It is my custom, every May 17, to make some kind of mention of Norway’s Constitution Day, celebrated each year on this date. I’ve told the story of the holiday many times – this year I’ll restrict myself to saying that Norway celebrates its Constitution Day as its major national holiday because of a historical anomaly – we had a constitution for almost a century before we got independence. So Constitution Day became the traditional patriotic holiday.
The video above is rather nice – lots of natural beauty, in which Norway is excessively rich. If you’d like a translation of the lyrics, you can find it here.
The Syttende Mai present I received today was a good writing session. I actually gave myself the shivers reading the current draft of The Baldur Game. I suppose that’s insufferable, like comedians who laugh at their own jokes. But writing at my level offers few tangible rewards. And finding the same exhilaration in your own writing that you get from your favorite authors’ is as delicious as it is rare.
To make things even better, I had a thought today – not as common an occurrence as you might imagine. (G. B. Shaw once said that he’d made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a month.) I can’t remember what provoked the thought (perhaps it was the creative thrill I described above, but I’m not sure). But it suddenly appeared, fully formed in my head, and even after several hours I can find no fault with it. It goes like this:
No work of art is ever fully original, nor should it be. Art is a multimedia matrix of interactive themes and influences — all hyperlinked, in a sense. Taken all together, great art participates in an infinitely greater tapestry.
Detective Comrade (seriously, that’s his name!) Flynt is part of the police force in a small, fictional California city. He is known to the other cops as “the leprechaun,” because he’s short, ugly, and his red hair is always unkempt. He was traumatized in a bad shooting some years ago, and his old partner covered for him ever since.
But his partner is dead now, and as Micheal Maxwell’s Dead Beat begins, Flynt is partnered with Lieutenant Noah Steele (Flynt and Steele, get it?). Steele is an up-and-comer, and their commander has tasked him, among other things, with finding a reason to fire Flynt, whom he considers (not without cause) dead weight.
But then they’re called to investigate the murder of a teenage drummer from a punk rock band, found stabbed to death with his drumsticks in a storage locker. As they proceed, Steele gradually discovers that, in spite of his partner’s eccentric and even repulsive personal habits, he has genuine gifts for investigation. And they start to form a bond.
When I find an ineptly written book these days, my inclination is to drop it quietly without ragging on the author. But author Micheal Maxwell describes himself as an “Amazon bestselling writer,” and that annoys me in a petty way. The fact that this kind of writing can generate bestsellers is painful to contemplate for someone who’s worked hard to improve his skills.
What was wrong with Dead Beat? Let me list some of the problems:
The prose was awkward – a representative line runs, “She was both maternal and attention-starved at the same time.” Or, “A mad array of pushing and shoving…”
In describing life in a Catholic orphanage, the author indulges in extreme stereotyping: All the nuns are cruel and abusive. Even as a Protestant and a well-known misogynist, I find that implausible. Women, in my experience, tend to be pretty sympathetic people – I find it hard to believe that, in any group of women, every single one could be a sadist.
In general, the writing here is amateurish. The author describes his characters to us (at excessive length), rather than revealing their personalities through their actions – and their actions, in fact, seem inconsistent and pretty much random.
I found an odd continuity problem in one particular scene, where the characters are described getting ready to sit down in a room, and then suddenly they are back in the hallway, walking toward the room.
Police procedures (I won’t describe them in detail) seemed implausible and unprofessional.
And finally, the big, brilliant deduction that impresses everybody at the climax turns out to involve a very obvious technical matter that I’m certain any crime scene technician would recognize in a minute.
In short, Dead Beat was a book that any pulp publisher back in my day would have shot back to the author before he’d finished reading the first page. I do not recommend it.
The Conversion of Saint Paul – painting by Spinello Aretino (Spinello di Luca Spinelli) (MET, 1975.1.11)
It is, I think, a function of my essential pessimism that I worry too much about celebrity conversions. Celebrity conversions, I’m sure, ought to be treated like any other conversions. Good news. Pray for them. But do not impute to them too much significance. In the parable of the sower, for instance (Matthew 13), only one seed out of four survives to bear fruit. And that, in my experience, is a pretty fair (possibly generous) rule of thumb.
