Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blackhouse,’ by Peter May

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The northern part of Lewis was flat and unbroken by hills or mountains, and the weather swept across it from the Atlantic to the Minch, always in a hurry. And so it was always changing. Light and dark in ever-shifting patterns, one set against the other – rain, sunshine, black sky, blue-sky. And rainbows. My childhood seemed filled by them. Usually doublers.

I was encouraged to check out Peter May’s “Lewis Trilogy” of Scottish police novels. I have now read The Blackhouse, the first of them. My reaction is positive, but mixed. The writing (witness the passage above) is superior. My main problem with the book was with the main character and sometime narrator (he narrates the out-of-sequence flashbacks which constitute about half of the book), Fin McLeod, Edinburgh police detective. One likes to like the hero of a book, but sometimes Fin is hard to like. However, there’s a reason for that, entirely in line with the purposes of the story.

Fin is a native of the island of Lewis, in the Hebrides, a bleak place where life is tough to sustain and economic times are hard. He got away and became a policeman in Edinburgh, and has been back only once since. But when a man is murdered in his old home town, in a way almost identical to a murder he’s investigating in Edinburgh, he’s assigned to go and see if there’s a connection.

Back at home, he encounters many old friends and enemies, most of them greatly changed physically but much the same at heart. The course of his investigation rouses memories, which constitute the many long flashbacks in the narrative. Gradually he finds that the similarities between the two murders are no accident, and that he will have to confront the deepest and blackest secrets of his past.

As I mentioned, I found it hard to root for Fin sometimes. He often seems cold and unsympathetic to others. But it’s not surprising that he keeps people at a distance, considering the amount of loss he suffered growing up, as we learn. He seems to have been touched by more than his share of tragedy, even in a place where life is a marginal proposition for most.

For the Christian reader, there are interesting implications. Fin describes himself as not a believer, but not an atheist either – he’s just mad at God. Christians – and there are many on Lewis – seem to be uniformly pinched and joyless. On the other hand, one of the most important positive characters in the book reads the Bible constantly and draws wisdom from it. So I think there’s more going on here than mere flippant modern secularism.

The Blackhouse is a beautiful book, but challenging. I’m not sure whether I recommend it or not, but I’ve bought the sequel. Cautions for sex and language and graphic descriptions of murdered bodies.

Fiction

“Nothing drives people to the church faster”

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The second season of Netflix’s “Daredevil” was released today. Aaron Earls of “The Wardrobe Door” talks about the themes of the series.

“Nothing drives people to the church faster than the thought of the Devil snapping at their heels. Maybe that was God’s plan all along,” Father Lantom, Matt Murdock’s priest, says, “why he created him, allowed him to fall from grace to become a symbol to be feared, warning us all to tread the path of the righteous.”

Netflix’s “Daredevil” confronts the problem of evil in the world and challenges viewers to consider how they can be part of the solution. And it does it through the life of a blind Catholic superhero. . . .

When wrestling with the problem of evil, “Daredevil” gives an answer that may not address all of the philosophical wonderings, but addresses a much more practical issue. We see evil in the world and we wonder what God is doing about it. As those created in His image, we have to once again look in the mirror. “Daredevil” reminds us that God is there in the midst of the suffering, able to serve, because we are there.

I’m looking forward to this season. One image from the first season that sticks with me is that while the hero takes up the metaphor of the devil, the villain sees himself as a savior, at least until the very end when he spins another metaphor for himself. Unlike Jessica Jones, Daredevil wants to team up with God in this fight.

Religion

When Guinness Heard Wesley

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Guinness lived at a time when no one understood micro-organisms and how disease is spread. They routinely drank from the same waters in which they dumped their garbage and their sewage. Unknowingly, they polluted the rivers and lakes around their cities. People died as a result, and this made nearly everyone in Guinness’ day avoid water entirely. Instead, they drank alcoholic beverages.

Their drinking led to public drunkenness and crime, so some businessmen began brewing beer, which had less alcohol and was far healthier than homemade whiskey.

So as Arthur Guinness sat in church on the day we are imagining, he was a successful brewer in Dublin, selling a drink throughout the city that made people healthier and helped them avoid the excesses of the hard liquor that had done so much damage for so many decades.

Stephen Mansfield goes on to describe what happened when Arthur Guinness heard the great John Wesley in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Fiction, Writing

Jeeves Was Scarcely Mentioned

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In Wodehouse’s first story of the exploits of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves, many of the familiar details are present: the language, Bertie’s aunts, and the predicament that needs resolving.

But there was one notable exception: Jeeves scarcely got a mention. “I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter,” wrote Wodehouse. He would flesh him out later. “[A] tallish man, with one those dark, shrewd faces” who brings order to the scrape-ridden world of Bertie and his friends with noiseless omniscience. In that first story, however, there is no hint that we are in the presence of a “bird of the ripest intelligence”, who “From the collar upward…stands alone.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten around to this story. My first foray into this part of Wodehouse’s world was with one or two stories from Very Good, Jeeves, which being written in the late 20s was beyond establishing many of the principles. When I saw that another book, Carry On, Jeeves, began with what you might call an origin story (originally published in 1916), I read through that one before returning to the other. I like to keep things in order.

Jeeves and Wooster came into play for Glenn Fisher the other day when he praised these habit of two writers he admires. “Both JG Ballard and PG Wodehouse challenged themselves to write 1,000 words a day.”

That may be just the idea I need to press ahead with my own goals.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Island of Sheep,’ by John Buchan

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I’ve told you often of my fondness for John Buchan’s books, especially the Richard Hannay series, through which I’m working my way. Most recently I read The Island of Sheep, which offered the usual pleasures, with the addition of a Scandinavian element for me.

Richard Hannay, retired British intelligence agent, is settling into a peaceful country life with his wife and son, and feeling a little uncomfortable about it. So he’s up for an adventure when an event from his past reaches forward into his present.

Long ago, in Africa, he and a friend helped to save the life of a well-known explorer, a Dane named Haraldsen. When it was all done, Haraldsen called on both of them to make a vow, in Viking fashion (he’s a Scandinavian romantic), to come to his help, or his son’s, at any time. Now Richard hears from the son. Old enemies of his father’s from Africa have reappeared, with both a lawsuit and an implied physical threat. Young Haraldsen has a daughter, and he’s terrified for her safety as well as his own.

Hannay and the friend who also made the vow sally forth from their respectable lives then, to keep their promise, with the help of another old friend, familiar to the reader from previous books, and Hannay’s teenaged son.

The story climaxes in a struggle on the Island of Sheep, Haraldsen’s home (one assumes it’s really in the Faeroe Islands, since that’s what “Faeroe” means). It’s all fairly preposterous, but Buchan knows how to tell a story, and it’s great fun. As usual.

Recommended.

Uncategorized

Understanding Pornography Through Tolkien

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“‘No, I am afraid not, Sam,” said Frodo. “At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire.”

Samuel James says, “I don’t think I have ever read anything that more poetically expresses what it’s like to be addicted to pornography than that passage.”

“As someone who was rescued from severe bondage to porn, I can feel the contrast in my life now versus my life then much more keenly than I can describe it. I feel emotional lightness, I suppose, and I no longer live in that withering dread of exposure that colored every human encounter.”

Uncategorized

Make Moral, not Materialistic, Arguments

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Americans are not materialists. Most find materialism noxious and ugly, as they should. They are uneasy at its presence in their own lives and they rebel against it in public life. So when conservatives present the policies America needs with materialistic language, we are placing our ideas in a box so ­unattractive that people simply don’t want to look inside. They instinctively side with moral over materialistic rhetoric, and often vote for progressive politicians as a result. But many of the policies they subsequently get are materialistic to the core. The people are left dissatisfied and convinced that both sides are awful.

Arthur Brooks explains how conservatives lose arguments, even with good ideas. He says conservative Republicans, energized by the Reagan revolution, began to view themselves as primarily economic advocates. If we can just explain how money and taxes work in the real world, people will listen to us. But that’s the way we lose. Instead, Brooks recommends leading with our hearts.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Breakdown,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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The big problem with a successful, ongoing fiction series is self-repetition. The template for Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels is pretty well established. Dr. Delaware, successful child psychologist, gets a call from his police detective buddy Milo Sturgis (overweight, conservative, and “gay”), who asks him to advise him on some case in progress. Alex happily cooperates, and together they uncover motive, means, and opportunity. (In real life, of course, Alex would never be allowed to meddle in police work that way, and defense lawyers would have a heyday with his involvement. But in the real world both Alex and Milo would be long retired by now, so why mess with success?).

In Breakdown, the latest in the series, author Kellerman jiggers the template a little. This time it’s Alex who asks for Milo’s help in a case of his own. Some years ago, he was called in to consult on the welfare of a child at risk. The little boy’s mother was an actress on a TV sitcom. She had personality disorders, but seemed to be functioning all right as a mother, and Alex found her son highly intelligent but otherwise normal.

Now he gets a call from a mental health worker. The actress, long out of work, has been found living on the streets, psychotic. Her primary psychologist is dead, so Alex is now the health care professional of record on the file. Alex talks to the former actress, being held in a ridiculous government-funded facility (which gives the author a chance to make some pointed comments on our current mental health system). She’s almost completely psychotic now. There seems to be no record that she ever had a child, and Alex, driven by concern and guilt, enlists Milo in trying to uncover the actress’s past, to see what happened to the boy.

What they uncover is a dark family secret and a string of unsolved murders going back decades.

I always enjoy the Alex Delaware books, and this one pleased me particularly. I love cold case stories, and Breakdown was a fascinating one.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture