Fiction, Reviews

‘Do-Overs,’ by Jon Spoelstra

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Time travel books form an interesting sub-genre of science fiction. Some writers like to play with the inherent paradoxes of the time-line – what happens if the hero kills his own grandfather? What happens if he meets himself? Suppose you killed Hitler as a baby – would fate provide a second-string substitute and history go on pretty much the same?

Other time travel stories are more about memory and regret. That’s the case with Jon Spoelstra’s Do-Overs, a book tailor-made to appeal to people of a certain age, who have life regrets. As a man who meets both criteria, I liked it.

Roy Hobbs (same name as the hero of The Natural) used to be a Chicago news reporter. Then his ex-wife, whom he still cared for, fell victim to a vicious serial killer. Roy wrote a bestselling book about the murders. But he lost all the money he earned.

Now he’s gotten an invitation from a reclusive billionaire, one of the old Silicon Valley computer moguls. He and a group of his fellow billionaires have pooled their resources on something like a privately funded Manhattan Project. Their purpose was to prove the existence of parallel universes. This, he says, they have accomplished. There are multitudes of parallel universes, mostly differing from one another only in minor details. By traveling between these universes, it’s possible to move about in time – though never in our own universe; only in the others.

What he wants from Roy, he says, is a book. A book only he himself will read. He wants the book to describe Roy’s own subjective experiences in parallel universes, not the science. The payment will be princely. Roy sees no reason to refuse.

Naturally, he travels to his own past. There, he observes himself meeting his wife for the first time. He is astonished at the sensation of seeing her, and falling in love again. But on another trip, as he’s following her around, she notices him and makes an excuse to meet him. She feels, she tells him, a strange attraction to him (in spite of their near-thirty-year age difference). Apparently, Roy comes to believe, there’s such a thing as a “cosmic connection,” which binds souls (or something) together, even across universes.

Enthused by this renewed passion, Roy makes up his mind to travel to many universes and stop the killer early in his career, saving his wife and as many women as possible. What he doesn’t realize is that this cosmic connection connects more than love – he may have given the murderer the key to a longer, even bloodier career in countless iterations.

Do-Overs was adequately written. The prose wasn’t memorable, and there were occasional grammatical slips, as in when we’re told a character “had drank” wine. The narrator also speaks of an “uncompromising position” when he means a “compromising position.”

But the storytelling was adequate, it kept my interest, and I cared about the characters. We’ve all imagined going back and fixing our lives’ mistakes. It was pleasant to follow a character doing just that.

There was a little more sex than I thought necessary in this book, and it was just a tad more explicit than it had to be. Is it immoral to go to bed with a woman you just met, when she’s been your wife already in another universe? Intriguing question.

However that is, I found Do-Overs quite a lot of fun. Recommended.

Authors, The Press, Writing

3 things: Chapel, Mano, and red ink

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Three items for you tonight. The video above, in case you care to view it, is my sermon last Thursday in the chapel of the Free Lutheran Bible College and Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. I note that it times out at 17 minutes, 57 seconds. The time frame they allotted me was 18 minutes. I did no padding or cutting on the sermon – it was the right length pretty much out of the chute. This is something I seem to have been born able to do, writing to a set time. I find it wholly inexplicable. Anybody know a politician who needs a speech writer? I work cheap. Preferably a conservative; I hate being a greater hypocrite than I already am.

Secondly, our friend Dave Lull, ever on the watch for references to the late author D. Keith Mano, for whom I cherish a fondness, sent me the link to this piece from National Review. An excerpt:

Keith was soon established within our senior ranks and was included in the periodic “off-sites,” where vexed NR policies were (endlessly) debated and (occasionally) resolved. He and I would sit together, two high-school sophomores in the back row of an algebra class, with D. Keith providing sotto voce commentary on the otherwise tedious proceedings. On one occasion I lost it and laughed out loud. NR publisher William Rusher, who on solemn occasions made himself available for hall-monitor duty, barked at us from across the room, “Perhaps Freeman and Mano would care to share that witticism with the rest of the group.” (We did not care to share it. It was about Rusher.)

Thirdly: Report from the writing front: I’m in the process of doing a paper revision on The Baldur Game. It’s well known that I’ve been almost entirely assimilated by the digital Borg; I read and write mostly electronically. Yet I retain a semi-superstitious conviction that I ought to do at least one revision per book in red pen on printed sheets. That’s what I’m doing right now.

And you know what? It does seem to be different on paper. I almost feel as if I’ve re-written the book by hand, in red ink. (Some of it’s even almost legible.)