The latest celebrity conversion I’ve been hearing about is the English actor, comedian, and media personality Russell Brand. I knew nothing about him before this news, aside from hearing his name and seeing his face online. He seems, according to Wikipedia, to have had a troubled life (imagine that – a comedian with a troubled life!), and has experienced drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and dabbling in various religions. But now he’s been baptized, and he claims to truly believe.
I’m all for him. Less promising converts have proved out to be great blessings. John Newton, for instance, was a foul slaver, insufferable even to other foul slavers. But God took hold of him, and he ended as a minister and a powerful abolitionist. He left us with the hymn, “Amazing Grace.”
I’ve reminisced about the 1970s before, the heady times we called the Jesus Movement. They made a movie about the Jesus Movement not long ago, starring Kelsey Grammar. I couldn’t get excited about it, though, because my memories of that time suffer in retrospect. Of all the people I prayed and evangelized with in those days, only one or two (out of my own circle) have persevered in anything that looks to me like the same faith.
As a cultural phenomenon, the Jesus Movement seems to me almost a complete bust. No doubt it suffered from the biblical illiteracy and theological ignorance of a bunch of young people gushing about their “experience.” In the long run, my perception is that the Jesus Movement simply got swallowed up in the wave of subjectivity that is still washing the pilings out from under our civilization.
In my mind, the Jesus Movement was too cool, too popular for a season. Luke 17:20 says that the Kingdom of God does not come in ways that can be observed. Which means (as I see it) that it doesn’t come in any way that we see coming. Jesus Himself didn’t come as expected. The stone that the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone (Psalm 118:22). God loves to blindside us.
I’ve seen lots of celebrity (and other) conversions in my time. The most promising often fell short. The least promising sometimes amazed us. Russell Brand could go either way. It’s not up to me, and it’s not my place to judge.
The most remarkable celebrity conversion I’ve observed was the one I expected the least from. I remember reading about Charles Colson’s conversion back in 1973, while I was in college. I think I read about it in Time Magazine. Congressman Albert Quie, who came from my home area and to whom I have family connections, helped lead him to Christ. Colson said reading C. S. Lewis had influenced him greatly.
“Oh great,” I said at the time. “That’s just who we need on our team. Colson.”
Chuck Colson was one of the most hated men in America in those days. Beyond the general contempt being rained on President Nixon, there was special derision for Colson, “Nixon’s hatchet man,” the guy who’d said he’d run over his grandmother for political advantage. I remember a college teacher bringing it up in a class, and I cringed on behalf of all Lewis fans.
But what do you know? Colson rang true. He served his sentence. He devoted himself thereafter to self-sacrificial ministry. He always spoke honestly, and he cared for the lost and the least.
There were plenty of people who never stopped hating him, of course, and he acquired new enemies as he went on. But he was a blessing, and he walked the walk.
In other words, let’s pray for Brand and wait and see.
Detective Chief Inspector Thurstan Baddeley (hero of The Box, which I reviewed a while back, and which takes place later in his career) has just taken over the Major Crimes unit on the Liverpool police force, as The Road to Eden Is Overgrown begins. A recent widower, he gets on well with his colleagues, and is excellent at his job.
Meanwhile, there’s a killer out there. His name is Nickson (“Nicks”). He’s smart, professional, and efficient (and, like Baddeley, a recent widower). He only hits selected targets – the worst of the worst, depraved criminals who, for one reason or another, the police can’t touch. Serial murderers, sadists, child abusers, human traffickers. He gets his assignments from a shadowy organization with the influence to cover up his killings and facilitate movements and false identities.
DCI Baddeley’s job is to find and arrest Nicks. But he isn’t terribly broken up about the death toll among psychopaths.
Nicks always seems to be one step ahead of the police. But he’s never come up against a cop like Baddeley before. He may have met his match.
