Fiction, Reviews

‘A Winter Grave,’ by Peter May

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And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.

What do you say about a book that was well-written, one which you enjoyed, when you believe that book to be effectively (if unintentionally) in the service of evil? That’s my problem with Peter May’s A Winter Grave.

Actually it’s not that big a problem. The answer is to tell the truth and let the reader make up his or her own mind.

The year is 2051, and climate catastrophe has struck the earth. The tropics are uninhabitable now, and the loss of the Gulf Stream has turned Scotland into a subarctic wasteland. Addie Sinclair, a weather monitor, climbs a mountain near Loch Leven to check her equipment and discovers the body of a man, frozen in the ice.

Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow police detective. When his superior tells him to go up to the village of Kinlochleven to investigate, he begs off at first. He explains, truthfully, that he’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will be retiring from the force. But when he hears Addie Sinclair’s name he changes his mind, saying it was a false alarm. Because Addie is his own daughter, from whom he has been alienated a long time.

Cam boards an electronic, self-piloting helicopter with a friendly forensic scientist. But when they arrive, murder quickly follows, and Cam is soon fighting for his life in the midst of blizzards, while trying to find a way to explain to his daughter – after all these years – the real cause of her mother’s death.

Peter May is one of the best mystery writers out there, and A Winter Grave showcases all his virtues. The prose is excellent, the characters interesting, the setting vivid, the mystery confounding.

But it’s all in the service of the Green religion. The message of this book, when you get down to it, is, “Wake up! If you don’t surrender all your liberties to the government without delay, so they can implement draconian regulations on every area of your life, future generations will be cursed, and it will be all your fault.” It’s a fascist book, though I’m confident the author is a true believer and intends nothing of the sort.

One thing I found ironic was the book’s depiction of the Green movement as a beleaguered, embattled little cause with diminishing political power, rejected even by the news media.

I can only dream.

Writing

Author’s journal: Holden on to hope

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The current Holden Lutheran Church building. Photo credit: St. Olaf College

I’m pretty sure a one-hour road trip to my home town didn’t used to exhaust me the way it does nowadays. This is partly because I’m ancient and venerable, of course – and I have particular reason to be aware of that just now. But I’m pretty sure it’s also because we didn’t have constant, disruptive highway repair going on in those days. I suppose one must bear in mind that the highways – like the glaciers and the pyramids – were much younger back then. But I also suspect that the Powers That Be just like messing with Gaia-killing auto drivers.

Which is a roundabout way of approaching my story. I drove down to Kenyon, my home town, today. It was the second time I’ve been there in a week, not a common occurrence. A group of my high school classmates and I gather somewhere for lunch every time there’s a fifth Wednesday in any month. Today was that day. We met at a new café in Kenyon, which is remarkable in itself. Kenyon has rarely been capable of supporting more than one restaurant, and sometimes it hasn’t been up to any at all. I wish the folks at Angie’s well. The food was pretty good.

There was really little reason for me to go down today, though, since I saw most of these people on Saturday. (Must be the gypsy in me.) We held a class reunion Saturday, which we do every five years. (And no, I won’t tell you which anniversary it was. No doubt it’s possible to deduce my age through a web search, but I’m not going to hand it to you on a plate.)

We met in a nice little park in Holden, a township north of town. Holden is pioneer country for Kenyon, one of the earliest Norwegian settlements in the area, going back to the 1850s. This was long before my own family moved up from Iowa to settle ignominiously southwest of town, with the newbies. Holden was the home and headquarters of Pastor Bernt Julius Muus, a prominent Norwegian-American pastor and church planter. Muus is best remembered as a main founder of St. Olaf College in Northfield. In his day, however, he was equally notorious for being sued by his wife for divorce – something that just didn’t happen among Lutheran clergy at the time. It became quite a scandal – the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjornsen, on tour in the U.S., interviewed Mrs. Oline Muus and found – to his own surprise, since he hated the Norwegian clergy – that he sympathized with her husband. Prof. Georg Sverdrup of Augsburg College (the subject of a journal I edit), took the wife’s side, seeing Pastor Muus’ behavior as symptomatic of the dictatorial tendencies of too many pastors in church bodies he disagreed with. The radical journalist Marcus Thrane wrote a satirical play about the affair, which was produced in Chicago.

