosexual.

Fictioneers have treated this admirable pair very shabbily.

And it occurred to me then that somebody ought to write a good novel about Haakon’s life, emphasizing his education (there’s a good chance he might even have been literate) at Athelstan’s court.

Eric Schumacher has written a series of books on Haakon, but I read the first one and didn’t like his treatment.

And then I thought of a Bridge Character for a Haakon story. Which means I’ll have to write the book now.

I’ve mentioned more than once that I attribute the success of my Erling books (success as literary works, not financial success, obviously) to the insertion of Father Ailill as a bridge character. A bridge character is a character with a relatable enough personality that he can explain a very alien, antique culture to modern readers. (Hobbits are the classic bridge characters in Tolkien, which is why The Lord of the Rings is so much more accessible than the Silmarillion.)

This bridge character came to me almost in a moment. He won’t be anything like Father Ailill. In fact, he’ll be a Viking himself.

How can a Viking be a bridge character to the Viking Age?

This will not be your ordinary Viking.

Watch this space for the next couple years, for more information.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mystery of L’inconnu,’ by Dan Grylles

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As the first installment in a series of mysteries starring Miami police detective Remy Ferguson, Mystery of L’inconnu introduces us to the detective and his team. For this reader, it wasn’t a very impressive debut.

“L’inconnu” (French for Unknown) is a very large, state of the art luxury yacht owned by a yacht manufacturing company. As a sales inducement, the company periodically offers free cruises to small groups of the super-rich, so they can enjoy the service, food, and amenities. But this voyage goes very, very bad.

The first part of the book concentrates on the story of the voyage, in which we gradually learn that one of the crew has made a deal with smugglers to take drugs on board at sea, to be delivered in Miami. Then the deal goes very, very wrong, and soon there are cartel gunmen rampaging through the vessel while the crew and passengers try to devise ways to either hide or defend themselves. They do surprisingly well, and the reader is rooting for them.

(Spoiler coming up.)

Then we switch to the investigation, led by our hero, Detective Remy Ferguson. And we are abruptly informed that pretty much all these people we’d been rooting for are dead. Remy’s investigation is subjected to pressure by his superiors, who are being pestered by the (very influential) yacht company to wrap the case up.

Then we get a final section, where we are presented with a Big Plot Twist (admittedly not a bad one), and a perilous situation from which our hero escapes only through a deus ex machina.

In my opinion, this is a very poor way to tell a story.

On top of that, the prose was weak. The author often misuses words, confusing “Cavalry” with “Calvary,” “flare gun” with “flair gun,” and other such errors. He appeared (I wasn’t quite sure because the prose was confusing) to confuse a rifle with a shotgun. He thinks Multiple Personality Disorder is the same as schizophrenia. And he delivers clumsy lines like, “’Whatever works,’ Brewer mumbled his simplistic estimation.”

Mystery of L’inconnu was a disappointing novel. I did finish it, though, so I suppose it wasn’t a total narrative failure.

Non-fiction, Uncategorized

What To Do with a Dragon Hoard?

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With all the dragons in new fantasy stories today, I hope young readers haven’t been shielded from their traditional setting. The picture of a dragon hoarding treasure under a mountain is a classic depiction of greed.

The beast is at the top of the food chain. It can destroy whole kingdoms if it wanted to. If two dragons were to fight each other, the disaster to their field of battle would be apocalyptic. But a defining quality of a dragon is its hoard. Why does it sleep on a mountain of gold? Why did Smaug care that Bilbo took a cup, and how could he have noticed one cup missing from his trove of treasure? Because that’s what dragons are about. They want all the wealth for themselves, and they are powerful and conceited enough to refuse to allow anyone to slight them.

I was thinking this morning about how some of us tend to use what we have and some of us tend to keep it unused. I’m a keeper. I’ve had my favorite t-shirt for over 20 years because I don’t wear it often. When people ask, “What would you do if we gave you $1000 today,” my first thought is to put it in the bank for the future. Of course, there will be a time to use it, but not today, because if I use it now, I may not have it tomorrow.

