Tony Last, who is sort of the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, is a landed Englishman, barely managing to maintain his ancestral estate in the 1930s. His ancestral home, we are informed, has been defaced in hideous Victorian Gothic style, but he loves it. He also loves his wife Brenda and his little son John.
Over the course of this book he will lose all three of those, in various ways, and will be last seen on a feckless exploratory expedition, in search of a lost city, in the Amazon region of South America.
A Handful of Dust has a high reputation as a satirical novel. I found it a very wry book, but funny only in a mordant way. The humor is subtle (much went over my head, I’m certain) and exceedingly dark.
Perhaps later history was too much in my mind as I read. This book was written before World War II, before the British Empire dissolved, and before the Anglosphere fell into the hands of people committed to its erasure. Tony Last, the hero of A Handful of Dust, is an idealist and a romantic, which is his tragedy.
It is also the tragedy of everyone who ever loved England, if only from afar.
The legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.
The novelist Andrew Klavan has morphed himself (in between writing marvelous mystery stories) into a philosopher of art in recent years. His book The Truth and Beauty examined the English Romantic poets, linking their artistic strivings to the search for God. I loved that book, but had trouble understanding its ultimate point. This led me to do some theorizing of my own (I’ve posted some of my thoughts on this blog). Klavan’s latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, suggests to me that I’ve been generally on the right track.
Andrew Klavan has often mentioned wryly that one of his great fears, when he became a Christian, was that he’d become a Christian writer – the kind of writer who tells stories about a little girl who prays that God will help her find her bunny rabbit, and God obliges. Instead, he has made his uneasy way working at his proper craft, writing the kind of stories he cares about and suffering the criticism of those readers who want bunny stories.
So this book begins as a sort of apologia for realistic (even earthy) Christian fiction – an issue that matters to me as well, in my humble way. Can depictions of the darkness of life – the ugly things that evil, twisted men do to each other and to the innocent – serve to glorify God?
Klavan thinks they can.
He starts out with the ancient, original murder – that of Cain upon Abel. He describes how the spirit of Cain has passed down through history to find full expression in post-Christian thinkers and psychologists – men like Nietzsche and Freud – and de Sade. How Dostoevsky pondered such ideas, found them wanting, and brought forth brilliant, moral works of art – Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. He describes the crimes of a nondescript Wisconsin psychopath named Ed Gien, whose hideous career inspired “Psycho,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” and a score of inferior knock-offs.
Then he ponders the mysteries of creation, the fall of Man, and redemption. The book ends in a vision of what the author considers possibly the greatest work of human art – Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” an achievement that contemplates what Christians consider the greatest crime of all time – the greatest crime possible – and transforms it into sublime beauty.
Here, he suggests, is an answer to the mystery of Theodicy, the question how a good God could permit evil. The answer, Klavan suggests, cannot be parsed in logic or spoken in words. Only Beauty, a gleam of light from Heaven received by the soul, can provide answers for those who have eyes to see.
But read The Kingdom of Cain for yourself. I’m certainly going to read it again. I experienced genuine physical thrills as I followed its line of thought.
Ahead, I saw the tall concrete wall painted the color of Meyer lemons. Terminal de Autobuses was emblazoned in thick black letters. Behind the station a hill rose, half covered in foliage, with orange-roofed buildings poking their heads up like school children. The sky was painted the perfect blue, a light breeze cooled my sweaty neck, and the events of the last couple of hours faded with the distant cries of gulls.
My friend Craig Terlson was kind enough to send me an advance copy his next novel Sayulita Sucker, now available for pre-order. It’s a shorter book (a short story is appended for good measure), but features Terlson’s usual excellent neo-hardboiled prose.
Luke Fischer, our continuing hero, is a Canadian expatriate, living as a beach bum near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He subsists on the hospitality of his patron, Benno, a genial crime boss. From time to time Benno takes advantage of Luke’s size, strength, and fighting skills to help him out with various small problems.
Benno is out of town as Sayulita Sucker begins, and Luke is approached by a man who claims to be a friend of his. He has a daughter, he says, who has always been a little wild. Now she’s disappeared, and he fears she might have fallen into the hands of traffickers. He has an idea she’s being held in a town a little way north up the coast. Luke agrees to go and look, and takes a bus up. Clues lead him to another town called Sayulita, and violence ensues.