I am still at a loss to understand my fascination with Daniel Wheatcroft’s novels. His prose is nothing special, occasional shoddy (we’re told a character “reversed back” in his car, and he has trouble conjugating the verb “sat”). The Road to Eden Is Overgrown seemed to me less complex than the other Wheatcroft novels I’ve read, which I appreciated, though I still had some trouble keeping plot threads straight (not unusual for me). I think I like the characterizations best. The characters drew me in.
This book is the first in a trilogy called “Leveller.” I’m going to read more.
Oh yes, there’s a mention of the Narnia books, almost always a good sign.
I don’t preach very often, but I was invited to do so yesterday, at Faith Free Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. The sermon has been posted on YouTube, and can be viewed above. I fumbled the service itself a bit (the Prayer of the Day, which I couldn’t find, was actually in my suit coat pocket, mistakenly put away with other papers I thought I didn’t need. That’s how my efforts at efficiency generally work out.) But the sermon itself, I believe, went okay.
This is a sermon I’d delivered before, in a slightly different version, at the Free Lutheran Bible College chapel. I think it’s not entirely contemptible.
Today’s hymn is by German lawyer and hymnist Johann Jakob Schütz (1640-1690). The recording above has only two verses, and the second isn’t copied below. Perhaps it’s another translation.
“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end” (Lamentations 3:22 ESV).
1 Sing praise to God who reigns above, The God of all creation, The God of pow’r, the God of love, The God of our salvation; With healing balm my soul He fills And ev’ry pain and sorrow stills: To God all praise and glory!
2 The angel hosts Thy praises sing Around Thy throne in heaven. On earth and sea, O mighty King, All praise to Thee is given. Let all who ‘neath Thy shadow dwell In hymns of praise Thy wisdom tell: To God all praise and glory!
3 What God hath wrought to show His might, He evermore sustaineth. His eye is o’er us day and night, His mercy never waneth. Thro’out His kingdom’s wide domain His works are right, His judgments plain: To God all praise and glory!
4 I cried to God in my distress, His mercy heard me calling; My Savior saw my helplessness And kept my feet from falling; For this, Lord, praise and thanks to Thee! Praise God most high, praise God with me! To God all praise and glory!
5 Ye, who confess the Savior’s name, To God give praise and glory! Ye who the Father’s might proclaim, To God give praise and glory! Let idols under foot be trod! The Lord is God! The Lord is God! To God all praise and glory!
6 Thus, all my gladsome way along, I’ll sing aloud Thy praises, That men may hear the grateful song My voice unwearied raises; Be joyful in the Lord, my heart, Both soul and body, bear your part; To God all praise and glory!
For Bond, the casinos at Beaulieu and Le Touquet were less ostentatious and more welcoming. He was comfortable there. At Monte Carlo, he always felt as if he were auditioning for a part in a play he would never actually want to see.
I recently reviewed a book by Anthony Horowitz, an author I’d never heard of. Turned out that just showed my ignorance. Horowitz is quite a big noise in the world. He created Midsomer Murders, and has written bestselling Sherlock Holmes novels in addition to series of his own. He’s also done authorized James Bond books. I got a deal on Forever and a Day, a Bond prequel, and purchased it out of curiosity.
Full disclosure – I’m not a great James Bond fan. The movies have occasionally been amusing, if you didn’t think about them too much. I’ve read two or three of the novels, and I can take them or leave them. I find the literary James Bond hard to care about.
I have to say, though, that I did care about Anthony Horowitz’ Bond.
The book is written in period – it’s shortly after World War II. James Bond is a veteran spy, now an assassin for the British government. We observe him in Stockholm, cleaning up some leftover trash from the war – killing a Norwegian resistance traitor who thought he’d gotten away with it.
Back in London, he’s informed he’s been selected for the coveted “00” designation, the license to kill. Agent 007 has been murdered in Marseilles. Bond is to go and find out who’s responsible, and to complete his mission – looking into the activities of a Sicilian gangster who controls the drug traffic in the south of France. He is permitted to take over the 007 designation.
All the elements are present here for a classic Bond adventure – a colorful supervillain (actually, two), a mysterious, beautiful woman who may or may not be friendly, a casino interlude, fights and torture scenes.
