Fiction, Reviews

‘There are No Saints,’ by STephen Kanicki

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It’s 1857. Dexter James, an itinerant demonologist, comes to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where he’s sure there must be a lot of demon-possessed people in the backwash of the recent oil rush. He has trouble getting business at first, until he performs a miracle of healing (to his surprise) and becomes a huge success; then he crashes on his own hubris. Meanwhile, he falls in love with a local prostitute, who helps him find his true destiny.

That’s a brief, bare=bomes outline of Stephen Kanicki’s There Are No Saints, which could be classed as Christian fantasy, I suppose, or at any rate religious fantasy. There was a certain amount of creativity in the writing, and the characters showed some genuine depth and development. The ending of the book, I must admit, moved me.

However, I didn’t really like it. The writing style was not outstanding (a number of homophone errors), and the diction was purely 21st Century. No effort was made whatever to make the narrative read like one that could conceivably have been written in the 19th Century.

And speaking of the time setting, it was never explained why Dex had what seemed to be Viagara pills to distribute, or how he knew the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous almost a century before they were composed. I was looking for some kind of time travel plot element, but there was none.

And, as a doctrinaire Christian, I don’t accept the theology expressed in the book. It’s syncretist, saying that all religions are really the same: all about love. Which means Jesus Christ and His Cross were unnecessary, and it’s all good works.

So, in aggregate, I don’t personally recommend There Are No Saints. But you might find it amusing. Cautions for some foul language.

Blogs, Socials

Filtering Images, Videos, not just Websites

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This is the kind of tech we’ve been thinking should have been active for years. Justin Taylor says Canopy has “the most effective technology on the planet to block pornography.“

Canopy’s CEO says, “One of the big challenges of navigating the digital world is that explicit content no longer is limited to pornography websites. It can appear anywhere and everywhere, which renders many of the traditional safeguards ineffective.”

Canopy, an expansion of an Israeli tech developer, has developed a smart filter that “can detect sexually explicit content in real time and seamlessly remove it.” They also fight sexting by scanning images stored on the filtered device, flagging them, and offering the user to either delete them or send them to their parents for review.

Fiction, Reviews

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin, Rebus #1

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Having read the fourteenth book in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus series, I looked up the first one, published in 1987. It was fairly different overall. I’ll have to read a few more to see whether this one or the other is the anomaly.

In Knots and Crosses, DS John Rebus is pulled away from all of his current cases to join the growing team going after the separate kidnappings of two pre-teen girls. At his first conference, they announce it has become a murder investigation, and they have as many as zero leads. Rebus and a younger officer are assigned to comb the M.O. files for possible leads–the worst mental drudge. The police get nowhere until the murderer finally presses his point, that his main goal is Rebus himself.

Rankin has earned a lot of praise for his use of Edinburgh in these novels. Though Rebus is an officer at the fictional Great London Road police station, other details are well grounded. One of the main ideas you get from this book is that Edinburgh is good city, filled with stone walls and solid people. Kidnapping and murdering random girls couldn’t happen in this city. But Rebus and his fellow officers are dragged into the long shadows of sinful Scottish men.

Knots and Crosses delivers a fairly good original story for the series hero. In A Question of Blood, everyone knows Rebus doesn’t talk about his Army days, but in these pages all of that is spelled out. We also learn Rebus is a Christian, which means something unclear. Maybe he had a churched upbringing (though thinking of his father, I don’t know why they would attend services). He seems to hold to rudimentary Christian tenets and seek hope in a Good News Bible, but his sexual morality is complete mess and he avoids the church as if he has been wounded there. I wonder if we will see more of his faith in other books.

The main thing I disliked about this book is how the perspective jumps between many characters: a few cops, a couple victims, a newspaper man. His editor gets a couple paragraphs. The murderer gets a few lines. I think the ole universal third person may have been a better narrator.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Declare,’ by Tim Powers

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The cracks and thunders made syllables in the depleted air, but they didn’t seem to be in Arabic. Hale guessed that they were of a language much older, the uncompromised speech of mountain conversing with mountain and lightning and cloud, seeming random only to creatures like himself whose withered verbs and nouns had grown apart from the things they described.

Wow.

To what shall I compare Tim Powers’s novel, Declare? Think of John LeCarre. And cross it with C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, or… pardon my blushes… my own historical fantasy novels.

But really, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read.

