Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chill,’ by Scott Carson

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The day was dull and gray but the leaves were a brilliant assortment of orange, yellow, and red. A long, lovely summer with its throat cut.

Long ago, the town of Galesburg, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, was taken by eminent domain and drowned under what became the Chilewaukee Reservoir (popularly known as “The Chill”). The purpose was to provide backup water for the City of New York. The residents, fiercely superstitious folk, had warned the planners and engineers that the land there was dangerous, and they had sealed their warnings with violence and fire. But the dam was built and has stood ever since.

Gillian Mathers is a descendant of the Galesburg folk. She was raised by her grandmother near the reservoir, but her father fetched her to the city after the grandmother’s disappearance. Somehow Gillian felt compelled to come back, though, and now she’s on the water authority police force, guarding the man-made lake where her ancestors are buried.

Aaron Ellsworth is the son of the county sheriff. He once set his heart on being on a Coast Guard rescue crew, but he washed out in training. Now he’s a ne’er-do-well, shiftless, on the road to criminal life. Until the day he accidentally kills a man at the dam, but then the same man reappears out of the water, apparently uninjured.

Old prophecies are beginning to come true. Unseen, unknown forces are at work under the earth. And Gillian is feeling the pull of her grandmother’s earliest lessons – of the old faith of Galesburg, and the sacrifices it demands. Meanwhile, the rain falls, threatening to overwhelm the old dam, and the people downstream have no idea what danger they’re in.

Like all Scott Carson novels, The Chill is very well written. I thought of Dean Koontz as I read, though I guess the style and subject matter are closer to Stephen King. I don’t like horror as a genre generally, though I do like Koontz, and The Chill seems to bear some of Koontz’s essential optimism. There are even faint echoes of Christianity: “Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word. Lots of people would die for family, honey. But how many would die for a stranger?”

I enjoyed The Chill. Not as much as I liked Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane, but it’s quite good of its kind.

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‘The Mansions of the Lord’

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I never feel qualified to say a bloody thing about Memorial Day, having neither fought in a war myself nor lost a close loved one in a war. I merely carry a deep sense of indebtedness to countless people (mostly young men) who have paid the highest price you can pay in this world.

So I keep coming back to “The Mansions of the Lord,” from the 2002 movie, “We Were Soldiers,” written and directed by Randall Wallace. He wrote the song too, because the one he was looking for didn’t yet exist.

To all who made the sacrifice — thank you.

Authors, Religion

Reasonable madmen

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Now and then, ideas converge for me, which is about the best fun I have in life. And then I feel compelled to write about them here, in the sight of my guardian angel and everybody, inviting public scorn and ignominy (I believe Ignominy is a town in Wisconsin. Good fishing, they tell me).

A while back I posted about what seemed like a breakthrough in my own mental life – by way of, of all things, a dream. I found a “place” in my brain where I could take shelter from intrusive memories. I even had an idea where that “place” was located – on the right side of the brain, just above the ear. The technique of resorting to this “place” has not proved the panacea I hoped at first, but it remains a useful trick for me in regulating my thoughts, and I still use it pretty much every day.

More recently, I discovered the psychiatrist Iaian McGilchrist, initially through the conversation with Eric Metaxas embedded above. I have not yet shelled out for any of his books, because they’re kind of pricey, but I’ve watched several more videos. So far as I can grasp his thesis, I understand it thus:

We all know that the normal human brain is bilateral. Most of my life I’ve been informed that the left brain (which controls the right side of the body) is the plodding, logical, workhorse of the mind. Meanwhile, the right brain is creative and spontaneous. Back in the sixties and seventies, the hippies were always trying to access their right brains.

McGilchrist’s thesis does not contradict these distinctions, but refines them. The left brain, he says, evolved for the purpose of concentration and task completion. It learns routines, devises systems, puts things in boxes and labels them. It’s what allows us to do things automatically. Its functions are necessary to our survival. But it considers itself very smart – smarter than it is. Its true purpose is to be the servant or “emissary” of the “master” – the right brain.