I wonder if the idea of a dragon hoard would apply well to those of us who keep to ourselves and take comfort in what we could do tomorrow if the need arose. Maybe all we’re doing is holding on to our wealth, not out of greed but out of pride, fear, and personal comfort.

What else do we have today?

Moon Caves: In the Sea of Tranquility or Mare Tranquillitatis, there’s a 200-foot pit, one of many spotted by satellites orbiting the Moon. Scientists studying the photographs have reason to believe this pit has a cave. Why we aren’t sending people to the Moon by now is likely a political question. The current NASA plan appears to be sending a team around the Moon.

In related news, Space X has been sending astronauts to the International Space Station for a few years. They have a team, Crew-8, at the station now and will send Crew-9 in mid-August.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Religion

Bored in Heaven?

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“Rosa Celeste,” by Gustav Dore. Public domain.

[This is an irregular, unscheduled Saturday blog post. I got the idea this morning during my prayers, and I liked it too well to keep to myself.]

I caught a short video clip where a guy was ridiculing the idea of Heaven.

“Isn’t perfection kind of boring?” he asked. “I mean, if everything’s perfect, what’s left for anybody to do?”

The answer to that, I think, starts with C. S. Lewis’ response to those who laugh at images of wings and harps in Heaven – “People who can’t understand books written for grownups shouldn’t read them.”

Is there a more common truism than the statement, “I began to grow wise when I began to understand how little I knew”?

As we grow and learn in this life, we never reach a point where we can say, “Now I’ve got it all. Now there’s nothing left for me to learn.”

On the contrary. The more we learn, the more we grow aware of all that’s left to learn. Sometimes the material is just not available at the moment – unrecorded history, scientific discoveries not yet made, mathematical formulae that haven’t been worked out yet.

It never ends.

And that’s just in this world.

Suppose you were suddenly transported into the Infinite. Do you think you’d run out of things to discover? Do you think you’d run out of truth and beauty, when you’re face to face at last with the very Source of truth and beauty, who is infinite?

It sounds more like an everlasting Quest to me.

This might be why Pride is the greatest sin. If we approach the Ultimate Truth with a prideful, know-it-all attitude, we won’t be capable of enjoying Heaven at all. We might think it dull.

Maybe that’s what Hell is.

Religion

The glory in the Face

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Rembrandt, Head of Christ. Fogg Museum. Netherlands Institute for Art History, Digital ID 232193

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6)

I’ve been thinking about the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That turn of phrase has intrigued me for a long time.

The glory of God is a frequent topic in Scripture. In the Old Testament, God’s glory is a serious issue. The people of Israel could not bear to hear His voice on Sinai, and asked Moses to be their mediator instead (Exodus 20). When Moses was permitted to see God’s “backside” (Exodus 34) on the mountain, he got the merest glimpse of the least part of the divine glory, and yet his face shown for days.

The Holy of Holies in the temple was so sacred that common people couldn’t enter. When Uzzah touched the Ark of the Covenant – even to keep it from slipping off a cart – God struck him down (2 Samuel 6).

In short, the Hebrews took God’s holiness deadly seriously. God was just and merciful, but nobody to treat lightly. Holiness meant separation, and nothing was holier than God. His holiness could kill you. He was so Other that even images of Him were forbidden.

Then along comes Jesus Christ, claiming to be God incarnate.

Suddenly God – of whom no image might be made – had a face.

That’s amazing, when you think of it.

If He really was the incarnation of that same God who terrified the Hebrews, a tremendous condescension had happened. The voltage had been stepped down infinitely, just so God could walk among men without leaving corpses behind wherever He went. To the contrary, this Holiness healed the sick and raised the dead.

Too often Christians forget what we’re dealing with in Jesus Christ. We take the incarnation for granted. We handle holy things lightly. We ought to remember what incredible power we’re dealing with. The Lion has agreed to be our friend, but it would be wise not to poke the Lion.

More than that, how amazing is it to look in a kind Man’s face, and encounter God Himself? As theologians have observed, only the Highest can descend to the very lowest level. God has always been perfect goodness, but Jesus Christ made that perfection touchable.

The phrase “perfection made better” comes to mind. It’s probably wrong in some theological way, but it’s what strikes me.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture