Fiction, Reviews

‘A False Mirror,’ by Charles Todd

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It’s 1920. Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard is dispatched to the town of Hampton Regis, to investigate the beating of Matthew Hamilton, a prominent local citizen, a diplomat who has retired to the seaside. Suspicion immediately falls on a young man named Stephen Mallory. Mallory was engaged to Hamilton’s young wife before the war, from which he returned with shell shock. He thinks he’s been discreet about keeping a watch on the Hamilton house, to spy on the woman he still loves, but you can’t keep secrets like that in a small town.

Inspector Rutledge is inclined to suspect Mallory too. He knew him personally in the war, and considered him a coward. But he knows – better than most – that such prejudices can disrupt your judgment. He has battle fatigue himself, manifested in the form of Hamish MacLeod, his best friend, who did not survive the war – due to Rutledge’s own actions – and who constitutes a continuous presence at his shoulder now, commenting on everything that goes on when he’s not accusing Rutledge.

When Mallory barricades himself in the Hamilton house, holding Mrs. Hamilton and her maid hostage, things look black for him. But Rutledge thinks there’s more to this business than is apparent, especially when Hamilton inexplicably disappears from his bed in the doctor’s house.

There was much to like in Charles Todd’s novel, False Mirror, but I have to confess I found it hard going. It seemed to me to move slowly, but what bothered me most was the downbeat atmosphere. The book was depressing. Especially for me, as I know something about accusatory voices from the past (don’t ask).

On the other hand, Christianity comes out looking very good in this book. Remarkably good by the standards of our time.

A look at Amazon reviews told me that this is in fact a flashback book, an origin story, in a very popular series, and other readers say this book’s atmosphere is not representative of the series. So I may try another Ian Rutledge book. I did like the Christian elements.

The Press

Will California Have Its First Black Governor?

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If [Larry] Elder were running as a Democrat, the press would be celebrating the possibility of California’s first black governor. Instead, we hear nothing about “shattering glass ceilings” or “diversifying” the ruling elite. The New York Times ran an entire front-page article on Elder’s candidacy without once mentioning that he was black. (The article did claim in passing that Elder was an affirmative-action admit to Brown University, an unthinkable charge regarding a black liberal.)

Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated talk show host and lawyer running to replace the current California governor, if voters approve the recall. Real Clear Politics has recall polling results stepping over the line toward approving a recall and Elder is clearly ahead of the many candidates vying for the governorship.

That has the heads of national media outlets spinning.

City Journal describes the issues and some of the media’s attempts to whitewash Elder as a white supremacist. Editor Heather Mac Donald notes how the press celebrates minority status with leftist candidates but have ignored it with Elder’s gubernatorial victory close at hand.

Reading, Uncategorized

‘Weariness and water were our chief enemies…’

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The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it…. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boats with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscapes of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII)

I floundered for something to post tonight. Like so many Americans, I’m upset over a war strategy that seems both foolish and suicidal, with the fighting men (as always) paying the costs. Add to that that I’m reading a novel about the aftermath of World War I, the same sort of thing on a massive scale. So I settled on the excerpt from Surprised by Joy above, Lewis’s greatly softened public reminiscence of his war experience. (For a more candid view, see if you can find a copy of Jack’s Life, by Douglas Gresham, in which he relates what Jack told him in private about the war.)

I’d love to do a political rant, denouncing certain officials who shall remain nameless. But I haven’t the heart for it these days.

Authors, Fiction

Missing the Joke or Playing Along?

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What’s the thing you saw to make you wonder about people’s grasp on reality? Sure, we seem to run a fair risk of seeing a Karen-type in social media each week, and that’s enough to wonder who those people think they are. But if you haven’t seen one of those people, here’s a story that may make you scratch your head.

In The Princess Bride, William Goldman opens talking about himself, how he was introduced to this “classic” from another era, and throughout the novel he inserts editorial notes of explanation or obfuscation. The fictional classic author Morgenstern, whom Goldman says he is merely editing, does the same. Somewhere in the middle, Morgenstern interrupts the narrative to say his wife had a complaint. Goldman interrupts the interruption to explain that M., not G., is interrupting at this point and that he agrees with M’s wife’s complaint.

I assume you know the story well enough for me to carry on. Yes? All right.

