Fiction, Reviews

‘Envoy Extraordinary,’ by E. Phillips Oppenheim

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Envoy Extraordinary

Sometimes a book attains added significance, not on its own merits, but because of its time and place.

That’s the case with E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Envoy Extraordinary. A pretty good thriller in its own right, its historical context adds a weird poignancy to the whole exercise.

The hero is Ronald Matresser, an English nobleman in the 1930s best known as a big game hunter. Few people are aware that he has been serving as a government agent in his travels, reporting on conditions in various hot spots. Now he has announced he’s settling down to take up his ancestral responsibilities in his home county and in Parliament.

But one night, during a powerful storm, a man is murdered bringing a message to Ronald’s palatial home. The same night a mysterious Dutch nobleman brings his yacht into the nearby port, despite the weather. The Dutchman, a large and intimidating man, pushes his way into Ronald’s social circle, and nearly murders Ronald and the Austrian woman he’s falling in love with, during a hunting party. Ronald soon realizes that the Dutchman is trying to disrupt his participation in an upcoming European peace conference.

Envoy Extraordinary is a book full of ironies. One assumes that people of good will, in those unsettled days, were hoping and working to find a way to avert the tragedies they could see coming (much as in our own time). Author Oppenheim (whose name, after all, was German) imagines a situation where the dictator of Germany (who appears in this book under a disguised name) was a genuine patriot, in failing health and willing to barter power of which he’s grown weary for the return of Germany’s colonies. An era of peace and stability is possible, if only the Dutchman can be stopped…

In light of actual events, it’s hard to read this book without a sad smile.

Still, it’s a good story, and worth reading on its own merits.

Authors, Fiction

New Batman Writer Is Ex-CIA

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Tom King joined the CIA in response to the 9/11 attack. After several years as an undercover operations officer, he returned home, began to work on writing, produced this superhero novel, and now has landed a job with DC Comics to write Batman.

“Batman gets close to the insanity of Gotham, to the craziness, to what drives that city mad, and not be driven mad himself—or at least most of the time he isn’t,” says King. “That’s most like the mission of the CIA. We get into the heads of our enemies without becoming our enemy. I’ll use that experience to tackle this character.”

Bookselling, Fiction, Non-fiction, Publishing

How Significant Is a Book’s Truth Claim?

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According to Geoff Dyer, who says his next book is “a mixture of both fiction and non- but will be published as non-”, the strength of the distinction in anglophone culture has waxed and waned. “Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick points out that ‘12 of the 14 pieces in Penguin New Writing in 1940’ – which included Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant – ‘were of a then fashionable genre that blurred the line between fact and fiction,’” Dyer explains. The nonfiction novels of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer blurred the lines again in the 1960s, he continues, and the boundary is “perhaps going through another porous phase right now.”

At first glance, this article on the demerits of the labels “fiction” and “non-fiction” seems to disparage the need to state whether a book claims to reflect reality or to be a work of imagination. Quoting  a translator, Richard Lea writes:

The division between “the writing of imagination and the writing of fact” that seems so obvious to the anglophone readers “doesn’t seem straightforward at all to much of the rest of the world.”

But how many non-fiction books do not represent the truth, because of shoddy research or editorial bias? How many fiction works have taught us profoundly deep truths (isn’t that what we love so much about some novels)? Perhaps claims of truthfulness should be done in ways other than publisher brands or bookseller shelving, but the reason we say truth is stranger than fiction is because when something bizarre actually happens, it doesn’t have to be as believable as something we make up. You might say, “That could never happen,” but if it in fact happened, that’s all the rationale you need.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Abducted,’ by Roger Hayden

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I must be cranky these days. This is the second novel I’ve reviewed in two days which I thought well written, but to which I refuse to read the sequels.

