Fiction, Reviews

‘The Black Loch,’ by Peter May

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Peter May is an excellent novelist with a gift for scenic description. I’ve read a number of his novels with great pleasure. I think he may be trying to lose me as a reader now, but more about that below.

Fin Macleod, hero of The Black Loch, is a native of the Isle of Lewis, a former policeman now employed as a civilian in the city (I forget which city), doing computer forensics on cases of child pornography. The job is nearly killing him.

Then he learns his son has been arrested for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl, back home at Stornaway on Lewis.

Years before, as a detective, Fin had returned to Stornaway when an old friend (married to Fin’s old girlfriend) was murdered. In his investigations, he learned that that friend’s son was not actually his, but Fin’s own. Fin ended up marrying the former girlfriend and getting to know Fionnlach, his new-found son.

Fionnlach had stayed in Stornaway and taught school there. Now one of his female students is dead, and it turns out Fionnlach had been having an adulterous affair with her. Her body was found floating in the Black Loch, marked by signs of rape. A witness saw Fionnlach fight with her on a cliff and knock her over the edge.

Fin drops his work and, together with his wife, travels to Stornaway to see what’s wrong. Their son won’t talk to them; he talks as if he’s guilty. The townspeople have already made up their minds.

Fin asks questions, mostly of old friends. The community has many secrets (for one thing, a lot of the young people seem to be the children of different men from their legal fathers). But one person in particular has deadly secrets to hide, at any cost.

There was much to enjoy in The Black Loch. I love the Scottish Isles, and Author May brings them and their people to dramatic life. The dialogue was very good, though Americans will have a little trouble with the dialect – as well as a lot of trouble pronouncing names (though a pronunciation guide is included).

My problems with the book were mostly personal. The depictions of the church were uniformly negative – though Fin makes it clear that he mainly dislikes the present minister, whom he knows to be a hypocrite, every mention of the church always includes some comment on how grim and barren and comfortless Calvinism is. As a Lutheran I can sympathize somewhat, but I thought he overdid it.

There’s also the political element. In this book and the previous May book I read, he made the choice to go full-on environmentalist. He seems to believe – no doubt sincerely – that now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the planet.

The problem with this is that you end up with the old “Law & Order” cliché. If a certain type of character appears, you can always be sure that they’re going to be the culprit. Sad to say, that predictability was front and center in The Black Loch.

When all is said and done, The Black Loch is a good novel, but (in my opinion) the author is selling his birthright for a pot of message.

A criticism which (obviously) more than applies to me, too.

Bookselling, Non-fiction

On Bookselling and Encouraging a Desire for Books

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In his book on the bookselling business, Joseph Shaylor notes Dr. Johnson’s recommendation for sharing sales revenue among all participants in the year 1776, saying “the country bookseller selling a book published at twenty shillings” should retain 3 shillings 6 pence from the sale. No less than that is possible, the good doctor writes, because booksellers operate on paper-thin margins (ba-dum-ching). Writing in 1911, Shaylor notes the same was true during his career and makes this important business principle:

All retail establishments exist either to create a want or to supply one. This applies equally to a bookseller — either he must help to educate the public to be lovers of books, or he must simply exist to supply such books as an educated public requires. The former is to be desired, and the greater the inducements held out to encourage men and women of intellectual aptitude to be distributors of books the better it will be both for themselves and for the trade they represent.

— Shaylor, The Fascination of Books with Other Papers on Books & Bookselling

Perhaps even more than publishers, booksellers need to cultivate a market both of readers and people who appreciate owning books themselves. In that vein, David Kern, proprietor of Goldberry Books in Concord, NC, reviews The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. “As recently as 1993, 13,499 independently run bookshops were open across the country,” and yet historian Evan Friss states, “Americans have never really been readers.”

Last week for National Read-A-Book Day, a Philadelphia Barnes and Noble invited two dozen authors “to come down to the store, sit in the leather chair in the window display outfitted with a side table and lamp, and silently read a favorite book.” The store manager said her staff thought it a crazy idea, but the authors loved it.

Of course, all bookshops should be as attractive and picturesque as we imagine ourselves to be. Scrivener’s Books & Bookbinding in Buxton, Derbyshire fits the bill. Liv Clarke visited the other day and called it magical. The shop boasts five floors of books with a cellar housing “the smallest Victorian Museum in Buxton . . . found next to the buildings’ original stove.”

Religion, Uncategorized

In a Viking church

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A fragment of a wall painting from my ancestral church at Aakra, Norway.

Here’s something one of my Facebook friends brought to my attention. The Viking Museum at Ribe, Denmark, has unveiled its recreation of what they think a 9th Century Viking church in Denmark would have looked like. It is not – as you can see – exactly what you’d expect. And by you, of course, I mean me.

