In the second book of the Joe Boyd series, An Inconvenient Death, Joe, a police detective in the town of Culpepper, is camping with his family (apparently he’s a workaholic, and this is a good development). While his son is walking their new puppy, the dog locates a buried human skeleton. Although Joe calls the discovery in, he manages to convince his superior officer to let him continue his vacation, leaving his younger subordinate Hank to start the investigation on his own.
Hank proves to be very competent. Based on what remains of the clothing, along with a high school class ring found nearby, he manages to pinpoint the likely victim – a boy who worked in a local convenience store and vanished in 1988.
Meanwhile, in a writers’ group that meets at a local church, a couple female members are annoyed by one of the male members. He’s socially awkward and “creepy,” and he keeps bringing in pages from his work in progress – a book about how three high school boys murder a convenience store worker and hide his body in the woods.
G. K. Chesterton once said (I quote from memory), “There are two meanings to the word ‘good.’ If a man were to shoot his grandmother from a distance of 500 yards, I would call him a good shot. I would not necessarily call him a good man.”
There are two kinds of good book — a book that is morally good, or a book that is good in terms of the writing craft. An Inconvenient Death is morally good. Salutary virtues are praised and nobody uses a word harsher than “crap.” Even more admirably, it deals in a genuinely Christian way with the awkward issue of scandal in the church.
It is not, however, good in terms of writing. The author, like so many young authors, overwrites. He informs us what people are thinking and feeling without letting them reveal those thoughts and emotions through gesture and dialogue. He sometimes doubles his dialogue – first recounting a conversation, and then having that conversation repeated to another character in detail (this bores the reader). He tells us how people greet each other at the beginnings of conversations (also boring and unnecessary). There are grammar mistakes from time to time too.
Also, the suspense could have been ratcheted up considerably.
So, my bottom line is, I appreciate the effort to write a clean, uplifting mystery, but An Inconvenient Death wasn’t very well written.
I suppose this will happen more and more as I grow old and fuzzy-brained, and the list of books I’ve read stretches longer than the unabridged dictionary. I picked up a set of the first three books in the Father Tom series for Kindle, only realizing toward the end of the first volume, The Penitent Priest, that I’d already read it. And reviewed it here. And forgotten it completely.
The Amazon page says this is a revised edition, so maybe the changes were extensive enough to mitigate my embarrassment. I note that my main concern with the book the first time through was the number of coincidences in the plot. I felt the same way this time, but it didn’t bother me as much. Perhaps that’s one of the problems they addressed in the revision.
In any case, Father Tom Greer is a Catholic priest in Pennsylvania. He came to his vocation late in life, following the murder of his wife in Myerton, the town where they lived. The crime has never been solved. Shortly thereafter Tom cut all local ties and left town, eventually attending seminary, getting ordained, and being put to work as an archivist.
But now (the book is narrated in the present tense, something I dislike on principle. Though I can’t say it actually decreased my enjoyment any) the archbishop has assigned him to fill in for the priest at St. Clare’s Church in Myerton. Then one day, in the confessional, someone tells Tom something that makes him believe they witnessed his wife’s murder, and might even be responsible. Then he gets a look at his late wife’s laptop, which a friend has been holding, and learns from her e-mails that she had a stalker. But when he tells the police detective in charge of the case, she says that’s not enough for her to take action on.
This encounter is complicated by the fact that the detective turns out to be a former girlfriend of Tom’s, one he nearly married before he met his wife.
What I liked about this book – the prose is excellent. The dialogue is natural, smart, and engaging. The characters are believable.
What I disliked (though not as much as on my first reading) — the number of coincidences in the plot. They interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief.
Still, considering that this is a “clean” novel, without profanity or sex and with excellent moral values, I was very impressed with The Penitent Priest. Our hyper-Protestant readers may not consider a Catholic novel a “Christian” work, but I think most any Christian can read this book and appreciate its values and even (for the most part) its theology.
So I recommend it, all things considered. I enjoyed reading The Penitent Priest. I think the authors have talent and good instincts.
