I’ve never been inclined to pick up books based on movie franchises. The movies have been enough for me, but the Disney Star Wars list of sorry productions provoked me to seek out Star Wars novels. I learned Timothy Zahn’s trilogy was the best set, so I picked up Heir to the Empire, published in 1992.
“Now, for the first time: the authorized continuation of the legendary Star Wars saga . . .” The story picks up five years after Return of the Jedi, with the Rebel
forces trying to put together a new republic. Princess Leia is the leading figure in every diplomatic endeavor, which is increasingly difficult for the soon-to-be-mother of two. Her husband, Han Solo, is also working too much to make the new government as functional as it needs to be. Luke Skywalker has the smallest role of the three, that of friend, security guard, and last living Jedi. What can he do to train Leia and the children when the time comes?
What they don’t know is that an Imperial Grand Admiral has survived. They know the Empire still has loyalist planets, stormtroopers, Star Destroyers and other ships, but they don’t know that a gifted military strategist is rebuilding a fleet. Raids on Republic outposts look like mere harassment, but Grand Admiral Thrawn is working a long-term plan to bring every Republic planet to its knees, if not its grave.
Two things stand out about this novel. First, the characters sound like their movie representation. Some of that is probably fan-service, callbacks to movie dialogue, but it’s thrilling to read good characters in a good story. Second, it’s a solid story—coincidences or contrivances. Everyone has proper motivations, making reasonable decisions, and conflicting with each other naturally. At one point, the heroes get caught up in an Imperial raid, and they naturally conclude they’re being followed, but they aren’t. The bad guys were there for other reasons. No one acts like an idiot. No motivations shift inexplicably. And Luke comes through like a hero.
I’ll let you know how the next one goes when I get to it.
On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the safest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.
It’s always cause for celebration for this reader when another Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald shows up on bargain sale. This time it was One Fearful Yellow Eye, notable (in this reader’s opinion) for the quality of its prose.
Years ago, our hero Travis McGee, lanky and languid Florida “salvage specialist,” found a young woman named Glory contemplating suicide on a beach. She’d had an astonishing run of bad luck and tragedy. He took her home, fed her and reassured her and took her to his bed, and eventually she went on with her life. She met an older man, Dr. Fortner Geiss, a prominent Chicago physician, who admitted to her he was dying, but they gave each other a couple good years, in spite of his adult children’s hostility. Now he’s dead, and she’s discovered that his considerable wealth has disappeared. In his last months, he’d converted everything to cash, which is nowhere to be found. The inevitable – but counterintuitive in such a good man – conclusion is that he’d been blackmailed.
So Glory calls on McGee. His deal is to look for things people have had stolen from them, and if he finds it he keeps half. That’s okay with her.
McGee flies to Chicago and agrees to look into the problem. He’s a little out of his element in a Chicago winter, and Dr. Geiss’s son and daughter are no warmer – especially his daughter Heidi, a gorgeous ice queen. It’s not a big surprise when Heidi becomes McGee’s special rehabilitation project.
One Fearful Yellow Eye is not, in my opinion, one of the best McGee novels in terms of plot. I thought the ending strayed a little close to deus ex machina.
But in terms of prose, I’d rate it one of MacDonald’s best. He was soaring as a stylist in those days. Although I’d entirely forgotten the plot here, I found more lines and passages than usual that had stuck in my mind from previous readings:
“Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”
The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city….
I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report: The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. And you can’t hardly taste the additives.
Anyway, I got a kick out of One Fearful Yellow Eye. Cautions for sexual situations and violence.
Another Toby Peters novel by Stuart M. Kaminsky. Light, seriocomic entertainment. Can’t go wrong with these. In fact, I think I found Dancing In the Dark a little funnier than most of the others.
Hard-luck Hollywood PI Toby Peters has been having a run of unaccustomed good fortune. He actually has a little money in the bank for a change, and his creditors aren’t hounding him. Then he gets hired by Fred Astaire. Astaire’s job poses certain challenges. A woman named Lyla, mistress to gangster “Fingers” Intaglio (who got his nickname because he likes to cut people’s fingers off) demanded he get her dancing lessons from Astaire. Once Astaire agreed, she started pressuring him to go to bed with her, or else she’d denounce him to her knife-happy boyfriend. Toby’s on the case, even if it involves learning to dance – a pastime for which he has zero talent.
