Fiction, Reviews

‘One Way,’ by Tom Barber

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Sam Archer, hero of One Way, is a New York City policeman, formerly a London policeman (it’s complicated). He’s on the counterterrorism squad, and in his last adventure (One Way is Book 5 in the series) he got injured badly enough to put him out of action for a while. It’s the last day before his much-anticipated return to work, and he’s relaxing on a park bench when he sees what he quickly identifies as a team of bodyguards moving a protected person. The protected person is a little girl, nine years old. Suddenly Sam spies a hit team attacking them, and he shouts a warning. Soon bullets are flying, one bodyguard (they’re federal marshals) is wounded, and Sam has no choice but to join the marshals in their escaping car. They end up taking cover in a 22-floor high rise building, whose ground floor is soon occupied by the attackers. The bad guys successfully cut off communications, and the little group of marshals, plus Sam and the protectee, are trying to find a safe hiding place – as the attackers begin hunting them down from room to room.

We’re operating generally on the Die Hard model here. Our intrepid hero, outgunned (joined here by a kick-butt female sidekick, for the sake of diversity), faces increasingly long odds, as their opponents turn out to be a lot better prepared than you’d expect – and to have surprising backup resources. Secrets are revealed, only to be topped by deeper, darker secrets. Betrayals are disclosed and further betrayals perpetrated. It all culminates in a rooftop showdown, with a bomb ticking in the basement.

For me, it was all a little much.

I’ve bellyached about the Cinematic Thriller Formula before. This formula dictates that the novel must work like a contemporary action movie – the drama has to ratchet up constantly (nothing wrong with that), and the limits of human physical endurance (as well as the laws of physics) can be generally ignored. Each narrow escape may be plausible in itself, but cumulatively they defy credulity. The strategy is to keep the audience so excited they don’t have time to engage their critical brains.

The problem with that is that novels are, by nature, a slower medium than movies. Most readers can, and do, pause for a break frequently. When we pause, some of us ponder – which conflicts with the author’s purpose.

Also, a movie usually doesn’t last much more than two hours. But a novel can take many hours to read. Being old and weak of heart, I dislike being kept in a state of fight or flight for ten hours straight. It wearies me, and I had a rough weekend.

For all that, I can’t deny that One Way did its job effectively. It was a little odd to read an American story written with English spelling and orthography – “kerb” for “curb,” for instance. But the author did a good job. His prose could use some pruning, but it worked.

Perfectly fine, if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

The Planets of the Apes Are Anti-War

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Over the past week, I watched the first three original Planet of the Apes movies. I didn’t know the stories. I knew only what anyone familiar with sci-fi over the years would know, a plot point even the sequel spoils in its own trailer. But the whole movie doesn’t turn on that revelation. It was just an interesting surprise to 1968 moviegoers–no doubt part of what made it a successful movie.

You’ve heard that the original Star Wars and Jaws movies were blockbusters that changed moviemaking ever since. You probably know parts of the score from those movies. They have a tone of adventure that feels like a movie. Planet of the Apes leans into the strange and alien. This trailer captures that tone with minimal spoilers. The score invokes the wild unknown of 1960s sci-fi. It isn’t the music of adventure but of survival.

The director, Franklin J. Schaffner, wants us to experience the space crew’s voyage and their crash landing in a sea. We see water breaking through ship’s seems as if in the crew cabin ourselves. The three-man crew drag themselves to shore, and the first real cynicism comes for Taylor (Charlton Heston) laughing loudly at his earnest crewmate planting a pocket-sized US flag next to the water. The crew treks through a canyon wilderness, afraid that, though the air is fine, there may be no drinkable water or living plant life.

The first 30 minutes follows this track. Will they survive or won’t they? This kind of story tension gets me scratching my head, because if you tell viewers upfront the apes rule the planet, how long will they tolerate the main characters scrambling along on their own? Maybe if we were learning about the crew as well-rounded men, it would be more interesting. But we only get the wilderness and three men looking for water.

On the other hand, Richard Schickel wrote in Life Magazine, May 10, 1968, it was the best American movie he’d seen that year–“faint praise,” he says, “considering the competition,” but still he and his four-year-old daughter loved it.

