I intend to read more books this year, but since I didn’t quite track how many I read last year, I don’t have an actual number to aim for this year. Goodreads has 23 on last year’s list, which includes several manga. Not sure those count, and a number of books isn’t my goal anyway. A number of pages would be more accurate.
I bought a few Christmas gifts for this purpose, and Tom Holland’s Dominion is 542 dense pages. That will take me a while to get through and in no way diminishes my enjoyment or education for being only one book. (I should take notes too.)
Writer Max Liu read a poetry anthology over two years, “each morning in the four minutes it took my coffee to brew. It was a wonderful reminder that reading is never about quantity and always about the quality of time you spend with a text.” He encourages all of us to read well and for fun, not to meet some goal. (via Joel Miller)
Christian Poetry: How would you define Christian poetry? What about a poem would make it Christian? In a new anthology, Christian Poetry in America (which I bought last month), part of that definition is placing “imitation and tradition over originality and self-expression.”
War in Ukraine: “Someone said it’s essential for Ukraine to win as it would give Russia a chance to rethink its values and undergo cleansing and much-needed change. We pray for it.”
Self-Absorbed Much? A new book is coming on the dangers of social media. The Wolf in Their Pockets is written to pastors to help them minister to “those whose online influences have filled them with cynicism and contempt.”
Photo: Santa’s #1 reindeer, Magic Forest, Lake George, New York. 1996. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
The inner office was, however, empty when Joss entered. It was only after he had banged cheerfully on the desk with a paperweight, at the same time shouting a jovial “Bring out your dead,” that Mr. Duff came in from the little balcony outside the window, where he had been attempting to alleviate his dyspepsia by deep breathing.
“Aha, J. B.,” said Joss sunnily. “Good morrow.”
“Oh, you’re there are you?” said Mr. Duff, making no attempt to emulate his junior’s effervescence.
The managing director of Duff and Trotter was a large man who, after an athletic youth, had allowed himself to put on weight. In his college days he had been a hammer thrower of some repute, and he was looking as if he wished he had a hammer now and could throw it at Joss….
“You’re late!” he boomed.
“Not really,” said Joss.
“What the devil do you mean, not really?”
“A man like me always seems to be later than he is. That is because people sit yearning for him….”
The first book of P. G. Wodehouse I ever bought was the collection The Most of P. G. Wodehouse, published by Simon & Schuster back in the ‘70s, which included the novel Quick Service as a sort of extra (it remains the most reasonably priced way to get this book, so that’s the link I’m using). Thus, Quick Service was the first Wodehouse novel I ever read. I enjoyed it immensely then, and did again on re-reading. Especially because its main character is surprisingly different from most of your Wodehouse heroes.
The plot of the story is extremely tight and complex, but cutting back to the essentials, we start at Claines Hall in Sussex, which now belongs to Mrs. Howard Steptoe, an American millionairess, and her husband. Also in residence is her poor relation, Sally Fairmile, who serves as a sort of secretary. Sally has just gotten engaged to young Lord Holbeton, another guest at the manor. The problem is that under the terms of his father’s will, Lord Holbeton can’t touch his inheritance yet without the approval of his trustee, Mr. J. B. Duff of Duff and Trotter’s exclusive grocery store in London. Sally suggests that she go talk to Mr. Duff, and see if she can’t charm him.
But when she arrives at Duff’s office, she finds not him but our hero, Joss Weatherby, an artist who works in the advertising department. Joss immediately falls in love with her. When she’s gone, Duff reappears, having learned, through eavesdropping, that Joss painted a portrait of a Mrs. Chavender, which now hangs at Claines Hall (where Mrs. Chavender just happens to be a current guest). Duff was once engaged to Mrs. Chavender, he says, and it occurs to him that her face, with its haughty sneer, would make a wonderful poster for the store. He then fires Joss, but Joss heads off to Claines Hall, to take a job as Mr. Steptoe’s valet (a job that Sally mentioned is open). His plan is to steal the portrait, get his job back, and marry Sally.
There may be other heroes like Joss Weatherby in other Wodehouse stories (my memory sometimes fails, and there are a lot of stories), but such an energetic, bright, confident type isn’t the Master’s usual fare. Uncle Fred and Uncle Galahad were probably something like this in their youths. “Aplomb” is the word that best suits Joss. It makes no difference whether he’s discovered swilling his boss’s sherry, breaking into a French window, or perched on a chair, cutting a painting from its frame, he is never dismayed. His self-confidence only ebbs in those moments when he contemplates his unworthiness of the woman he loves. And then only briefly. Joss Weatherby is a great tonic for the depressive reader.