The right brain is where our real intelligence lies. The right brain makes imaginative leaps. It maintains a global awareness of its surroundings. It is creative and inventive. It’s meant to be in control.

All my life, the left brain has been associated with people like me – the orthodox, the conventional. Left brain people reduce everything to set formulas and are quick to judge. Which – I can’t deny – is not far from a description of my own nature.

But McGilchrist also directs his spotlight onto other kinds of idealogues – the leftists and fascists and communists and feminists and environmentalists, etc., etc. who’ve infested our politics and history for so many decades. They’re left-brain people too, he says, and we’re beginning to get tired of them (or so he hopes).

But here’s the point of tonight’s essay. In a recent McGilchrist video I watched, he made a comment that rang a little bell for me – he said, in so many words, “The left brain is, in fact, mad.”

I immediately recalled something G. K. Chesteron wrote in Orthodoxy:

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

McGilchrist is not a Christian. By his own account, he values Christianity but is unable to believe in the miracle of the Resurrection.

Yet he has managed, after a century, to catch up to Chesterton, by the empirical rather than by the theological road.

Chesterton, I imagine, was thinking with his right brain.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Red Harvest,’ by Dashiell Hammet

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He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.

Dashiell Hammet wrote a number of stories about “the Continental Op,” a fat, nameless private detective working for a company based on the Pinkertons, as well as two Op novels. I reviewed the second Op book, The Dain Curse, not long ago, so I thought I might as well do Red Harvest (1929) too. I’d read it before, but way back in the 1970s.

We find the Continental Op in the western mining town of Personville, which seems to be in Utah. The town bears the nickname of “Poisonville,” and well deserves it. It used to be controlled by old Elihu Wilsson, the mine owner, but he’s allowed it to fall into the hands of various groups of criminals (these are Prohibition days, after all). Elihu’s son, Daniel, who has taken over the local newspaper, has decided to be a reformer. He’s requested a detective to come and help him ferret out corruption.

But Daniel is dead before the Op can even meet with him. The Op manages to get in to see Elihu, the old man, and eventually gets his permission to investigate his son’s murder.

Poisonville is in every way worthy of its name. The police are just as corrupt as the various criminal organizations, and as the Op stirs the waters, he finds that poison entering his own soul: “This d**ned burg’s getting to me,” he says. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” (This is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie, “Blood Simple.”)

There is no subtlety in Red Harvest. This is a story about killing, and lots of it. As in Hamlet, the stage is nearly empty at the end, most of the main characters dead, our very unromantic hero still standing, but shakily.

There is a pervasive rumor (denied by director Akira Kurosawa himself) that his classic samurai movie, “Yojimbo,” was inspired by Red Harvest. If so, it would be the grandfather of “A Fistful of Dollars” and a score of other imitators. However, Red Harvest is more complex than those movies. Instead of a scenario with two warring gangs, this novel features a complex situation. There are multiple factions, and the Op busies himself with inciting each of them against the others in various combinations, just stirring things up to see what reactions he can get, increasingly callous to the sanguine results.

When one has grown accustomed to Raymond Chandler’s prose (I can never resist the comparison), Dashiell Hammett comes off as something of a blunt instrument. But Hammett came first, and was breaking new ground, so to speak. Critics consider Red Harvest a classic and a groundbreaking literary work.

But it’s pretty grim.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Digital Barbarism,’ by Mark Helprin

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For modernity, ceaselessly mercurial, is nothing more than obsolescence yet to occur. To put one’s faith in or devote one’s attentions to it is to chase after a vapor.

Back when I was toiling through library school, one of the topics we were supposed to study was Copyright. The material they gave us to read was pretty uniformly partisan – on the side of the Creative Commons and against Copyright (or at least its extension). Much was made of the tyranny of Disney (though Disney generally holds trademarks rather than copyrights, but it’s all Intellectual Property). As a holder of copyrights myself, I found such material a little troubling, but I had no established principles on the topic in general (I hadn’t even known it was a topic), so – as I recall – I accommodated myself to the crowd, and wrote something about how copyright might be necessary for a while, but the free flow of information meant copyrights ought to end as early as reasonably possible.