I had thought the first film was going to focus on racial tolerance or bigotry, but it’s really an anti-war movie. The ape society is governed by religious zealots who won’t tolerate evolutionary theories and stamp out any hints of civilization beyond their own. God made apes in his own image, they say. Humans are just mute wildlife. Most of the hostility is in apes treating humans as non-sentient animals, and the story is driven by the threat Taylor poses to their carefully managed social order. The overarching theme, which starts with questions from the crew after they abandon ship and resumes with chimpanzee Cornelius revealing his exploration of ancient human ruins, is the question of what happened to humanity. The authorities won’t tolerate open discussion of humans once having civilization or being anything more than they are today. For viewers, though, if humans were more on this planet, what happened to them?

That’s what the famous scene at the movie’s end hammers home. Taylor realizes he didn’t crash on another planet. He returned to Earth 2000 years later, long after mankind had destroyed civilization through endless warmongering and the A-bomb.

Planet of the Apes (1968) is good period sci-fi. There are things to complain about (like the fact the humans are described as being unable to speak but in fact they are completely mute —they never make a sound), but it’s a good story. I laughed at the scene of government leaders being confronted with facts and ideas they rejected.

Continue reading The Planets of the Apes Are Anti-War →
Music

Sunday Singing: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place

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“My Faith Has Found a Resting Place,” performed by Danielle Franklyn & Waneisha Denny

This month, our theme will be faith, which will gather in popular song this one from Li­die H. Ed­munds (1851-1920). Edmunds, a native Philadelphian, was home-bound for many years. In order to use her time well, she studied literature and wrote hymns.

“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 ESV).

1 My faith has found a resting place,
from guilt my soul is freed;
I trust the ever-living One,
his wounds for me shall plead.

Refrain:
I need no other argument,
I need no other plea,
it is enough that Jesus died,
and that he died for me.

2 Enough for me that Jesus saves,
this ends my fear and doubt;
a sinful soul, I come to him,
he’ll never cast me out. [Refrain]

3 My heart is leaning on the Word,
the written Word of God,
salvation by my Savior’s name,
salvation thro’ his blood. [Refrain]

4 My great Physician heals the sick,
the lost he came to save;
for me his precious blood he shed,
for me his life he gave. [Refrain]

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Writing

Two Hours with Ted Gioia

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Music and culture writer Ted Gioia talked on camera with David Perell of the podcast “How I Write” to talk about his life of reading and writing. I just watched it, and it’s marvelous.

Ted, who has been writing on Substack for three and a half years, shared the interview with a short excerpt about musicians getting inspiration from dreams. In the almost two-hour interview, he discusses becoming a well-read man over many years, reading books for content or style, chasing publishing trends, writing honestly for yourself first and then for readers, and how our worldview as well as social pressure presses us toward select kinds of inspiration.

It’s well worth your time. Many good thoughts were shared. You’ll note some that I didn’t, so feel free to comment on it here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Missing Man,’ by David Carter

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Sometimes, especially in English crime fiction, your run across what I’m inclined to call a “Police Cozy.” It’s a story about cops, but low on the action and violence. That kind of story suits me very well.

Author David Carter is producing a series about Chester (England) detective Walter Darriteau. He works in a sex-balanced headquarters (they’re always sex-balanced these days, at least in fiction), and cooperates well with his colleagues. His partner, Karen, is an attractive blonde, but they both have outside romantic relationships. The Missing Man (one of the least charismatic book titles I’ve ever come across) is a novella featuring the regular characters.

A middle-aged woman calls the police and informs them, matter-of-factly, that she wants to confess to a murder. Nearly 25 years ago, she says, she killed her philandering husband. Now she wants to come clean.

Walter and Karen go to her home to interview her, and she tells them she didn’t actually commit the murder herself. She hired a couple criminals to do the job. She doesn’t in fact have any evidence of a crime. The perpetrators are dead, and even the purported burial site is under a concrete overpass (called a “flyover” in England), so it would be difficult to dig up. But her husband disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since, so she’s confident he’s dead.

Walter’s and Karen’s bizarre job is to try to ferret out any evidence or witnesses that might still be around after a quarter of a century. In time all will be revealed – and I have to admit it was a surprise.

The writing in The Missing Man was good. I enjoyed the story. Based on this short sample, the series appears worth checking out.