In spite of the fact that I was standing on what had once been enemy territory, from a Georg Sverdrup point of view, I had a good time in Holden Community Park, next door to the church, where they’ve restored an old railroad depot as a shelter.

I’m not sure whether attending reunions is good or bad for the human psyche. It’s a little melancholy to see how much one’s friends have aged (though a moronic but benign natural response assures one that oneself looks better than everybody else). But it’s morally good, I’m convinced, to display oneself before the others, giving them the same reassurance. Also, of course, to renew acquaintances and see what everybody’s been up to. And to learn everybody’s name over again, because I DON’T RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE RELICS!

I can say for sure that the experience knocked me for a loop psychologically. I’ve been weird for days now, and I fell off my diet. Various explanations for this reaction occur to me, but I’m not sure of any of them.

Nonetheless, I carry on relentlessly with my novel writing. I’ve wrapped up the Baltic Campaign of King Knut’s war against St. Olaf (the man, not the school). Now I must build up, with tragic inevitability to… well, you’ll know when you read the book. I’ve been experimenting with some limited multiple viewpoint narrative in this work, and that’s where I’ll be going now. I’ll need to pause at least one day in laying down words, to organize my research.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bloodshot,’ by Mac Fortner

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I gave a mixed review to Knee Deep, Mac Fortner’s first Cam Derringer book, yesterday. I thought I’d give the series one more chance, so I bought Book 2, Bloodshot. My mind is made up now.

Cam Derringer, our hero, big, handsome and irresistible to women, has left Key West temporarily to spend a year in New York City (where he apparently had no trouble obtaining a concealed carry gun permit). The deal is that if he works at his friend Chad’s law practice for a year, he can get his own law license reinstated. Then he figures he’ll go back to the Key. As another inducement, his girlfriend Robin, an FBI agent, has also been assigned to New York.

He’s pleased when Chad announces his engagement to a beautiful heiress, but less happy when he learns that the woman’s father has a questionable legal record. Then a sniper starts shooting and wounding members of the fiancée’s family and circle, and Cam and Robin find themselves facing a dangerous, skilled opponent with an astonishing agenda.

It gradually dawned on me as I read Bloodshot that these books are – from my perspective –   creepy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. There’s Cam’s ambivalent relationship with his beautiful adult “daughter,” whom he raised but who is clearly in love with him. Then there’s one of the major characters, whom we’re apparently supposed to see as spontaneous and charming, but whom I found psychopathic.

There was also a lot of sex – not explicit, but the author sure kept some of his characters naked a lot of the time.

There were also logical oddities here. Our hero gets shot, in the traditional style, with a .45 caliber slug to the shoulder. This requires (of course) nothing more than in the way of treatment than a sling for his arm, and he’s soon using the arm again. His police detective friend smokes a cigar in his office and drinks on the job (I’m pretty sure that doesn’t fly in today’s NYPD).

More essentially, the writing was weak, with a fair number of mistaken word choices. I thought the plot here was less disjointed than in Knee Deep, but it was still complicated and improbable. The plot resolution failed to satisfy me from a moral perspective (perhaps I’m a legalist).

Personally, I’m done with Cam Derringer.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Knee Deep,’ by Mac Fortner

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I went through three phases in my reading of Mac Fortner’s novel, Knee Deep. At first, when I discovered that the detective hero Cam Derringer lives on a houseboat in Key West, I had a pleasurable moment of imagining there’d be some Travis McGee pleasures in the mix. In this I was disappointed. Then I was less disappointed, but also less than enamored.

Cam Derringer used to be a lawyer. Then he lost his license, and his home. And then his wife disappeared aboard her boat. He suspects she fell victim to boat-jackers, and has devoted his life ever since to discovering her fate, eking out his living through private investigating.

When a woman hires him to look for her missing husband, Cam finds himself once again on the trail of the boat-jacking gang. Along the way he meets a beautiful, mysterious woman who may herself be part of the gang, which is awkward because he’s falling in love with her. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys as a massive terrorist plot hurtles toward its consummation.

Cam Derringer is, as it turns out, nothing like Travis McGee. Which isn’t a sin – there’s more than one good kind of detective. Sadly, Cam isn’t any of those. In contrast to the McGee novels, this book departs from first person narration now and then to show us what the bad guys are doing. Which doesn’t make our hero look particularly smart. In fact, he’s generally a few steps behind them, and his own guesses and actions aren’t very successful. He isn’t even the rescuer at the climax, which employs a rather cumbersome and improbable technical trick.

