Fiction, Reviews

‘One Little Lie,’ by Christopher Greyson

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It’s always awkward reviewing a book in a genre (or sub-genre) you’re not very familiar with. If you criticize something, you don’t know whether it’s a routine feature of the form or not. If someone were to criticize my Erling books because they include magic, for instance, they’d be kind of missing the point.

Christopher Greyson is the author of the Jack Stratton novels, which I like very much, and he was kind enough to provide a free review copy of One Little Lie, which is a departure for him. It’s a women’s thriller.

Now writing women’s thrillers is a shrewd business move. I haven’t seen the statistics, but judging from the titles I see, women’s thrillers are a growth market. Women, after all, are by far the largest reading demographic. And (here I judge by the scripts I see as a translator) women have an insatiable thirst for stories with strong female lead characters, who overcome danger on their own. No rescue by knights in shining armor allowed. A hunky male love interest is acceptable – even desirable – but he has to be taken out of play in some way so the woman can discover her own strength and triumph independently.

That’s the kind of story One Little Lie is.

Kate Gardner has been a doormat all her life. She gave up her career aspirations when she married Scott Gardner, scion of a wealthy family in a small town. Then he dumped her for his high school sweetheart, manipulating her into accepting minimal child support. She is working as a receptionist, a job she hates, and trying to keep up with caring for her two young children. But lately she’s been troubled by depression and memory problems, and the medications she’s been prescribed haven’t been helping. And now Scott wants full custody of the kids.

As a side gig, she got an assignment from a friend to write a review on a new, sophisticated flying drone that can be controlled from her mobile phone. One night at her son’s football game, she tries the drone out, but then gets distracted. When the battery runs down, the drone homes in on her and lands on her head. When people come to help her, they find the drone, with footage on it showing a man stalking her. When the police come, Kate is embarrassed to admit that she was controlling the drone herself. Everyone assumes it belongs to the stalker. Later, Kate’s best friend and her ex-husband both tell her not to admit the omission to the police. If they catch you in “one little lie,” they won’t believe you. This is hard for Kate, a basically honest person, especially because she’s attracted to Ryan, one of the detectives, who seems to return her interest.

From that point, Kate’s life descends into chaos.  She loses her job, her best friend disappears, a slut-shaming campaign is launched against her, and she’s physically attacked in her home. All the while, memory lapses have her wondering if she’s losing her mind. Her wealthy mother-in-law, who claims to be on her side, gives her an ultimatum – she has to learn to stand up for herself. But if she fails, she’ll lose everything.

One Little Lie was an engaging read. I did have problems with some elements in the story, but I’m not in a position to know if these are standard tropes or weaknesses in this particular plot. A book of this kind calls necessarily for a final crisis where the woman is forced to discover her strength all on her own. But it seemed to me the resolution here was kind of contrived, depending too much on sheer coincidence.

Aside from that, it was an enjoyable read. Recommended, especially for female readers. Subtle Christian messages.

Religion, Uncategorized

In praise of virtue I do not possess

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Photo credit: Jeff Ochoa@jeffochoa, Unsplash

No book to review tonight. So, you’re stuck with my deep thoughts. “I got a million of ‘em,” as Jimmy Durante (or somebody) used to say.

Back on Memorial Day I was talking about how young men are (usually) risk-takers. I got to wondering, “What’s the survival value of youthful risk-taking?” Its value would seem to be the opposite of survival.

(I don’t want to get into the Creation vs. Evolution thing here. I think survival value is a real thing, created by God. It’s just the way He designed things to work.)

One would assume that Nature (whether intelligently designed or not) would want young people to stay safe until they grew up. So they’d go on to produce further offspring.

But in fact, Nature drives young men (typically) to go out and try to kill themselves. Drag-racing. Sky diving. Rock climbing. Joining gangs or (sometimes more responsibly) armies. Experimenting with drugs. Asking cheerleaders out on dates.

(I, of course, never did any of these things myself. But there were consequences to playing it safe.)

The point, I think, is that Nature is wise, and under God’s governance. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that God is a storyteller. His book of Nature is not an equation or formula. It’s partly about science, but it’s also about love and hate and ideals and passions. And one of the things storytelling tells us is that safety is not first. “Who dares wins.” “Faint heart ne’er won fair lady.” “Do not take counsel of your fears.”

Both in the spiritual and the physical worlds, too much caution is fatal, at least in the aggregate. Cowardice would appear to have survival value, but it doesn’t. Cowardly communities do not thrive. Courage kills off some of its acolytes, but those who survive end up running things and making progress.

I think churches often work too hard to produce guys like me. The Kingdom is for risk-takers – “Men of violence take it by force.” (Matthew 11:12) In a feminizing world, we need to provide a place where risks can still be taken, wounds bound up, and locker room speeches delivered. To young men with skinned knees and black eyes.

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture