Fiction, Reviews

‘The Valley of Fear,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-stated performance.”

The last Sherlock Holmes novel (as opposed to short stories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote was The Valley of Fear, which was serialized in the Strand Magazine during 1914-1915. Doyle set the story well back in time, before Holmes’ “death” in a fight with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Doyle places Moriarty in the story’s background, laying some preemptive groundwork for the story, “The Final Problem,” where Moriarty, one must admit, appears a little suddenly for an arch-enemy and nemesis.

In The Valley of Fear, Holmes gets a cipher message from an informant inside Moriarty’s organization, warning him of danger to a man at a country place called Birlstone House. Soon after this, a police detective named MacDonald arrives to ask him to help solve a grisly murder at that very place.

They arrive at Birlstone, which is a stately house surrounded by a moat, whose drawbridge is drawn up every night. So it’s virtually impossible that anyone sneaked into the house during the night. But some time that night, the owner of the house, Douglas, was murdered in his study, his face destroyed by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun. The circumstances make suicide unlikely, but in that case how did the murderer get away? Holmes, of course, goes over the crime scene carefully with his magnifying glass, and it’s not long before he hits on the solution.

I have to admit that The Valley of Fear is one of my least favorite Holmes stories. It follows the pattern Doyle used in A Study In Scarlet, where you have half the story describing the investigation, and the other half consisting of the killer’s confession, in which he explains his back story and motives. (Borrowed loosely in this case from the story of the radical American labor group, The Molly McGuires.)

Doyle seemed to believe (and perhaps he was right in terms of his audience at the time) that people would enjoy stories about far-away, exotic places like the American West or India. I find Doyle a pretty pedestrian writer in these narratives. He tends to get the local details wrong – his American slang here is pretty clumsy, for instance. When I read a Holmes story, I want Holmes, and London. Or at least Victorian England.

So I can’t say I love The Valley of Fear. But if you’re a Holmes fan, you’ll want to read it.

Religion, The Press, Uncategorized

From the sublime (mine) to the ridiculous (Netflix)

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In today’s really important news, my article on the Lutheran Free Church for the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Magazine is now available free online. You can marvel at its awesomeosity at this link.

In even better news, I HAVE FINISHED MY MARATHON SLOG THROUGH THE VIKINGS: VALHALLA SERIES.

It was particularly frustrating watching a series that covered events I’ve researched and dramatized in my own novels, observing how the producers took historical events and characters, shuffled them like cards, and dealt them out in random order. Particularly annoying was their treatment of King Magnus the Good of Norway, who is treated here as a homicidal psychopath. I mean, they called him “the Good” for a reason.

But what’s important is that I can write my article now, with an eventual eye to payment. All through my life, I’ve harkened back to a poem I read somewhere, which went like this (more or less):

There’s a little check at the end of this verse. 
I see it just three lines away.  
And it shall be mine  
For the good of my purse  
If luck is my fellow today.

(I’d credit the author, but a web search doesn’t reveal his name, and I can’t find it in the book where I thought I saw it.)

Music

Sunday Singing: How Great Thou Art

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One of the greatest hymns of the 20th century was written by poet and member of the Swedish parliament Carl Gustav Boberg (1859 – 1940). A member of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden, he wrote “O store Gud” in 1885 in response to church bells and the beauty of a summer evening. Englishman Stuart K. Hine translated and arranged the text to a Swedish folk melody in 1949. The great George Beverly Shea sings with a choir in the recording above.

“I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart;
I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you;
I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.” (Psalm 9:1–2 ESV)

Fiction

New Discovery of Old Fantasy

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Praise for the 1989 Ken Follett novel, The Pillars of the Earth.

Also, World released its book issue this month with several reviews, including this list, “Devils and dragons: Eight books for summer.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Graveyard Shift,’ by Jack HIggins

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Back in the 1960s, before he became a bestselling thriller writer (The Eagle Has Landed, etc.), the English author who wrote under the name Jack Higgins produced mysteries under his real name – Harry Patterson. Among them was a short series featuring London police detective Nick Miller. As The Graveyard Shift, the first entry in the series, begins, our hero has just been promoted to detective, after some special training. He is young for a detective, and well-educated. He’s also rich and likes to dress fashionably. Not a natural fit for the Crime Squad, but his extreme self-confidence never wavers, and he operates with a James Bond-like cool.

Meanwhile, Ben Garvald, a convicted robber, is being released from prison. He’s barely on the street before a couple of thugs attack him with a message to stay away from his ex-wife, now married to their boss, a crime lord. It takes more than that to intimidate Ben, who casually cripples them both and leaves them with a message for their boss. He has business to attend to, and then he’ll be on his way. If they want to stop him, they’ll need to kill him. Which they’ll try to do.

The ex-wife’s sister asks the police to find Ben and warn him off. This will lead to a trail of mayhem and death.

I was a big fan of Higgins/Patterson back in the day. He was a good storyteller, and set a good scene. His prose was adequate. As time went on (in my opinion), he got formulaic and predictable in his storytelling. But this is early work, and pretty fresh.

The book definitely shows its age in many ways. The cops are all men. Most everybody smokes, and they smoke in the office. The language is assuredly un-PC. I generally liked all that. I feel at home in that world.

I did figure out whodunnit, though.

The Graveyard Shift was intended to be dark and gritty by the standards of the time, depicting the hopelessness and desperation of the denizens of the rougher districts of London. Little did they know that it would only get worse with the coming years.

Not a bad book. Cautions for violence and insensitivity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wife,’ by Sigrid Undset

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Human beings could not have done this work on their own. God’s spirit had been at work in holy Øistein and the men who built the church after him. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Now she understood those words. A reflection of the splendor of God’s kingdom bore witness through the stones that His will was all that was beautiful.

I will not try to tell you that Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy is easy reading. The books are extremely long, and a lot of time is spent on medieval Norwegian (and Catholic) arcana that even I don’t always understand. And the books are deep as much as long. The author takes us into her characters’ hearts, with an unsparing eye for their loves and their sins.

Volume 2 of the trilogy, The Wife, could be summarized by calling it the tragedy of a woman who’s gotten what she wants. Kristin, beautiful daughter of a wealthy and honorable man, grew up loved and spoiled. She rewarded her parents’ love by manipulating them into letting her marry Erlend, the man she loves. Now she’s his wife, mistress of the great estate of Husaby, and her chickens gradually come home to roost. Her husband may be handsome and romantic, but he’s also thoughtless and rash, the kind of man who can be counted on to join the losing side just when the tide is turning against it.

Kristin is a good wife to him, efficiently taking over management of the estate – which has been shamefully neglected till now – and bearing him seven handsome sons. But her guilt never leaves her, and she takes constant offense at her husband’s thoughtlessness. This drives them apart, until Erlend’s poor judgment gets him arrested and tortured – very nearly costing him his life.

Sigrid Undset demands some effort from the reader, but she provides an unforgettable reading experience – a journey through time and the human soul.

As a translator myself, I noted that Tiina Nunnally, the translator here, has generally done an excellent job. I wonder about her use of the word “village” to translate what I assume to be the Norwegian word “bygd.” I don’t think I would have made that choice, though I sympathize with her problem. “Bygd” has no exact equivalent in English. It refers to a rural community of several farms, not to a cluster of houses with streets. But I’ll admit my alternatives would have been a little clumsy.

In terms of typographical errors, I note that on several occasions, quotation marks are missing from the beginnings of paragraphs, so that the reader is left uncertain whether the words are dialogue or not.

Authors, Reading

From Undset to Valhalla

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At sunset Kristin was sitting up on the hill north of the manor.

She had never before seen the sky so red and gold. Above the opposite ridge stretched an enormous cloud; it was shaped like a bird’s wing, glowing from within like iron in the forge, and gleaming brightly like amber. Small golden shreds like feathers tore away and floated into the air. And far below, on the lake at the bottom of the valley, spread a mirror image of the sky and the cloud and the ridge. Down in the depths the radiant blaze was flaring upward, covering everything in sight.