Andrew Hale is an English spy. He was born in Palestine and baptized in the Jordan River. He doesn’t know who his father was, though it’s rumored he was a fallen priest. He does know his mother was a failed nun. As a young boy he was introduced to a tall man named Jimmie Theodora, who swore him into a kind of secret organization – he didn’t understand what it was about. But eventually it led him to recruitment in British intelligence. And he began to glimpse a secret known to few and denied by all – that above the business of fighting the Germans and the Russians, there is a metaphysical war going on. Good vs. evil, principalities and powers of darkness in high places.

In occupied Paris in World War II, Andrew meets and falls in love with a Spanish Communist agent, Elena Ceneza-Bendiga, But their work will keep them apart, as Andrew carries out various assignments taking him to the deserts of Kuwait, to Turkey, Berlin and Moscow. And again and again he will come up against a man whose fate seems entwined with his – the charming, stuttering, utterly treacherous and amoral Kim Philby. The two men’s shared birthright will bring them together in epic confrontations on Mount Ararat and, finally, in Moscow.

This novel, as I mentioned last week, is very, very long. Be prepared to invest time in it. But it’s packed full of historical detail – Powers says in his afterword that all the dates and events (except for the invented supernatural activity) are scrupulously faithful to the documented record. It’s also packed with fascinating fantasy speculation.

The final impact of it all is hard to describe. Almost perception-altering. I highly recommend Declare.

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Helmet awareness

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The Danish Road Safety Council has come up with a very clever commercial to promote the use of bike helmets. I’m not sure I agree with the safety uber alles fetish of the helmet purists, but the commercial is fun. And, as somebody said, probably the most interesting Viking film made since the 1960s.

Also, it pokes subtle fun at the History Channel series, it seems to me.

As for me, I am up to my aventail in translation work right now. For a while I thought I’d promised to deliver it sooner than I ought to, but now I think it will be OK.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Spy Who Came In From the Bin,’ by Christopher Shevlin

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‘He’s a hard man to photograph,’ said Lance.

‘But these are good likenesses, right?’ said Lizzie.

‘Sort of. It sounds weird to say, but there are other people who look more like Jonathon than he does himself.’

I’ve been trying to come up with blog topics all week, and I forgot I’d finished a book last week that I hadn’t reviewed yet.

There’s a third book in  Christopher Shevilin’s weird Jonathon Fairfax series, The Spy Who Came In From the Bin. Jonathan Fairfax, if you recall my earlier reviews, is a well-meaning Englishman who bumbles through life, never quite sure what’s going on as adventure swirls around him.

In this book, Jonathon wakes up in a garbage truck in Berlin, being unloaded from a bin, having completely forgotten who he is. He’s taken to a hospital, but manages to escape after an assassin shows up to murder him. Soon he’s taken in by a friendly American student and her Russian boyfriend. They go on the run, pursued by CIA killers, as Jonathon’s best friend and girlfriend rush to rescue him, assisted by other CIA killers, who may or may not actually be on their side.

It’s all very weird, in the style of these books, where there are very few actual gags to laugh at, but the situations are highly comic in cumulative effect.

What I disliked about this book was a lazy European anti-Americanism, that sees the US as the world’s only real problem. I’m not sure whether I can overlook that attitude enough to read the next book, assuming there is one.

But it’s funny. I can’t deny that.

Religion, Writing

Making new friends through novel writing

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Nicolai Cleve Broch as Saint Olav in the annual Stiklestad Play, near Trondheim. Photo by Leif Arne Holme/NRK, 2004.

Enjoyed a minor writer’s pleasure today, as I worked on the new Erling book.

I went over this one scene I’d added during the last revision. I always feel uncertain about inserted scenes, worrying that the graft might not take (even though most of the time I insert them precisely because I feel something’s missing at that point).

But it did work. Quite well, actually. Not only dramatically, but emotionally. The scene moved me, in fact. Which is always a surprise, like playing a practical joke on yourself.

The scene centered on King Olaf Haraldsson – Saint Olaf. Who is, in the great scheme of the series, the villain. In spite of the fact that he’s the patron saint of my second favorite country, the man was a totalitarian. Also a heretic, in my view, because I consider the use of violence in evangelism heretical. So I approached this project prepared to give him a waxed mustache and a black top hat.