Before he knows it, Layla has been murdered, and she’s only the first of a string of victims. Backed up by his cowardly dentist friend and his gigantic ex-wrestler/poet office landlord, Toby does his best to avoid gangsters, solve the murders, and keep Astaire out of the newspapers. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a new relationship with a woman who got away many years ago.
The sexual mores here are not ones I approve of (but what else is new?). And Toby makes a decision to let one suspect off that puzzles me.
On the other hand, at one point he finds himself dancing with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. That seems to me to qualify as a good day even if somebody’s shooting at you.
Bottom line – Dancing In the Dark is a fun book, and one of my favorites in a fun series.
I took a break from our Sunday Singing posts, partly because I went on vacation and decided not to work out Sunday posts for a few weeks, then because my work week or weekend was busy. I start back today and hope these posts will lift our heads to the Lord.
Today’s hymn, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” comes from the influential Bishop of Orléans Theodulf (760-821). He was an Italian in France serving under Charlemagne and afterward King Louis the Pious. He was a patron of the arts and had a chapel built in Germigny-des-Prés, now a testament to Carolingian architecture.
“He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:32–33 ESV)
1 All glory, laud, and honor To Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children Made sweet hosannas ring. Thou art the King of Israel, Thou David’s royal Son, Who in the Lord’s name comest, The King and Blessed One.
2 All glory, laud, and honor To Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children Made sweet hosannas ring. The company of angels Is praising Thee on high, And mortal men and all things Created make reply.
3 All glory, laud, and honor To Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children Made sweet hosannas ring. The people of the Hebrews With psalms before Thee went; Our praise and prayer and anthems Before Thee we present.
4 All glory, laud, and honor To Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children Made sweet hosannas ring. To Thee, before Thy Passion, They sang their hymns of praise; To Thee, now high exalted, Our melody we raise.
5 All glory, laud, and honor To Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children Made sweet hosannas ring. Thou didst accept their praises; Accept the prayers we bring, Who in all good delightest, Thou good and gracious King.
Season two of Rings of Power has begun on Amazon Prime, and I have no plans to watch it. The first season was enough. I didn’t dislike the first season from the start, but it wasn’t a Tolkien story as claimed. It was LOTR fan-fic and not a good one. It wasn’t good enough to give a boat the hope it needs to float, if you know what I mean.
The second season appears to be more of that and worse. Sauron was styled as a returning king to Mordor, but now he’s appealing to the orcs and their father-figure to accept him. The orcs are styled as misunderstood foreigners who just want to live free of tyranny. What?
Erik Kain describes other story points like this: “We need Conflict Between Main Characters, after all, even if it doesn’t really make sense,” and “nothing here is even remotely based on Tolkien’s lore.”
Brett McCracken notes another common complaint. “The series feels bogged down by overwrought dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue is great; often it’s cringey.” Plus, there’s excessive exposition and many opportunities for viewers to ask how a character would have known whatever they just said.
You can get it a feel for Rings of Power season two in this mostly positive IGN review, which according to those who pay attention to IGN is remarkably critical. Don’t those rings look cheap?
Reading into the Text: Ukrainians have long referred to Russian soldiers as orcs and apparently Soviet leaders did too. “Comparisons between Mordor and Russia go back to the Soviet era, when the regime considered Tolkien’s literature politically threatening. The USSR banned Tolkien’s books because they saw the orcs as an analogy for the Soviet people.”
I thought, since it’s Friday, I’d post some music consistent with my overheated musings in yesterday’s post. So here’s a lovely arrangement of “This Is My Father’s World,” one of my old favorite hymns. It was originally published in 1901, with lyrics by Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901), a sadly short-lived Presbyterian pastor who published several popular hymns. The tune is Terra Beata, based on an English folk song. (And I’m pretty sure they cribbed the first line for the Shire theme in the Lord of the Rings movies.)
Pages 22 and 23 feature Dale’s article on Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896-1958), with whom Lewis had a variable relationship. They came to Oxford at the same time, and were good friends for a while. But even before he stopped being an atheist, Lewis grew weary of Weldon’s relentless, materialist cynicism. As a tutor in Moral Philosophy his teaching method (according to R. W. Johnson’s book, Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age) was to first demolish his students’ conventional beliefs, and then to demolish whatever new beliefs they constructed, until they were left “in a state of free-floating agnostic cleverness.”
Weldon declared, in a 1944 lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, near Oxford, that the carpet bombing of German cities was justified because it would shorten the war and save lives. Lewis was already on the record, along with a number of Anglican clergy, as rejecting that argument categorically.