Just a passage from my reading in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter today. I thought it was rather nice. I’m nearing the end of the second book, having watched Kristin’s half-smart husband gradually weave the rope that will hang him in the end – in terms of his ambitions, at least.

I’ve also, of course, been watching “Vikings: Valhalla.” And simple justice demands that I admit that it surprised me – I like it better than I expected. Though my expectations, as you probably guessed, were pretty low.

But the fact is that the writers and showrunners of “Vikings: Valhalla” seem to have made the decision to pull in their horns a bit. The “Vikings” series, especially in the later seasons, just went loopy. They let their freak flag fly, so to speak, to the point where it almost came loose from the flagpole. They produced the wildest fantasies and impossibilities and anachronisms, pinning them now and then to odd points of history or saga.

“Vikings: Valhalla” seems a little more controlled, at least as far as I’ve watched so far. Time is still compressed, but not as radically as it was in the first series. Instead of making the same man the attacker of both Lindisfarne (793 AD) and Paris (845), this story seems to be concentrating on the stories of Canute the Great, Saint Olaf, Harald Hardrada, and Leif Eriksson. In this series, all those men are involved in Canute’s conquest of England in 1016 – at which time the real-life Leif had already discovered America and had (I believe) settled down as chieftain of the Greenland Colony. And Harald Hardrada was an infant. Still, all these people could have conceivably met each other in real life.

Many of them show up in my Work In Progess, The Baldur Game. I doubt that Erling will show up here, for which I’m grateful.

The most audacious liberty taken is making Jarl Haakon a Strong Black Woman (and, of course, as is the custom in our times, she is the story’s great font of wisdom). Actually, she’s supposed to be Haakon’s widow, Estrid, who took his office over for him (women could not do that in real life – they could inherit a chieftainship, but needed to get a man to exercise it) and uses his name as her last name. The fact that the Vikings didn’t have last names in the sense we understand them seems to be outside the producers’ ken.

But the costumes (though not in the least authentic) are a little less radically imaginative than the ones in the previous series, and the haircuts are generally much better. I’m grateful for that.

As we age, we learn to be grateful for small mercies. And I’ve aged a decade watching these programs.

Uncategorized

The scourge of yet more ‘Vikings’

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“How long, O Lord?” said the prophet (Isaiah 6:11 is a prominent example of the theme, but several prophets asked the same question with – it seems to me – some justification). I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet (Amos 7:14), but the same question has occurred to me now and then too. Right now I’m wondering how long, O Lord, this “Vikings” series will plague me.

I’m happy to report that I have at last finished all 6 seasons of the History Channel “Vikings” travesty. The longer the thing went on, the more the writers seemed unconstrained by the petty straitjacket of actual facts. Occasionally a historical character shows up, less often a historical event. But they are portrayed in ways the writers must have thought clever (like hand-operated paddlewheel landing craft for an invasion). I have endured all these outrages with the patient endurance of a Christian. And now I find that lo, my travails are not ended. For I’m going to have to go on to watch the sequel, Netflix’s “Vikings: Valhalla” series.

The thing is, the topic I’ve been commissioned to write about is the conversion of the Vikings to Christianity. And it’s not that the original series didn’t deal with the issue – it’s just that they dealt with it in ways that don’t have much to do with my thesis. The Vikings in this series are treated as an ethnic group (which is not what “Viking” originally meant), and they’re all proudly and stubbornly heathen. Christianity has made almost no inroad among them (in this production) by the time of King Alfred the Great’s victory over their armies at Edington. This was not the case in real life. The conflict of faiths is treated here as almost a religious war, which (in my moderately educated opinion) it was not. The Vikings on the series are always talking about their gods as “the true gods.” They didn’t really think that way historically. They were actually more like Hindus, recognizing any god they happened to encounter. They’d be happy to acknowledge the Christian god too, except for His offensive insistence on monotheism.

What I want to write about is the progress of Christianity in Scandinavia itself. I’ve avoided reading much about this new Netflix sequel series, but I understand it involves Jarl Haakon (gender-switched, because of course he/she is), and Harald Hardrada. So they’ve got to touch on my topic.

Therefore, I must gird up my loins for the ordeal.

And I believe I can do this. A couple weeks ago it would have been harder. I’ve always had an irrational and extreme response to watching programs I considered stupid or offensive. Such experiences raised very painful feelings in me.

But in just the last couple weeks, I seem to have made a breakthrough. I’ve found what appears to be a “brain hack” that helps me regulate my emotions better than in the past. I’m not going to go into detail about it now – I want to see whether the effect lasts, and even if it does it may not be applicable to anyone else.

But, like Alfred the Great, I believe I now am equipped to go forth and face the “Vikings.”

Authors, Reviews

Theatrical review: ‘Further Up and Further In’

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I had a great experience Saturday afternoon (before all the shock of the events in Pennsylvania). Max McLean was in town with the Fellowship for the Performing Arts production of “Further Up and Further In.” A friend of a friend had bought a block of tickets, they had a seat free, and my friend arranged for me to get in.

“Further Up and Further In” is a splendid example of a one-man show. The performance time (about an hour and 20 minutes) rushed by.

I’d seen McLean’s work before, having bought the DVD of “The Most Reluctant Convert.” I thought it an impressive low-budget production, though McLean seemed a little rubber-faced in the role of Lewis. I suspected that the stage was his true medium, and was gratified to be proved right.

I read an article years ago that said that if you only know Sir Laurence Olivier from the movies, you have no idea what a genius he was. He was directed to subdue his reactions and his gestures for the more intimate environment of film. But some spark (the author said) was lost.

McLean doesn’t seem to have subdued his performance greatly for the movie, but on stage this approach is highly effective. The dramatic scenario here is that we’re having a conversation with Lewis in his study in the year 1950, but of course it’s not really like that. Lewis would never have gesticulated as McLean does – these exertions are for the audience in the upper decks. (Also, Jack Lewis would have been smoking constantly, which does not happen in this play.) What we actually have here is a long sermon – but it’s a brilliant sermon, cut-and-pasted from Lewis’ articles, books, and letters. It’s all vivid and exciting, and the stage furniture – desk, wing-backed chair and drinks cabinet – sits before a large rear projection screen that displays images illustrating the narrative.

The text deals with problems of faith such as how we can believe in God at all, and how to deal with the problem of pain. It ends with Lewis speculating on ultimate things, on the end of the world (he quotes heavily from the sermon, “The Weight of Glory”) and the wonders of Heaven.

If “Further Up and Further In” comes to your town, I highly recommend going to see it. I had an exhilarating time.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

Travels to Worlds Unknown (Maybe Fictious)

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It’s been a full week and will continue to be so for rest of the month. I feel a deadline pressing upon me, so let me move quickly to these links.

Poetry: “While Observing A Summer Storm” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. “these I take as pathfinders and guides”

Art: Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) painted moody mythological scenes, like Isle of the Dead (which you’ve likely seen whether you knew what it was).

Chariots of Fire: The story of Eric Liddell’s race in the classic movie Chariots of Fire took place at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The Scottish runner won gold in the 400-meter, breaking Olympic and world records with 47.6 seconds. World’s Paul Butler talked about it on Friday’s podcast of The World and Everything in It. I listened to a tape of the movie soundtrack during my fruitful, cassette-tape-buying years. Here’s a nice tribute to the movie and music.

The Facts Fudged: Bill Steigerwald talks about the work he put into his book dividing fact from fiction in John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. “Taking on the great Steinbeck and challenging the existing narrative about his iconic book was no big deal. I was used to being an outsider, whether it was when covering a KKK cross-burning or attending a conference of public transit officials. The process of reporting and researching Steinbeck’s travels and book was no different from what I had done in a hundred big Sunday newspaper features, just a lot bigger and on my own dime.”

Photo: Elks Lodge, Tacoma, Washington. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.