That same evening that Egil left home, Skallagrim had his horse saddled, then rode away from home when everyone else went to bed. He was carrying a fairly large chest on his knees, and had an iron cauldron under his arm when he left. People have claimed ever since that he put either or both of them in the Krumskelda marsh, with a great slab of stone on top.
Skallagrim came home in the middle of the night, went to his bed, and lay down, still wearing his clothes. At daybreak next morning, when everybody was getting dressed, Skallagrim was sitting on the edge of the bed, dead, and so stiff that they could neither straighten him out nor lift him no matter how they tried.
If you ask a saga fan which is the best saga, they’re likely to say either Egil’s or Njal’s Saga. In my case, it usually depends on which one I’ve read last. Both sagas excel in one quality you don’t expect in a medieval book – complex, layered characterization. In some ways they’re like modern novels.
But they don’t start out like novels. A novel writer tries to start with a bang, to engage the reader in the conflict from page one. Icelandic sagas are localized stories written for a localized audience. The first thing the Icelandic reader wanted to know was where the action would occur, and where in the matrix of interrelationships around him the story falls. So we start Egil’s Saga with the tale of Egil’s grandfather Thorolf, who supported King Harald Fairhair’s conquest of Norway, then fell out of favor and was finally killed by the king Then we see how Egil’s father Skallagrim relocates to Iceland (getting his vengeance along the way), and stakes his claim as one of the early settlers. Finally Egil himself appears – big and strong, ugly and soon bald, but wicked smart and the greatest of all skaldic poets.
Egil goes out as a Viking – what else could he do? – and also tries to claim his inheritance in Norway, becoming a mortal enemy to King Eirik Bloodaxe, whose son he murders. He fights as a mercenary in England (on the English side) and has the kind of set-piece side-adventures that tend to show up in sagas.
Eventually, we come to the dramatic climax of the saga – amazingly, not a battle or even a duel. It’s an act of headstrong audacity. Shipwrecked on the coast of Northumbria, Egil learns that Eirik Bloodaxe is the new king of the country. Instead of putting on a hooded cloak and making tracks, Egil heads straight for York, to beard the king in his den. Supported by his best friend, the king’s man Arinbjorn, Egil offers Eirik a proposition. In return for his life, he will compose a poem for the king so brilliant and memorable that it will secure his fame forever. When he succeeds (brilliantly), Eirik is left with no choice. To kill Egil now would shame him forever.
Make no mistake – Egil is a bad man. He’s a thief, a slave-taker, a cold-blooded killer. He cherishes his hatreds and dabbles in magic. And he doesn’t mellow as he gets older; only weakness makes him a little safer to be around.
Yet there’s pathos there as well. His poetry provides a glimpse into his heart as he mourns the friends and family he’s lost, and the injustices he’s suffered. He’s as faithful a friend as he is dangerous as an enemy. And his courage is mind-boggling. Possibly pathological (there are many theories about brain and psychological disorders he may have suffered from).
I was pretty effusive in my praise of the translation of the Vinland sagas in the collection I’m now reading, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I must admit I was less happy with this translation (by a different translator). I thought it erred a bit on the side of literalism, suffering the awkwardness that literal translation entails. (Stylistically, I prefer the Penguin edition.) I also noted a couple textual oddities I hadn’t remarked on before. One is name spelling. Some of the choices seem to me odd – Hakon for Håkon, for instance – it gives English reader the wrong impression about pronunciation. And Kari for Kåri – a Norwegian acquaintance once complained to me about using that spelling in The Year of the Warrior, as in modern Norwegian Kari is a woman’s name (I changed the spelling in the next volume). The orthography is oddly mixed – they use double quotation marks in the American style, but English spelling, as in “harbour.” A lot of characters’ nicknames are rendered in novel ways; I’m not sure that adds to the value of the thing.
What we have here, I think, is a scholarly translation. I still recommend the collection for its completeness, if you can afford it. But you can get Egil’s Saga in a perfectly adequate translation for much less.