Luke is a laconic character, and his ability to handle himself in a fight always surprises me a little. He strikes me as sort of a cross between Travis McGee and Jeff Lebowski. His investigative technique mostly involves sitting in bars and hotel lounges until somebody takes offense at one of his questions and tries to kill him. The whole story had, for this reader, a kind of dream-like quality.
Quite an enjoyable story, adorned by the author’s excellent prose and dialogue. Recommended. Cautions for language.
If atheists or anti-theists have the good fortune to live in a society still governed by religious belief, or even its afterglow, they may feel free from absolute moral bonds, while those around them are not. This is a tremendous liberation for anyone who is even slightly selfish. And what clever person is not imaginatively and cunningly selfish?
The Hitchens brothers, Peter and (the late) Christopher, both famed journalists, were divided not only by temperament (Peter says they’d never actually been close), but by their attitudes to God. Their childhood home practiced no religion at all, and both brothers enthusiastically embraced atheism. But Peter changed his mind and joined the Church of England as an adult, a decision Christopher found inconceivable. Christopher wrote a bestselling book called God Is Not Great, arguing that religion was the root of most of the world’s evil, and Peter responded with the book I’m reviewing now – The Rage Against God.
There’s an element of spiritual pilgrimage narrative in this book, in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions and C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Then it proceeds to a well-informed critique (offered from the perspective of a former fellow traveler) of the whole modern social construct of the West, based on the ruins of Communism, which stand on the ruins of Christendom.
Peter Hitchens tells us that his first boyhood faith was British patriotism, swelled by pride in his country’s clean victory over the evil Germans in World War II. In time he would learn that that victory was not as clean as he’d been taught, and that faith died.
Then he embraced Communism. But a few years in Moscow as a journalist, observing the actual workings of that tottering monument to arrogant incompetence, disillusioned him with prejudice.
And so, with time, he came to reexamine the religious faith he’d rejected, pro forma, without a hearing. He noted that, in contrast to his brother’s rejection of the greatness of God, our present culture is based on an even less plausible premise – that Man is great. If there’s little evidence for the first, there’s no evidence at all for the second. He surveys the wrecks that surrounds us, and offers some melancholy hope, or at least a call to courage.
He also spends considerable time refuting Christopher’s argument that the Russian Soviet failure was not a failure of atheism, because Russian Communism was essentially a religion.
I can hardly deny that I found The Rage Against God a congenial read, confirming opinions I already held dear – though the author’s criticisms of the neo-cons and their nation-building wars stung a little in my own case.
To be fair, I suppose I ought to read Christopher’s book too, but I expect I won’t. It’s not as if the arguments against God are unfamiliar or hard to find – while a book like this offers – I think – fresh ideas for the majority of our contemporaries.
When all else fails, a Perry Mason novel is always reliable. Erle Stanley Gardner was an old pulp man who knew his craft and understood what the reader wanted. The Case of the Lonely Heiress delivers the goods, complete with a nude female corpse for cover art opportunities.
Perry Mason’s new client is the proprietor of a sleazy lonely hearts magazine, which thrives on ads (some of them even legitimate) from people looking for romance (that’s what they used to do before Tinder).
The man tells them that one of his recent ads has been getting a lot of response. The woman who bought the ad claims to be an heiress, and is looking for a young man who comes from the farm. He wants to find this woman, who is obviously a fraud. Perry agrees to put his detective Paul Drake on the case, and soon the woman is located.
Oddly enough, she turns out to be completely legitimate. And before long Perry’s working for her, and then things get complicated, and then somebody gets killed.
And it all comes down to a neat criminal plot, unraveled in the nick of time in the classic Perry Mason style.
Those of us who know Perry Mason mostly from TV don’t really know the early Mason. That Perry Mason was forever young, while actor Raymond Burr aged (and put on weight). He lacked the judge-like gravity of Burr’s interpretation. He was light-hearted, physically active, and not always strictly ethical. In this story (published in 1948) he sails pretty close to the wind in terms of his handling of evidence.
Good entertainment, The Case of the Lonely Heiress is an amusing book for occupying your time while waiting in a train station.
Today’s hymn is one of the songs that feels both timeless and time-bound. The rhymes and melody of “I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour” sound dated to me, and I don’t know if that’s a fair assessment or just a reflection of my tastes. After all, hymns are not high poetry nor should they be. They are expressions of faith for every generation in the church today.
New Yorker Annie S. Hawks (1835-1918) wrote the words in 1872. The well-rounded minister Robert Lowry of Pennsylvania (1826-1899) wrote the melody and added the refrain. It is one of his many popular hymns sung around the world.
“Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal 5:16 ESV).
1 I need Thee ev’ry hour, Most gracious Lord; No tender voice like Thine Can peace afford.
Refrain: I need Thee, oh, I need Thee; Ev’ry hour I need Thee; Oh, bless me now, my Savior, I come to Thee.
2 I need Thee ev’ry hour, Stay Thou nearby; Temptations lose their pow’r When Thou art nigh. [Refrain]
3 I need Thee ev’ry hour, In joy or pain; Come quickly and abide, Or life is vain. [Refrain]
4 I need Thee ev’ry hour, Teach me Thy will; And Thy rich promises In me fulfill. [Refrain]
I’ve enjoyed John Sandford’s Prey novels, featuring millionaire Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport, for many, many years. The books have changed with time, and Davenport, once a borderline psychopath local cop, is now a US Marshal and a settled family man who stays in law enforcement because, by his own admission, he likes shooting bad guys.
Lucas works all over the country now, but in Lethal Prey he’s called back home to Minnesota (which pleased me) due to a law enforcement crisis. Lara Grandfelt, a wealthy Minneapolis woman, has decided she wants to get her sister’s case solved. Twenty years ago, her sister Doris, an employee at an accounting firm, was stabbed to death. Her body was found in a suburban park, and examination showed that she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before her death. The investigators got the DNA, but no match was found. For years Lara has been bothering the police about the case, but now she’s decided to go public. She promises a 5 million dollar reward to anyone providing evidence leading to the murderer’s conviction.
Lucas gets teamed up again with his old friend Virgil Flowers, and, looking at all the work that will be necessary in running down old, faint leads, they decide to go public in a different way. There are a lot of true crime bloggers out there, and they’re keen to get in on the reward money. Lucas and Virgil put the word out that any private researcher who helps substantially in solving the crime will get a share of the reward. Such amateur participation will create problems of its own, but the added manpower will prove invaluable – if they can ride herd on their helpers.
They have no idea – though the reader does – who their adversary is, and it’s a formidable adversary indeed, one of the most formidable and memorable in the Prey series, I think.
Author John Sandford knows his business as few writers do, and Lethal Prey is entertaining all through. I liked that it featured no kick-butt female cops this time out, and the story didn’t involve the high level of perverse sexual cruelty many of the previous books have featured. But I was troubled by the fact that the reader is left with a sort of cliff-hanger at the end. Sandford doesn’t usually do that. Perhaps things will be explained in the next book.
Cautions for language and adult themes. Fun for grownups.
Tonight, for no good reason I can think of, I intend to tell you about the process of book narration recording. Is this of interest to anyone at all? I have no idea. Being dull has never stopped me before.
The first step, of course, is to set up my little makeshift studio in my closet doorway, facing out. The hanging clothes are at my back, so very little sound gets reflected from that side, and my mike is set to record only from the front. So unless a truck downshifts in the street out front, there’s probably not much noise to interfere with the ethereal music of my voice.
I have a little desk, and on it set my laptop (with the Audacity recording app opened), and my Kindle (convenient for reading from; no pages to turn). In front of me hangs my microphone on its boom, and attached to the microphone are my headphones. I also keep an insulated cup of green tea close by for refreshment and throat lubrication.
The Audacity app is free, but surprisingly sophisticated. (I wonder how they support themselves.) It shows you a screen, and as you begin recording, a graphic of the sound pattern appears in a ribbon running from left to right.
Of course, the reading never goes smoothly. You flub a word. You add a word that’s not there. You burp. Such problems must be dealt with in some manner.
There are two different ways of dealing with a reading mistake. Some narrators swear by the continuous method – you just clap your hands or click a clicker, leaving a very noticeable spike in the sound graphic, and then re-read the piece you got wrong and carry on. Later, in the editing stage, you will delete the bad stuff, and all that’s left is the good stuff, and Bob’s your uncle.
I don’t use that method, though. I use what they call “punch and roll.” There’s a built-in trick in Audacity, where you can stop the recording, click on a spot just before your mistake, hit the proper keystroke combination, and the software automatically starts playing back through your earphones about five seconds previous to the spot you clicked. You listen and along and then jump right in at the spot you marked, recording the right words (you hope), then proceed from there. Terrifying to learn (for me), but pretty slick once you get the hang of it.
Proponents of the continuous method claim that punch and roll takes you out of the rhythm and the spirit of the thing. But that’s not my experience. I can maintain my rhythm and spirit just fine.
Anyway, you keep on this way until you finish reading the chapter. Each chapter gets its own separate file.
Then comes the editing phase (for me, that usually ends up happening the following day). You go back to the beginning and listen to your work through the headphones, following along with the text in the book. More often than you expect, you find you’ve read something wrong and weren’t aware of it. In my case, getting caught up in the spirit of the moment is usually the cause.) Or maybe you made a mouth click, or breathed heavily. Such things must be cleaned up, and Audacity has ways of doing that, electronic forms of cutting and pasting.
Finally, there’s mastering. Another cause for fear and trembling, before I got comfortable with it. There’s a downloadable plug-in called ACX Check that tests your recording for three parameters: Peak volume, Volume floor, and RMS. Peak and floor are pretty self-explanatory. RMS will be explained below. Amazon Audible wants consistency in the products it publishes. So ACX Check predictably launches you on a moderately challenging series of corrections, and corrections of corrections.
Historically, the first ACX Check tells me that my Peak volume is too high. So I run the whole thing through a utility called Normalization. This utility sort of averages the highs and lows all through. Once that’s done, I run the ACX Check again, and the Peak volume will be fine. But (almost always) the RMS is now too low. (RMS is a sort of average of all the peaks and troughs. I can never remember what all the initials stand for, but the M is for “mean.”) So then I have to run the Amplify utility (there’s a formula for how to set that), and I get the RMS all tidy again. But now the Peak volume is once again too high, every single time. So (with a little prayer and fasting) I run a utility called Limiter, and in most cases all the numbers are now okay.
At that point, at least technically, the recording is acceptable for Amazon Audible. No doubt there are subjective criteria that could still disqualify the file, but from a robot’s point of view, that’s how it works.
I finished Chapter V of Troll Valley today. 20% done.
[Addendum: One hour later: On thinking it over, I realize the sequence of operations is incorrect. But I’m too tired to fix it.]
Icarus “Ike” Thompson, hero of The Perfect Lawyer, used to be a legal superstar in Chicago. He defended high-profile criminal defendants and usually won. Then he ran up against Ursula Rush, a hard-driving prosecutor who not only beat him but humiliated him in a case in which he was personally invested. Overwhelmed and shamed, he retreated to a leafy suburb, where he now practices property law. When he interviews Abby Blum, an attractive young lawyer from Colorado, as a new partner, and she brings up criminal law, he shuts her down and almost rejects her application. But she persists, and he takes her on.
Then “Father K.” shows up. He’s a Catholic priest and a well-known social crusader. He wants Ike to defend Mia Hendrickson. a media sensation, a mother accused of setting her house on fire and burning her two children to death. She’s already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Ike wants nothing to do with the case, but we just know Father K. will get through to him in the end.
Then follows a tale of increasing drama as Ike and Abby take on what looks like a hopeless case, only gradually realizing what kind of power and corruption they’re facing. And at the prosecutor’s table, once again, will be none other than Ursula Rush.
If I were teaching a novel writing class, and a student had submitted A Perfect Lawyer as a final project, I would give them an A. The book is well-plotted, generally well written, and gripping. The prose could have been better – occasionally an overwritten line shows up: “He was burning with their insolent intimidation.” But overall the writing is good, and way better than a lot I see these days. The dialogue is sometimes kind of bookish, and could use some polishing. But I’d tell the author he showed great promise and had produced a publishable work.
I was a little disappointed that some plot threads were left loose at the end, but no doubt the next volume in the series will pick them up. I almost mistook this book for Christian fiction, because I noticed no profanity (kudos for that).
All in all, The Perfect Lawyer, though less than perfect, is pretty good.
Tonight, I brag. In a modest, spiritual way, of course.
The latest issue of my church body’s magazine, The Lutheran Ambassador, contains a review of my novel Hailstone Mountain. The writer of the review compares it to biblical narratives, saying:
He manages to make the characters both likable and realistic, simultaneously saint and sinner, wrestling against evil around them and wrestling within themselves. Their lives are raw, sometimes offensively so, but also fully human. Like the Bible, the books are not rated G, but I would rate them five stars because somehow Walker manages to make God the hero and Savior rather than the human characters.
I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it never occurred to me before that God is the hero of the Erling books. But having that said is about the highest accolade I can think of for them.
It should be mentioned, in full disclosure, that the author of the review, Pastor Brian Lunn of Upsala, Minnesota, is a friend of mine.