Authors, Bookselling

Personal appearance alert: Nordic Midsummer Festival

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If you’re in the Twin Cities area, I’ll be present selling books, with the Vikings, at the Nordic Midsummer Fest at Buck Hill in Burnsville, on Saturday.

Information here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Odin,’ by David Archer and Blake Banner

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The voice on the other end was like dark chocolate that smoked and drank too much and didn’t give a d**n.

If you crossed Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin with Ian Fleming’s James Bond, you’d pretty much get Alex Mason, hero of Odin, the first volume in a series by David Archer and Blake Banner.

Alex Mason is an agent for “Odin,” an officially nonexistent espionage agency operating for the US government. Its head is known as the Chief, but he’s sometimes called “Nero,” an obvious hat-tip to Nero Wolfe, of whom he is a near clone. He summons Alex to his office as Odin begins, telling him that he’s concerned about an agent he’s had in place in Manila, who has suddenly disappeared. That agent was part of a small, strategically placed cell of assets working against the Chinese. And now it seems they’ve been discovered.

In fact, as Alex arrives, Chinese agents are already moving against the cell. Quickly one is murdered, two go on the run together, and another is captured. Alex needs to find the two fleeing assets and get them to safety. As he begins that task, he is joined by a friendly – and gorgeous – female Mossad agent.

In terms of writing craftsmanship, I find no fault with Odin. The characters were sharp and interesting, and the dramatic tension escalated steadily. The prose was often delicious, with lines like, “He turned and strutted over on crisp little feet.”

The plotting impressed me very much. A plot development that looked like implausible coincidence turned out to be perfectly plausible, by neat authorial jujitsu. An apparent contradiction resolved itself, paying off in heightened suspense for the reader.

I was less happy with a moment of justification of adultery, but I’ve overlooked worse moral sins in a novel.

Bottom line – Odin was a superior thriller, crafted with high professionalism. It was a good time with a book, well worth the purchase price.

Writing

Writer’s journal: Character lists and pronunciations

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King Olaf discovers a young man’s “treachery,” a scene I use in The Baldur Game: Illustration for Heimskringla by Christian Krogh.

First of all, I need to correct myself. I’m a little surprised nobody has rebuked me on the point already in comments. No doubt that’s because our readers are highly sensitive and polite people.

In a previous post, I called the list I’m working on right now, for my upcoming novel, The Baldur Game, an index of characters. It’s not an index. It’s just a list. Every index starts as a list, and the process reminded me of indexing. But to be an index, my list would have to specify pages on which the names are found, and doing that would be just making work for myself. Writing a deathless epic is plenty to do already, without such excess exertion.

The really hard part of the character list is the name pronunciations. I discussed that challenge earlier too. How many different ways are there to pronounce Saga Age names? You can use the pronunciations the top scholars use – the ones recreated on the basis of known linguistic laws concerning vowel shifts and the softening of consonants (there’s a name for that, but I can’t recall it. And it hardly seems worth the effort to look it up, even on the internet. Grimm’s Law enters into it, I know – and yes, it’s the same Grimms you’ve heard of, the ones who collected fairy tales). But nobody understands those scholarly pronunciations. I’m inclined to think, in my cattier moments, that the scholars themselves just use them to intimidate us.

Then you can use contemporary Icelandic pronunciation. But I’d have to master Icelandic pronunciation to do that, and it would sound strange to my readers, who are English speakers by and large.

And you can use contemporary Norwegian pronunciation. That’s more or less what I do, as the possessor of a middling facility with Norwegian. But you can only go so far with that too. I can do no more than suggest characteristic Scandinavian diphthongs that don’t exist in English. I fear my attempts won’t entirely please my Norwegian friends and family. My relatives in Rogaland, for instance, pronounce the name Einar something like “AY-nar,” but I make it “EYE-nar,” like Kirk Douglas does in the Vikings movie. Because I don’t want to challenge my American readers’ patience too much. Not when I’m expecting them to plow through my prose too.

The bottom line is that I’m unsatisfied with my pronunciations – and if I changed them I’m pretty sure I’d still be unsatisfied.

It looks like there’ll be a small delay in getting the book finally published. One collaborator, whose contribution can’t be omitted, is being delayed due to multiple obligations.