Our friend Dave Lull has shared an article about the latest sign of the Apocalypse – the bowdlerization of the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The link he sent went to an article hidden behind a paywall, but my formidable investigative skills enabled me to locate a cognate report here, at National Review:
Wodehouse joins a growing list of prominent authors, deceased and living, whose works have been tinkered with by sensitivity readers, including Roald Dahl, R. L. Stine, and Agatha Christie. Penguin Random House, which recently relented to a degree on the Dahl edits, has released new editions of the Jeeves stories that include trigger warnings, the Telegraph reported.
The warning on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank You, Jeeves reads: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”
It goes on to state that the changes do not affect the story itself. The 2022 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves has also been edited and features the same disclaimer.
The traditional word for this kind of activity is “Bowdlerization,” named for Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), an English physician and social reformer who’s most famous for producing The Family Shakespeare, in which he (and his sister) cleaned the offensive words out of the Bard’s plays.
Thomas Bowdler used to be mentioned pretty often back in my college days, in the Age of Aquarius, when we were letting it all hang out and “keeping it real, baby.” We Baby Boomers, in the toilet flush of our youth, laughed at the weak-minded old English who’d get the vapors from hearing a dirty word or two. Thank Henry Miller we’d evolved past all that!
Well, in the 2020s we Boomers are still more or less running things, but in our dotage we’ve succeeded in sinking beneath Bowdler’s level. It ought to be noted that old Thomas did not hold a copyright on Shakespeare’s works. He never made any attempt to remove the original versions of the plays from the literary market; he simply offered an alternative to people who wanted one. Penguin Random House has changed the official, copyrighted text of Wodehouse for all readers, young and old, wise and foolish. “We have a responsibility to shield the public, you know.”
The Great Pendulum swings in accordance with implacable laws of physics. Swing too far toward license in one generation and you’ll swing back to authoritarianism in the next. It seems we humans live just long enough, generally speaking, to betray our principles.
Continuing an Easter theme, here’s a marvelous hymn that fits our Good Friday meditations. “Stricken, smitten, and afflicted” comes from the Irishman Thomas Kelly (1769-1855), who wrote 765 hymns over 51 years. The tune, I believe, is of German folk origin with harmony arranged by American Paul G. Bunjes for Lutheran Worship (1982). The text below is taken from the 2006 Lutheran Service Book.
1 Stricken, smitten, and afflicted, see him dying on the tree! ‘Tis the Christ, by man rejected; yes, my soul, ’tis he, ’tis he! ‘Tis the long-expected Prophet, David’s Son, yet David’s Lord; Proofs I see sufficient of it: ’tis the true and faithful Word.
2 Tell me, ye who hear him groaning, was there ever grief like his? Friends through fear his cause disowning, foes insulting his distress; many hands were raised to wound him, none would interpose to save; but the deepest stroke that pierced him was the stroke that Justice gave.
3 Ye who think of sin but lightly nor suppose the evil great here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate. Mark the sacrifice appointed, see who bears the awful load; ’tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed, Son of Man and Son of God.
4 Here we have a firm foundation, here the refuge of the lost; Christ, the Rock of our salvation, his the name of which we boast: Lamb of God, for sinners wounded, sacrifice to cancel guilt! None shall ever be confounded who on him their hope have built.
Isn’t it curious how the Bible is not an instruction manual? Some preachers and parents talk about it as if it is one, but if we know anything about actual instruction manuals, we know the Bible is nothing like them.
It’s mostly narrative history, even the prophecies fall into this. The gospels are not direct proclamations of good news, like what the angels declare to the shepherds from the skies, and the epistles, which are the most direct instruction, are more like single lectures from a larger course.
The Lord gave us a Bible with songs, proverbs, stories, and rules that require interpretation for a modern audience. Deuteronomy is the most like an instruction manual, and it isn’t something today’s believers can treat like a guidebook. Even the fourth commandment trips us up.
What we have in Scripture is the most marvelous book ever written. It shows us who we are apart from our vain imagination, and it shows us something of the majesty of the Almighty. It offers us the words of the Holy Spirit for feeding our hearts and minds from the hand of the author of our lives. It’s closer to a devotional than a manual.
This post may show how much Jared C. Wilson has influenced me, because when I looked up Midwestern Seminary’s For the Church site for something on this idea, I found two of Jared’s posts. From his book on the church, “The Bible is Not an Instructional Manual,” and again last year on the statement that the Bible is Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
Here are some other posts.
Bookselling: Jeremy Anderberg suggests intentional browsing. “There are a lot of great books published every year — every month! — but publishers are increasingly putting all their marketing power into a smaller group of titles, in hopes of ensuring that coveted bestseller or celebrity book club status.”
“One of the big misperceptions about cowboys is that they were only dumb, itinerant, agricultural workers, when, in fact, most people of that period were self-educated. Heck, one of the most referred to books as being read by the cowboys in Louis L’Amour’s novels is Plutarch’s Lives.”
“I was having lunch with the Wyoming Office of Tourism, and they were telling me how much they loved the books, and I asked them why? They said that even though Absaroka County is fictitious I use all the businesses, landmarks, roads, and trails so that it’s easy to tell the tourists where they are. I’ve always found it’s easier to remember the truth, even when writing a novel.” (via Books, Inq)
What Holds Us? “Such attentiveness – call it curiosity or engagement with our surrounding — is a form of reverence and gratitude, and likewise an admission of willful ignorance: we learn little when we ignore our world.”
I don’t intend to start adding music to my Saturday posts, but I listen regularly to traditional music like what Julie Fowlis sings here and I want to share it. This whole album is marvelous.
A set of traditional songs starting with “Fodder for the small stirks”
From Dave Lull, the following citation. I don’t know where he got it.
Priscilla Jensen’s review of “An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!” by Florence Hazrat (Bookshelf, April 7) reminds me of something the novelist D. Keith Mano wrote in National Review in 1975: “The exclamation point may be used only in dialogue and then only if the person speaking has recently been disemboweled.”
The third of postmodernism’s triumvirate of stooges, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), focuses his indignation on common sense because it carries “the tyranny of goodwill, the obligation to think ‘in common’ with others, the domination of a pedagogical model, and most importantly—the exclusion of stupidity.”
If like me you’ve read Francis Schaeffer and Allan Bloom, and if you’ve pondered C.S. Lewis’s “The Poison of Subjectivism,” you’re aware that the central intellectual battle of our time rages around Reason. Does reason give us a window on reality, something conccrete on which we can fully rest our weight, or is everything “subjective”; is one person’s world entirely different from another’s? Is thinking worth anything, or must passion rule all things?
My friend Mark Goldblatt, novelist, columnist, and educator, provides a useful guide in his recent book, I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism. The book offers a short historical overview of how the Enlightenment came to enshrine Reason, and then how a rising tide of Subjectivism gradually infiltrated our institutions of higher education, turning the culture of the mind into streams of thought that must ultimately run dry.
He examines Critical Race Theory, showing how it employs Subjectivist philosophy to exalt feeling over fact, turning the quest for knowledge into a quest for raw power (because once reason is dead, we can’t have a discussion. All that’s left is a shouting match. And after shouting come fists). He goes on to outline how the Me-Too movement corrupted its honorable ideals by abandoning objective standards of justice, and how more and more people, in the spirit of transgenderist dogmatism, are now destroying their own bodies.
He ends by suggesting some means by which our schools of liberal arts, having become divinity schools of Woke religion, might be amputated and allowed to wither, before they can poison the whole body.
This book is only six months old, but it might possibly already be too late. The schools of the STEM disciplines, in which the author places much hope, seem to be already in the process of corruption, embracing Woke mathematics and physics (Want to fly in an airplane designed according to Woke math principles? You first; I’ll wait).
Still, I Feel, Therefore I Am is a worthwhile introduction for the thoughtful reader desiring some points of reference in the churning sea of Relativist culture. I enjoyed it and recommend it. Cautions for some rough language.
He was overcome by the poignancy of the situation. Here was a girl who had frankly admitted that in her opinion he was Prince Charming galloping up on his white horse and would have liked nothing better than to be folded in his embrace and hugged till her ribs squeaked, and here was he all eagerness to do the folding and hugging, and no chance of business resulting because the honour of the Bodkins said it mustn’t. Beat that for irony, he thought as he rubbed his shin. It was the sort of thing Thomas Hardy would have got a three-volume novel out of.
Having intensely enjoyed, and positively reviewed, The Luck of the Bodkins the other day, I thought I might as well go right ahead and review the sequel, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin. (Monty also figures largely in a previous book, Heavy Weather, a Blandings story. I’ll have to be getting on to that one too, though it will be out of sequence.)
PG & MB redresses one of the few niggling problems that exist with TLOtB, otherwise a near-perfect confection. The sensitive reader can’t avoid the nagging sense that in getting engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, All England field hockey player, Monty has made a blunder. Monty is much like Bertie Wooster – except that he wants to be married – and one can hear Jeeves saying, if Bertie had ever found himself handcuffed to La Butterwick, “The young lady is undoubtedly healthy and vigorous, sir. But might I suggest that a person with her record of breaking multiple engagements might conceivably be a touch too volatile in temperament for the establishment of a felicitous domestic partnership?”
In short, the reader wants Monty to be happy, and under Gertrude’s thumb he’s likely to sink to the level of a third-rate power. Monty requires a woman a little more cheerful. A little more trusting. A woman less subservient to the commands of her blighted, vegetarian father.
So when Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin opens, one year to the day from the close of the previous novel –
[At this point I need to break off and blather a moment about the question of time in Wodehouse. The Luck of the Bodkins was published in 1935, and somewhere in the last couple pages it’s mentioned that Prohibition was recently repealed in the US. Monty’s deal with Gertrude’s father calls for him to hold a paying job for one year before they can be married. At the beginning of PG & MB, we’re told that that year has now passed. But PG & MB was published in 1972, nearly forty years later. One of its first pages mentions TV studio audiences. In the dreary world you and I inhabit, there was no point in history at which the first thing could have been separated by a single year from the second. But this is Wodehouse world, that foretaste of Paradise in which time exists only for the purposes of the story, and the world never changes much.]
So, as I was saying, this book starts one year after we left off. Monty has been toiling away, doing unspecified tasks, as a technical advisor at Superba-Llewellyn Studios in Hollywood. His secretary, Sandy Miller, has fallen head-over-espadrilles in love with him, but she knows his heart belongs to Gertrude. And now, he announces, he’s headed back to England to claim his bride.
However, when he arrives, Monty finds old Mr. Butterwick unwilling to close the deal. He has learned, he tells Monty, that Monty acquired his job with Superba-Llewellyn through blackmail (which is true), and so it doesn’t count. Monty finally persuades the old blighter to give him one more year.
Then Sandy shows up, to his surprise. She’s in England with her boss, Ivor Llewellyn, who has taken a country house for an extended sojourn. He has done this at the bidding of his imperious wife Grayce, who wants him to write a history of his studio. In fact, he needs a secretary to help him with the book. The perfect job for Monty!
The action switches to the country house at that point, and comes to focus on a valuable pearl necklace currently belonging to Grayce, a gift from Ivor. Ivor confesses to Monty that, because Grayce has him on a strict budget, he pawned the necklace some time back and replaced it with cultured pearls. Now their daughter is getting married, and the necklace is supposed to go to her. Ivor will pay Monty handsomely to steal the necklace and drop it in the water somewhere. They are unaware that there are three actual jewel thieves also staying in the house, plotting to relieve him of the job.
In terms of classic Wodehouse prose, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin stands equal to any other work in his corpus, despite the fact that he was over 90 when it was published. Plot-wise, I’d have to say he’d slipped a little. The book seems to wrap up prematurely, with a lot of possible plot twists passed over. There are long stretches where Monty really has no problems at all, and just seems unaware of it.
Still, a very amusing book, and it’s great to see Monty settle with a suitable girl.