I had thought the polishing stage was almost complete on this thing. I was surprised find so much substandard writing all of a sudden, like shining ultraviolet light on a crime scene. I’ve never noticed any difference in the reading experience between paper books and my Kindle. Yet revision, somehow, seems to be different.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lone Wolf,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Clouds boiled up over the opposing ridge, backlit and tumultuous. A scorched violet sangria sky breathed its last breaths. Nighttime had dusk in its teeth already, choking it out. There was electricity in the air, and the sky was vast and dangerous, and somewhere far to the west over the Malibu hills, the tide thrashed against the coast. Alone for a moment on this spot, Evan had the feeling of standing on the planet itself.

At this point in my reading life, there are two annual events I look forward to like Christmas. One is Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels. The other is Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels. A new Orphan X is just out. It’s called Lone Wolf, and I think it may be the best so far.

Evan Smoak, our hero, lives his life according to his operational Ten Commandments (essentially based on Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, who is a friend of the author). This keeps his existence tight and controlled, as he carries out his vocation of helping the helpless, when summoned by a call to his private phone number.

So it’s out of character for him to lose himself for days on an alcoholic binge. But that’s just what he’s doing at the beginning of Lone Wolf. To be fair, he’s been having a rough time lately. His goth foster daughter Joey, who just started college, has decided she wants to pledge a sorority, and is suffering all kinds of female angst. The neighbors at his condo are trying to involve him in a HOA president takeover scheme. But the real problem is that he just met – at last – his birth father, and the meeting was nothing at all like he’d anticipated.

But he has another family member, also recently discovered – a loser, alcoholic brother. And that brother has a daughter – Evan’s niece. When she calls in desperation, asking Evan to help her find her missing dog (the ugliest dog Evan ever saw), he tries to explain that this isn’t the kind of thing he does. But her tears move him irrationally. Okay, he’ll do what he can.

Little does he know that the search will lead him to a murder – the murder of a brilliant scientist in the Artificial Intelligence field. When he realizes that this murder is just one in a string of assassinations, all carried out against people with connections to cutting-edge computing, he has to go hunting for the assassin, who turns out to be an incredibly dangerous – and ruthless – young woman.

Gregg Hurwitz turns out excellent prose (though I did catch one grammatic error). But where he really excels is as a plotter. Lone Wolf is packed with breakneck action, and the breathing intervals feature hilarious farce, as Evan and Joey, each in their own ways, find themselves operating in worlds way outside their comfort zones.

There’s also a disturbing preview of a possible dystopian future. And in the end, another personal kick in the stomach for Evan.

Lone Wolf is a really, really good novel, in spite of some “girl boss” moments. Cautions for language and violence.

Music

Sunday Singing: Make Me a Captive, Lord

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Today’s hymn was written by Rev. George Matheson of Glasgow, Scotland (1842-1906). He published several works of prose and poetry while serving as a parish minister. His most popular hymn is “O Love, That Wilt Not Let Me Go.” “Make Me a Captive, Lord” was published in 1890. The tune was written in 1862 by George William Martin of London.

“Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.” (Psalm 146:3–4 ESV)

1 Make me a captive, Lord,
and then I shall be free;
force me to render up my sword,
and I shall conqueror be.
I sink in life’s alarms
when by myself I stand;
imprison me within Your arms,
and strong shall be my hand.

2 My heart is weak and poor
until it master find;
it has no spring of action sure —
it varies with the wind.
It cannot freely move,
till You have forged its chain;
enslave it with Your matchless love,
and deathless it shall reign.

3 My power is faint and low
till I have learned to serve;
it lacks the needed fire to glow,
it lacks the breeze to nerve;
it cannot drive the world,
until itself be driven;
its flag can only be unfurled
when You shall breathe from heaven.

4 My will is not my own
until to You it’s given;
it must its earthly crown resign
if it would reach to heaven;
it only stands unbent,
amid the clashing strife,
when on Your bosom it has leant,
and found in You its life.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

Things Napoleon Said and Award Censorship

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May I share some quotes and marginalia from my old quotation book with you today?

Cervantes said in Don Quixote, “There are no proverbial sayings which are not true.”

To say, “a man has an axe to grind,” first appeared in print in “Essays from The Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe” by Charles Miner, published in 1811 in the Wilkesbarre Gleaner, a Pennsylvania newspaper.

Another phrase, that sounds out of fashion to me, is “to mix with brains.” English portrait painter John Opie was asked what he mixed his colors with. He answered, “I mix them with my brains, sir.”