Weldon was (according to George Sayer) that “hardest-boiled atheist” who remarked to Lewis in his rooms one day that the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ was remarkably good, saying, “Rum thing,” as Lewis recalled in Surprised By Joy.
Weldon was also the model for the Dick Devine, the cynical, flippant character who’s so annoying in Out of the Silent Planet and (promoted to the title, Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength.
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27, ESV)
Whenever I read the Sermon on the Mount, I’m struck by the surreal nature of the whole message. It’s as if someone told us, “Well, obviously the sky is green, and the quickest way to get from New York to San Francisco is by way of Hong Kong.” Look at the Beatitudes – “Lucky you if you’re spiritually poor! The Kingdom belongs to you! Lucky you if you’re mourning, because you’ll be comforted! Lucky you if people push you around, because you’ll inherit the whole shebang!”
These things are – very obviously – not factual, at least about life as we experience it. Jesus is turning our expectations upside down. The world doesn’t actually work the way you think it does, He’s saying. You need to zig when everybody else zags. You need to do take dangerous path instead of the safe one. Where there’s smoke, don’t expect fire. Don’t plan ahead. Don’t budget sensibly. Live like the birds of the air.
Live an impractical life.
And then, here at the end, He comes out with this metaphor of a rock. Which seems an obvious contradiction. He’s been telling us to build castles in the air, and now He’s saying, keep your feet on the ground, No, more than that – build your house on a rock. You need solid foundations.
The point, it seems to me, is this – Jesus is telling us not to believe our lying eyes. The world is not what we think it is. Everything that seems solid is in fact nebulous (a preview of modern Physics, perhaps?) while the really solid things are invisible and counterintuitive and have to be taken on faith.
Part 2: Emotion in faith
I’ve been thinking recently about the problem of emotion in our Christian faith.
I was raised, as I’ve told you, in the Pietist tradition. We believe in having what’s sometimes called an “Ah ha!” moment, when we receive Christ personally, often in a very passionate way. Much in our tradition is aimed at keeping that passion worked up. We’re warned against growing lukewarm, losing our first love.
The more high church tradition, against which my ancestors reacted, dismissed such thinking as “enthusiasm” (a negative term for them). They recognized – very sensibly – that it’s not only difficult, but ultimately self-defeating to try to live with our emotions perpetually amped up. It wears you down, emotionally and spiritually. (Remember how C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, describes abandoning his faith as a boy with great relief, after having worked very hard at keeping his fervor up?)
But the high church approach, to us Pietists, seems cold and lifeless.
It occurred to me that imagining the created universe as music, an idea I’ve been playing with recently, might help resolve this conundrum.
If you think of the Kingdom of God as a musical masterpiece, a symphony or an oratorio, then we believers are members of the orchestra, or the choir. If you don’t feel like playing or singing today, it doesn’t matter. You perform your part anyway. Just do the work. The music is the main thing.
And quite often, the music takes you by surprise and you get caught up in it spontaneously.
So when I pray or go to church or serve the in my vocation and “I’m not feeling it,” I do it all the same. Because the music is the main thing.
If my mind is on the music – the Kingdom of God – the religious ecstasy comes on its own timetable. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
Unless you’ve been in a monastery for a while, it would be pretty hard to read John Corwin’s Dead Before Dawn without thinking of Jack Reacher. Corwin’s hero, Amos Carver, is a former operative for yet another super-secret military black ops unit. But some years back the unit was abolished, with Carver left under a cloud of suspicion. His superior, a woman named Rhodes who’d been his friend, felt particularly betrayed. Carver dropped out of sight to live a beach bum’s life in Florida. Then he got a message from Rhodes, asking him to come quickly to the town of Morganville, Georgia, where she is now chief of police. Like Jack Reacher, he travels light, owning few possessions.
When Carver arrives in Morganville, hiking up the highway from the bus stop, he finds a pink pistol lying in the middle of the roadway. He knows that pistol – it belonged to Rhodes, who would never have mislaid it. Carver does not pick it up. He recognizes a set-up, and immediately goes on defense. The attack that’s supposed to kill him fails, and soon he’s in jail in Morganville, where someone tries to murder him in his cell. Those are just the first of the threats he’ll meet and handle in this town. Strategy was never Carver’s forte. He was a strong-arm guy, good at action. Rhodes was the thinker – but Carver will need to learn to think too before he can unravel a plot that just keeps leading to higher and higher-level conspiracies.
