Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald

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I rarely buy the e-book versions of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. I just can’t justify paying the prices they ask for books I’ve already got in paperback. But now and then one shows up at a bargain price, and I always snap it up. So it was with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, one of the most memorable in the series – in a dark way. I got it during a brief sale.

Travis McGee, Florida beach bum, calls himself a “salvage specialist.” That means he recovers things that people have been robbed of, returns them to them, and keeps half the value. But he makes exceptions for friends, and the Pearsons are friends. Years ago he helped them with a boat deal, and then after the husband’s premature death he comforted the widow – in a carnal manner. They’ve kept in touch and he’s very fond of her and her two daughters.

At the start of this book, he comes back from a job to find a letter from the mother, Helena, telling him she’s dying of cancer. She’ll probably be gone by the time he reads this. She asks if he’d see if he can help her older daughter, Maureen, a beautiful woman married to a prosperous land developer. Maureen is suffering from a mysterious malady involving short-term memory loss, and has attempted suicide several times. McGee can’t imagine what he could do to help with a problem like that, but guilt (and the large check enclosed with the letter) motivate him to travel to their central Florida home and check things out.

Some things don’t add up. And then people start physically attacking McGee, which just gets him mad. There’s a lot of rot in this community, it turns out, and McGee is ready to kick it over to see what’s underneath. And – hopefully – save a life or two.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper is one of the darkest books in the series, and features one of its most shocking climaxes. There’s a lot of sex, but it’s described metaphorically, and quite beautifully. The rough language, as always, is consistent with the times, which means it’s cleaner than you’ll generally find in books written today. The book deals quite heavily with the race issue, in what seems to me fairly prophetic terms, though the scenes were a little awkward to my ear.

When I pick up a John D. MacDonald novel, I have a sense of plain, solid quality, like Shaker furniture. Nothing dazzling (though MacDonald can turn a fine phrase with the best of them), but every part is strong, and the whole thing is assembled with a craftsman’s eye. The books just work. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Does the Old Man Lose to the Sea?

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I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with friends last month. It was my first time. We found the essential story of catching a prize-worthy fish fairly gripping. I’ll summarize it quickly with spoilers.

Santiago is a poorer-than-most Cuban fisherman whose sail resembles a flag of defeat. The community has decided he is unlucky for catching nothing over the last 84 days at the start of the novella. But what is he going to do–sit on the beach and starve? With the encouragement of a neighbor boy who is as a grandson to him, he goes into the sea again, intending to go farther than all the other fishermen. He does so and hooks a gorgeous and enormous Marlin that takes him the rest of the story to pull in.

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.

Christians will notice the explicit Christ imagery in the story’s second half. Santiago is wounded with stripes on his back and pain like a nail through the hand. In the final pages, he carries his mast on his shoulder toward his hut and stumbles. He lies in his bed, arms outstretched, palms up. What does this mean, because the old man doesn’t redeem himself or anyone else? Perhaps the old man’s suffering and endurance is meant to be the ultimate a man can give.

His suffering is the cost of pursuing something great. He challenges a noble beast, his equal in some respects, and conquers it. He makes mistakes along the way and considers whether some of them are actual sins (though he claims to disbelieve in sin), but he achieves his goal nonetheless.

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Fiction, Reviews

‘Quicksilver,’ by Dean Koontz

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To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

Dean Koontz’s umpteenth novel is Quicksilver. I wouldn’t put it on the highest tier of his works, but it’s quality, patented Koontz all the way through, and all the expected pleasures are present.

Quinn Quicksilver is a young man living in Phoenix. He is an orphan, found abandoned as a baby in a basket on a highway median and raised by loving nuns in an orphanage. Now he works as a writer for a small magazine, and is entirely unremarkable – except for a “strange magnetism” that sometimes draws him to locations where he finds valuable things.

So when, one day, he finds a couple of tough guys from a covert government agency sitting on either side of him in a diner, about to abduct him, he manages to escape out the back and successfully get away by car. Following his strange magnetism, he drives to an abandoned farm, where he’s just in time to rescue a kidnapped old man and his granddaughter – the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. They’re grateful but not surprised by his arrival. They’ve been expecting him, they say. On top of that, they inform him that he’s going to marry the granddaughter. If they survive.

