Fiction, Reviews

‘Bring Her Home,’ by C. E. Nelson

Leave a comment

I’ve gotten some pleasure from C. E. Nelson’s Trask Brothers novels, of which Bring Her Home is the third. The author seems to be trying to fill the gap left by John Sandford when he moved his Lucas Davenport character to a wider canvas than Minnesota. And he succeeds to some extent, especially in terms of cop banter (I love cop banter). The Trask Brothers, our heroes, are identical twins, one a county sheriff in northern Minnesota, the other an officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension based in Minneapolis. This adds the element of sibling rivalry to their banter, and that’s fun.

In Bring Her Home, the brothers have taken a week of common vacation leave for fishing, their favorite pastime. But it’s been raining all the time, and finally boredom drives them to the local police department to inquire about a missing person’s poster they’ve seen. The local chief is happy to have them review his files on the disappearance of a young woman three years ago. They don’t come up with any new ideas, but when a similar-looking young woman disappears up north, they start to suspect the two abductions might be connected. Don, the BCA brother, assigns a female officer to go north to look into things. After a while she becomes suspicious of a security officer at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Having given the Trask Brothers three books to win my favor, I have to say the weaknesses in the stories outweigh the virtues for me. The author isn’t a particularly good wordsmith, and makes a fair number of word mistakes – using “lead” for “led” and “dived” for “dove,” for instance. Also, there’s too much dependence on sheer good luck and coincidence to get main characters out of deadly danger – characters have a right to some luck, but you shouldn’t go to that well too often. I was slightly annoyed that a lot of the actual investigation in this book was delegated to a brand-new character – an improbably attractive female BCA agent whose presence I can only attribute to creative affirmative action. Also, I was supposed to believe that some highly placed people were covering up actual serial killings to avoid bad publicity. Few people have less respect for high officials in Minnesota than I do, but that strained my credibility. Also, the violence in this book was of a particularly distressing kind.

Some amusing banter doesn’t make up for all these weaknesses. I think I’m done with the Trask Brothers. Regretfully.

Authors

25 Minutes on C.S. Lewis on BBC Four

Leave a comment

Here’s a segment on BBC Four’s Great Lives program on C.S. Lewis. Suzannah Lipscomb, a historian, says she has not heard Lewis’s voice prior to this, calling it more “plumby” than she had imagined. She talks with Matthew Parris and Malcolm Guite about his faith, books, appearance, his marriage, and how he very much valued his privacy. (via Twitter)

Music, Religion

Sissel sings ‘Amazing Grace’

1 Comment

The tale of my day is short and sweet. Quick translation job, under a deadline. Dedicated labor. Then a revision. Also, in the vacant spots, I did the laundry.

Here’s Sissel with something approaching the best arrangement of “Amazing Grace” ever recorded. I think it’s slightly different from a version, quite similar, which she recorded at a later date (arranged by Andre Crouch). Unless I’m mistaken.

Have a good weekend.

Uncategorized

‘Atlantic Crossing,’ translator’s reaction

1 Comment

Although I’d already seen the first two episodes of “Atlantic Crossing,” I wasn’t about to miss the big premiere on PBS Sunday night. I found a friend who was willing to have me over to watch with his girlfriend on his big TV (I even got a free meal out of it).

As I told you before, it was as good as I remembered. Well acted (I’m highly impressed with Kyle Maclachlan’s performance as FDR. He really nails the character), nail-bitingly dramatic, and beautiful to watch. Just a class production all the way.

I know this script intimately. Not as a writer would – as I keep telling people, I had zero creative input – but as someone who helped translate through multiple revisions. I know where certain minor cuts were made to tighten things up. I remember how I imagined the scenes when I worked on them, and in every case they’re more spacious on film (or on tape, or however it’s done nowadays). And I had the opportunity to lecture my fellow viewers about Norwegian history, and the unspoken dynamics behind the historical events.

Based on the reactions I’ve seen on Facebook, American readers liked the show very much indeed. I will say nothing about historical authenticity here, or anywhere. That’s not for me to discuss. I’ll only say that this is a miniseries, and that dramatic form involves certain iron demands. You’ve got to have a full dramatic arc for each of the eight episodes, and that involves massaging actual events to some extent. I think “Atlantic Crossing” ought to be evaluated as a work of art. And on that level it succeeds brilliantly. There ought to be awards.

If you missed Episode One, you should be able to stream it here.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

Leave a comment

{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mind Games, by Dan Willis

1 Comment

Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby series of urban fantasy/mysteries grows more intriguing as one reads on. The fourth installment is Mind Games, in which many puzzles are solved and puzzlier ones appear.