But a funny thing happened as I wrote. I started getting under his skin. The first breakthrough came some years back, when I was talking about Olav’s life with a (longsuffering) friend.

I told him about a story from the Icelandic Flatey Book, not included in Heimskringla (the usual source). Flatey Book explains how Olaf was named after an ancestor, a great king called Olaf Geirstad-Elf, believed to have had supernatural powers. In the old heathen religion, naming a child after a recently dead relation was thought to cause a sort of reincarnation. The new baby was believed to be, in some sense, that ancestor reborn. (Yes, they also believed in Valhalla. And they believed the ancestor slept in his grave mound. Consistency played no part in their theology.) So Olaf was raised believing that he was really a wizard who’d lived before. His foster father Rani even dug into Olaf Geirstad-Elf’s grave mound and removed the ancient family sword, Besing, which was then given to young Olaf.

But Olaf sailed abroad as a Viking, saw a bit of the world, and chose to be baptized a Christian. We’re never told what he thought of his supposed reincarnation, in light of his new faith.

But there’s a story in Flatey Book about how he rode his horse one day past his ancestor’s grave mound. And suddenly a terror came over him. He turned his horse around and galloped off, giving orders that no one should stray near that mound again.

As I told that story to my friend, I suddenly felt I had an insight into Olaf’s psychology. He’d had a traumatic experience there at the grave mound. It instilled in him a terror of the old religion, a fear that he’d be sucked back into the power of a horrific ancestral curse. This helped explain his whole approach to Christianization.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an Olaf booster. His actions are too repellant.

But I think I’m beginning to sympathize with him. A little.

Which leads me to the inevitable thought…

After a thousand years dead, this S.O.B. is charming me! No wonder they made him patron saint!

Uncategorized, Writing

The transmission lockdown, continued

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I’m reading a book right now that I’m enjoying very much. But it’s long. Looooooooong. So the stream of consciousness blogging must continue, regardless of the cost in pain and suffering to our audience.

On the automobile front, my car, Miss Ingebretsen, yet languishes in durance vile, in the transmission shop. I learned today that the transmission itself is all right. It’s the shifter that’s broken. They’re trying to find me a used shifter, and I guess those things must be harder to find than you’d expect. Maybe tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll have to use Door Dash for groceries again.

If you skipped the video above, take a minute to watch it. It’s not much longer than that. It’s the Dragon Harald Fairhair, the big Viking ship I hoped to see in Duluth a few years back, but was disappointed. Seriously, was anything ever more romantic than that graceful ship cutting through a stormy sea? That (or the idea of it, anyway) was what surprised me by joy nearly 60 years ago, making me a lifelong Viking nut, and pointing me to my destiny, as a highly peripheral figure in the world of Norwegian history, literature, and entertainment. And, oh yes, a novelist.

I can report that I’m still working on the new Erling book, King of Rogaland. Its current status hovers in a weird space where the book is essentially written, but far from finished. We speak of “polishing” a manuscript, and that’s what it is. Very like sanding wood. Going over the same surface again and again, smoothing out the rough spots. I’ve got a few passages where I’ve left out place names I still need to select, with a map. And there are joints that aren’t tight. Once this current pass is finished, working onscreen, I think I need to print the next draft out, and labor over it on paper. Some things work better with a red pen and notes and swoopy arrows. Especially when you need to hunt through the pages multiple times.

Also, I’ve never gotten a splinter polishing a manuscript.

Fiction, Reading

Culling the Shelves of Bad Books

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Sometimes I browse a bookstore as I would other stores I visit while playing the tourist. I look at the many curious spines, letters, and colors, seeing the curiosity of one, the value of another, with little intension of buying either. Sometimes I go to a bookstore in hope of finding a few, specific titles or types of books or maybe anything by that guy who wrote those stories–you know the ones–about that cool thing, remember, and though I enter with hope, I must put it on a table somewhere to pick up something else, because I gradually despair of finding anything I want.

But there are times when I take a chance on a book I know nothing about. That’s when I run the risk of having my wife read it.

I’m a slow reader. If I wasn’t so good-looking, I’d be notably less successful than I am. My wife is fast reader, and I don’t mean by comparison to me. I can buy her a promising title from the used bookstore, and in two days, having read it through, she’ll ask me to take the trashy thing back.