The Abducted tells the story of a string of child kidnappings in a single county in southern Florida. Each kidnapping takes place precisely one year after the previous one. All the victims are blonde girls about ten years old. The only person to actually see the kidnapper – though not well – is Officer Miriam Castillo, who caught a glimpse during a routine traffic stop that ended disastrously. Miriam leaves the force in the wake of the disaster.

A year later she’s contacted by an old colleague, Detective Dwight O’Leary, who’s investigating the last kidnapping as a cold case. He thinks (for reasons that I frankly find hard to understand) that Miriam, who’s not a cop anymore, knows something that can crack the case. She agrees to help him, and an investigation and manhunt follow.

The book was well written, the characters and dialogue good. What annoyed me was that the author ended the book with a serious cliff-hanger. I guess I’m perverse about these things. I like to buy the next book because I enjoyed the last one, not because bait has been thrown over my fence.

So I think I’ll let this one go. You may enjoy it, though. It’s not at all bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter,’ by Malcolm Mackay

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It’s an interesting experience to read a book that’s extremely well done, but just doesn’t make you care.

That’s my experience with The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, by Malcolm Mackay.

The book is written from the “narrator as omniscient camera” point of view. The author describes, dispassionately, utterly without judgment, as a young but “promising” hit man in Edinburgh takes the job of killing a small-time drug dealer. We follow him, we follow the gangsters who hire him, we follow the victim and the victim’s girlfriend, and the detective who investigates the murder, as well as others, all with the same clinical lack of judgment. The characters themselves make judgments all the time – each of them considers him or herself a pretty good person, under the circumstances, certainly better than those other fellows. But we are provided only the bare data – what happened. The author leaves it to us to draw morals, or not.

This is a very fine job of writing. The weakness is that there isn’t much reason to care about any of these people, and in the end I didn’t. This book is the first installment of a trilogy, but I can’t think of a reason to spend money to find out what happens next.

Still, author Mackay did an impressive job of doing what he did. If it interests you, by all means try it out.

Cautions for sex, violence, and language.

Religion

The Anti-Christian Mindset of Big Business

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Sociologist George Yancey asks, “When does Big Business call for a boycott?” He points to the MLB threatening to boycott Arizona over an immigration law and the threats made against Georgia this month over a religious freedom bill. He notes that no boycotts have been publically discussed in support of the social conflict in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Flint, Michigan.

So what motivates a call for pulling business out of an area? Perhaps it’s primarily an anti-Christian (not so much anti-religious) bias.

Given what we are seeing in this year’s presidential campaigns, there may soon be a breakup in the Republican Party — the party has politically united the interest of large corporations and conservative Christians over the last few decades. That “marriage” may have provided Christians the illusion that leaders of those businesses care about them. In most cases, they don’t.

In another story, a dean at Catholic university Marquette is demanding one of his professors apologize for his criticism of another professor who was recorded telling her student that a traditional Catholic position on marriage was not welcome in her class. (via Prufrock)

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‘The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok’

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As you know, I’m not exactly a fan of the “History” Channel’s Vikings series. However, this book, which seems to have been produced in order to capitalize on the show’s popularity, was actually worth the money to me.

The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok is a compendium of sagas, poems, and ancient annals, providing pretty much all we know of Ragnar’s legend out of the middle ages. The stories have very little credibility as historical sources – other than the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is sparse on details, and Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, which is a hopeless mess assembled with little historical or critical sense.

But it’s not often that I run into material on the Viking Age that I’ve never read before, and most of this was new to me. The saga story of Ragnar “Hairy Breeches” was written down long after the original events, and these sagas contradict one another in details and are generally unreliable. But they also contain many agreements, and the kernel of a true story seems to be here.

Only one section, the poem Krákumál, shows evidence of bad OCR reading, including a number of misprints. The rest of the book is well edited, and the scholarly notes are of high quality.

Worth reading, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Fiction

The Best and Worst Batman

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Peter Suderman explains how Frank Miller created the best version of Batman and also the worst.