The complaint is over the lack of a reunion scene between Westley and Buttercup after she discovers who he is. Goldman says Morgenstern did not write such a scene, about which his otherwise appreciative wife complained. Goldman claims to have written the scene himself and that his editor would not allow him to insert it, because he’s not writing the book, only editing what Morgenstern wrote. Goldman tells us we can have this scene sent to us by request, giving an address for Urban del Rey at Ballentine Books, and saying his publisher would pay for return postage.

So please, if you have the least interest at all or even if you don’t, write in for my reunion scene. You don’t have to read it–I’m not asking that–but I would love to cost those publishing geniuses a few dollars, because, let’s face it, they’re not spending much on advertising my books.

—William Goldman, The Princess Bride, ch 5

How many letters would you say have arrived in New York with this request? When the book debuted, six or so letters a week found their way to the publisher. It was released in paperback the next year, 1974, and spurred upwards of 100 letters a week. In 1987, the L.A. Times reported that since the movie came out, 400-500 letters a week began coming in.

I don’t know how long that stream kept up that pace, but it seems a bit unhinged, doesn’t it? Combine this with reports of people asking for the original Morgenstern edition, which doesn’t exist because the whole abridgment thing is a joke, and you wonder about their grip on reality. Are they playing along or do they realize Goldman says many things he doesn’t not mean?

Uncategorized

Media alert

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The local PBS station in Brainerd, Minnesota did a report on our festival last weekend. My red Viking banner is prominently featured, and I can also be seen from a distance, at my book table beside my tent, under my awning.

It really was pretty cool.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Paper Girls,’ by Alex Smith

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It’s common to find “extreme” thrillers on bookshelves today. Usually that means extreme in terms of action – improbably indestructible heroes taking damage that would permanently cripple lesser men, ripping drip lines out of their arms and escaping hospitals, and dominating climactic showdowns against impossible odds amid large explosions.

Alex Smith’s Paper Girls is extreme in a different way. It’s extreme on the interior level, driving its hero to the limits of his emotional resources (before he nearly gets killed in a fight).

Detective Chief Inspector Robert Kett is a London policeman on compassionate leave; he’s moved temporarily to Norwich to decompress and spend time with his three daughters, one of them a baby. Famed for his skill as a finder off missing persons, he’s tormented by the fact that he couldn’t locate his own wife, who has been kidnapped.

His down time is interrupted, though, when his boss calls and asks him for a favor. The local police in Norwich need help with a pair of kidnappings. Two eleven-year-old girls, who made money delivering newspapers, have been snatched. Everyone knows that after the first few hours, chances of discovering the victims alive sink to almost zero.

Personally, I don’t think I’d have put up with the guff Kett takes when he shows up to help. His temporary boss, rather than being grateful, is openly insulting and uses him as a scapegoat when things go wrong (though he’s a layered character; I like that in a book). And Kett has more than enough on his hands trying to care for his traumatized girls. But he doesn’t quit because he cares deeply; he can’t help himself thinking about what the victims are suffering. He can’t help believing that if he can find these girls, maybe he can find his wife too.

The detective work was pretty plausible. The characters were very good. Paper Girls was almost too intense for me – I have a hard time dealing with kidnapping stories in general. But I stayed with it and was glad I did. There was a cliff-hanger at the end, but the author played fair.

Male readers will enjoy the suspense and the action. Female readers will enjoy seeing a man find out what women have to do all day. I highly recommend Paper Girls. Cautions for language and mature subject matter.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Viking Heart,’ by Arthur Herman

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In short, a clear thread may connect the Viking sokemen of the Danelaw to the intellectual ferment that produced the Petition of Right of the English Parliament in 1628 and, ultimately, the Bill of Rights in America.

There seems to be something essentially un-Scandinavian about blowing one’s own horn. One hears of – and is often amused by – the Irish braggart or the German braggart. But we rarely hear of Scandinavian braggarts. Not due to any ethnic superiority, but because of our ingrained cultural habits.

The makes Arthur Herman’s The Viking Heart a slightly awkward book to read, at least for fellow Scandinavians. (Herman explains that after he wrote the book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a Norwegian uncle asked why he’d ignored that side of the family, so there seem to be exceptions.)