Alex operates as a runewright/private eye in a 1930s New York where magic is the main technology. In Mind Games, a rich couple ask him to find their daughter, who has gone missing. Alex uses a finding rune to locate her in a nightclub, but the owner says she’s with him and they’re going to be married. The girl agrees that’s true, so Alex leaves them alone. But the next day she calls the police for rescue.

There’s also a young man who asks Alex to prove his wife didn’t murder her lover. In fact, he says, his wife didn’t even know the man she was arrested for shooting to death. Alex assumes he’s just in denial, but in fact there’s no evidence she even knew the guy. So why would she kill him?

Meanwhile, a number of the lower-level runewrights who operate from street carts have started working for a company that’s mass-producing runes in a way Alex had always assumed impossible. And homeless people are disappearing altogether.

And then there’s the little problem that Alex gave up the majority of his life force while saving the city, a few adventures back. His energy clock is running down, and his friend and mentor Iggy is working feverishly to create a life-extension rune for him.

As Alex Lockerby’s world develops over the course of the books, it grows increasingly interesting. I especially like the chemistry between Alex and Sorsha Kincaid, New York’s foremost sorceress. She’s beautiful, rich, highly dangerous, and a denizen of the highest society, while Alex is a lowly P.I. But there are sparks between them, and she’s learning to respect him. You can’t help wondering what comes next.

The prose is pretty ordinary, but the storytelling and world-building are excellent. And the characters aren’t bad. I’m enjoying the ongoing series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Clean Kill,’ by C. E. Nelson

Leave a comment

The second of the Trask Brothers murder mysteries, set in Minnesota, is Clean Kill. The first book centered more on David Trask, sheriff of Lake County in northern MN. This time we spend a bit more time with his twin brother Don, a big shot with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

A band on tour borrows a tour bus, only to notice a foul smell coming from one of the luggage compartments. Inside they find a ripe corpse, which has – oddly – been cleaned with bleach, and had its finger- and toenails removed. Soon similar bodies, all of drug addicts, start showing up around Two Harbors, where David lives, and so the cop brothers will have to join forces. Meanwhile, Don is growing curious about a prominent, highly connected man who seems to be connected to all this, and his bosses are telling him to back off. Which only makes him more suspicious.

Since John Sandford has taken Lucas Davenport national, there seems to be an opening for a new fictional Minnesota super-cop. Or cops. I’m not sure the Trask brothers quite fill that vacancy yet, but they’re not bad. My main complaints were that the author seemed ignorant of Chinese buffets (he seems to think you pay after eating), and the addition of a new homosexual character, one assumes in order to fill some quota. But the character isn’t all that annoying, and isn’t on stage too much, so I’ll put up with it for now.

Uncategorized

‘Atlantic Crossing’ 2nd chance

Leave a comment

If, in spite of all my exhortations and horn blowing, you somehow missed the premiere of the miniseries ‘Atlantic Crossing’ (which I helped translate; I probably haven’t mentioned that) Sunday evening, you can stream the episode here.

It’s awesome. And I’m only partly responsible.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Chain,’ by Dan Willis

Leave a comment

In an alternate-universe New York City, where they mostly have magic instead of science, Alex Lockerby is a runewright/private detective. In an earlier adventure, Alex saved the city by transporting the floating castle of Sorsha Kincaid, one its foremost sorceresses, into the Atlantic. This succeeded, but left him with snow-white hair and only a few months left to live. Thanks to a restorative potion he takes several times a day, he’s able to still function as a runewright, but he’s well aware of time running out.

In The Long Chain, Number 3 in the series, a Nobel-prize winning chemist disappears, and his daughter hires Alex to find him. He does, but the old man has been injured and has lost his memory. Meanwhile a number of prominent alchemists have disappeared, and Alex is concerned for the safety of one of those remaining, the mother of his new girlfriend. However, Sorsha the Sorceress wants Alex to use his “finding rune” to identify the source of a mysterious, unnatural fog that has blanketed the city for weeks and seems to be growing worse day by day.

As you’ve probably noted, the plot of The Long Chain is a complicated one, but I was impressed with the way author Dan Willis tied it all together. And one of the mysteries ended in a resolution that was at once surprising and poignant.

The writing could be better, but I’m enjoying the storytelling in this Arcane series.

Music, Religion

‘Near the Cross’

1 Comment

Today is Good Friday. One of my favorite songs about the Cross of Christ is “Near the Cross,” lyrics by Fanny Crosby. My old musical group used to sing this in harmony. I looked for a worthy arrangement to post, and this was the one I found that pleased me best. Done by three sisters of whom I know nothing at all. They’re not as good as my buddies and I were, but it will do.