The influence of Miller’s Dark Knight, however, extends far beyond this one movie. The four-issue comic permanently redefined the character of Batman, and is arguably responsible for making him the pop culture sensation he is today. Today’s Batman, from Christopher Nolan’s austere Dark Knight to the gothic hero of Scott Snyder’s contemporary Batman comics, is inseparable from Miller’s vision of Batman and, in some sense, from Miller himself.

But in the years since Dark Knight, Miller has continued to work with both the character and the brooding sensibility, with increasingly unpleasant results. And in the process, he has squandered much of what made the original so great. Miller gave us the best Batman — and the worst one, too.

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Critic Steven Greydanus says on Twitter this article aptly describes what he calls the Frank Miller worldview, “a nightmare world of antiheroes, brutal villains, whores, femmes fatales, sickening violence—lots of visual impact, no human interest.”

“Miller’s rather pathetic Superman was a logical extension of Miller’s Dark Knight universe—the right Superman for that Batman’s story.”

As Suderman says it, “Miller positions Superman as Batman’s true rival, a polite water carrier for ineffectual elites and authority figures, a symbol of weakness and civil decline to which Batman provides the antidote.” An antidote that feels as bad as the sickness.

I hope we see a new, hope-filled Superman, a Captain America-style Superman, by the end of this decade. Maybe we’ll see that in Wonder Woman.

Fiction

Crime and Punishment, 150 Years Old

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During the year 1866 only Crime and Punishment was being read, only it was being spoken about by fans of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left which caused people with strong nerves to risk illness and forced those with weak nerves to give up reading it altogether.

A great novel is 150 years old this year, and readers are talking about it. Prufrock News has collected several links, and the curator, Micah Mattix writes about it for the WSJ. If you don’t have access to the WSJ, here’s a post he wrote on why every Christian should consider reading Dostoevsky’s classic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Iron Chamber of Memory,’ by John C. Wright

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They spent a few moments looking for her dropped hat, gradually circling out from the path as they searched, but they did not find it. It seemed the wind had taken it away and hidden it somewhere among the trees. He found the size of them oddly disquieting, rather like seeing a cow taller than a man.

I have shot my mouth off more than once – publicly – about my low opinion of most contemporary Christian fantasy. When I do that (and I expect I’ll do it again) I need to make a clear exception for a very few writers. One of those is John C. Wright, author of the new ebook, Iron Chamber of Memory.

If I had to find a comparison for this work, the closest thing I can think of is George MacDonald’s Lilith. It takes place (mostly) in a world which is ours, but not quite the same as ours. And there are excursions to worlds even stranger.

Hal Landfall, the hero, is an American student at Oxford University. His best friend is Manfred Hathaway, who has just inherited the Channel island of Sark, “the last feudal government in Europe.” On Sark no automobiles are permitted, and no electric lights burn at night. Manfred is engaged to the beautiful Laurel. Hal is attracted to her too, but would never dream of making a move on his friend’s fiancée.

But that’s in our world. There is a secret room in Manfred’s manor house in which all the relationships are different, and all the identities somehow altered. But Hal only remembers this when he enters that room – so he has to leave himself messages, to “trick” himself into going there.

And that room is only the first of a series of secret rooms…

Iron Chamber of Memory is simply a wonderful fantasy story – an original and unforgettable work of imagination. It’s about memory, and it’s about sex – or rather, erotic love. Not a dirty book, but I wouldn’t give it to younger readers. C.S. Lewis described That Hideous Strength as a “fairy tale for adults,” and that’s what this is.

Splendid stuff. Much recommended. There are a few copyreading errors (or I think they are), especially where Manfred repeatedly gets called Mandrake for no apparent reason. I assume that’s an incomplete search an replace job in the word processing, though there may be a subtle message being sent that I’m just too dense to comprehend.

Anyway, read this book. Especially if you’re a MacDonald fan. Strong Protestants may take issue with some Roman Catholic sentiments expressed.

Also, what a great cover!

Book Reviews, Creative Culture