Meanwhile, Mark Helprin, one of our greatest living authors, wrote (as he tells us) an op-ed for the New York Times. He thought an article about Copyright would be innocuous. He argued for its extension, so that a writer’s heirs can enjoy the fruits of their parent’s work just like the heirs of businessmen. He was astonished to discover that he had unleashed a firestorm of online comments from copyright abolitionists, who understood him to be arguing for everlasting copyright. This roused his fighting spirit, and so he came to write Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

The book is quite long. It probably could have been shorter, but Helprin clearly warmed to his topic as he labored. He regards the anti-copyright movement as a branch of Marxism, its general war against property. The world has no lack of people (generally without productive ability of their own) who believe that property is theft, and that if the greedy owners would just fork over, all the world’s problems would be fixed. Creators, it is assumed, will just continue toiling away for the love of creation itself.

As far as I can learn, Helprin’s fears haven’t come true. Copyright continues in force, and its opponents seem to be a small (if loud-voiced) group. He must also be gratified by the current resurgence in the purchase of paper books, something he does not foresee in this work.

Digital Barbarism is full of Helprin’s vivid prose, which is always worth reading. I did weary of the argument somewhat after a while, though.

Non-fiction, Reading, Reviews

‘The Saga of the Sworn Brothers’

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A scene from Ravnsborg in Missouri, which sadly no longer exists. The man addressing the feast is not a skald, but Sam Shoults, the owner of the place. But you get the idea.

I have apparently survived my first Viking weekend of the “summer season.” It’s not quite summer yet, of course, as was made abundantly clear by events. The skies were overcast, the breeze (though fortunately light) was a-chill. I don’t wear my fine woolen tunic a lot, as Viking reenactment in the country is mostly a warm-weather activity, but I was glad of it this weekend. The crowds at the Fantasy of the Lakes Renaissance Festival in Lindstrom, MN were not large, but that’s hardly the fault of the organizers, who did their best. Oddly enough, my book sales were better on Saturday (the colder day) than on Sunday.

Instead of reading from my Kindle in my abundant free moments, I chose to bring along my current volume of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I had a long saga to read, and one I’d read before – at least in the variant recorded in Flatey Book. The version printed in this edition is compiled from four source texts, including some variant passages, which are clearly marked.

This one is The Saga of the Sworn Brothers, quite a famous saga. It seems to be based on a skaldic poem by a man who you may recall if you’ve read my novel The Baldur Game – the poet Thormod Kolbrunarskald (Coal-Brow’s Skald). (I’ve blogged about the Flatey Book version before in this space). The poem, of which this saga preserves passages, celebrates the achievements of Thormod’s friend and sworn brother, Thorgeir Havarsson. Sworn brotherhood was a serious matter in Viking society – once the oath was sworn, each brother was honor-bound to avenge the other’s death. Judging by the poem, and the saga built on it, Thormod was likely from the git-go to be called on to do just that – because Thorgeir seems to have been a complete psychopath. Thormod says of him that he never knew fear – not even bothering to call for help while clinging for life to nothing but a clump of angelica at the brink of a cliff.

The saga is episodic, as sagas tend to be, but it follows the two friends as they carom from one adventure to another, casually killing men and getting outlawed here and there on the way. In time they part company. Thorgeir (the psychopath) enters the household of King (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson, but leaves him eventually to meet his fate. Thormod, when he learns of Thorgeir’s death (at the hands of several killers, of course), sets out to get revenge, a quest that will take him as far as Greenland. Later he enters Saint Olaf’s service in his own right. He is a prominent figure in the legends of Olaf’s death at Stiklestad. His death from an arrow wound after the battle takes place here (as well as in Flatey Book, which I’d forgotten) in a barley barn. I made it a cattle byre in The Baldur Game – Snorri’s Heimskringla does not specify what kind of building it was.