I have no complaints about the writing in Dead Before Dawn. It was professional and tight. The dramatic tension ratcheted up nicely all the way. The characters were adequate. There was even a happy ending of sorts.
My reservations are personal. I didn’t like the scenario of a guy going into fire fights against professionals with no backup except for two women (no doubt a concession to feminism, as if many women were going to read this book). I was also uncomfortable with the vigilante elements – vigilantism always troubles me, though I don’t deny it might be necessary in desperate situations. But I found it odd that a vigilante was called upon here to save (minor spoiler alert!) the rule of law in America.
Still, Dead Before Dawn was a good story, written by a professional. Can’t deny that. Worth the money.
It occurred to me this morning that (as far as I remember, in my increasing mental decrepitude), I’ve never yet inflicted on you my opinions on the subject of the Viking Funeral.
These opinions are strong.
The movie clip above, from the 1959 Kirk Douglas/Tony Curtis film, “The Vikings,” seems to have strongly influenced popular ideas about how the Vikings handled their dead. When I say, “Viking funeral,” that’s what people imagine. The corpse is placed on a pyre on the ship, the ship is launched out to sea, and the ship is set afire. The hero sails majestically off to Valhalla.
A few minutes’ critical thought will suggest to rational people that this is not a practical scheme.
First of all, you need a favorable wind. While you’re waiting for that (which could take a while) the corpse will be… ripening.
Secondly, the first thing to go up in flames would be the sail, which was generally made of wool impregnated with animal grease. That would go up like a match head. After which – oops! – the ship has no more wind power. Unless the wind is quite strong, the vessel will sit there burning down to the water line. What’s left will probably be left floating.
Or the wind may change and blow the whole thing back to shore and need to be dealt with all over again.
Finally, cremating a corpse is not as easy as most people think. You can’t just place a body on a pile of wood and expect it to be consumed. It takes very intense heat. Einar’s pyre in the movie doesn’t cut it.
In point of fact, we have no historical reports of such a funeral. There are legendary accounts – I know of two, one only similar. The first is in the myth of Baldur, where the god’s funeral ship is treated in just that way. The second is in the poem “Beowulf,” where the legendary Danish king Scyld Scefing is supposed to have been returned to the sea in a ship (he originally appears as a baby in a small boat, sort of like Moses). But that ship doesn’t burn. It just sails away into the other world. The idea is that Scyld came from the sea and is given back to it.
Both these accounts are legendary. The original listeners to the myth and the poem did not view them as how-to guides.
Archaeologists will tell you that there were two primary ways that high-status Vikings were sent off. The use of a ship or boat (or in some cases, an array of rocks placed in a ship shape) was common, and seems to suggest that the Norse believed that the afterlife involved some kind of voyage.
Depending on culture, historical period, and date, the bodies might be cremated before inhumation or not. Many believe that Christian influence was responsible for inhumation gaining popularity over time.
Grave goods were a necessity. The wealth of the family determined how much stuff would be buried with the dead – and there’s some evidence for a custom of ritually digging into graves and removing certain objects after a time.
Human sacrifice seems to have been common in elite funerals, and is attested by some excavated graves. There is no evidence whatever for the portrayal in the History Channel’s Vikings series showing sacrificial victims as free people who willingly volunteered for the job. The best account is the famous one from the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan (part of the basis for the movie, “The Thirteenth Warrior”), who described what seems to have been Vikings in Russia (though some historians dispute this identification). He describes the custom (in that particular setting) of a volunteer being called for (no doubt under considerable pressure) from among the slave girls, then being kept drunk (and likely drugged) through the days of the funeral feast, while being serially raped until she was finally stabbed and strangled. Horrific.
Call me narrow-minded, but I prefer the Christian way.
Still from the trailer for the movie, ‘Bhowani.” Public domain. At least I didn’t post another cover of the Tolkien book.
I’m sorry, I’m going to borrow material from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien again. Just one more anecdote, I promise you. I think it’s too good to keep to myself – but then I’m a pathetic name-dropper (when I have a name to drop, which is rarely).
Anyway, here’s an story Tolkien relates in a January 9, 1965 letter to his son Michael:
An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves…. It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: ‘it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before’. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude; and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her….
Robert Graves was, of course, the author of I, Claudius and various other stuff. Tolkien doesn’t seem to have respected him much, but I’ve omitted his personal comments.
