I took a chance on the first novel in an unfamiliar detective series, Bad to the Bones, Book 1 of James Harper’s Evan Buckley series.
It held some interest, but didn’t work for me.
Private Eye Evan Buckley (I never really noticed where he
lives) suffers a shock and vows to end his meat and potatoes work –
investigating unfaithful spouses for divorce cases. His original motivation for
becoming a PI was to find missing people, like his own wife who disappeared
without explanation. A (surprisingly) friendly police detective refers him to a
woman whose son and husband both disappeared some years earlier. She believes
the police found an easy explanation and dropped the case without really
solving it. Evan vows to discover the truth for her.
Which he does. But the journey to the explanation seemed
weird to me. Character relationships struck me as unrealistic – people start by
snarling at each other, then suddenly become bosom buddies. The police don’t
operate like real police at all.
And the final “resolution” was so horrific that I couldn’t
at all comprehend the sense of closure we’re supposed to believe both Buckley
and his client feel at the end.
So I don’t really recommend Bad to the Bones. I saw potential in the author, so maybe the following books will be better.
There really isn’t much to say about a new Gray Man novel, except that it’s a Gray Man novel. One knows what to expect – rising levels of implausible, cinematic action, improbable endurance of injuries by the hero, and a running cast of characters who, if not profoundly portrayed, are interesting and amusing.
Mission Critical (Number 8 in the series) offers a couple fresh elements – new developments in the Romeo-and-Juliet-with-guns romance between hero Court Gentry and the former Russian agent Zoya Zakharova, and the introduction of a new villain whom Court, with all his skills, actually fears.
Court is catching a ride on a CIA transport flight when a
covert team transporting a hooded prisoner comes on board. Later, when the
prisoner is being transferred on a tarmac in England, the team is attacked by
unknown foreign agents – Court kills some of them, and is then sent by his
handlers to try to retrieve the prisoner.
Meanwhile Zoya, still being “debriefed” in a safe house in
the US, learns that her Russian spy father, whom she had believed dead, is
still alive. She makes a snap decision to escape and find him – thus narrowly
avoiding an attack on the house by hired assassins. Now she’s in the wind, and
the CIA is uncertain whether to consider her friendly or hostile.
There’s a big plot underway to deliver a devastating blow to
the intelligence services of all the English-speaking nations at a conference
in Scotland. It will take all Court, Zoya, and their teammates can do to stop
it – and there will be a price to pay.
Mission Critical was as good as any book in the Gray Man series, and they’ve all been good. High in entertainment value. The usual cautions apply for language, violence, and sexual situations.
After Shakespeare’s death his works were collected into a folio and printed. Two hundred thirty-three editions out of the seven hundred fifty originally printed still exist, and some of them have notes and marking from early readers. Now a Cambridge fellow believes he has compiled enough evidence to identify one annotator’s handwriting as belonging to the great John Milton.
Cambridge University fellow Jason Scott-Warren made the discovery in response to research conducted by Pennsylvania State University English professor Claire Bourne. Naturally he hesitated to suggest this, because it’s too easy to see what you want to see.
But he soon found that other scholars were agreeing with him. “Not only does this hand look like Milton’s, but it behaves like Milton’s writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks,” said Dr Will Poole at New College Oxford. “Shakespeare is our most famous writer, and the poet John Milton was his most famous younger contemporary. It was, until a few days ago, simply too much to hope that Milton’s own copy of Shakespeare might have survived — and yet the evidence here so far is persuasive. This may be one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times.”
You know what Anne Frank wrote about her experiences under Nazi oppression. Now another diary from a Jewish girl living under the Nazis is being released this month. Renia Spiegel lived in Przemyśl, Poland, and she started writing about Nazi attacks and family disappearances in 1939. Renia’s Diary has been translated by her sister, who lives in New York City.
What a terrible night! Horrible! Dreadful. I lay there with my eyes wide open, my heart pounding, shivering like I had a fever. I could hear the clanking of wheels again. Oh, Lord God, please help us! A truck rolled by. I could hear a car horn beeping. Was it coming for us? Or for someone else? I listened, straining so hard it felt like everything in me was about to burst.
I heard the jangling of keys, a gate being opened. They went in. I waited some more. Then they came out, taking loads of people with them, children, old people. One lady was shaking so much she couldn’t stand, couldn’t sit down. The arrests were led by some fat hag who kept yelling in Russian, “Sit, sit down now!” She loaded children onto the wagon. The whole night was horrific. I couldn’t wait for the dawn to come.
Some of the people were crying. Most of the children were asking for bread. They were told the journey would take four weeks. Poor children, parents, old people. Their eyes were filled with insane fear, despair, abandon. They took whatever they were able to carry on their slender backs. They are being taken to Birobidzhan. They will travel in closed, dark carriages, 50 people in each. They will travel in airless, dirty, infested conditions. They might even be hungry. They’ll travel for many long weeks, children dying as they pass through a supposedly happy, free country.