Another difference from Heimskringla is Thormod’s famous last words. In Heimskringla, he pulls an arrowhead out of his chest, looks at it, and says, “The king has fed us well – I am fat at the heart-roots.” Then he dies. He does not say that in this version, but dies in the midst of the last line of a poem he composes on the spot, which is finished by Olaf’s brother Harald (later King Harald Hardrada). This reinforces my guess, which I employ in The Baldur Game, that Harald must have been present at Thormod’s death, and would have been the source of the story.

(The veracity of the “heart-roots” line is also questionable due to the fact that the same line occurs in other sagas, notably when Leif Eriksson’s brother Thorvald is dying after a fight with Native Americans in Vinland.)

The Saga of the Sworn Brothers is an intriguing one, notable for being based on the recollections of a man who’s fairly honest about himself and his dead friend. The sworn brothers are not high heroes, but reckless, feckless youths who do as much harm as good in the world. Thormod’s death in Saint Olaf’s service is regarded as a grace. (The saga writer is not shy about inserting little moral homilies here and there.)

The Sworn Brothers is an intriguing – and valuable – saga.

Bookselling, Uncategorized

Fantasy of the Lakes

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The wonders of my set-up some years ago, when I had fewer books to sell, and before I had a Viking tent of my own.

In case you’re in the general area this weekend, I will be making a not-so-rare public appearance, Saturday and Sunday, at the Fantasy of the Lakes Renaissance Festival in Lindstrom Minnesota. This will be my first time at this event; they claim to be family friendly. (Though I sometimes pretend to be too good for Renaissance Festivals, I am in fact a lowly fantasy writer, after all.)

This will also be my first opportunity to offer my entire Erling Saga for sale in paperback form. For many years only The Year of the Warrior and West Oversea have been incarnate, and I’ve given away promotional bookmarks for the e-books of the rest of the series. When people asked if they were available in paper too, I’ve mumbled something about “maybe someday.” Well, someday is now. I assume after this I’ll have to answer questions about whether there are e-book versions.

There’ll be questions about audiobooks too, of course, so I’ll still get to practice my “someday” responses. (Troll Valley is coming, though. I’m about a third of the way through it. Didn’t get much done this morning; Friday mornings are rough because the garbage trucks rattle by.)

Pray for me. I’ll be dealing with human beings, and that’s always a trial.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ripped Into,’ by Jack Chandler

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Stuart “Fin” Finlay, the hero of Ripped Into (the first book in a new series by Jack Chandler) is a sort of a private detective in England, specializing in locating missing children. This time he takes a job from a man named Stanton, who wants him to find his missing stepdaughter, Sarah. She disappeared the same night their house burned down and his wife disappeared.

Fin starts running down leads, but the author also follows the activities of Sarah herself, living a high-stress life under a false identity. The mystery becomes one of why she’s hiding, and why she doesn’t simply go to the police.

As the story works itself out, we learn that some extremely dangerous people are hunting for Sarah. Fin eventually is able to take her under his wing, but she is very fragile and paranoid, convinced that she can trust no one, ready to bolt any moment. Only perfect honesty and a measure of self-disclosure, very hard for Fin, will keep her on his side.

I can’t deny that Ripped Into is an intense, fast-moving book. Considerable space is spent on Fin and Sarah painfully disclosing their personal traumas to one another in an effort to build rapport; I’m not sure that element wasn’t a little mushy for a book as violent as this. Which brings up my main problem with the story – it involves an extended scene of the torture of a woman. We have an occasional commenter on this blog who never fails to take umbrage at my objections to female cops in novels. I willingly admit to my sexism, but that’s not the main reason why I dislike the topic. The primary reason is that I just hate witnessing violence against women. (The fact that author Chandler turns out to be a woman herself doesn’t mend the matter for this reader.)