I’d heard the author interviewed on the radio, and got the impression that this was mainly a book about the Vikings. But it’s not. Though the Vikings get much of the page count, the author goes on to describe Scandinavian history (at home and overseas) up to modern times. We read about the Normans, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Swedish pioneers in colonial Delaware and New York, Charles Lindbergh and Norman Borlaug. The executives of both Ford and Chevrolet who engineered US industrial mobilization in World War II were both Scandinavian-Americans. Gutzon Borglum and Carl Sandberg. The list is quite long.

The ongoing theme is the titular Viking heart (sometimes also the Viking Legacy, a title already taken. Herman might have consulted that book profitably). The Viking heart seems to be a pretty amorphous concept, but in the end he identifies it as physical courage, commitment to cultural identity, “the instinct of craftsmanship” (a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, who grew up about 10 miles from my childhood home), Christianity (after the conversion, of course), “the Lutheran work ethic,” the power of individual freedom, and “a constant willingness to strive toward unknown frontiers in order to find a place for oneself and one’s family.”

I’m not sure how different that makes the Viking heart from a lot of other ethnic groups’ hearts – the Scots-Irish, for instance, could claim a lot of those traits, and they carried them off with more flair.

As always, when it comes to a subject about which I know quite a lot, I have nitpicks. There are a lot of minor errors in the chapters on the Vikings. The author doesn’t go as far as some historians in rejecting the evidence of the sagas, but he tends to find things credible that I doubt, and doubt things I consider pretty plausible (such as the existence of King Harald Finehair of Norway).

On the plus side, he is far more positive about Christianity and its cultural influences than many current historians.

He judges it a failing of the Scandinavian countries that they never fully adopted feudalism. That’s something we Norwegians have always been pretty proud of, in point of fact.

The book is quite long. I did learn things from it, when the story moved outside my wheelhouse. I appreciated it, but I’m not entirely sure the whole exercise was necessary.

That’s probably just my Norwegian diffidence talking.

Recommended, for those interested in the subject.

Writing

A Common Root Origin of Pray and Prey?

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Ever notice that some words with diverse meanings sound alike? There are called homophones and are the source of countless confusions and misspeakery. The curious may ask if two homophones have a common origin, if perhaps a single word split in the distance past to give us the two words we have now.

Something of an example of a single word would be content. When we say CON-tent, emphasizing the front of half of the word, we mean the reading material, images, videos, or objects that fill up a website, magazine, or other media container. What’s in a thing is its content. When we say con-TENT, we mean to be at peace with a situation. “Having the desires limited to that which one has; not disposed to repine or grumble.” That’s the definition from Webster’s New International (2nd ed., many years old), adding this Spencer quotation: “Content with any food that God doth send.”

This word is not actually a homophone. It’s the same word with two meanings, both from one Latin word continere, meaning “to hold together, enclose” or to contain. The content of this blog is the substance contained therein, and to be content with something is to contain one’s desires within the bounds of that thing. Your umbrella may be bent and a bit shabby, but you’re content with it because you don’t want a new one yet.

My old Webster’s makes a good point contrasting content and satisfy. You may be settled or undisturbed by what you have, even though all of your desires have not been met or satisfied. “When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travelers must be content,” Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It. The speaker could easily want more or different, but today he’ll remain as he is–not satisfied but content.

But I was talking about homophones, such as pray and prey.

Pray came into English in the 13th century as preien, shown in this old Anglican prayer, “Almyghti god, euerlastynge, we preien thee grant us to slaken the flawme of oure vicis, that grauntidist to seynt laurence thi martir to ouercome the brynnyng of his turmentis. Bi crist.” The word came through French from the Latin precari, meaning “ask earnestly, beg, entreat.” You can hear a close relationship to the word precarious, which we often use to mean “uncertain” or “doubtful.” It actually means “dependent on someone else,” which is rather close to what the prayerful saint intends.

Prey in Middle English was preie, essentially the same spelling as the word intended as “pray.” Searching old prayer books, I see this spelling used repeatedly, such as this line from a tract by John Wyclif, “Christene men preie wiþout cessynge.” So, speaking as a layman, a novice, and a non-scholar (despite what they constantly told me in high school), perhaps both pray and prey were spelled the same in 13th century English.

