I put River Rising in my Amazon cart while buying some other books—homeschool material I think—saying to myself I should buy a good book like this one, fun to spend money on myself, buy something good to read as though I didn’t have other good books on the shelf to read—books I bought for friends or family and never wrapped up or all those Graham Greene books I bought for $0.99 each and failed to read the rest of that summer as I had planned. So I bought River Rising, and when it came, I put it neatly on the shelf. It’s wonderful to have a new potential read smiling down on me from a line of other potential reads.
I tell myself I should read more and blog less. I say it with a weak voice from behind my gullet, which regularly questions my motives and actions. When I read, it asks if I shouldn’t be writing; when I write, it asks if I shouldn’t be reading or gardening or cleaning, parenting, diapering, fixing, or working on something more profitable than writing what-is-it-again. Moments of clarity or passion prevail at times, of course, or you wouldn’t know me in these words.
I didn’t have a newborn at the time I bought the book. She’s four months old, and the book was acquired a several months ago. I didn’t have her then, so I didn’t have to hold her gassy tummy and wiggly arms. She’s such a precious thing, spit-up and all, and there’s a patch of spit-up cheese on the carpet there, sweet wife, if you would grab a towel while you’re up. I didn’t have the princess tiny when I bought River Rising, so I didn’t have that delay on reading it. Continue reading River Rising by Athol Dickson
Category Archives: Reviews
Amazing Grace Is a Beautiful Film
My wife and I saw the Wilberforce movie, Amazing Grace, last week on one of our rare opportunities to see a movie in the theater. It was a beautiful, solid drama, much like the quiet British adaptations of Jane Austen, except in a two-hour timeframe not a marathon miniseries. In fact, I enjoyed seeing Michael Gambon, Ciaran Hinds, and Bill Paterson, all of whom I’ve seen in literature adaptations before.
Amazing Grace starts when Mr. Wilberforce is sick from fighting the British slave trade for years. He recounts his tale partly to himself, partly to a young woman who hopes to befriend him. And after some struggle, he recovers himself enough to fight again.
The real teeth of the story is in the political battles. It isn’t enough to argue the dehumanizing of trading men, women, and children for menial labor and bondage, nor the barbaric treatment they received in the holes of slave ships. The illogical counter-argument was that the slaves don’t appear to dislike their bondage or that the British empire would collapse if its slaves were sent home. Little ground could be made defending the humanity of slaves (similar to the personhood arguments we have today). So Wilberforce and his supporters had to find another way (which does not involve explosions or one-liners).
For more information on William Wilberforce books and articles, look into the links at Common Grounds.
Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling Youth
My admirable cousin, Jimmy Davis, has reviewed a Baker Books reference guide to youth counseling for Breakpoint.org. Here’s my entirely biased post on it. He writes:
Like the biblical book of Proverbs, this handy reference book brings together hundreds of wise, God-inspired sayings about the practical issues of living. Unlike Proverbs, this book categorizes its insights under almost one hundred different sub-headings making its collective wisdom easier to find. Why didn’t Solomon think of that?
…
Rather than dump dozens of verses about sexual purity into a box labeled “sexual purity” without any other helpful arrangement, the Millers have carefully sorted the verses related to each topic into smaller groups headed by a simple statement of truth. For example, under the heading “Dress/Clothes” the authors have organized twenty passages underneath ten simple statements such as “1. God has promised to supply our necessary clothing” and “2. He knows that we have need of clothing but asks that we give him priority in our lives” or “10. Spiritual qualities are the most important ‘clothing’.”
This particular topic was one of my favorites in the book because it summarized an excellent “theology of clothing.”
Read the rest of his review on the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling Youth.
Auster's Travels in the Asylum
“Say what one will about Auster’s repetition of devices – the book within a book, the off-stage tormentor, the loss of memory – he has become frightfully good at manipulating a good story out of them.” John Freeman reviews Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium.
Auster’s Travels in the Asylum
“Say what one will about Auster’s repetition of devices – the book within a book, the off-stage tormentor, the loss of memory – he has become frightfully good at manipulating a good story out of them.” John Freeman reviews Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium.
Damnation Street by Andrew Klavan
Had the opportunity to meet faithful commenter “Michael” today. He’s a pastor in my church body, and was here for a missions conference. He probably won’t see this for a few days, but nice to meet you, Michael.
One-line review of Andrew Klavan’s Damnation Street: “Woo-hoo!”
I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for Christmas, and Damnation Street was one of the books I chose to get with it. I don’t generally buy hardbacks, but I felt this was a special case.
It was, in fact, a more special case than I knew. Because it appears that Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop books (the previous ones are Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley) are not going to be an ongoing series, but a trilogy (unless I read the ending wrong).
I’ve told you about these books before. Klavan, author of such blockbusters as True Crime and Don’t Say a Word, made an abrupt shift from big thrillers to smaller mysteries, and the Weiss and Bishop series is the result.