During a debate, when one of Phocian the Good’s (402-320 BC) statements stirred up applause of the audience, he asked a nearby friend, “Have I inadvertently said some evil thing?”

Napoleon (1769-1821) has these words attributed to him (without sources):

“Imagination rules the world.”
“I made all my generals out of mud.”
“There are two levers for moving men–interest and fear.”
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
“Independence, like honor, is a rocky island without a beach.”

Greek general Aristides (530-468 BC) said, “The Athenians will not sell their liberties for all the gold either above or under ground.”

And, finally, the Stoics had this proverb, according to Plutarch: “The good man only is free; all bad men are slaves.”

Do all of those right true? They aren’t all proverbial, so we could cut them a bit of slack. What else do we have?

Volcanos: Seven years after Vesuvius erupted, a Jesuit priest climbed it to make his observations. “I thought I beheld the habitation of hell.”

Books: Simon Leys asked, “Are books essentially useless?” Well, they aren’t food.

Sci-Fi Award Censorship: The Hugo Awards are being held in China this year and some notable works were declared ineligible without explanation. Authors conjecture the Chinese government is to blame. Two members of the nomination board have resigned in response.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Religion, Writing

‘If you don’t tell them a story…”

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Unsplash license, in collaboration with Getty Images.

[The following is the text of the sermon I delivered at the chapel at the Free Lutheran Bible College/Seminary this past Thursday,]

And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’” (Luke 8: 9-10, ESV)

Dr. Sebastian Gorka tells a story about when he was writing his book, Defeating Jihad. When he’d finished it, he showed it to his wife and asked her what she thought of it. As a writer myself, I know what he wanted to hear. He wanted her to tell him it was the most wonderful book she’d ever read, and it would certainly be a bestseller and change the world.

But she didn’t say that. What she did was ask, “Is that all there is?”

He said yes. Here were his facts and his arguments. What was there left to say?

She told him, “You need to tell a story. Nobody will listen to you if you don’t tell them a story.”

So he went back to his word processor and he wrote an introduction. In that introduction, he told the story of a young man who’d been in the underground in Communist Hungary, back in the days of the Soviet Union. He was betrayed by the famous English traitor Kim Philby, and arrested by the government. Imprisoned and tortured.

Then, in 1956, the Hungarians staged an uprising. The man was released from prison, but he knew the Communists were coming back. He made plans to escape to the west. When he left, he took a friend’s 17-year-old daughter with him, at that friend’s request. The man wanted his daughter to live in the free world. They made the very dangerous journey across the border, and ended up in England. Later he married the girl, and they were Dr. Gorka’s parents. He says that whenever people talk to him about the book, they never want to talk about the main text. They ask him about that story.

“Nobody will listen to you if you don’t tell them a story.”

If God had asked my advice, back when He was planning how He’d reveal Himself to Mankind through a book, I’d have told Him to give us a book of Systematic Theology. You start out with a chapter on Epistemology – the science of how we know things. Then I’d suggest a chapter on Trinitarian Theology. And a chapter on the Incarnation. A chapter on Soteriology, the theology of salvation. At the end, a chapter on Eschatology, the Last Things. Everything organized, like the books I used to stock up in the bookstore for seminary classes. I’d want it laid out neatly, with headings and subheadings. Charts and bullet points would be nice, too. Think of all the theological arguments we’d be spared!

But for some reason – and theologians marvel at it to this day – God did not consult me on the subject.

Continue reading ‘If you don’t tell them a story…” →
Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 2

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The father and son parted with little love lost between them. Many people wished Grettir a safe journey, but few a safe return.

I have finished reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I have much to say about it, though I fear a lot of it strays into the deep grass.

My main takeaway from the saga, as I stated yesterday, is that the real-life hero, Grettir Asmundarsson, seems to have been a psychopath, very likely suffering from PTSD. Even in a book written in the 14th Century, his status echoes ancient tribal attitudes. The heroes of ancestral times were not admired for their moral virtue. A remnant of this world view remains, in residual form, even in our English language. Our word “great” has two meanings. The common one (in our time) is that of “important” or “admirable.” But its older meaning was “large.” We still speak of a Great Hall or a greatcoat. In the same way, old heroes like Sigurd the Dragon Slayer could massacre whole villages of innocent people and still be considered heroes and great men. Because greatness was about magnitude, not virtue. Likewise, Grettir is a hero because he does things in a big way, whether it’s killing men or lifting heavy objects.