One morning Karlsefni’s men saw something shiny above a clearing in the trees, and they called out. It moved and proved to be a one-legged creature which darted down to where the ship lay tied. Thorvald, Eirik the Red’s son, was at the helm and the one-legged man shot an arrow into his intestine. Thorvald drew the arrow out and spoke: “Fat paunch that was. We’ve found a land of fine resources, though we’ll hardly enjoy much of them.” Thorvald died from the wound shortly after. The one-legged man then ran off back north. They pursued him and caught glimpses of him now and then. He then fled into a cove and they turned back. (Eirik the Red’s Saga)
I hope I don’t cause any embarrassment when I publicly thank my friend (and our frequent commenter) Dale Nelson, formerly of Mayville State University in North Dakota, for these books. Along with his wife Dorothea, Dale has gifted me – entirely to my surprise – with the full, boxed set of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. It’s published by Leifur Eiriksson Publishing in Reykjavik, and is a collection of brand-new scholarly translations, carefully selected and edited by a team of scholars.
When you read the title, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, you’ll probably assume, as I did, that this is a collection of all the Icelandic sagas. Once I’d read the introductions (there are several) I realized that that would involve a very large collection indeed. It would have to include legendary sagas of pre-historic legends, as well as later sagas about bishops, saints and courtly love. What the editors here mean by “the sagas of Icelanders” is in fact the classic sagas – the tales of the Icelandic settlers, heroes, and feuding in the Viking Age.
Just my meat, in fact. I have a good number of saga translations in my library already, but this collection gives me a set of uniformly high-quality translations living up to the latest standards of criticism. I’m delighted to have it.
In this post I’ll review the first two translations in the first volume – Eirik the Red’s Saga and The Saga of the Greenlanders.
These two sagas are (as the editors freely confess) not the best, considered purely as texts. What we have is two different accounts based on the same original events, but developed into two highly divergent narratives. (This is embarrassing, I must admit, for someone like me who spends a lot of time defending the use of sagas as historical sources. But nobody’s saying the saga texts didn’t suffer alteration with time – only that they contain useful information, which certainly remains true even of the Vinland sagas. We’ve got an archaeological dig in Newfoundland to prove it.)
Generalizing a great deal, I can say that Eirik the Red’s Saga (I should mention that the editors here have chosen a different manuscript source from most previous translations, so this version is a little different from other published editions) describes Leif Eiriksson discovering Vinland (America) by accident, blown off course in a storm while sailing to Greenland from Norway. Later the focus switches to Thorfinn Karlsefni the Icelander, and his wife Gudrid.
The Saga of the Greenlanders, on the other hand, attributes the first sighting of land in Vinland to Bjarni Herjolfsson, who is similarly blown off course, but never touches land. Leif later buys his ship and makes a voyage of exploration, followed by two of his brothers, and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and finally his sanguine sister Freydis.
When I was young, most historians considered The Saga of the Greenlanders earlier and more reliable than Eirik the Red’s Saga. Today I’m given to understand that historians consider both of them useful in parts. Both, it must be admitted, are also garbled in places, and contain preposterous elements.
What they have in common, it seems to me, is the fact that the story of Vinland is in a way secondary. The discovery is recounted, not primarily for its importance as a watershed historical event, but as a family achievement.
What lies behind both versions (it seems to this reader) is the fact that it was written by, and for, the descendants of the married couple Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid the Far-Traveled. Both narratives mention (as briefly as possible) the fact that Gudrid was descended from slaves. This was embarrassing in that culture – though pretty common in Icelandic society, many of whose Norse pioneers had married slave women. Great pains are taken in both versions to explain to the reader that, in spite of her low birth, Gudrid was recognized as a remarkable person very early in her life. Then we are told of her many adventures, culminating in her pilgrimage to Rome late in life and her death as an anchoress, a highly respected woman.
This professional translator finds no fault in the translation here. I’m not qualified to judge how well the Icelandic text is interpreted, but I know a clunky translation when I see one, and these two are very good, very smooth. I might also mention that the physical volumes are sturdily bound in signatures between handsome leather-covered boards, and the text, printed on heavy, acid-free paper, is in a highly readable font.
(One point that amused me is that, though the publisher uses Icelandic spelling in calling itself Leifur Eiriksson Publishing, the translators chose to use the more familiar form of “Leif” in the text.)
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is an expensive set, but if you can afford it, I recommend it highly.