Author Fortner’s plot is kind of loose and meandering, as well as complicated to follow. The writing is fair – I’ve seen worse, but I wouldn’t call it tight prose. The dialogue lacked tension, I thought. There was a fair amount of sex – not explicit, but Cam turns out to be the kind of detective beautiful women keep throwing themselves at, which can get annoying. For me. OK, I’m jealous.

Still, I bought the next volume in the series. I can’t have disliked it that much. I can state that Knee Deep was sometimes an amusing read.

Music

Sunday Singing: Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul

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Today’s hymn is another old text paired to a new tune. Though it’s been published in hundreds of hymnals, I’ve heard it only because of the recording above. English author Anne Steele (1717-1778) was the daughter of a Particular Baptist minister working in southern England. She was something of a literary star in her circles. She died in great pain, but I don’t know that this hymn was written during that suffering.

This text has been copied from a 1793 publication.

“Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15 ESV).

1 Dear refuge of my weary soul,
On thee, when sorrows rise,
On thee, when waves of trouble roll,
My fainting hope relies.

2 To thee I tell each rising grief,
For thou alone canst heal;
Thy word can bring a sweet relief
For every pain I feel.

3 But O! when gloomy doubts prevail,
I fear to call thee mine;
The springs of comfort seem to fail,
And all my hopes decline.

4 Yet, gracious God, where shall I flee?
Thou art my only trust;
And still my soul would cleave to thee,
Tho’ prostrate in the dust.

5 Hast thou not bid me seek thy face?
And shall I seek in vain?
And can the ear of sovereign grace
Be deaf when I complain?

6 No, still the ear of sovereign grace
Attends the mourner’s prayer;
O may I ever find access
To breathe my sorrows there.

7 Thy mercy-seat is open still;
Here let my soul retreat;
With humble hope attend thy will,
And wait beneath thy feet.

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks

A Con Artist, Betrayal, and Artificial Intelligence

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If the Christian life is one of continual repentance, then what do we do with a minister who has lived in sin for many years, justified his sin with spiritual abuse, and disqualified himself from ministry–most of which was learned after his death?

One of my friends brought up an apologist who recently passed away and was subsequently exposed as having lived an abusive life for years. Before his death, we thought he was a great Bible teacher. Now, we slough off his books at the used bookstore. Aren’t his books still as good as they were before? He compared the apologist to King David, who sinned far more extensively than we usually give him credit for. We overlook Solomon’s gross sins too.

I didn’t say anything this time. I’ve argued my case before, and maybe it doesn’t sit well with me.

The comparison to David doesn’t work. He and Solomon are categorically different. We look to them and see the Lord’s saving grace unbound.

Should we reject a man’s published work for a pattern of sin mostly uncovered after his death? Does known sin raise any theological questions? The man wrote a book on living the faith we profess, and we should consider its merit on the words of the books, not the life of the author? If this were a local pastor, would we continue to distribute his books, studies, and recordings as if it’s all academic? No. If he were a local pastor, we would expect him to be excommunicated were he still alive. The filth of his sin touches everything.

But that argument doesn’t sit easily with me, because I think of readers down the road who won’t know of the sin. They’ll only know the books, and perhaps the Lord will demonstrate his unbounded grace yet again.

I assume you know whom I’m talking about. It still hurts to remember it. Why do I feel betrayed by someone I didn’t know personally? I don’t know. It isn’t academic for me.

What else do we have today?

Deception: I recently listened to the first season and a little more of a well-produced podcast by Brian Brushwood called “The World’s Greatest Con.” Brian is a good storyteller, and this show is dynamite. The first season is on Operation Mincemeat, a scheme from WWII to deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allied would attack Italy.

Artificial Intelligence: “With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that.”

This rings true to me. Microsoft’s Bing AI presents itself as if you’re talking to an intelligent friend, but it doesn’t give answers any better than regular search results. Microsoft seems to think we all want to search as if we’re talking to someone IRL, but if it doesn’t understand us like a friend could, it’s pointless.

