Today I got a little translation work to do. Not a lot, but there are reasons to hope things may pick up a bit.
And I did a little housework.
And I have nothing to write about. I’m blank. In lieu of an actual intellectual contribution to the world wide web, I offer the opening titles from a truly mediocre Viking movie, The Long Ships, with Richard Widmark.
This film, beyond its general inaccuracy and implausibility, commits the great sin of being unworthy of its source material — the fine novel The Long Ships, by Fran Gunnar Bengtsson.
You may note that the ship’s rudder is (properly) on the starboard side in some shots, and occasionally on the port side. This is the result of a cheat on the film editors’ parts. They just reversed the print. For some reason.
I owned a 45 rpm vinyl disc of this song — a cousin had it and didn’t want it, and she gave it to me. I think I listened to it once — somehow I left it sitting a car window and it melted.
Only the first of many disappointments connected with this movie.
I was in a mood for a change of pace from intense crime thrillers, and thought I’d look for a good, old-fashioned police procedural. I found it in The Last Straw, Paul Gitsham’s first in a series starring Detective Chief Inspector Warren Jones of the (fictional) Middlesbury police force, in England.
Professor Alan Tunbridge of the (also fictional) University of Middle England’s biology department was a genius and, by all accounts, a pretty vile man. He abused his colleagues, exploited and sabotaged his student assistants, and pursued any pretty young woman who came his way.
Nevertheless, he didn’t deserve to have this throat cut.
Which is what happened, in his office, on a day when the laboratory building
was nearly empty.
A suspect is quickly identified. A figure on the building’s closed circuit TV is readily identifiable as a former student of Tunbridge’s, an Italian man with good reason to hate him. When bloodstained clothing is found on the man’s property, it follows naturally he must be arrested and charged.
But DCI Warren Jones, newly promoted and transferred in to
Middlesbury, is a stickler for “dotting the Is and crossing the Ts,” as he
repeatedly says. And he and his subordinates begin to have doubts about the evidence.
Looking more closely, they begin to uncover a ruthless conspiracy, one which
will not stint at committing further murders to keep its secrets — and even cops are not safe.
To be honest, I found The Last Straw a little dull at first. I’ve grown accustomed to angst-ridden detectives, bedeviled by alcoholism, PTSD, bad marriages and ingrown guilt. DCI Jones is another kind of policeman altogether. He’s healthy, well organized, and generally cheerful. And when personal conflicts appear on his team, he handles them in a manner that’s an example to us all. I do worry about his marriage though – his wife is remarkably patient, but the pressure is heavy.
The book grew on me. It didn’t hurt that a couple of the characters identified as Christians and church-goers. I recommend The Last Straw for a more leisurely read than common in the genre, with only a mild caution for language.
I’d been told that Hollywood was where you went if you wanted to sell your soul to make movies. I went, but I never sold my soul. No one would buy it. I just got tired of carrying it around.
As a fantasy writer myself, I resent the way an interloper, like thriller writer Andrew Klavan, can just waltz in and write a compelling fantasy without (apparently) breaking a sweat or learning the secret handshake.
I comfort myself by finding a few nitpicks in my generally
enthusiastic reception.
The hero of Another Kingdom is Austin Lively, a lowly Hollywood “story analyst.” A story analyst reads unsolicited scripts, and novels under consideration for script development, for Hollywood studios. Austin wrote a very good script once, but it died in development purgatory. Now he just gets by, a Hollywood drone, the despair of his high-achieving family.
But one day he has an impulse to re-read a book he “analyzed”
a while back. The author withdrew it from consideration, but it stuck in his
mind. He can’t find it on Amazon, and no bookseller seems to have it. On his
way to check out another possibility, he walks through a doorway…
And finds himself in a tall castle window, teetering over the edge. He has a bloody dagger in his hand, and a beautiful woman lies dead, stabbed to death, on the floor behind him. Armed men break in and arrest him, dragging him off to a dungeon. There he nearly loses his mind with fear, until the guards come to take him away for torture. As he passes through the door again, he is transported back to Los Angeles…
Where he soon finds himself being hunted by a sexually
ambiguous hit man, who works for a billionaire – who just happens to be the man
who employs his father, his mother, and his brother. Who also owns the studio
where Austin works.