The main characters are Scott Weiss, private detective, and Jim Bishop, his operative. Weiss is a large, sad-faced, fat man, an ex-cop who longs for goodness and justice and true love. Bishop is a wild man with sociopathic tendencies. He’s a special forces veteran who rides motorcycles and flies planes, parties hard, uses women and throws them away. But Weiss saw some decency in him long ago, and gave him a second chance.
Now he seems to have thrown that chance away. In Shotgun Alley he came close to selling Weiss out for the sake of a seductive girl who was using him just as he’d used so many other women. He’s left the firm, and is seriously considering a career in organized crime.
Which is why, as the story begins, Weiss is searching for Julie Wyant alone. We know Julie from Shotgun Alley. She’s a prostitute and one-time porn actress of rare beauty, and Weiss fell hopelessly in love with her without ever meeting her. But Weiss isn’t her only admirer. She is also the obsession of the Shadow Man, a mysterious contract killer. He’s a sadist and a natural chameleon. Five minutes after talking to him, people can’t remember what he looked like. He used Julie once in the past, and he decided she was the woman he intended to love—to death. She managed to escape him, and fled in terror at the things he’d done to her.
Shotgun Alley ended in a sort of stand-off between Weiss and the Shadowman. Weiss knew that if he found her (and finding people is what he does best) the Shadowman would be close behind. So he made the decision to leave her alone. (Sorry for the spoiler. I can’t see how to avoid it.)
Now Weiss has changed his mind. He’s decided that if he leaves Julie alone, the Shadowman will find her eventually anyway. The only way he can ensure her safety is to find her, use her to flush the Shadowman out, and eliminate him (by whatever means necessary).
Weiss is an old cop. A smart old cop; an intuitive old cop. But he’s not a killing machine like the Shadowman. He could use a back-up man, someone like Bishop. But Bishop’s not around anymore.
So Weiss goes on his own, tracing Julie Wyant’s path across the American southwest, learning her story, bit by bit. Watching his back, knowing the Shadowman is there somewhere, watching. Waiting.
The tension of the story is relieved by a seriocomic subplot involving the unnamed narrator, a young man working as a sort of intern in the agency. This plot thread is a romance, and—wonder of wonders—it has a Christian element. Hopeful Christian authors should read this book just to see how a real storyteller handles spiritual matters.
I loved this book. I can’t praise it highly enough. As I read it I couldn’t avoid the feeling that I was reading a novel that could be a turning point in the history of the detective story, just as the works of Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers and Raymond Chandler were. (That’s not saying it will have such an effect. That will only happen if the book gets the readership it deserves.) In my view, Klavan has taken the detective story to a whole new level of character depiction and spiritual exploration. This is more than a story about crime. It’s about love and hate and loneliness and longing. It’s about the deepest needs of the human soul—good and bad.
Not for children. Cautions are in order for language, violence and disturbing subject matter.
Just like real life.
A Feast For Crows, by George R. R. Martin
One line review of A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin: “I give up.”
I say that with great regret. In my view there’s only one contemporary fantasy author who bears comparison with J.R.R. Tolkien in any meaningful way, and that’s Martin. No other author in the field today comes close to him in combining fully realized worldbuilding with skillful prose and insightful character development. There’s no other contender in that weight category.
Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is loosely based on (or perhaps “suggested by” would be a better combination) the English Wars of the Roses. But Martin’s wars are bigger affairs. Britain has become Westeros, a full-fledged continent, home to a dozen kingdoms, as culturally diverse as the European Scandinavia-to-the-Mediterranean range. All are under the overlordship of the Iron Throne, but the death of the king in the first volume set off a rash of dynastic wars. The wars are big. The passions are big. The treachery would put the Borgias to shame. The crimes are appalling, the heroism…
Well, no. There isn’t any real heroism in these books, which is a major part of my problem with them. People who aspire to chivalry in these books generally get cut off pretty promptly, and those who survive mostly do so by lies, murder and betrayal. The only fighters Martin seems to admire much are the female ones, of which I counted about four (it’s hard to remember) in this book.
“It’s hard to remember” is something you’ll hear a lot from Martin’s readers. His method is not to put a few sympathetic characters on stage and follow them over time and geography, in Tolkien’s manner. Martin sets out dozens of characters (all of them admirably fleshed out) in hundreds of locations, and leaves it to the reader to keep them straight (with the help of character indexes in back, without which reading these books would be impossible for anyone not blessed with a photographic memory).
And that’s only the half of it. Martin explains in a note at the end of this volume that he’s left out half the characters and action in this section of the plot, and that he’ll provide those in the next volume. Just be patient. And keep your notes at hand.