Orthodox Church: St. George’s Church in Drohobych, Lviv Oblast (west Ukraine), is a gorgeous work. It “is a unique monument of Galician wooden architecture of the late 15th – early 16th centuries. It is one of the best preserved monuments of old Ukrainian sacral architecture.”

Also, St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (via The Cultural Tutor).

Coffee: I don’t mind pumpkin spice, but I don’t drink it either. “Six bucks is a small price to pay (apart from still being scandalous and highway robbery) for the appearance of agency.”

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Writing

Author’s journal: The Battle of Holy River

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Statue of St. Olaf on Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim.

Tonight you’ll get a bit of authorial journaling, since nothing better occurred to me. The other day I topped 40,000 words on my work in progress, The Baldur Game. I’m adapting saga material here (whether historically factual or not), and I don’t think I can do much harm describing some of the challenges involved.

The Battle of Helgeå (Holy River) happened some time in the period from 1025-1027 AD. Snorri Sturlusson, in Heimskringla (the sagas of the Norwegian kings) seems to place it in 1026. I actually spent some time analyzing the chronology and decided to use the same year – mostly because it fitted my plot. But I think it’s a good guess. We know King Knut the Great was in Rome for Conrad II’s coronation as Holy Roman emperor the following year.

The battle itself seems to have actually happened (contemporary chroniclers mention it), but the details are sparse and debatable. Snorri tells an elaborate tale about a sophisticated stratagem Olaf used to trick Knut (and Erling too, of course, since he was in Knut’s fleet), but the actual practical effects seem minimal, even in Snorri’s account. It’s treated as a great victory for Olaf, but in fact it only bought him a chance to escape – ultimately without his ships, which he left in the Baltic (Denmark, as I keep reminding people, controlled the Baltic outlets, the source of its power), going back to Norway overland and wearing his shoes out.

I’m not going to detail Olaf’s clever battle stratagem here. Wouldn’t want to spoil it for you; you can just wait for the novel. (Or read Heimskringla.) It doesn’t really work with the physical features of the topography at the mouth of the real Helgeå, which is one reason scholars have proposed alternate locations.

I’ve decided to stay with the traditional battle site, in eastern Skåne (part of Sweden today but Danish at the time). I’ll have to contrive some kind of fantasy device to epic-afy the whole business, but I intended to do that anyway. So far this first draft is a little light on the fantasy element, and my readers expect some mermaids and monsters. (I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a problem. I always tell aspiring writers that they need to remember that a first draft is just raw material. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Doesn’t even have to be good. It’s what you start with. Somebody (I don’t recall who) said, “Stories aren’t written – they’re re-written.” The revision process is as important as the first draft – maybe more important. It depends, I suppose, on what kind of a writer you are.)

I’m still less than half-way through writing this draft, but I’m OK with that. This is meant to be my big book. My epic. My War and Peace, or Atlas Shrugged, or something. I’ve begun work and I’m making steady progress. I possess few virtues, but finishing projects is something I do seem to be able to do.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘In Forkbeard’s Wake,’ by Ben Nimmo

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Our friend Dan Nelson, in a comment, mentioned a book about sailing in King Svein Forkbeard’s wake, and I was reminded that I owned the book and ought to consult it on my current project. It’s a 2003 release called In Forkbeard’s Wake, by Ben Nimmo. I remembered it as a good book, and my review confirms that judgment.

Ben Nimmo is (or was, according to his bio) a British scuba instructor. He had written one previous book and – as far as I can tell – that’s the end of his output. That is a great pity – he’s an engaging writer. An internet search suggests that nowadays he’s involved in combatting online “disinformation.”

I can’t claim that I re-read In Forkbeard’s Wake in full – I only reviewed the parts dealing with the places I’m writing about in this book – Sweden and Denmark. Information on sailing conditions was especially useful to me.

But as a bonus, the book’s general pleasures were notable. Nimmo excels at describing landscape and weather. He relates well to the people he meets, who – except for government functionaries (occasionally) – are almost always friendly, interested, and accommodating. A sailing voyage, even in our day of satellite navigation, remains a risky project, especially when you’re sailing solo in a small boat. So there are some genuine thrills here too.

Ben Nimmo is a fine writer. I appreciated his wit, as in passages like this: “I’d also been warned that Danes have a real problem welcoming strangers; this, coming from a Norwegian, was a fine case of the pot calling the Ketill black.”