And how many will reach their destination? How many will die on the way from illness, infestation, longing? When they finally reach the end of this deportees’ route somewhere far into Asia, they will be stuck in rotting mud huts, hungry, exhausted, ironically forced to admire the happy workers’ paradise and sing this song:
A man stands as the master Over his vast Motherland
Christian leaders have attacked contemplatives on and off for centuries, banning their books and threatening contemplatives with prison, exile, or death. The more concentrated church power became, the more it opposed contemplation. This type of prayer is beyond the scope of leadership’s control because it is interior and personal, even if it is cultivated and supported in community or through spiritual direction.
Mystics of all stripes probably should be pushed against, because they tend to encourage a loosely defined Prozac spirituality that leaves religious distinctives in favor of personal inner peace. Contemplative prayer habits step into the space of mystical Christianity. But I suspect the modern evangelical criticism of it comes largely from modernist thinking, not solid biblical interpretation.
For generations we have been taught that segments of the Christian life can be accomplished in a few clear steps. For prayer, some teach the pattern of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. Such a pattern can be helpful in directing our prayers, but as with so many things we may hold to the pattern more than we hold to the Lord. And whether we pray this way or another way, we may hold to the answers we receive more than we hold to our Lord, even telling each other that our prayers were answered because we delivered them in a specific way. Contemplative prayer puts those things aside, so we have very little to hold onto and ask whether we’re doing it right.
If this is a habit that can cultivate a deeper satisfaction in Christ, then we need not neglect it.
I have enough thoughts for a lecture (if anybody wanted a lecture), but I’ll lay some of them out very briefly here.
The Church adjusts to the world. It isn’t determined by the world – or shouldn’t be – but we have to relate to people as they live, and we have to live in the world as it is. So we adjust our message to the tenor of the times. We have to. It’s not necessarily bad.
But it can be bad when it goes off the rails.
The modern world, I think, began with Isaac Newton. Newton occupied the role of prophet in European civilization, sparking what we call the Enlightenment. “God said let Newton be, and all was light,” as Alexander Pope wrote. The Enlightenment achieved the level of religion – and that religion was Deism, where God was sublimated into a cosmic Watchmaker. Intellectuals believed they now understood the laws of Nature, and soon all questions would be answered.
The Church followed the Enlightenment to an extent. Great emphasis was now placed on correct doctrine. Cold reason was elevated, in some quarters, to a theological virtue.
But the Enlightenment didn’t last long.
In practice, it was inadequate to actual human life. Enlightenment thought was like trying to feed people with vitamin pills only. Technically all the necessary nutrients might be there, but people need more than that. They need flavor and texture and scent. They need the whole human experience. The Enlightenment didn’t feed the soul.
So the Enlightenment was replaced. It was replaced by two
movements (you could call it one of them a sub-movement, but I like the sub-movement
too much to subordinate it).
The secular reaction was Romanticism. Romanticism reacted
against cold formalism and logical reductionism. Romanticism centered on passion.
Life was to be lived with intensity. Love and freedom were what made life
worthwhile.
But there was a theological corollary to Romanticism (some,
as I mentioned, would probably call it a sub-movement). This was Pietism (the
forerunner of contemporary Evangelicalism). To the rationality of Enlightenment
Christianity, the Pietists replied, “That’s not enough! Jesus’ greatest
commandment was not to understand God, but to love Him!” They emphasized a
personal experience with Christ and a life of growing sanctification, learning
to love Him more.
Now an argument can be made that Pietism led directly to the Liberalism of today’s mainline churches. It’s argued among Lutherans, in some quarters, that Pietism’s emphasis on personal experience led people to set their subjective feelings at the center of their faith – which is what Christian postmodernism is all about.
And there’s probably a measure truth in that.
But I would relate it, once again, to the Church’s habit of imitating the world. Christian postmodernism (I maintain) is mostly the fault of secular postmodernism. The nihilism and despair that followed the World Wars led secular thinkers to existentialism and moral relativism. The mainline churches followed suit, rejecting all authority, including that of the Bible and orthodox doctrine. (Leaving both the Pietists and the orthodox out in the cold.)
It wasn’t the Pietists’ fault, in my view. But they did get
sucked in.
The one unifying principle of all these theological fashions, it seems to me, is following the world. We have to adjust to the world, but we must not let it set our agenda.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12;2, ESV)
The second season of the Icelandic miniseries, Trapped, (I reviewed Season One below) was – in some ways – superior to the first (in my view). There were parts I didn’t care for, but I admit that was mostly due to my personal opinions and tastes.
Two years have passed since we last saw our bearded hero,
Andri Olafsson (Olafur Darri Olafsson). He’s moved back to Reykjavik to be a
cop there again, one assumes to be close to his daughters, who were living with
his ex-wife. Only the older one, Thorhildur, has returned to the small town of
Siglufjordur to be close to her friends – especially a particular boy. She is
now a rebellious teenager, and in the tradition of teenaged girls in thrillers,
is a complete idiot when it comes to her personal safety.