Quick Service is a tremendous story, and everyone should read it.
Your correspondent is a tad down today. Translation work has been slow (read nonexistent), and it snowed and snowed for days and days. Stopped today, and we should be safe for a while according to the forecasts. But it’s… full out there. Chock full. This is one of those years when we don’t know what to do with all the accumulation. The piles along the driveway are nearly as tall as we are.
Of course my neighbor clears the snow for me with a machine, but it’s guilt-inducing to watch him at it.
The news is depressing too. I think I’m going to turn off talk radio again for a while (except for some hours of Prager). Listen to Pandora instead. Confession: I’d like to see my party, you know, pulling together. But I’m afraid that if I say that I’ll be accused of being a RINO. The arguments in favor of the Twenty make some sense to me, but I don’t like watching friends turn into enemies. Simple soul that I am, I don’t think that really helps in the long run.
Above, maintaining the theme of love for That Hideous Strength I’ve been proclaiming all week, here’s Andrew Klavan talking about it. Some of this is a little hard to understand (how can anybody not love Narnia? How can anybody read THS with ease the first time through?), but his opinions on the meaning of the book are spot on. They get him the all-important Walker endorsement, which is nice.
I opened my eyes again. Ridiculous. The truth—as the last half hour had demonstrated beyond doubt—was that the war was lost. And yet here I was, so trapped in the habit of writing, that I was already trying to find the words to explain to someone who would never read them why no one would ever read them.
Dale Nelson reviewed this book in the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, comparing it to That Hideous Strength. I bought it on the strength of that. Coyote Fork is a very different book from THS, but a fascinating parallel read.
Robert Lovelace is an English journalist who used to make his living as a travel writer. But that livelihood is gone, destroyed by social media. His last, desperate bid for writing work is an assignment to go to Silicon Valley and report on the roll-out of TOLSTOY, the latest brain-child of social media mogul Evan Bone (whom Robert blames for the loss of his job). TOLSTOY is supposed to represent a whole new level of Artificial Intelligence, one in which computers will be creating their own stories. Robert can only take so much of this, and rushes outside at last for fresh air.
In the parking lot, he sees Anne Grainger, his ex-girlfriend, who’s supposed to be in England. She’s another victim of Bone’s empire – after rediscovering her Christian faith in mid-life, she was cancelled for her thought crimes in a thoroughgoing way by Global Village, Evan Bone’s social media empire. She fled into hiding, her reputation ruined.
Back in his hotel room, Robert gets the news – Anne is dead. She killed herself, and she was nowhere near California at the time.
The vision, or visitation, of Anne leaves Robert with a single resolve. He’s going to discover the secretive Evan Bone’s true story, and tell it to the world. Give him a dose of his own medicine. Destroy the destroyer. His quest will take him to Coyote Fork, the abandoned site of a 1970s hippie commune, where it turns out Evan grew up. There’s a standard popular narrative about Coyote Fork, and then there’s the true story, which only a few people dare to tell.
Along the way, Robert will be joined in his quest by Ruth Halassian, a scholar who shares his passion – and might share his future. But the real secret of Coyote Fork lies with the local Indians, and they don’t tell their story to just anyone.
Coyote Fork is really not very similar to That Hideous Strength, except in certain themes related to the abuse of science and technology. Robert is a little like Mark Studdock in some ways. But this story is much simpler (which will relieve many readers). Where THS is explicitly Christian, Coyote Fork is more ambivalent – not anti-Christian is the best I can say on that. Where Christianity comes up, it fares pretty well, but the real truth in this story (to the extent that there is a truth) seems to be hidden among the pre-Christian Indians. The final resolution seemed ambivalent at first, but became clear once I’d thought about it.
All that said, Coyote Fork is expertly written, fascinating, and disturbing. I recommend it. Cautions for adult stuff and rough language.
And mixed with this was the sense that she had been maneuvered into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their gray formalized one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like.
The time has come to review C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, and how am I to do that? I think a scholar could devote his whole career to this one. It’s packed full of good stuff. All that stuff doesn’t always work together as you might wish, but even the “failings” look different once you’ve grasped the grand design. Or (perhaps better put) designs.