But there was some quality in Forever and a Day that I never found in Ian Fleming’s books. Horowitz’ Bond is recognizably the same man, but he’s somehow more human. I could relate to him (to the extent that I can ever relate to somebody brave and handsome).
I must confess I saw the big twist at the end of the book a mile off. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the ride very much. I need to check to see if there are any more of these books in the public library.
Another post in between reviews. I searched for “Icelandic Sagas” on YouTube and came up with this video by Dr. Matthew Roby of the University of Iceland. I’ve posted one of his other videos, about Egil’s Saga, here before. What I like about these videos is that he describes the action on the actual historical sites.
This one is about Njal’s Saga, which may be the greatest of the genre. It certainly deserves the attention it’s gotten.
I’m bemused by the Icelandic pronunciations. I was never aware before that Icelandic words ending in “L” get a “K” sound added. That’s just the sort of thing you’d expect from the Icelanders, who do their best – it seems to me – to make their language as unlearnable as possible.
This situation creates a problem for people like me, who produce what is (laughingly, in my case) known as “popular” literature. I’ve maintained the custom of including a character list in my Erling novels. In that list, I include my suggested pronunciations. These pronunciations, you may have noted, bear no resemblance to how Dr. Roby pronounces them.
It’s essentially an insoluble problem from my point of view. If I went to the trouble of learning how to pronounce Old Norse as Dr. Roby does (something I’m not inclined to do in my limited time), I’d be offering pronunciations that a) nobody would bother with, b) listeners would not understand, and c) are not even precisely what the Vikings used, as scholars admit the language has changed somewhat in the last thousand years.
So I give my suggested pronunciations, based (more or less) on contemporary Norwegian speech. This is mostly the way English-speaking scholars pronounce them in lectures, and they’re more or less comprehensible to other English speakers.
It’s a makeshift.
So much of fiction is a makeshift.
So much of life is a makeshift too, if it comes to that.
“Poor devil!” he said, commiseratingly, after he had listened to my misfortunes. “What are you up to now?”
“Looking for lodgings,” I answered. “Trying to solve the problem as to whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price.”
“That’s a strange thing,” remarked my companion; “you are the second man to-day that has used that expression to me.”
“And who was the first?” I asked.
“A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital….”
Back in 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle was a struggling physician in the London suburb of Southsea (I’ve always understood that he was an ophthalmologist, but his Wikipedia bio says he didn’t turn to eye medicine until a few years later). Lacking patients, he devoted some of his abundant leisure time to writing, with some success. He sold a detective story called “A Study in Scarlet” to Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a publication remembered today almost solely for that story. It was a one-off; Doyle took the modest fee and went on to other things.
But the story came to the attention of the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine in the US, and he commissioned a sequel. This would be “The Sign of the Four.” Doyle’s fictional detective, based to a large degree on the analytical methods of his medical teacher Dr. Joseph Bell, was off like a galloping horse – one that would eventually (in Doyle’s view) run away with its owner.
Having, as I mentioned before, started re-watching the excellent BBC Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett, I decided it would be pleasant to re-read the stories – something I haven’t done, I think, since the 1970s. I was right. I enjoyed “A Study in Scarlet,” which I read in this inexpensive Kindle collection (they’re all out of copyright now) immensely.
If you’re not familiar with the story (it’s never been properly dramatized, for reasons I can understand), it’s narrated by Dr. John H. Watson, an army surgeon recently returned from Afghanistan, where he was wounded in action. He’s living on his medical pension while recovering, and starts looking for a roommate. (See the extract above.) He soon finds himself living at 221B Baker Street with the eccentric Sherlock Holmes, whose profession is a mystery to him for a while. Finally, Holmes reveals that his frequent visitors, Lestrade and Gregson, are Scotland Yard detectives. He himself is the world’s first “Consulting Detective.” When the policemen ask Holmes to come view a body found in an empty suburban house, Holmes asks Watson to come along.
I’ll leave it at that. The story is to get hold of, and easy to read. Doyle’s prose is certainly Victorian, but not stuffily so. His characters are vivid; his dialogue is sharp, even after all these years.