Reading the saga from a historical perspective, I noted that most of the episodes where Grettir comes off as heroic by our standards – a virtuous hero – are implausible scenes involving either invulnerable berserkers or supernatural creatures like witches or ghosts. Even the scenes of Grettir’s death, which are likely to have some factual base, are embroidered with elements of witch’s curses, which the saga writer found necessary in order to explain his invulnerable hero’s death at the hands of common men. (Though in an odd interpolation, Grettir finds a friend who’s even stronger than himself. No actual magic is attributed to this character, but one gets the feeling he’s not entirely human.)

The only plausible episode where Grettir exhibits mercy is one calculated to advance his own interests. He spares the life of a son of Snorri the Godi [Chieftain] (an important saga character who makes a brief appearance in my novel, West Oversea), who has come out after him as a sort of bounty hunter. Grettir understands that winning Snorri’s friendship through letting his son live could win him a powerful friend, something he badly needs by now.

Indeed, one remarkable thing about Grettir’s saga is the fact that he had all kinds of prominent connections – “Almost all the chieftains in the country were related to Grettir… either by blood or by marriage.” He’s related to the Norwegian royal family too. And yet he can’t seem to catch a break with the law. (For all I’ve written and said about the importance of the Law to the Norse, your father’s status and who you knew counted for a lot. Rich men’s sons could usually find a way to wiggle out of legal scrapes with their skin intact, even as today. The fact that Grettir couldn’t make this old boy network work for him, seems to have convinced his family and friends that he must have been under some unique curse).

There’s a hint of character development in the later chapters, when Grettir, formerly entirely reckless of consequences, now searches for a way to attain a peaceful life. He’s been outlawed, which means he can’t leave the country and is legal prey for killing. In the end, he will hold the record for survival in an outlaw state – 20 years (though there’s some inconsistency about that figure in the text here). He holes up on the natural fortress of Drangey island, where he fights off repeated attacks. It’s at this point that he becomes a more sympathetic character. He’s terrified of the dark and of being alone – though he knows from experience that few men are to be trusted. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what his killers’ real story is – Grettir has been living by robbery, and he never hesitated to use violence. Stealing sheep and other food could have serious consequences in a marginal economy  The charge that his killers employed witchcraft is not impossible (at least technically – I don’t believe their magic actually worked), but it seems to me more likely the witchcraft stuff was added by the author (who was possibly related to Grettir) in order to make his hero more sympathetic. No small task, with this guy’s record.

An element in the saga which I’d never noticed before (perhaps it was bowdlerized in previous translations I’ve read, or maybe I just forgot) is a couple sexual situations. In one scene, which would have played better in the 14th Century than it does today, a serving woman makes fun of Grettir’s physical endowment, so he rapes her to teach her a lesson. In another, he spends some time sharing a house with a woman whose husband is away, saving her from a monstrous troll woman who’s been ravaging the farm. He leaves a souvenir behind:

Towards the end of that summer, Steinvor from Sandhaugar gave birth to a boy named Skeggi. At first he was said to be the son of Kjartan…. Skeggi was distinguished from all his brothers and sisters by his strength and build. By the age of fifteen he was the strongest person in north Iceland, and then his paternity was attributed to Grettir. Everyone thought he would grow into an outstanding man, but he died at the age of sixteen and there are no stories about him.

In sum, the Saga of Grettir the Strong is a powerful and memorable tale, and an amateur psychologist like me can spend unlimited time picking out clues concerning its underlying facts. That game can go on forever, because there’s no way to prove them wrong.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 1

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This is a partial review. The book I’ve been reading is one of the longer sagas in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and (as I’ve said before) my reading time has been limited lately. But I’m about half way through with this one, so I thought I’d do what I’ve done with some other longer works in the past. This is an incremental review, my thoughts on what I’ve read so far. The saga under consideration is The Saga of Grettir the Strong, one of the great classics.

I’ve read Grettir’s Saga at least three times before, so the material is familiar. But my response this time is a little different from previous ones. Perhaps it’s this translation, which is more literal than most. I’m not generally a booster of literal translating, but possibly it’s conveying some nuances I’ve missed in the past. In any case, I find I have less sympathy for the hero this time around.

The Icelandic sagas are classic stories of violence on the frontier, stories that anticipate the American Western. One of the standard themes of the Westerns is, “What do we do with violent men, who are valuable but expensive?” We want the gunfighter to come in and clean up the town, but then we’d prefer him to ride off into the sunset and bother somebody else.

Grettir Asmundarsson is often referred to in the saga as “an accomplished man.” But the only accomplishments of his (aside from composing poetry) that we observe are fighting and lifting heavy objects. His family and friends support him (cautiously) because of his value in a brawl, but his impulse control seems poor, and he shows little indication of ever being domesticated, or wanting to be.

In fact, he shows all the signs of PTSD. He’s quick to react violently, he’s suspicious and socializes poorly, and he suffers night terrors. In the saga, this weakness is explained by a nightmarish fight with a revenant, what I called a “walker-again” in my novels – the Scandinavian ghost that’s kind of like a vampire or zombie. Grettir’s nightmarish fight with Glam, the ghost, is portrayed as an experience of such overwhelming horror that even our bold hero can’t undergo it without emotional scars (though he does, needless to say, “kill” the ghost.) What happened to the real-life Grettir we’ll never know, but fighting monsters is a pretty good metaphor for a traumatic experience in combat.

And that’s about all I can really say in Grettir’s defense. The rare occasions in the saga where he appears sympathetically are the most fantastic and implausible – like the ghost-fight, or his rescuing of a houseful of defenseless women from rapist berserkers. These are saga set pieces, the kind of episodes that show up again and again in sagas to keep things lively. I doubt they actually happened in the man’s life.

What I do believe is the stories of his murders, which generally seem to be acts of impulse and overkill.

More on Grettir tomorrow.

Music

‘Les Bicyclettes de Belsize’

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Yet another reviewless night. My reading has been sharply curtailed, and it looks to be thus for a while, due to a pile of work (some of which I’m even getting paid for. So I’ve got that going for me). Today was also my annual appointment with my thoughtful Tax Professional, always an ordeal. People as poor as I am shouldn’t have such complicated taxes (multiple tiny income streams are to blame). I’m pretty sure I’d vote for a flat tax.

So I post music again. The song above, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, is outside my usual, Norwegian-oriented repertoire. It’s just a song I’ve loved ever since it came out, during my college days. I did not know, and have only recently learned, that it’s the theme for a short film. I watched the film on YouTube, but I’m not going to link to it here, because I suspect it’s copyrighted and will soon be pulled. Furthermore, I found it kind of disappointing. It’s a short musical with but one memorable song.

I must have been misled by my own mood when I first heard the song; I always assumed the film would be bittersweet. It’s not. It’s dumb and cheerful, a rather banal story about young people dressed in what we used to call “mod” clothes. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl are separated. Boy and girl find each other again. That’s about it.

In spite of the French title, it’s an English movie and an English song. If you’d like to hear the English-language version, Engelbert Humperdinck had a pretty big hit with it. It’s easily located.

The singer here is Mireille Mathieu, a French artist I’m amazed I never heard of. Incredible voice. According to Wikipedia, she’s a devout Roman Catholic and stands fully 5 feet tall.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine

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Tonight, another mystery classic. I was familiar with the name of the author, S. S. Van Dine, but I knew his Philo Vance character only through old movies (William Powell was the first to play him). Raymond Chandler called Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and now that I’ve read The Bishop Murder Case, I can’t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).

Philo Vance, New York City esthete and amateur detective, is called upon by the district attorney (who has apparently decided, after a couple of cases, that he can’t operate without the young twit’s help) to visit the home of the mathematician Prof. Dillard. In an archery range next to the house, a young friend of the family has been found killed by an arrow. Suspicion immediately falls on another young male friend, a rival for the affections of the professor’s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, they all realize that this was part of a cold-blooded plan. When other murders, all with Mother Goose themes, follow, it comes down to breaking alibis and analyzing personalities – just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.

What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn’t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as “’Sit down, Pyne,’ said Vance, with peremptory kindness.” (What does “peremptory kindness” mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.

Secondly, Vance relies heavily on very simplistic Freudian psychology, which has not aged well. The author goes so far as to affirm that extreme (even cruel) cynicism is a sign of mental health, because it eases repressions(!).

By this time in history, we’re used to seeing amateur sleuths in fiction working in cooperation with the official police, but the kind of slavish devotion the police in this book show to Philo Vance – to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations – is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I’ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney’s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member.  Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus doesn’t exist in Philo Vance’s world.

There’s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he’s an Ibsen fan).

The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting – and perhaps revealing – case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th century. He was also a cocaine addict and a German sympathizer during World War I. When his career foundered, he took up writing mysteries, despite the fact that he despised the genre. In an exquisite irony of fate, his books proved popular, and he came to depend on them for a living. Applying a little Freudian psychology of my own, I wonder how much his self-hatred contributed to the generally acknowledged deterioration of his work over time. (And it wasn’t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case is any indication.)

In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case. It dragged on and on, annoying me increasingly as I read. Recommended only if you want to fill a hole in your education in Golden Age mystery stories.