But first, they have a mission to complete. There’s a secret compound in the desert where a reclusive billionaire is running a sex cult. Joined by one further team member and a dog, they set their course to find the billionaire and rescue his victims.

Beautiful prose. Goofy humor. Action with a supernatural element. And the occasional moment of transcendence. That’s what we buy Koontz books for, and it’s all there in Quicksilver.

Also a lesson on theodicy and free will, at no extra charge.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Silent Blade,’ by Blake Banner

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I’ve been following, and enjoying, Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer series of action thrillers. The Silent Blade is the sixth in the series. It delivers all the action you could ask for, though it’s probably best not to think about it too much.

Harry Bauer is a covert operative for a shadowy private organization called Cobra. His particular passion is wiping out drug lords. In the last book he got rid of two at once, and now he’s on the run in Trinidad, cut off from his employers, trying to figure out a way to get back to New York without alerting either the law or the cartels.

Then he meets a beautiful woman who works for the CIA, who first helps him and then turns him over to her bosses for “enhanced interrogation.” They want to recruit him, they explain, but first they need to know who he’s been working for. He finally escapes from them and runs to the leader of a Colombian cartel, offering (he claims) to be their source inside the CIA when he goes to work for them. Here he meets another beautiful woman, and fireworks (of a couple kinds) follow.

The action is hot and heavy, the sex pretty much the same (though not too explicit). But I can’t resist noting that the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Harry has reached a stage where he seems to just jump into deadly situations without a plan for survival. Are we supposed to think he’s a master strategist, or does he just have a death wish? I have a suspicion we’re not supposed to think that far.

Good of its kind. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Music

Sunday Singing: O, The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus

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“O, The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”

Englishman Samuel Trevor Francis (1834-1925) gave us this hymn. It’s one of the hymns I feel I’ve always known. The tune is Welsh.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free,
rolling as a mighty ocean
in its fullness over me.
Underneath me, all around me,
is the current of thy love;
leading onward, leading homeward,
to thy glorious rest above.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Spread his praise from shore to shore;
how he loveth, ever loveth,
changeth never, nevermore;
how he watches o’er his loved ones,
died to call them all his own;
how for them he intercedeth,
watcheth o’er them from the throne.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Love of ev’ry love the best:
’tis an ocean vast of blessing,
’tis a haven sweet of rest.
O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
‘Tis a heav’n of heav’ns to me;
and it lifts me up to glory,
for it lifts me up to thee.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion

The God-Man Jesus, Philosophical Deadends, and Social Media

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Some people would have us believe that Jesus never claimed to be God, but you cannot read the Gospels thoughtfully and come to that conclusion. Christ Jesus made authoritative claims about Scripture and the people around him. He said, you have heard it said … but I say to you. Well, who is he to be claiming such authority of the text and its traditional interpretation? A crowd took up stones at least twice, because they knew what he was saying. “The Jews answered him, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God'” (John 10:33).

But maybe appealing to the reaction of the crowds is deeper in the weeds than we need to go. Jesus’s teaching ministry was not lightweight moralism that could sound true to anyone. He called for repentance and the coming of the kingdom of God.

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher,” C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity. “He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.”

Let me jot down some blogroll links.

Social Media: Chris Martin has been writing a newsletter about social media for a while. Last summer, he wrote, “Social media and the internet are being used to perpetuate sin in ways that some sermon series on ‘technology and the gospel’ isn’t just going to fix.” In November, he said censorship isn’t the big problem with social media among Christians; it’s the way this technology is discipling us.

Martin released a book this month on this topic, called Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media.

Johann Georg Hamann “gives us a way forward from both the deadends of modernism and the deadends of postmodernism.” Hamann calls us ultimately to the Bible.

Trending: Merriam-Webster reports a sharp increase in searches for the definition of infrangible, which means “unbreakable, not able to be separated into parts” or “not to be violated.”

Trueman: “As the medieval world granted tremendous spiritual power to its priesthood and indulged its sins because of that, so we do with our celebrities.”

Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Uncategorized

Swords in the rock

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Above, a very nice little video of the “Sverd i Fjell” (Sword in Rock) monument at Hafrsfjord, near Stavanger, Norway. I’ve been there, briefly, years back. It is, you will not be surprised to learn, my favorite monument in the world. It’s directly north of Sola, where Erling Skjalgsson lived. This is about where he docks his ships in my novels.