But prey, a hunted animal, does not have the same root as pray. It comes from another French word (also preie) from the Latin praeda. These two words were used to mean “plunder and the spoils of conquest” as well as the rabbit in the falcon’s eye. And the verb form, to prey upon, is derived from the same Latin root.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Uncategorized

Viking Festival report

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Since I’m sure you were praying fervently for my safety this weekend, considering my age and deteriorating mental state, you’ll rejoice to know that I and my loaner car both returned intact from an intensive experience.

First, at noon Friday, a lunch meeting with the board of the Georg Sverdrup Society at a restaurant in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. That went fine, except that I have lots of work to do now on delayed projects (delayed, surprisingly, by other causes than my personal laziness).

Then on eastward to the Brainerd area, where I met my hosts for the weekend. They were an extremely gracious retired couple who fed me sumptuously and listened to my tales and anecdotes. I, for my part, actually asked some questions of them, which is not my usual way. I must have been transitioning into Public Lars mode, which is more outgoing than my true personality.

In the morning my host guided me to the Crow Wing County Fairgrounds, where some of my group were already waiting. We set up, and other Vikings from other groups showed up and set up as well. In the end the Crow Wing Viking Festival looked like the photo above.

Things were slow starting off. I suspect the weather had a lot to do with it. It had been stormy overnight (everyone was grateful for the rain after a dry summer), and some clouds and sprinkling moved through before everything lightened up. It became a beautiful day – about 70 degrees – the only problem being strong wind gusts that bludgeoned us now and then (at one point one actually knocked the post out from one corner of my sun shade awning).

And the crowds came, as we hoped, as eager as the Vikings to finally get out and do something with people under God’s sun. The fighting contingent had enough participants to form reasonable shield walls in the battle shows, and – judging by my business – people were eager and willing to spend their rapidly devaluing dollars. I took home a nice amount that had previously been in other people’s pockets.

Then, because I had a young guy carrying my impedimenta in his big vehicle, we convoyed home, stopping for burgers in St. Cloud. I was the old man in the party, and did my best to appear clueless and opinionated. Pulled in at home a little after 10:00 p.m., and unloaded. Dragged my stuff inside, and collapsed to a better night’s sleep than I’d had in a while.

Oh yes, somebody asked for a picture of my Viking chest. I forgot to take one at the festival, but here it is in its customary spot, subbing for a desk chair in my home office.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Cuba in ‘1984’

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A few weeks ago, I started reading 1984 as a change of pace from the Rubus novels I went through. That was when news from Cuba came out on Twitter, and Cubans had taken to the streets.

Our media, which allows claims of Cuba’s “entirely free” health care to go unchallenged, told us they were upset that COVID vaccines were in short supply. But everything has been in short supply. Farmland that could be cultivated with modern techniques is wasted by political bullies who must control everything even when there’s nothing left. Little abuelas are saying they have lived under communism for 60 years and they’re sick of it. The protests sprang up everywhere. Police have ushered hundreds of people off the streets, beating them for protesting or “disappearing” them. World reports some of the details here.

Communists blocked all or most of the country’s Internet access early on, prompting U.S. advocates to talk about deploying special Internet beacons like we did in Puerto Rico a few years ago. Doctors are now speaking up about the sorry condition of state-run hospitals. Health is not a particular care of the state.

This week, Cuba has made it illegal to complain online, so the video last month of a woman crying hysterically over her son bleeding to death under state-run care, wounds caused by police, would be a crime to record and share. Praising the all-knowing, ever-benevolent state is all that’s allowed.

With this going on, I found it difficult to read 1984. The parallels were too strong, the story too dark. It was akin to enduring my mother’s death in a hospital a couple years ago and later trying to watch a Korean TV drama set in a hospice care facility in which characters regularly pass away.

I made it through about 70-90 pages. I heard a professor (I think) say he thought the book felted dated, pulled out of history’s dustbin. I think it describes Cuba perfectly. A country at war with ideological enemies. History constantly rewritten to agree with present claims. Enthusiastic support of our dear leader is required from all. No one is interested in discussing the truth or exploring possibilities. No one wants personal risk or neighborly respect. The state speaks for the people, because the people have no voice of their own.

I don’t find that kind of fear entertaining or enlightening.

I wonder if Cuba has their own version of Newspeak.