Somebody will be killed, and Austin will be blamed. And all
the while, at uncontrollable intervals, when he least expects it, Austin will
be dropped back into the world of Another Kingdom, where he is now part of the
resistance to a tyrannical government, fighting to bring back the rightful
queen.
Each time he passes into Another Kingdom, he learns
something – something that helps him survive in the “real world” of Los
Angeles. And gradually he matures, becoming the man he always wanted to be, but
never believed he could be.
Because this is Klavan, I assume Another Kingdom is Christian fantasy. But it’s not like your ordinary Christian fantasy (not even mine). There’s foul language, and sex scenes without any reference to Christian morality. I’m expecting the lessons to be deeper, and to become apparent later in the trilogy.
I had a few quibbles, as I mentioned. The medieval fantasy world of Another Kingdom seems to me pretty much pro forma, a city boy’s imagination. It lacked verisimilitude, for me. I don’t expect a medieval manor house to have glass doors (too expensive and fragile). A horse is lent to the hero, and all he does with it is ride it – he doesn’t feed it or unsaddle it or rub it down or check its feet. It’s just there for his use, like a car.
But the trademark Klavan storytelling delights are all here –
the action never lets up, and one deadly peril follows the other in breathtaking
style. This book will not bore you, not for one moment. I recommend it (with
cautions for adult stuff) and look forward to the rest of the trilogy.
This is my formal announcement of the release of The Elder King, the latest book in the Erling Skjalgsson series. Available as an e-book for Amazon Kindle.
Tell your friends.
By coincidence, today, March 25, is the anniversary of the Battle of Nesjar in 1016. The battle is described in this book.
Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”
. . .
There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”
Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.
The famous phrase, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” was inspired by this book [Heimskringla]: Snorri is indeed a deft biographer.
Any Viking aficionado can’t help being aware of Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic chieftain who penned Heimskringla, the sagas of the Norwegian kings, and the Prose Edda, which tells us almost everything we know about Norse mythology. He is an essential figure in the lore – Tom Shippey called him “the most influential writer of the Middle Ages.”
And yet, although he has a saga we can read, most of us don’t know a lot about his life (the saga is rather sad and bloody, and was written by a relation who disliked him. I confess I haven’t read it). So Nancy Marie Brown, who wrote Ivory Vikings, which I reviewed not long ago, has done us a service by writing his biography for a modern audience in Song of the Vikings.
Song of the Vikings follows Snorri’s life story, and integrates it with commentary on his important works (some of the attributions have been questioned, but Brown seems to accept them). Thus we get insight on the events of his life through considering the things he wrote that appear to have been informed by them. For instance, the content of Heimskringla bears witness to Snorri’s ambivalent attitude toward the institution of kingship – he was somewhat star-struck by kings (and may have collaborated to subvert the Icelandic republic for a Norwegian king), but he had bitter experience of royal capriciousness. His narrative of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, may relate to some bad years Iceland suffered following devastating volcanic eruptions, and also the violence that accompanied the breakdown of his own (somewhat cynical) schemes to make himself “the uncrowned king of Iceland.”
The book begins with an anecdote about J.R.R. Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis, and we learn much about the amazing influence of Snorri’s work
throughout the world’s literature and art – for better and worse. This is all
the more remarkable because his books weren’t even known outside Iceland until
around the beginning of the 17th Century.
I was very impressed by Song of the Vikings. Any reader interested in Norse history or myth will gain many new insights. Author Brown is a good writer and an impressive scholar. I recommend this book.
Richard Brookhiser: “The Brookhiser Decimal System depends on memory. Why is volume 2 of My Struggle (Karl Ove Knausgaard) next to Churchill, Roosevelt & Company(Lewis Lehrman)? Because I put them there, and I know that is where I can go to find them. (Sometimes I am distracted by ghost memories of the locations of books I have given away.)” He also loves Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child.