I’ve never bothered to describe Father Ailill’s church in detail in my Erling books. I assume it was built of wood, and I conceived of it of being similar to the average Viking house. In Hailstone Mountain, I describe it as having at least one tapestry hanging on the wall. It has an altar in front. Pews were not used in those days. I’ve kept it vague.

But here come these Danes now with their bright painted walls. I’m reminded of the church at Åkra, near Skånevik, Norway, an ancestral church of mine I visited two years ago. (Picture above.) It’s not as old as the Viking Age, but pretty old. There was one place where restorers discovered a bit of wall painting underneath a door frame, over the top of the sacristy door. They left that section of frame hinged, so you can lift the piece of wood and see the painting below. They believe it showed a scene of Samson killing the lion.

In any case, I do have quibbles. The brightness of the photos in the article should not be taken to indicate what churchgoers saw in the Viking Age. The building would have been illuminated mostly by lamps. There would have been a lot of shadows. The brightness of the images would have been necessary in part (I think) to make them visible at all in the general gloom.

Speaking of light, I’m curious about the windows in this reconstruction. My own understanding is that glass windows, in that period, were rare and extremely expensive. I expend quite a few words, in my work in progress, The Baldur Game, in having Father Ailill describe, on a visit to England, how amazed he is to see a modestly large glass window in the palace at Winchester. And Erling is quite proud of one small window in one of his halls. I imagined no windows at all in Ailill’s church.

However, the people at Ribe are experts. They undoubtedly know a lot more than I do. (Though I’m not sure Norwegian churches would necessarily have followed Carolingian fashion.)

In any case, those windows look pretty extravagant to me. I wonder what archaeological evidence there is for them.

Reviews

Watching old TV: ’87th Precinct’

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Reading an 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain recently reminded me that there was a TV series, long ago, which I remembered enjoying – even before I knew the books existed at all. I checked it out and found and watched it on YouTube. And it’s not bad at all.

One major departure from the books is that the pretense of a fictional city is dropped entirely. This 87th Precinct is set solidly in Manhattan. The fairly large cast of the books is trimmed back here – we have Steve Carella (Robert Lansing), Meyer Meyer (Norman Fell), Bert Kling (Ron Harper) and Roger Havilland (Gregory Walcott). Although I’ve read several of the novels, I’d forgotten the character of Det. Havilland altogether. Wikipedia tells me that he’s a corrupt and unpopular cop in the books, but here he’s a good guy, kind of like Cotton Hawes, who doesn’t appear at all until a single episode late in the series (it only lasted one season). Gina Rowlands is also there as Teddy, Steve Carella’s deaf wife.

The casting could be worse. This was the first role I ever saw Robert Lansing in, and he became one of my favorite actors (though from what I’ve read of him, he wasn’t popular with the people he worked with). Ron Harper as Bert Kling looks about right – blond and young. Norman Fell as Meyer is a disappointment. Meyer in the books is a complex character with an ingrained stoicism dating back to traumatic antisemitic violence in his childhood that caused him to lose all his hair. He’s a large and strong man. Fell did not shave his head for the part (that was pretty rare in those days) or bulk up, but it’s not just that. Fell was primarily a comic actor, and he plays Meyer that way –downbeat Jewish comic relief. Not entirely, but mostly. (Meyer has never had justice done to him on the screen, as far as I know.) Gina Rowlands was lovely, but a blonde rather than black-haired as Teddy was in the books.

The scripts are based on the original novels, whittled down for the time available, with roles switched for the actors on hand. In terms of storytelling, it was really very good, adult television for the 1960s, and it deserved a longer run. Some familiar actors show up – Robert Vaughn as “the Deaf Man,” Robert Culp as a psychopath, and Leonard Nimoy as a young heavy.

Bottom line: Pretty good show. Worth a watch.

Uncategorized

Historic Spacewalk Today, Major Advance in Reusable Spacecraft

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SpaceX, an American spacecraft manufacturer, sent four astronauts into orbit today to enable two of them to execute spacewalk maneuvers. That’s one small step for man . . . no, that’s a major advance in spacecraft and spacesuit engineering.

Eric Berger of Ars Technica explains this as an achievement in reusable spacecraft. The Falcon 9 “will launch more than 100 times this year, something no government or company has ever done before.” It is “the world’s first orbital class reusable rocket,” according to SpaceX. It has reflown 302 times.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Catch a Spy,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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It’s New Year’s Day 1944; the world war is winding down. But Toby Peters, shabby Los Angeles private investigator, has a new celebrity client – Cary Grant. Grant, a naturalized US citizen from England, has been doing unofficial work for British Intelligence. He has recently heard from a source among American Nazi agents, who has secret documents to sell. But the source doesn’t want Grant to bring the money; he has to send someone else. That someone is Toby Peters, who, despite being the smallest of small-timers, has a reputation for reliability and discretion.

But when Toby shows up at the designated exchange spot, people start shooting. The seller of the papers ends up dead, and the money and the papers disappear. Grant wants Toby to keep searching for the conspirators, and it will lead to great danger for Toby and all his motley friends.

The usual eccentric cast of characters is here as always – Gunther, Toby’s Swiss midget best friend, and Sheldon Minck, the worst dentist in the world. Jeremy Butler, Toby’s office landlord, who is also an ex-wrestler and a poet. Mrs. Plaut, Toby’s apartment landlady, who is almost totally deaf and inhabits a bizarre world of her own. Not to mention others.

When I think about it, in the end, the whole thing would have worked out better if Toby and Cary Grant had left the case to the FBI from the start. But it’s not about the plot, it’s about the Keystone Kops chase.

To Catch a Spy was lots of fun.

Religion

When a storm is a rock

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Jesus Calms the Storm – Fresco by Silvestro Pistolesi in the clerestory of the Church of the Transfiguration at the Community of Jesus. Creative Commons attribution-Share alike 4.0.

And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” (Matthew 8: 23-27, ESV)

My Heaven-sent translation work continues. I had a good day yesterday and got a little ahead of my quota. This is good, because I translated nothing on Saturday (and I don’t write for money on Sundays if I can help it). I need to translate 100 pages each month for the next five months to deliver on time. I’m 50 pages in now, and the month isn’t half over yet, so I’m doing just fine.

But it never hurts to run ahead of schedule. Impress the client, and if I finish sooner, I get my final payment sooner.

The laborer, as the Good Book says, is worthy of his hire.

Speaking of the Good Book, I was struck by the passage printed above during my devotions last week. I wrote about the Sermon on the Mount not long ago, and now I’m in the early passages that follow the sermon. I’ve read the Bible a number of times since I was a kid, but I never noticed until recently how much context means.

I wrote about it in my earlier posts – how counterintuitive Jesus’ teaching is (none of these thoughts are original to me, of course. I’m coming to them from the back of queue). The bottom line seems to be, “Build your house on a rock.” But what’s the rock like? It has nothing to do with a good job, or saving money, or investing in bonds or real estate. The rock Jesus is talking about seems to be solidly anchored in mid-air. Invest in Heaven. Step out onto the stormy waves – that’s your real security.

And Jesus demonstrates this in Matthew 8:23-27. Immediately after He delivers the sermon, He’s confronted with human chaos – he meets a leper, the very embodiment of disordered health. He heals the leper. He heals a centurion’s servant – the centurion, interestingly, doesn’t need to observe Jesus performing the miracle; he believes without seeing, earning approval. Then Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, and then he’s mobbed by a multitude of “many who were oppressed by demons.” That’s the disordered state of the world – exactly what He’s been preaching against; exactly what He came to fix. Then a couple of disciple wannabees show up, offering to follow Jesus, but with reservations. Jesus puts it on the line – it’s all or nothing. They can’t handle the apparent insecurity and back off.

 And then what does Jesus do? He gets into a boat and starts across the Sea of Galilee.

I think I’ve written about this before. I allude to the theme frequently in The Baldur Game (it’s coming, it’s coming!). The Jews thought of the sea (any sea) as Chaos, as Sheol, as Hell. The place of maximum insecurity, maximum danger. The opposite of the Rock we’re supposed to build our houses on. And Jesus just sets out to sail on it. Not only that, but He’s headed for the Decapolis — pagan territory, where demons dwell.

And as they’re crossing the Sea (or lake), a storm blows up – which I understand is common on Galilee. And the disciples are terrified, and (one assumes) they’re running the sail down and bailing and rowing like mad…

And Jesus is sleeping like a baby. They wake Him, and He says, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” And he snaps His fingers (so to speak) and the storm turns over on its back like puppy wanting its belly scratched.

What Jesus is saying, I think, is “Buckle up, boys, this is what it means to build your house on a rock.”

The church, I think, is built by people who see faith as an adventure. It withers under people who see it as a job of work.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘Killer-Glum’s Saga’

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Reading on in Volume 2 of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one was fairly long – “Killer-Glum’s Saga”. (Also known as Viga-Glum’s Saga, which is just the same thing translated.)

I struggle to describe Killer-Glum’s Saga, as it really left no strong impression on me. Most great sagas feature some kind of powerful motivation for the main character – vengeance or a woman’s love or the righting of some great wrong. Killer-Glum has none of those things. He’s just a guy who goes through his life, and happens to have a talent for man-killing.

The saga writer seems to sense this lack, because he begins Glum’s tale with a trope borrowed from a thousand sagas, folk tales, and fairy tales: The hero starts out as his father’s least promising son, showing no initiative and often being taunted for his laziness. But when it comes down to cases, he proves extremely adept at fighting and killing, and before long he is the most powerful man in his district. We are told that he maintained this power for an unusual length of time. But eventually his enemies get the best of him, and he loses his property and has to move elsewhere. In the end he is converted to Christianity and dies in old age.

There are many incidents here, and a hundred characters to try to keep track of, but not much of a central narrative line. The situation is not improved by the fact that the text is somewhat corrupt.

One interesting scene did strike me – at one point Glum’s son kills a man, and Glum wants that fact not to be known. So he compliments a thrall on doing the killing, repeating the praise so may times that the stupid thrall begins believing it himself. Early medieval brainwashing.

My final evaluation is that Killer-Glum’s Saga is not one to read if you’re new to saga reading. This one is for the saga buffs; it demands a little effort.

Music

Sunday Singing: Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness

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Today’s hymn comes from a lawyer and poet from Brandenburg-Prussia, Johann Franck (1618-1677). A biographer praises his hymns as “distinguished for unfeigned and firm faith,” avoiding the objectivity and congregational character of the older German hymns” for “a more personal, individual tone.” Originally “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele,” our hymn “Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness” was published in Johann Crüger’s Geistliche Kirchen-Melodien (1649) to the tune heard above.

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light do we see light.” (Psalm 36:7-9 ESV)

1 Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness,
leave the gloomy haunts of sadness;
come into the daylight’s splendour,
there with joy thy praises render
unto him whose grace unbounded
hath this wondrous banquet founded:
high o’er all the heavens he reigneth,
yet to dwell with thee he deigneth.

2 Now I sink before thee lowly,
filled with joy most deep and holy,
as with trembling awe and wonder
on thy mighty works I ponder:
how, by mystery surrounded,
depth no mortal ever sounded,
none may dare to pierce unbidden
secrets that with thee are hidden.

3 Sun, who all my life dost brighten,
light, who dost my soul enlighten,
joy, the sweetest heart e’er knoweth,
fount, whence all my being floweth,
at thy feet I cry, my Maker,
let me be a fit partaker
of this blessed food from heaven,
for our good, thy glory, given.

4 Jesus, Bread of Life, I pray thee,
let me gladly here obey thee;
never to my hurt invited,
be thy love with love requited:
from this banquet let me measure,
Lord, how vast and deep its treasure;
through the gifts thou here dost give me,
as thy guest in heaven receive me.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Publishing

Digital Lending Library in Trouble with Publishers

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The Internet Archive may have lost its struggle with publishing companies over the “Fair Use” legality of its Open Library service. It argues that by purchasing print copies of books, it could legally digitize them and lend them on a one-to-one basis to readers around the world just like a regular library.

This week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling against The Internet Archive, saying its practice of controlled digital lending does not fall under an application of the Fair Use of copyrighted materials, according to Publishers Weekly.

“We conclude that IA’s use of the Works is not transformative,” the decision states. “Instead, IA’s digital books serve the same exact purpose as the originals: making authors’ works available to read.” The practice effectively substitutes the original work, which specifically runs contrary to the intent of Fair Use.

I can’t judge whether this is an appropriate application of the law, but it doesn’t look wrong from what I’ve read. The Internet has gotten out of hand in various ways. Maybe Open Library’s concept doesn’t work, but a tweaked version of it would.

In other news of publisher lawsuits, six of the big publishers along with the Author’s Guild are challenging Florida’s new law that requires schools to remove books with inappropriate sexual content. The suit specifically claims the term “pornographic” is undefined and takes no consideration of a book’s context.

Janie B. Cheaney gives a broad view of this and similar efforts to, as the Florida bill put it, “discontinue the use of any material the [district school] board does not allow a parent to read out loud.”

Scopes Monkey Trial: Historian Thomas Kidd reviews a new book on the Scopes Trial and doesn’t recommend it. “Author Brenda Wineapple calls America a ‘secular country founded on the freedom to worship.’ But various Christian demagogues in American history have tried to force people to worship God in a narrow-minded way, she warns.”

Reading: Brad East in “The Reading Lives of Pastors”— “It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. . . . Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?”

Ye Old Shoppe: Here’s a little bit on old business cards and store signage.

(Illustration by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator)