48 hours, by J. Jackson Bentley

Is there a category called a popcorn novel? Because that’s what I’d call 48 Hours by J. Jackson Bentley. An interesting plot, engaging characters, and the occasional hint of conservatism. Can’t complain about that. If the technicalities aren’t always perfect, I can hardly grouse. I was satisfactorily entertained.

Josh Hammond is an insurance adjustor in the City of London. He’s not a magnate of any kind, but he’s managed to put away money almost no one knows about. So he’s surprised in more ways than one when he gets a text message from a blackmailer (the book keeps calling it blackmail, but in this case it looks more like extortion to me) telling him to pay up pretty close to all he’s worth, or he’ll be murdered.

Josh goes to his boss for advice, and his boss retains a security company to protect him. This involves a bodyguard, who turns out to be a beautiful woman named Dee, well-suited for Josh to fall in love with. The police are called in. The blackmailer is smarter than they are, and then they are smarter than the blackmailer, and it goes back in forth in a well-matched battle of wits with the occasional spice of a fist- or gunfight.

I was particularly pleased with the social attitudes of this book. Although sex outside of marriage is taken for granted, pretty much a given in our time, I guess, businessmen are treated sympathetically, and the villain is both a Labor politician and a former trade unionist.

There are weaknesses in the writing, but I’ve seen a lot worse. The author doesn’t know what “enormity” means (of course no one else does these days either), and messes up on the choice between “I” and “me” at one point. There’s the occasional redundancy (we don’t need to be informed twice of the heroine’s height). In an odd orthography choice, quotations are set in the American style (single quotation marks inside double quotation marks) but the marks are left off the beginnings of new paragraphs inside speeches.

But 48 Hours was fun. And it’s free for Kindle, at least at the time of this review. Recommended.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe Dropped Calvinism

Barry Waugh describes what the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin thought about God and the historic religion of her region and how she came to believe “the common man must no longer accept the monarchical rule of God; there is neither a king in New England nor one in heaven.”

Nature Meditation: Crickets

Here’s a recording of crickets, played in two tracks. One track is normal; the second is slowed. The beautiful result makes a good meditation on God’s creative genius. (via Jeffrey Overstreet/Facebook)

"Be less authentic, if you don't mind."

Today, as I was brewing the green tea I generally drink at lunch, my thoughts wandered to Sir Thomas Lipton the tea magnate (although I was drinking a different brand). I remembered something that irritated me long, long ago, and I still remember it well enough to vent about it now.

In the early 20th Century, Thomas Lipton was among the most famous people in the world. He was one of the original “self-made men,” a Scotsman who spent time in America and learned American business ideas, which he put into practice in building a grocery empire in Great Britain. Then he shifted to the tea business, with even more success.

He was a prominent philanthropist and sportsman, and it was as a sportsman that he became a true celebrity. He loved yacht racing, and made repeated, expensive attempts to win the America’s Cup, failing each time. But his sunny good sportsmanship won him the affection of the American public, which did his tea sales no harm at all.

I wish I could remember the book or article about Lipton that got my dander up. I was pretty young at the time. I have the idea it was a biographical book I read a review of, but I can’t find the book listed anywhere. Maybe it was an article in Smithsonian or something. Continue reading "Be less authentic, if you don't mind."

Tales out of school

This is a good place to share things I don’t dare say in class, isn’t it?

Sure.

Part of the process of studying for your master’s degree online is discussions in forums on the school’s site. I’ve already established my reputation as a contrarian there, asking questions where other students just agree on how wonderful the assigned reading was. But I don’t say all I think, because it soon became clear that there’s something like a religious element to the course. We’re being taught the doctrines of the Church of the Enlightenment, Library diocese, and my plan is to mostly keep my head low when we touch on matters of dogma.

Anyway, one of our recent readings was a study whose author questioned whether it’s factually true that we’ve entered into an Information Age, as everybody keeps saying. He analyzes the studies usually appealed to in arguing for this societal change, and finds in them a lot of mushiness and fuzzy categories. Fair enough. He makes some excellent points. But I posed the question, could any real-world evidence actually satisfy his criteria? It seemed to me we could all be assimilated by the Borg, and this guy would still insist there wasn’t enough hard evidence to prove there’d been significant change.