I’ve always rated “A Study in Scarlet” as one of the weaker stories, mainly because of the “back story” chapters, where the murderer – arrested (he uses the delightful Americanism “snackled” for it) after being lured in by Holmes, explains how and why he came to commit the terrible murders he is confessing. The story takes us back to the American Wild West and the Mormon state of Utah. This back story works better than I remember, though (although I have no time for Mormon theology) I still think the Mormons are portrayed pretty harshly.
But taken all together, I found “A Study in Scarlet” more entertaining than I expected. And I have even better stories to look forward to, as I move into Doyle’s stronger work.
One caveat about this edition – it appears that, in scanning, the OCR software incorporated the page numbers into the text. So you’ve got to ignore those when they show up.
Southeast across Hvalfjörður toward the mountains north of Þingvellir (left) and Esja (right), November 21 09:00 Iceland, November 2007 Photo by me user debivort (or friend, with permission given to upload and license freely). CC BY-SA 3.0.
Back to the sagas, from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Today’s report is on “The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm.” This is one I’d never heard of – perhaps because it’s so perfectly typical of the form that it doesn’t stand out a lot. This is a saga of which we only have late copies, and it certainly shows the effects of generations of artistic embroidery.
Hord Grimkelsson is a young man of good family, living in the neighborhood of present-day Reykjavik. We’re told that he was a late bloomer in terms of his development, but eventually he grew into the kind of tall, strong, handsome figure a saga demands. He develops a close relationship with his foster-brother, who is his constant companion to the end. And he has a sister with a strange background – rejected by her father, forced to live with beggars for a while, then finally returned to her own family with a chip on her shoulder. She will impact the story eventually, in a bloody way.
Eventually, Hord joins a merchant expedition. One interesting element of the story is an encounter Hord’s friend Geir has in Bergen, Norway (which did not actually exist as a town, I’m pretty sure, at that time). He runs into one of King Harald Greycloak’s men, who tries to steal his vararfeldir cloak (vararfeldir was a woolen cloth with short threads woven through the fabric, to produce a fleecy appearance). Defending himself, Geir kills the king’s man, which forces the whole crew of Icelanders to flee to Gotland, where Hord marries the jarl’s daughter. (This sounds like a romantic invention, but may actually have been true, as the wife returns to Iceland with him and bears his sons.)
What’s interesting about this cloak incident is that it seems to be inspired by a famous episode in Heimskringla, the kings’ sagas – a much more genial anecdote explaining King Harald’s nickname. In that story, the king himself chats with an Icelandic merchant, who complains that no one is buying his wool cloaks. The king then asks him to give him one of them. He wears it, and of course it becomes the height of fashion. The merchant is then able to sell off his whole stock at a good profit.
In any case, Hord and his companions finally return to Iceland, where he proceeds to live prosperously for some years, until he gets involved in a feud. His enemies use witchcraft to ruin his luck, and he and his household end up holding out on an island in the Hvalfjord, until their final violent end.
Some sagas, such as Egil’s and Grettir’s, seem to be written by authors with enough honesty, or understanding of human nature, to admit that their heroes are partly responsible for their own tragedies. But more commonly, the hero is portrayed as pretty much blameless, victim to either fate or witchcraft, the only things that could overcome so outstanding a man. That’s how I read “The Saga of Hord.” The unvarnished record looks pretty ugly – to survive on a desolate island, Hord and his people steal valuable supplies and foodstuffs from the people in the area – and this is in a marginal economy. Hunting Hord down was a matter of survival for his victims.
Sagas are commonly loaded with characters, many of whom come complete with genealogies. This makes it hard for English readers to keep track of the players. I found this one heavier loaded than most in that way. Hord fills out most of the conventional saga tropes – he digs for treasure in a grave mound and overcomes the revenant there, who curses the sword Hord takes from him. He visits foreign courts where the lords entreat him to stay with them because of his noble qualities. And all his failures are blamed on bad friends or supernatural forces.
In fact, I’d say “The Saga of Hord” probably qualifies as a good representative saga. It’s not the cream of the literary form, but it checks most of the boxes.