So my final verdict is that Ripped Into is a pretty effective mystery thriller featuring generally good writing, but it did not suit my very subjective taste.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where They Wait,’ by Scott Carson

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The signature sound of the loon is a solitary sound. It’s a haunting cry of undeniable beauty with an undercurrent of sorrow. An announcement of peaceful northern isolation, the Thoreau of birds.

The sound is a lie, though. Loons are not solitary, nor are they peaceful. The loon’s life is a violent one. The birds will stab each other with their beaks, beat each other with their wings, and pull each other under the water. The midnight cry that makes people think of Thoreau at Walden Pond is anything but serene.

I picked up another novel by Scott Carson, whose Lost Man’s Lane impressed me so. Where They Wait did not bowl me over to quite the same degree, but it’s very good.

Nick Bishop is a journalist, out of work, yet another victim of the digital revolution. Living in Florida, he calls an old college friend in Maine, where he used to live and went to school. The friend tells him he’s editing the college’s alumni magazine, and offers him a decent fee to write an article about a distinguished alumnus, a young computer tycoon who lives locally. But Nick needs to come up and interview him in person, he says.

Well, it’s been a long time since Nick has gone home to Maine. His mother is there, but she’s in nursing care, her memory lost to a stroke. Ironically, she’d been a highly respected expert on memory. There’s also the family’s lakeside “camp,” what people in other states would call a cabin, on a lake. Nick drives up and interviews the young tycoon, surprised to be met at the door by a young woman who’d been a childhood friend, and on whom he’d had a crush. The tycoon shows Nick a new cell phone app he’s working on – a relaxation program. Nick tries the beta version, and it works well. Rather too well. His life will never be the same, and soon he’ll learn facts about his past he’d never guessed. Facts that could be the death of him and others.

Where They Wait is an earlier novel than Lost Man’s Lane, and (in my opinion) not quite as successful. However, I considered Lost Man’s Lane almost perfect, so plenty of room remains for this to be quite a good novel. And such judgments are subjective anyway. Where They Wait offers intriguing characters and a compelling mystery, with one foot in science and the other in the supernatural. Very much in my own line, when I’m writing such books as Wolf Time.

I enjoyed Where They Wait, and read it in a day. There are a couple respectful, vague references to Christianity, and the whole thing could be viewed allegorically, if one were in the mood.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Rough Treatment,’ by John Harvey

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In an unnamed city in England’s Midlands, a pair of well-dressed burglars are having a successful run, breaking into rich people’s homes during the daytime when they’re supposed to be gone. But one day they burgle a TV director’s house, to find his wife, Maria Ray, at home. They rob the place anyway, and there are sexual sparks between one of the burglars – Jerry – and Maria. But the big prize of their day’s haul is a kilo of cocaine, hidden in a wall safe. Maria’s husband had been “holding it for a friend.”

So begins John Harvey’s police procedural Rough Treatment. As Jerry the burglar and Maria begin a torrid affair, Inspector Charlie Resnick, the hero of this series, heads up the police investigation. The clues will lead to organized crime and possible police corruption.

There’s  much to be said for Rough Treatment. It has a creative idea – particularly memorable for the character of the burglar with a heart of gold. Inspector Charlie Resnick himself is a pretty good hero, with a properly tragic back story – I wish we’d been given more information about it. One would need to read the first book in the series, I suppose – this is the second.

I found the writing style kind of ragged, though – the author is inclined to make sudden scene changes without alerting the reader (this may be a formatting problem, though). He also likes to begin scenes without telling us where they’re taking place, leaving that illumination for a few paragraphs on. Which annoys me.

The story is set in the 1990s, and so is gratifyingly free from the fashionable 50-50 male to female personnel ratio that’s become so popular today, at least in fiction. Cop humor is much in evidence, and in the (general) absence of women, tends to be pretty dirty, without any of the wit we find in John Sandford’s novels. There’s also a lot of offensive racist talk (disapproved of, of course). The sex scenes get pretty steamy too.

Rough Treatment was all right of its place and time, but I didn’t love it.