Anyway, In Forkbeard’s Wake is a first-rate sailing book, and I recommend it. Not available, alas, in electronic form.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Return Fire,’ by Tom Barber

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Tom Barber, author of Return Fire (part of the Sam Archer thriller series) is apparently a very young man. So I suppose I should cut him some slack in criticizing his prose. He seems to have been pretty successful as a novelist (which I certainly can’t claim), so he must be doing something right.

Return Fire, which I got through a free offer, is another example of the genre I call… what do I call it? I forget. Tonight I’ll call it Movie Thrillers in Print. The idea is to give readers the same irrational thrill they get from a John Wick kind of movie. The story won’t stand up to much logical analysis, but there will be thrills galore.

Sam Archer, our hero, is a former London policeman who moved to America (he has dual citizenship) to join the FBI, then joined an antiterrorist unit in the New York City Police Department. He is engaged to Alice Vargas, a member of the same squad (how did they work that?), but she went on vacation to Spain after a lover’s quarrel. Now she’s been kidnapped, and evidence suggests she’s being held in London. Sam and several of his friends from work are assigned to fly to London and assist in the investigation (we’re supposed to believe a cop would be allowed to work a case involving his fiancée). But little do they know they’re all being maneuvered into a kill zone by a vengeful master criminal.

Plausibility is not a high priority here. As in action movies, our hero and his friends suffer incredible physical punishment (including one guy being technically dead for a couple minutes) and just keep on fighting. About a ton of lead gets expended through firearms, both Glocks (all handguns are Glocks) and automatic weapons, but somehow only peripheral characters get killed, at least at first. Cars get shot to pieces before – eventually – somebody thinks of shooting out a tire to stop one. A pistol shot is used to open a padlock (safety tip: you can’t generally do that).

Aside from logic problems, the prose was weak. The author has a university degree in English and should know not to misplace his modifiers. Example: “Dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a sweat-stained t-shirt, blood was spattered on a white wall.” (You’ll note that the sentence is telling us how the blood was dressed.) There are awkward lines like, “Before long, what had been lying just under the surface between them had quickly caught fire.”

And finally, the author has an annoying tick of not knowing when to quit. He likes to close chapters with a zinger, which often doesn’t zing but just weakens the previous line with a redundancy. For instance, he says of the kidnap victim, who has spent a terrifying day in brutal captivity:

She’d never been to London before and so far the jury was out on whether she’d ever want to come back.

Today hadn’t exactly been the most pleasant of welcomes.

Now re-read that passage without the last line. Works better, doesn’t it?

However, I did finish Return Fire, so I can’t claim it wasn’t readable. Author Barber is young enough that he might possibly someday refine his craft.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Tale of Sarcastic Halli’

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Stained glass image of Harald Hardrada in Kirkwall Cathedral, the Shetland Islands. Credit: Colin Smith.

Tonight, another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one is called The Tale of Sarcastic Halli. It’s a little longer than the last one’s I’ve read and offers several points of interest, though there are a few problems as well.

Halli is an Icelandic poet who has a string of adventures in Norway and elsewhere during the time of King Harald Hardrada. His adventures tend to involve rather coarse jokes and tricks.

Halli first meets Harald while sailing up the Trondheimsfjord. With amazing impudence – especially considering King Harald’s well-known temper – he takes an insult from him (an insult, by the way, which was particularly offensive to Norsemen), and turns it back on the king. Harald is apparently in a good mood, because when he returns to the town he accepts Halli into his household. He seems to keep Halli around as a kind of a jester (along with a dwarf about whom I’d never read before), permitting him quite a lot of leeway. He even lets him get away with an ambivalent insult to his wife (Thora, Erling Skjalgsson’s granddaughter), using the opportunity to score off her himself.

Some of the references to Halli’s poems are hard to understand. At one point, in the court of King Harold Godwinsson of England (who would later defeat Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge), he gets away with a reward for a poem which he privately admits is just a load of rubbish. Apparently we’re meant to understand that the English were so unsophisticated about skaldic poetry that you could unload anything on them at a profit.

Two of the stories prominently feature what we like to call the “f-word.” No doubt this is faithful to the text – however, such earthy subject matter harmonizes rather poorly with the sometimes stilted quality of the literalist translation.

Still, this was an intriguing tale, showcasing the famously ruthless Harald Hardrada in a surprisingly genial light.