Fiction, Reviews

‘Those Who Disappeared,’ by Kevin Wignall

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Kevin Wignall is always an interesting novelist, even when I don’t entirely care for some of his plotting choices. His latest is Those Who Disappeared, which had challenging moments, but was a very satisfying reading experience overall.

Foster Treherne is a young artist with a world-wide reputation, very famous and very wealthy. English and American by heritage, he lives mostly in Berlin and keeps a low personal profile. He’s generally disconnected from humanity, except for his staff. His father disappeared before he was born, and his mother committed suicide while he was a baby. His grandparents saw to his physical needs and education, but kept him at arms’ length. His essential view of life is, “People leave.”

Then he gets the news that his father’s body has been found, frozen in a Swiss glacier. With the help of an embassy employee, an attractive woman named Daniela with whom he cautiously begins a relationship, he gets the opportunity to see his own father for the only time in his life – in mummified form. Suddenly he conceives an obsessive desire to learn about this man. He studies his personal journal, found wrapped in plastic with the body, and goes through his old photos and documents. He makes contact with his father’s once-close group of post-graduate student friends, and is puzzled by their reactions. They tell contradictory stories, and lie about one another. They all say the same thing about Foster’s dad – “He was fun to be with, but had a dangerous side.” Are they trying to protect Foster from some harsh truth? Or is one of them actually guilty of murder?

Those Who Disappeared is a splendid example of a story which contains no shootouts or fist fights, but keeps the tension high and the reader fascinated. What’s better (for this reader) is that it’s the story of a man re-integrating with life. I love that kind of story, as it’s an experience I expect I’ll only ever have vicariously.

Anyway, I highly recommend Those Who Disappeared. There’s one problematic plot element for Christians, but it’s not preachy or implausible.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Night Gate,’ by Peter May

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I had actually thought that Peter May had wrapped up his Enzo Macleod mystery series with the previous installment. But Enzo rides one more time (if a little gingerly) in The Night Gate, which is advertised as the series finale.

Enzo, a Scotsman resident in France, has slowed down since the last book. He’s 65 now, and constantly on guard against the Covid-19 virus. He’s retired as a forensic science teacher and consultant, but when a skeleton is uncovered in the roots of a fallen tree in a picturesque town in the French Pyrenees, and that skeleton is dressed in the remains of a German officer’s uniform, the skull containing a bullet hole, Enzo is asked to take a look. He travels to the town with Dominique, his wife, and notices crime tape across the door of the house next door. There has been a murder there recently – a prominent art critic died inside of a slashed throat – but the local police ask Enzo to give them the benefit of his expertise. Though the culprit seems to be obvious – a German art broker was seen fleeing the crime scene covered in blood.

Enzo, however, is not sure about the man’s guilt. As he looks into the history of the murder house, he discovers that a former resident was involved in an audacious scheme to protect no less an artwork than the Mona Lisa, during World War II. A series of flashbacks tell us the story of Georgette Pignal, a young woman tasked by General de Gaulle himself with substituting a perfect copy for the original.

The Night Gate provided an enjoyable ride, relating a harrowing World War II adventure, along with the present-day heroics of a hero somewhat diminished by age and quarantine. I was left unsatisfied at the end, though – the resolution of the mystery was kind of a downer, and the extra surprise at the end was ambivalent.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ll want to read this one to cap things off. If you haven’t, this isn’t the place to start.

Fiction, Reviews

Fear is the Mind-Killer

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[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 2: Dune opens just before a scene you’ve probably seen from a movie trailer. Paul Atreides, 15, stands before a revered, old woman for some kind of test that is rarely given to boys. He rehearses “the Litany against Fear” that his mother taught him from her background in the Bene Gesserit rite.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The test he endures is brutal but clean–no blood spilled, just scorching pain. Paul reveres the old woman less by the end because he begins to see she doesn’t have the answers she claims to have.

This introduction to Paul could have gone the direction many lesser stories have gone by having Paul become very proud of withstanding a severe test as well as his acute perception and begin blowing off all responsibility because, darn it, he’s the best. He may think he’s the best, but he hasn’t allowed himself to think it yet, because he is the son of Duke Leto. The family is moving to the sand-planet Arrakis to assume a role given to the duke by the emperor, and at least one other royal house opposes it. The Harkonnens have been ordered to vacate, so Leto Atreides could take control.

Plus, Arrakis is a difficult planet to live on. Everyone wants the spice harvested there, but the harsh environment and sandworms, some of which could swallow a harvester whole, roam the dunes. The worms may even create the spice (if that’s revealed later in the book or other books, I don’t know).

Paul could be a huge jerk in the first book (section) of Dune, but he isn’t. He’s a serious-minded, young man, mature beyond his years. He will be duke one day, if he and his family can survive the treat of this new planet.

A lot of characters are introduced in Dune‘s first book, and though Paul is a central focus, he isn’t the leading man yet. That would be his father. a man of many admirable qualities but perhaps not enough skill to navigate a galaxy of ruthless politicians. I think the story has told us that at this point, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say that a man who is overwhelmed in a shark-eat-shark world lacks governing skills. Maybe he lacks ruthlessness. Maybe survival means cruelty. Maybe surviving, in this case, isn’t the greatest good.

On the other hand, fighting fear and training others to fight it as well may be the greatest good. By fighting the mind-killer, no matter who survives, you may still win.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blood Promise,’ by Mark Pryor

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I was very much impressed with the Mark Pryor’s first Hugo Marston novel, The Bookseller. I liked the second one, The Crypt Thief, with certain reservations. Number three, The Blood Promise, lost me completely. I say it with regret.

In a rural house in France, an old woman is murdered by a burglar, who makes off with an antique sailor’s chest. Not long after, Hugo Marston, head of security at the US Embassy in Paris, is assigned to “babysit” a visiting US senator scheduled to negotiate a minor dispute with the French government at a palatial country chateau. Hugo isn’t enthusiastic about chaperoning Senator Charles Lake, an unvarnished character who may have been intended to suggest Donald Trump. But a minor crisis arises when the senator insists that someone has entered his room in the night, and insists that the invasion of privacy be investigated. Their noble French host, insulted, refuses more than the minimum cooperation, and the talks break down.

But to everyone’s surprise, one fingerprint found in the room turns out to match one left behind at the earlier murder scene. Soon Hugo, along with his CIA friend Tom, his policeman friend Garcia, and his journalist girlfriend Claudia, are on the hunt for a ruthless killer who will blow their lives apart.

I liked the characters in this series, and the writing wasn’t bad (except for Americanisms in the use of the word “like” that don’t really work well in a French setting). But there were also elements I liked less. One was certain suggestions of progressive political leanings – which up to now were not made explicit. This time out, in a plot choice that will shock readers, author Pryor removes one beloved character and replaces them with a new character who has an Agenda – one which a fair amount of word count is spent explaining. This is an Agenda I don’t really care to spend time with, and that means I’m dropping the series on grounds of a fun deficit.

But a second problem is non-ideological. I noticed it before, in The Crypt Thief – the villain’s motivations make no sense to me. The plot involves a blackmail threat over a secret that I can’t see as scandalous in the least, and I don’t think anyone would care much about it in the real world.

So I’m done with this series, which started out with a lot of promise.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

‘Rings of Love’

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The other day somebody on F*cebook shared a fine article on J. R. R. Tolkien from the archives (2002) of Touchstone Magazine. It’s about love and happens to have been written by Dale Nelson, a Tolkien scholar and a close personal friend of mine:

Tolkien told one of his sons about his young love for Edith in a letter, written after her death. “I met the Lúthien Tinúviel of my own personal ‘romance’ with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes, and beautiful voice” in 1908, when he was 16 and she was 19. Very soon after they married, he was captivated by his wife’s dancing, for him alone, when he was an army officer on leave from the Great War, in 1917, and they slipped away to “a woodland glade filled with hemlocks” in Yorkshire. And that moment was the origin of the myth of Beren and Lúthien, Tolkien wrote to another of their sons.

Read the whole thing here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘In Plain Sight,’ by Dan Willis

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I’m not a big fan of modern wizard books (you may have noticed I failed to succumb to the charm of Jim Butcher’s Dresden novels) generally, but someone suggested I check out Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby novels. I read the first, In Plain Sight, and found a lot to like.

Alex Lockerby is a private eye/rune writer in 1930s New York City, but in an alternate universe. In this universe, magic substitutes for science. Pretty much everything runs on electricity, and the electricity is provided by a small number of great sorcerers, who are the plutocrats of the day (Rockefeller is one of them). Rune writers like Alex are far more common, doing smaller-scale magic at various levels of expertise.

One day a beautiful young woman comes into Alex’s office to ask him to locate her brother, who has disappeared. He was a rune writer too, and she fears he might have gotten into magical trouble he couldn’t handle. Alex takes the job, and falls for the girl.

Meanwhile, a personal tragedy strikes, in the form of the mysterious deaths of a number of people in a church homeless mission, including the priest. That priest was the man who raised Alex, and the police (reluctantly) allow him to consult on the case. He lends his expertise to the hunt for a secret journal belonging to Leonardo Da Vinci, rumored to contain a few complex runes that would give their owner almost unlimited power – power for which certain foreign agents are hunting.

I liked In Plain Sight much more than I expected. It transposed a lot of good old hard-boiled tropes, and there was a pretty neat surprise at the end, involving a major character. The tension with Christian theology that tends to go with books about magic is softened here by the fact that Alex is close to a Catholic priest who has no objections. Apparently the rules are different in this universe. Here magic is like science, and spiritual beings don’t seem to come into it.

If you like urban fantasy and hard-boiled mysteries, In Plain Sight is a pretty fun way to spend your reading time. Recommended.

Music

Is St. Patrick’s Day Irish or Scottish? What’s the difference?

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The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air

W. B. Yeats, “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland”

We have storms in our region today. It’s been raining somewhat since Monday, gushing rain now. It will be flooding somewhere nearby. I’m thankful to have always lived on a hill.

I learned today that St. Patrick’s Day is not the unique in American holidays. We also have National Tartan’s Day on April 6. Maybe folks who attend Highland games knew that. I’ve only thought about attending those games, when I occasionally hear of them, so I didn’t know about Tartan’s Day.

I think most Americans couldn’t tell the difference between Irish and Scottish or Celtic and Gaelic cultural things unless clearly marked. As a trivial example, here’s my favorite Scottish reel, “The J.B. Reel,” arranged with a jig called “The Shepherdess.”

Note the stark contrast of this piece with the first of the Irish reels performed in this recording of Brendan P. Lynch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_feaIdTEA

That’s how you tell the difference, friends. Happy St. McPaddy’s Day.

Poetry, Writing

Snow and poetry

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Photo credit: Andrew Small @ andsmall. From Unsplash.

Remember that snow I said we’d probably still get, because you can’t get out of March in Minnesota without an encore or two? It came last night. A couple inches, and it’s already starting to melt. I guess some’s coming tomorrow too. But Spring has the big momentum now. Even if the snow keeps coming back, it’ll be in short, vicious snaps, like a rat dying in a trap.

Here’s something I don’t think I’ve written about before here. Poetic prose. I am, as I’ve often said, a poor poet, even when I bother. (I was fairly well on in years before I even started to figure out what poetry is.) But over the years I’ve picked up some ideas about adding poetic touches to my prose. Father Ailill in the Erling books, stage Irishman that he is, is particularly prone to poetic flights, which is one of the things that makes him fun to write. And with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, this might be a good winter’s day to discuss the subject.

A while back I was in a gathering where someone mentioned, cautiously, that they’d been writing poetry, and what did we think of it? And they read some of it. I think that person was hoping I’d say it was great, but I said nothing. Because it wasn’t very good. I wished I had the opportunity to talk to them about it one-on-one, but I didn’t get that.

Here’s what I wanted to say to them:

You think you’re writing poetry here, but what you’re actually doing is just writing prose, the way you’d write prose any time, and then breaking the lines up. Poetry is more than just the way you lay your words out on the page. It’s about using words, and loving words, and manipulating words, marshaling the power of words to say more than bald prose can.

When I think of good poetry, one line comes to mind – my favorite line of poetry in the world. I’m not generally much interested in Dylan Thomas, but his poem, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” amazes me. Just the first line (which is also the title), actually. I think it’s almost perfect.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
“Drives my green age…”

Look what Thomas does with that first line.

Eleven syllables. Of those syllables, each is single word, except for the last one.

Such a sequence constructs a picture in the listener’s mind:

Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-double.

Which translates, semi-visually, to:

Stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-FLOWER.

It’s a picture of a flower.

But then the poet takes that picture of a flower and manipulates it. The stem becomes a “fuse.” “Fuse” is obviously a loaded word. Slightly sinister. Suddenly, instead of a mental picture of a flower, the picture is of a fuse burning down toward a dynamite charge. And when the fuse gets to the end, the charge explodes, and that explosion is a flower.

Suddenly we see the flower in a whole new way. It’s not just a pretty (kind of effete) plant sitting in the ground, looking decorative. It’s a little explosion, driven by some kind of a “force.” The rest of the poem expands on that idea of a life force. This is not one of Wordsworth’s daffodils. This is a dangerous flower, a flower from a rough neighborhood.

That’s what poetry is. It exploits the sounds of the words, the rhythm of the words, the associations of the words, and even the way the words look on paper, to turn ideas into little explosions in your head. You think in a new way, and you see in a new way.

It’s like a workout for your brain. And your spirit. It makes the muscles stronger, capable of doing things you never knew they could do.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Crypt Thief,’ by Mark Pryor

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The second offering in Mark Pryor’s Hugo Marston series, about a US embassy security head in Paris, is The Crypt Thief. I liked it, but not as much as the first book.

On summer night in the famous Pére Lachaise cemetery, near the grave of Jim Morrison, a young couple is shot to death. One of them is an American man from a prominent family; the woman is a dancer who turns out to have connections to a suspected terrorist. It is also discovered that a grave has been robbed – part of the skeleton of a famous Paris dancer has been taken. Where others see a terrorist act, Hugo Marston, whose background is in criminal profiling, sees the grave desecration as the central point. He suspects – and fears – that this may be the beginning of a string of serial killings. Since he’s the hero, we know he’s going to be right.

Once again Hugo is joined by his CIA friend Tom (who is showing troubling signs of a serious drinking problem) and his girlfriend Claudia, a plucky reporter with (as is common in fictional females) no rational sense of danger whatever.

This story didn’t work for me as well as The Bookseller. I thought it fell into a lot of common thriller tropes. The serial killer was certainly an original type, but extreme; I had trouble believing in him. And I’m a little weary of stories where the hero is sure he has to rush into danger personally, because the police don’t understand the truth the way he does.

But it wasn’t bad. I’ll still continue reading the series. Cautions for very disturbing subject matter.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Discussing the History of Coffee

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Melvyn Bragg has a very pleasant conversation with professors Judith Hawley, Markman Ellis, and Jonathan Morris on the history of coffee. They discuss how early medicinal reports seem to be just marketing, and how coffeehouses formed around the drink and business needs of customers as well as the side benefit of coffee being non-alcoholic.