And that’s the other part of my problem with Martin. He seems to have allowed his grand scheme to run away with him. His desire to populate his books with a cast of thousands is admirable in its way, but it’s taxing for the reader. I could probably hang on to the end (whenever that comes—Martin is coy on the projected length of the series) if I thought the payoff would be one I’d appreciate.
But Martin doesn’t appear to be preparing us for any Tolkienesque “eucatastrophe.” His message, judging from what we’ve seen so far, would seem to be the old, tired (and false) one that goes, “War never solves anything.” To drive that message home, he employs the device of regularly killing off characters we’ve started to root for, and in the most unpleasant ways he can think of.
So sorry, George. I’m not going to invest the effort you demand of me just so I can watch you kill off the rest of your viewpoint characters and hear you sing, “Give peace a chance.”
It’s been a good effort. But I have other things to do with my life.
The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
How was Christmas weekend in Iowa? No snow, but otherwise great. A special plus was the presence of the Oldest Niece’s boyfriend’s little daughter. I haven’t had small kids around for very many Christmases in my life, partly because of not having any of my own, and partly because I was living in the wrong part of the country when my nieces and nephews were growing up.
Anyone who was around during the Watergate era has feelings about the late President Gerald Ford. Even though I was a Democrat in those days, I always felt Pres. Ford got a raw deal. Particularly galling was the running joke, fueled by Chevy Chase and Saturday Night Live, labeling him as a stumblebum. The man was in fact one of the best natural athletes ever to occupy the Oval Office. I think some of my disdain for the mainstream media (both the entertainment and the journalism flavors) rises from that old injustice.
This was the Weekend of Autism for me. The Youngest Niece had rented the movie “Mozart and the Whale,” which is a straight-to-DVD film that deserved a better fate. It’s a comedy (really!) about a couple, played by Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell, who meet in a support group for sufferers from Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism). I found the movie pretty uncomfortable, because a lot of the behaviors I observed were ones I can see in myself (I’m not autistic or Asperger’s, but I test pretty high for autistic traits within the normal scale). Good movie, by the way (for grownups).
Then brother Moloch mentioned that he had a book called The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. So I read that too (Despite the discomfort I was fascinated).
The Curious Incident is an unusual and rewarding novel. The title (as most of our highly intelligent readers, I’m sure, already knew) comes from a bit of dialogue from the Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze” (“The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes).
The narrator of the novel is Christopher John Francis Boone, a fifteen-year-old autistic boy (and mathematical genius) who lives in a small town in England. One morning he finds a neighbor’s dog killed, stabbed with a large grilling fork. Like most autistic people, Christopher likes animals better than people, and he cradles the dog in his arms. The neighbor woman finds him like that and accuses him of killing the animal. When the police come they try to calm Christopher by touching him, which he cannot tolerate. He hits one of them and is arrested.
His father finally gets him released, but Christopher (in spite of his father’s forbidding it) decides to play detective (he loves mysteries) and solve the killing.
As he tries to emulate the heroes in books, Christopher gives us a vivid tour through the world of the autistic. Talking to people is very difficult, because he doesn’t understand facial expressions or speech inflections. Strange situations panic him—he needs to be able to draw a map of a house before he can be comfortable in it. Loud noises terrify him so that he has to curl up on the ground and groan loudly to try to drown them out.
Yet he manages to travel all the way to London on his own, and solve the mystery.
That his activities cause tremendous pain to the people who love him is something that doesn’t register with him at all. Because feelings and empathy are not part of Christopher’s world.
And that was one of the things I found most interesting in the book. The narrative includes numerous asides in which Christopher explains complicated mathematical problems or meditates on how “stupid” it is to believe in God or the afterlife. Christopher’s mathematical expertise almost gives his atheist arguments credence, but then the reader (or at least this reader) remembers that Christopher has no conception whatever of love. Numbers and animals are more real to him than people are. And when, at the end of the book, Christopher is able to report total success in his investigation, he is completely unaware of the devastation he has wrought in his father’s and mother’s lives.
I could have read something more cheerful over Christmas, but this book was certainly educational and fascinating. Even if (in autistic fashion) I’m not entirely sure I got from it the meaning the author intended.
Privileged Information by Stephen White
A while back I read an article (in National Review Online, I think) that recommended mystery authors conservatives might like. Among them were Jonathan Kellerman and Stephen White, both writers of books featuring psychologist detectives. I took to Kellerman right off. White delighted me less, but I’ve run through the Kellerman in paperback now, and I’ve decided to move on to White. Privileged Information is the book that kicked off White’s Alan Gregory series. Having completed it, I think I may have underrated him on the first book.
Alan Gregory practices in Boulder, Colorado. He is separated from his wife and lives with his dog. He has a healthy practice and likes to take long bike rides for recreation.
One of his patients, a seductive and sexually troubled woman, commits suicide. Somehow her father, a rich, powerful man, gets his hands on information that leads him to believe that Gregory has violated professional ethics by sleeping with her. He calls for an investigation aimed at getting his license revoked.