But the place is most famous for the battle which the monument commemorates, the Battle of Hafrsfjord, fought (it is thought) in 872. This was a sea battle in which King Harald Fairhair (or Finehair) defeated a coalition of his enemies to secure control over the kernel of what would become the kingdom of Norway. Nobody knows the extent of his actual domains, and (of course) there are historians who doubt his very existence, and whether the battle ever happened.

They’re planning a big celebration of the Battle of Hafrsfjord this summer, and I’m seriously considering going over for it. I can plausibly hope to have the funds – the main thing I need to make up my mind to is the trip itself. Air travel becomes less fun as you age, and it’s become less fun for everybody in recent years. And Norway is not a place for people who have trouble walking. I walk okay, but my range isn’t what it used to be, and my fake hips complain if I overdo it. What I need is to lose some weight. I’m working on that.

I think I’ll regret it if I don’t go.

Goofing, Writing

‘Medieval help desk’

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The video above is quite old now, but I don’t think I’ve ever shared it here. Fits our topic, and it’s in my wheelhouse, too, as the language is Norwegian. It comes from the Norwegian national broadcast service. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s pretty clever.

Today was another of those clear, bright, bitter cold days in Minneapolis. I’ve mentioned the word “apricity” before – it means the warmth you feel when the sun shines on you, warming you a little on one of these polar days. This was an apricitous day.

I went to the gym (8 below) and then went to my tax preparer (about zero). Those two things are the sum of my achievements thus far, but I still felt worn out. Taxes will do that to you. My return is on hold, since it turned out a couple forms I need haven’t arrived in the mail yet. Next year I need to make a later appointment.

Now I’ll try to work on the novel. This thing is kicking my fundament. Every time I do a revision, I find more that needs fixing. I just discovered that in one story line, I put an effect ahead of a cause. This will have to be fixed.

I think it’s a good story, but it’s like a black hole. I like to think the book is smarter than I am, and I just need time to catch up with it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Truth or Die,’ by Jack Lynch

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The sixth volume in the late Jack Lynch’s 1980s detective series starring Pete Bragg is Truth or Die. I like Pete Bragg more and more because a) he’s pre-Woke, and b) he seems to be smoking less pot these days.

Pete’s relationship with his girlfriend, the artist Allison, is developing well, in spite of her reservations about his career as a private eye. He’s keeping a promise to her as Truth or Die begins, spending a weekend with her at the Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s a little awkward, though, when one of the people they run into is Jo Sommers, a beautiful woman Pete used to flirt with in his bartending days. Jo seems to be a compulsive flirt, and Pete can’t deny the attraction, even though she’s married to a prominent local psychologist.

Then the psychologist turns up dead, smothered with a pillow in his den. Jo is arrested for the murder, and appeals to Jack to clear her. Allison gives him limited permission. Pete’s not sure Jo didn’t actually kill her husband, but he soon uncovers evidence leading to old military secrets, secret tapes, and blackmail. Then Allison is endangered, and we get to see Pete in full Lone Ranger mode.

Lots of fun. Not much to object to except for extramarital sex, which seems almost chaste these days. I enjoyed Truth or Die.

Goofing

Librarians are not against book banning

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Photo by Anastasiia Krutota. Unsplash license.

Periodically we note great outcries in the media about “book banning.” The banning of books is indeed a serious issue, when it actually happens, but what these scares are about is almost never real banning. Banning means a book is declared illegal, and its publication and possession are forbidden by law. The closest thing to that that’s going on these days is when conservative books get cancelled by publishers. Which isn’t real banning, either.

Let me divulge (once again, because people keep forgetting) a secret from the forbidden world of librarians – librarians are not actually against banning (in their own sense of the term) books. They call it banning when parents want books kept out of libraries, or at least out of their children’s hands. But the fact is, librarians keep books off the shelves all the time. Deciding what books to acquisition, and what books to reject, is part of a librarian’s job.

The librarians aren’t against books being “banned” in that (erroneous) sense.

They’re against the peasants doing it.

Librarians believe that they themselves, as the anointed priesthood, have the sole right to “ban” books. They go into a snit when mere parents and concerned citizens violate their turf.

I used to be a librarian, but I’m out of the racket now. If I mysteriously disappear, you can be sure the Enforcers of the ALA have abducted me, and I probably sleep with the discards, for violating the Unwritten Code.