Still, I have a few things left to do. I need to make some more Photoshop additions to my map – locations mentioned in the book.

I could do another read-through, of course, but my instincts tell me no. I’ll give it one more reading before it’s published, but I think that should be the last step. There comes a point when you’re just rearranging the furniture in a manuscript, changing words and then changing them back. I suspect Frank Herbert was thinking as an author when he inserted an invented quotation in Dune that said (as I recall it): “Arakis teaches the maxim of the knife, cutting off that which is incomplete and saying, ‘Now it is complete because it ends here.’”

Any work of man can be “improved” indefinitely. At some point you’ve just got to let the baby be born already.

Fiction, Reviews

‘No Room for the Innocent,’ by Dan Wheatcroft

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The “Leveller” trilogy rounds itself off in a satisfying way in Dan Wheatcroft’s No Room for the Innocent.

This series, as you may recall, involves intertwining plots centered on two main characters – Inspector Thurstan Baddeley of the Liverpool police and a man known as Nicks, who is a top-level assassin dispatched by a high-level, secret government organization to kill the worst criminals the police can’t touch. The two men know each other, and share a grudging respect, though Nicks is always one step ahead of investigators.

But now there’s a problem. Nicks’ handler, Don, has been murdered. Because Don is his only contact in the organization, he’s suddenly out in the cold and vulnerable. When he learns that his controllers have been less than altruistic in their operational aims, he can think of only one person to go to for help – Inspector Baddeley.

The writing in these books is adequate, with occasional grammatical lapses. But the author’s knowledge of police work (he’s a former cop himself) makes the settings and procedures authentic, and I liked the characters a lot.

I enjoyed this series, and recommend it, with only minor cautions for grown-up themes and violence. Conservative opinions are occasionally hinted at.

Music, Religion

Memorial Day, Battle Hymn

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Today is Memorial Day. It was raining here today, so I couldn’t fly my flag. I’d better lose no (more) time in posting my virtual commemoration of the holiday. The video above was (oddly), compiled by a Canadian, using footage from some of our more patriotic movies and TV series, the kind they don’t do anymore.

The Memorial Day tradition goes back (according to Wikipedia, to a proclamation by John A. Logan, Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Civil War veterans’ organization), declaring May 30, 1868 to be a day for placing flags on the graves of fallen soldiers. Decoration Day, it was called. (That was what my grandmother used to call it. The official name was changed in 1971, some time after her death.) However, the Veterans’ Administration credits the idea to a woman named Mary Ann Williams.

The hymn tune, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is obscure in its origins. It seems to have risen in the camp meeting culture of the American south, and possibly echoes a Negro spiritual. The tune was picked up by the 2nd Infantry Battalion, Massachusetts Militia (the “Tiger Battalion”). They used the coincidence of one of their members being named John Brown to make up a song that teased him, when he was late to report for duty (apparently a frequent occurrence). They joked that this was excusable on the grounds that he was dead – all the papers said that John Brown (the abolitionist) had been hanged. Other units picked the song up without the teasing, as the conviction grew in the ranks that they were carrying on John Brown’s work.

Julia Ward Howe, the abolitionist, felt the lyrics were not worthy of the cause, and sat down to write a nobler version, which was first published in 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly. It is a stirring song, and I remember thrilling as I sang it as a member of the Waldorf College Choir in 1969.

A few years back I discussed the hymn with a scholarly friend whose field is American religion. He pointed out to me – and I should have been aware of this, but emotion dulls the sight – that the theology here is in fact rather bad. A political/moral cause is elevated to the level of the work of salvation. The fighting of a war is compared to Christ’s sacrifice for our sins.

Howe was in fact a progressive, my friend pointed out. She had left Calvinism to embrace Unitarianism. In the manner of progressive Christians, she downplayed the atonement for sin and focused on the creation of a more just society. She and her compatriots were the forerunners of today’s social justice warriors.

There has never been a nobler cause in human history than the abolition of slavery. It’s a supreme triumph of Christian civilization – one for which Christian civilization gets insufficient credit. But it wasn’t the same thing as Christ’s redemption.

Having conceded that, I still have to say I’ll always love the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It’s not a true Christian hymn, but it’s a very good earthly sentiment. I’ll put it up against secular sentiments from anybody’s culture you care to name.