Then another recent female patient of Gregory’s is killed in an auto accident.
And another female patient is murdered.
A police detective begins to look closely at the psychologist’s life.
Meanwhile Gregory starts dating a local prosecuting attorney who has intimacy issues. And one of his male patients begins to act in a bizarre, threatening manner.
None of this is coincidence. Someone is working out a plan, and Gregory’s life (along with his girlfriend’s) will depend on his ability to analyze the workings of a very dangerous mind. Because the rules of privileged information prevent him from telling the police about certain things he knows. And the killer knows that and uses it.
I can’t think about Stephen White’s books without comparing them to Jonathan Kellerman’s. And in terms of plain fun, for me there’s no contest.
Kellerman’s world is California bright. I picture his scenes in vivid colors and sharp definition. White’s stories leave me with a darker feeling, evening in an impressionist painting. I have a harder time imagining what his characters look like.
To me, White seems more realistic. Alan Gregory isn’t an optimist like Kellerman’s Alex Delaware. He practices psychology more in the manner I’d practice it if I had gone into the field (which would have been insanely wrongheaded). Gregory has trouble leaving his work at the office. He agonizes over minor failures, the sort that lead patients to leave therapy, to say nothing of the big ones where patients kill themselves.
I think that’s the main reason I enjoy Kellerman’s books more. White’s books are uncomfortably close to home.
I haven’t really discerned the conservative elements the National Review promised me. There was a gratuitious swipe at the Reagans in this book. However, one plot element did satisfy my prejudices. A female character turns out to be wrong about a serious matter, and apologizes at the end. When was the last time you read a book where something like that happened?
So I think I’ll carry on with White. I think Alan Gregory may grow on me.
The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning
The Bookman’s Wake is the second book in a detective series starring Cliff Janeway. Janeway is a former cop who gave up police work to become a rare book seller. In this story he is approached by a former colleague, another ex-cop who has become a private detective. Janeway neither likes nor trusts the man, but is tempted by his offer—five thousand dollars to arrest a woman who has jumped bail, and bring her back to Denver for trial. Her picture looks nice, the money sounds good, and her case is interesting. She is accused of stealing (twice) a rare book printed by a legendary small publisher named Darryl Grayson, whose books are famous both for being almost perfect and extremely hard to find.
Things go badly very quickly. Janeway approaches her under an assumed identity (her name is—seriously—Eleanor Rigby), and finds they have much in common. She’s a “book scout.” She makes a precarious living prowling used bookstores and thrift shops for underpriced books she can sell to dealers at a profit. Though very young, she can teach Janeway some things about books. He meets her family, printers themselves (her father worked for the famous Grayson) and likes them too. She makes a sexual advance, but he turns her down, partly because of his deception and partly because of her age.
About the time he decides he can’t bear to turn her over to the police, Eleanor gets arrested anyway. Janeway ends up escorting her as originally planned, but then she is kidnapped by a mysterious thug with an agenda of his own. Janeway must pick his way through the intricate maze of an old mystery in order to rescue her.
I liked Dunning’s writing. He uses words with real skill, and his characters are interesting and mostly well drawn. His knowledge of the book trade makes reading his novel educational in itself.
I had a problem with his hero though. Cliff Janeway is supposed to be both a cerebral book lover and a very tough guy. The combination isn’t impossible or even unlikely, but Dunning didn’t make it work for me here. The contrast between Janeway’s normal narration and the action sequences where he becomes deadly and violent struck me as too extreme. It was as if there were two characters, with no connection between them. I’d have liked to have seen some transition, some reflection of each facet in the other. But perhaps I’m just operating from a preconception about book people.
Also, except for the final showdown, I thought Janeway was just too good in a fight. In particular, he comes up against one criminal supposed to be a shadowy, dangerous, deadly killer, but he handles him with ease. It would have increased plot tension and improved believability if Dunning had made the struggle a little harder.
I was also irritated by Dunning’s politics. He’s entitled to them, of course, and I’d defend to the death his right to work them into his novels, but that doesn’t mean I have to buy his books. Conservatives, here, are uniformly either stupid or venal, all television evangelists are evil con men, and any dissent from environmental causes is a sign of moral turpitude.
I was also amazed by one bad word choice that astonished me in a book so well-written. This is the offending sentence:
“But the deal had to be handled with tenterhooks. The woman was extremely nervous”
A guy who knows words as well as Dunning ought to be aware that tenterhooks are not instruments of delicate manipulation. Tenterhooks were tools in the old weaving industry. Lengths of cloth were hung from them for stretching. “Being on tenterhooks” means to be in a state of tension, not caution.
The Bookman’s Wake has much to recommend it, but I don’t think I’ll be patronizing that particular shop again.