I went to the used bookstore a couple weeks ago, carrying a mug of hope for reasons I don’t recall. Maybe it was our recent collection of trade-ins and having avoided the store for about a year. Inspired by Lars’s recent urban fantasy reviews, I wanted to find something fun and maybe good to try. So I went home with a steampunk novel, first of a series. Saying she needed to screen it for the kids, my wife read it immediately.

I think I read somewhere that nothing in steampunk was worth reading. It was all fan-fiction, heavily derivative. This book has to be step aside from that, because it was traditionally published by an author who has many other published books, but it isn’t good.

Getting all of this from my wife, the dialog is awful, particularly everything the heroine says. The plot is dragged down by her constantly wrestling over marrying someone instead of doing the adventure thing that you’d expect from a novel like this.

The devices and contraptions are interesting, even though they don’t move the story. The pirates are vile, needlessly dark, and disappear after their initial scuffle, which may be realistic but not fun. The zombie disease doesn’t make sense, and I don’t need to go on.

That’s the risk I run plucking a book off the shelf, being too kind to the cover art, and even reading the description or a random page. I’ve done that before to positive effect. More than that, I don’t need to buy books. I have many good ones on my shelves and more on that little Kindle thing that could spy on me if I didn’t put it to sleep with no wi-fi every day.

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After-inaction report

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[Imagine a picture of Saturday’s events here. I neglected to take one. My brain was overheated, I think.]

It is one of the anomalies (I think that’s the word for it) of historical reenactment, that many of us impersonate people from the history of northern Europe, where it’s cool most of the year and most people historically wore wool. But we do it at events in America in the summer, where big wool costumes with cloaks are borderline dangerous if you don’t keep carefully hydrated. (And those who don’t reenact European stuff generally do the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, where wool is also de rigeur.)

Minnesota Military History Days, an annual event held in Dundas Minnesota (where my grandfather was once town constable for a year, as I kept telling people), was originally scheduled for May. But the weather was cold and wet in May, so they rescheduled for the first weekend in June. June is usually real nice in Minnesota.

This year the temperature hovered up just below 100˚. If I can trust my car’s thermometer, it actually hit 100 in the Cities. (Another thing I often tell people, whether they like it or not, is that I spent 11 years on the east coast of Florida, and never saw 100˚, but I’ve been through many such days in the North Star State.) I figured that after the long lockdown, people would want to come out to a public event in spite of the heat – but that was not the case. Attendance was sparse, much below normal levels, according to the old hands.

This was the first year anybody from The Viking Age Club & Society of the Sons of Norway had been to the event. (It was a three-day event, but we only did Saturday.) It’s what’s called a timeline event, where reenactors from various periods all come together to provide a walking (and camping) history lesson. There was a big World War II battle in the afternoon (America won again, I’m proud to report), but our Vikings did a couple combat shows too (I left that to others). And we had a good turnout of members, all of them young people – except, of course, for me.

I brought my tent and awning shade (we did need the shade), and it was good to have a lot of youthful free labor to do the bulk of the putting up and tearing down. Even so, I had occasion to ponder the fact that it had been more than a year since I’d done this stuff, and in the interim I’ve arguably become too old for it. Especially on really hot days.

I comfort myself with the thought that it will be better if I lose some weight. (Though that’s less comfortable when I remember that losing weight requires effort and self-control.) I got a fair amount of exercise in, though, walking back and forth to the water tap.

It was a fun event in spite of the sparse crowds. We (by which I mean mainly the other Vikings) made a lot of contacts. Invitations to other events and possible new group members came up. It was a good time.

In which I didn’t sell a single book, because we weren’t allowed to display any modern stuff.

However, another event was coming Sunday. Danish Day at the Danish-American Center in Minneapolis. Granted, I almost never sell any books at that event, but at least I’d be able to display them, and who knows?

As an added attraction, the temperature would be about the same as Saturday.

However, I was denied the joys of another tropical set-up and tear-down, when I went into my garage to start my car on Sunday morning, and the transmission wouldn’t function. Bummer. I unloaded my car and spent the day rehydrating and recovering from Saturday.

This morning I got AAA to tow my car to my regular transmission place (I have a regular transmission place because – as I have learned to my chagrin – PT Cruisers are prone to those kinds of problems.) If it’s the same thing it was the last time, it’ll be easily fixed. But they haven’t gotten back to me yet. Which leads me to worry.

On the high spiritual plane which I inhabit, we call this “opportunities to increase our faith.”