Andri is called back to Siglufjordur when a local farmer one
day appears near Parliament in Reykjavik, sets himself on fire, and tries to
ignite the Minister of Industries along with himself. She is, in fact, his twin
sister, a Siglufjordur native who long ago turned her back on the place. He had
been involved in protests against the expansion of an aluminum plant near his
home, as well as with right-wing nationalist groups. Shortly after Andri is
reunited with his old team of local cops, a manager at the plant is murdered,
setting off a string of crimes and arrests that culminate in a kidnapping and a
pursuit across the heaths.
There were several elements in the series that rubbed me the
wrong way. One was the involvement of right-wing groups – though when I think
of it, they were treated with surprising understanding. Another was the cliché of
the predatory industry that thinks it can make money by killing its customers.
Most uncomfortable of all was a subplot about homosexuals. Instead of the brief
heterosexual sex scene we saw in the first series, this time we got two men
involved in displays of affection – at one point in bed together. These are my
principles – I care about whether homosexuals live or die. I care that they not
be railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit. But I cannot be made to care whether
the boy gets the boy. There is no microscope sensitive enough to detect my
interest in that subject.
Another problem is the family relationships. Most of the
suspects (and victims) are bound (in classic saga style, I’ll admit) by a bewildering
tangle of marriages, divorces, and irregular liaisons. Everybody is a cousin or
an in-law of all the others, and for the life of me I couldn’t keep it all straight.
On the other hand, there were some fine elements here.
Because this story is set in the fall, we lose the claustrophobia of the snowed-in
town that so permeated Season One. Now we’re treated to vistas of Icelandic
heaths and mountains, herds of horses and flocks of sheep. Conscious tribute is
paid to the sagas, especially in a plot thread where a local boy flees the
police on horseback across the fells, looking for all the world like an outlaw
of old.
The resolution worked out in the same spirit as Season One –
the mystery is solved, the hostage rescued, but in a general environment of
ancient injuries, unhealed psychological wounds, and the shock of an Episode 8
plot development that blindsided me (at least).
All in all, fascinating TV, and pretty watchable. Cautions
for language and all the stuff I talked about.
A stupid 19th Century conception of a Viking skald.
In Trapped, the Icelandic miniseries I reviewed last night, both in the first season (which I reviewed) and the second (which I’m watching now), there’s a female character named Kolbrun. It was a familiar name to me, and by coincidence I came to the Tale of Tormod Kolbrunarskald in my reading of the Norwegian translation of Flatøy Book. Obviously this was a sign from heaven that I should share Tormod’s story with you.
Tormod Kolbrunarskald is an important character in the Saga of St. Olaf. He doesn’t appear in my novel, The Elder King, but I expect he’ll show up in a later book, because he’s an important character and has one of the most memorable deaths in saga literature. But that’s not my topic tonight. My topic is his backstory.
I’d always assumed that he got his nickname, which means “dark-brow poet,” because he had dark eyebrows. Turns out that’s not true. His nickname actually means, “Dark-Brow’s Poet”
This is the tale (in highly condensed form).
Tormod Bersesson was living at his father’s farm in
Laugabol, Iceland. Nearby, at a farm called Ogr, there lived a widow named
Grima who had a beautiful daughter named Tordis. Tormod got in the habit of
visiting Ogr, and spending time in private with the girl.
Eventually Grima, the mother, took Tormod aside and suggested
that he should either ask for the girl’s hand honestly, or leave her alone for
the sake of her reputation. Tormod hemmed and hawed, so to show she was
serious, Grima sent a thrall to kill Tormod, but the poet escaped with a wounded
hand.
After that, Tormod relocated to a fishing station his father
had at Bolungarvik. Nearby lived another widow, named Katla, who had a daughter
named Torbjorg, who was nicknamed Kolbrun because of her dark eyebrows.
Tormod thought Kolbrun not quite as pretty as Tordis, but nevertheless he started spending time with her. To gain her favor he wrote a series of poems, the “Kolbrun Poems.”
Later, when winter came, Tormod moved back to Laugabol, and renewed his visits with Tordis. At first she was distant. “I heard that you wrote a series of poems for a girl at Bolungarvik named Kolbrun,” she said.
“Oh, no!” Tormod lied. “That story is completely wrong. I
didn’t write those poems for Kolbrun. I wrote them for you.” He immediately recited
them for her, but changed the words so they now praised Tordis. Tordis was
pleased with this.
But that night, Tormod had a terrible dream. He saw Kolbrun floating in the darkness in front of his bed. She said, “You have broken your word to me. It’s dangerous to break your word to a witch. I will now lay this curse on you – your eyes will swell up and grow terribly painful. They will swell so that if it isn’t stopped they’ll pop right out of your head. The only way you can prevent this from happening is by announcing in public that the poems are mine, not Tordis’s, and that you lied.”
Tormod woke in terrible pain, and slept no more that night.
As soon as he could he assembled family and friends and confessed his lie.
Immediately his eyes improved, and soon he was well again.
But forever after he was known as Tormod, Kolbrun’s Poet.
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