What I didn’t say (though I may say it yet, if pushed), is that some time ago I spoke to a young missionary who’s involved with a project to provide open-source educational materials to Third World people in various cultures. The project faces many challenges, but distribution is not one of them. He said to me, “We’d been in all kinds of cultures – with cattle herders in the veldt, and jungle villages, and we noticed that wherever we went, everybody [that was the word he used, as I recall] has a cell phone, and they access the internet through it.”

My methodology may be sloppy, but that suggests to me that a major change has occurred in the world.

Citation sighted

Today in the library I was cataloging a set of books by a friend, Dr. John Eidsmoe – Historical and Theological Foundations of Law. Out of curiosity I checked the second volume to see what he’d written about Viking elements in our English tradition. And behold, he has good things to say. Even better, he mentions me in a footnote.

I’ve joked about being a scholarly citation before, since Prof. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger has mentioned my Erling novels in a couple of his books on the Viking Age. But this is a genuine footnote. In a passage about Erling Skjalgsson he inserts the following note:

…Lars Walker, a friend of this author, has recently published an engrossing and well-researched novel that portrays Erling Skjalgson as a Christian ruler who desires his kingdom to be a free republic under God’s law. Lars Walker, West Oversea: A Norse Saga of Mystery, Adventure and Faith (Nordskog, 2009).

He makes a couple small errors, calling Erling a jarl (he seems to think jarl is a generic term like chieftain), and talking about Erling’s “kingdom,” which was the last thing Erling wanted. Nevertheless, it’s nice to be a citation.

I wonder if I can get credit for it in graduate school.

Something tells me the answer is no.

What Makes a Murderer Tick?

drowningExcerpt: “The question March wants answered is what produces a dedicated murderer. Many stories depict the wages of hatred as murder. The loving husband, who worries over his troubled marriage, discovers his wife’s infidelity and distain for him, so in jealous rage he lashes out at her. Most people just walk out; some lose control.

“’You have heard that it was said to those of old,’ Jesus taught, ‘”You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council…’ (Matthew 5:21-22). This raises the bar very high, equating hatred with murder. Despite this warning, many of us still get angry with each other. Some of us hate certain people, even if we don’t actually kill them.”

My first Medium.com post is up. It’s on the second crime novel from one of our favorite authors, J. Mark Bertrand.

No coincidence

Our friend Greybeard sent me a link to a comic today, and I thought it was pretty funny. I’d post it here, but I’m not certain about copyright fair use, so I’ll just link to it and you can look for yourself.

It’s about “contrived coincidences” in story plots.

This, friends, is a very bad thing.

You read a story, and you’re following along with it, and suddenly something happens out of the blue, completely out of left field, purely so that the author can make the plot go in a direction he wants.

C. S. Lewis wrote about a similar issue, somewhere (I forget where, and I don’t have time to riffle through my library). In writing about miracles, he notes that it’s entirely against the rules for a novelist to include a miracle in a story, just to get his hero out of a tight place.

But, he notes, there is at least one legitimate use for a miracle in a story. You can start the story with a miracle. The occurrence of a miracle, followed by an examination of the way it affects the people who observe it, is a perfectly legitimate premise for a story.

In other words, a miracle can pose a problem in a story. But it can’t solve one.

Otherwise, you’ve wasted your reader’s time. You’ve dragged him through all the sturm und drang of plot development, rising action, rising tension, repeated frustrated attempts at resolution, and then you resolve the whole mess with a deus ex machina (a Latin term referring to a dramatist’s trick of sending an actor, dressed like a god, down by block and tackle to save somebody from a bad situation). The whole purpose of a story is to teach the main character something through suffering, and to teach the reader by proxy. The miraculous/coincidental resolution renders the whole exercise meaningless. The story itself becomes a redundant appendage to the climax. You might as well have written the climax on its own, and saved the reader the time.

I note that I have confused coincidence with deus ex machina in this post, but they’re closely related and undeserving of individual attention.

Bertrand on Bertrand: Truthful Imagination

Our interview with author J. Mark Bertrand for The Gospel Coalition has hit the screen. Here’s the start:

In Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World, J. Mark Bertrand asks, “How can imagination transform culture?” By giving it new eyes, he says. “As a reader,” Bertrand explains, “one of the most striking glimpses I have ever had of the divine came at the climax of The Man Who Was Thursday, a novel that starts as a thriller about anarchists and ends in a very different place indeed. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that the truth can be proclaimed and it can be defended, but it can also be imagined.”

Read the rest here.