Joseph Epstein: “One [bookcase] contains the works of the authors I most admire along with books about them . . . A bookcase alongside it contains exclusively Library of America books, which look, if I may say so, better than they read (the typeface and leading leave much to be desired), a number of which I’ve not read, and a few more of which I have no wish to read. “
Micah Mattix on his library’s disorganization: “I have developed an attachment to the inefficiency of trying to find that damn Sophocles or godforsaken Gregory Corso. Plus, it reminds me of life — disordered, exasperating, but punctuated by the momentary thrill of finding just the thing you’re looking for. “
Terry Teachout: “Unwealthy New Yorkers can’t afford homes large enough to amass libraries, and while degenerate city collectors keep books in the oven, I’ve never been reduced to that pitiful extremity. ” (via Terry Teachout)
My Close Personal Friend Gene Edward Veith posts an interesting meditation today on the differences between the ways conservatives and progressives think — and how Christians are (or should be) distinct from both.
It would follow that Christians, while tending towards conservatism, would also be sensitive to some of the evils that bother progressives. But they would see them as violations of God’s design, rather than as an excuse to violate that design further. Christians would have at best modest hopes for what human governments and “nation-states” can accomplish, avoiding all utopian thinking–whether of the conservative or the progressive variety–in a spirit of realism and skepticism, even while they do what they can to advance the common good. The Christian’s hope is fixed not so much on this world, which will soon pass away, but on the world to come–on Christ who has atoned for the sins of the world and who will reign as King over the New Heaven and the New Earth.
From this perspective, Christians must sometimes be progressive, sometimes conservative, in relation to changing conditions.
I’m sure (because they keep saying it) that my progressive friends truly believe that we are on the brink of a fascist takeover. That we must all run to the port side of the boat right away, lest we tip over to starboard.
I can’t see that. We have an (imperfectly) conservative president, and one house of Congress that’s sort of conservative on a good day. Our educational system, our government bureaucracies, our news media and our entertainment media are uniformly progressive — and at the moment they’re competing with one another to prove who can be the most like Mao.
I’ll continue to sit over here on the starboard side, thanks. Wake me up when the president closes down a newspaper.
In the book of Daniel, there’s a reference that’s always intrigued me to a being called “a Watcher, a Holy One.” I think such beings are usually explained as some kind of angel. I suspect – though I’m not sure – that some characters in Mark W. Sasse’s Forgotten Child Trilogy may be meant to be the same kind of creatures, though here they’re not exactly angels.
A Parting In the Sky is the third and final book in the trilogy. Our protagonist, Francis Frick, a repentant arms merchant, does not actually do a lot in this volume, being confined to a hospital bed. The main characters are Ash, a “watcher,” and Hatty Parker, a young black woman who has become Francis’s friend and ally.
Another main character in the previous books, “Bee,” a sort
of giggling fairy who loves pomegranates and blithely disregards the rules by
which Watchers operate, also plays a diminished role. Bee is beloved both by
Francis and by Ash, but she is banished from our world for her insubordination.
However, in her absence Ash finds himself restored and strengthened, and he
carries on her program for Francis and his friends, to the anger of his
superior.
The wicked arms merchants against whom Francis and Hatty are
now working are planning a major act of terror before fleeing the US with their
ill-gotten gains. Hatty willingly surrenders herself to her enemies, trusting
that the powers watching over her will use her to stop the evil. Things will
work out in a way beyond anyone’s hope.
The Forgotten Child trilogy is as strange a series of books as I’ve ever read. I can’t claim that the writing is elegant or precise – Sasse doesn’t know how to use the word “myriad,” for instance, and he makes other errors of diction.
But I enjoyed the books immensely. There’s an innocence and simplicity there (worked into a very complex, globe-hopping plot) that pleases and delights.
They’re the kind of books that might be Christian, but the Christianity is obliquely expressed. There seems to be an argument about theodicy embedded in the story. I recommend these books.
I didn’t even knowThe American Spectator Online posted on Sundays. But that was when the put up my latest column. And I guess it’s appropriate to the subject matter.