The setup, in case you’ve never read the book, is that this is the third novel about Prof. Elwin Ransom of Cambridge University, who traveled, first to Mars, and then to Venus, in the previous novels, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There he found the universe and its inhabitants to be very different from what he expected – more on the lines of medieval cosmology than anything imagined by H. G. Wells.
But in this third book, Ransom himself doesn’t appear until well along in the story. We first meet Jane Studdock, educated young wife of a fellow at Bracton College of the (fictional) University of Edgestowe. Jane has been having troubling dreams of a disembodied head, connected by tubes to some kind of mechanism. She confides her fears to “Mother” Dimble, wife of an older faculty member, which leads her gradually into the orbit of an eccentric community of Christians who live in the nearby village of St. Anne’s.
Meanwhile, her husband Mark is excited to be gaining entrée into the “inner ring” at Bracton – the young, “dynamic” men who know the important people and are poised to sweep the old traditions away. But soon he gets a chance to join an even more exclusive ring – the men of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which is acquiring the college property. Mark’s new duties, should he agree to take the post with N.I.C.E., are a little vague, but they clearly involve ethical compromises. And he cannot guess N.I.C.E.’s true goal – the extinction of all life on earth.
If you’ve read Perelandra, you’ll recall how the narrator, as he approaches Ransom’s cottage at the beginning, has to struggle against a “barrier” – a spiritual blockade of sorts. Readers approaching That Hideous Strength have to pass a barrier too. Ironically, this barrier exists because the author did such a good job of realizing his narrative goals.
The problem with the first half of That Hideous Strength is that the passages set at Belbury (the headquarters of N.I.C.E.) are highly effective in portraying the worst aspects of bureaucracy, as Lewis had come to know (and loathe) it. His hatreds of petty ambition, of envy, of snobbery, of fuzzy thinking, of officiousness, of chronological snobbery and moral relativism spring into sight here – not in vivid, but in muted, colors. The satire is biting. But it makes for rather dreary reading. It’s like a breath of country air when we switch to the scenes at St. Anne’s, where the breeze is fresh and there are friendly people (and animals).
Somebody said (it might have been Dale Nelson; it might have been in the comments here) that That Hideous Strength is Lewis’ catch-all book, the book where he threw in everything he wanted to say all at once. Perhaps it would have worked better artistically if he’d practiced more restraint. But it wouldn’t be what it is – a book you could study all your life.
What themes are we dealing with here? The Abolition of Man. The whole nightmare of Belbury is a vision of a new world order based on subjective values – in which all the things that make our lives worth living are dismissed as chemical accidents, reducing humanity itself to raw material for working experiments on. The “humanitarian” theory of punishment, in which the prisoner’s rights are swept away on the pretext of “treating” him. The lure of the “inner ring,” where a man sells his soul by stages for rewards of diminishing happiness. The values of hierarchy and subordination, including in marriage. The mythopoeic fantasies of Tolkien, which Lewis weds to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain. The “spiritual thriller” genre written so well by Lewis’ friend Charles Williams.
There’s something strangely familiar about Belbury to the modern reader, although the parallel isn’t apparent at first. The great goal of the N.I.C.E. is to utterly wipe out organic life, leaving only Mind (ostensibly human, but in fact diabolical). That seems like the opposite of the dominant movement of our own world, a Nature worship that seems poised to embrace human extinction.
But it seems to me the two things aren’t that far apart. Both the Greta Thunberg cult and N.I.C.E. are hostile to human procreation. Today’s progressives, though “sex-positive” in theory, in fact despise any human sexual activity that could produce natural offspring (like the inhabitants of the moon described in this book, “their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”).
I could go on and on. That Hideous Strength occupies a very special place in my heart. Every time I read it, it moves me and teaches me. It brings me to tears. I recommend it highly, but I warn you it requires a little work.
My thanks go out to the people at Shepherd.com, who asked me to select a group of five novels to promote. The idea is to push books I like, and also to give people some clue what my own books are about. You can see my selections here.
Rather a nice concept, I think. The site is worth poking around some.
I see now that the movie ‘Narvik,’ dramatizing the World War II battle, is coming to Netflix January 23. So I guess it’s okay for me to tell you that I worked on this project as a script translator. It was one of the very first I was involved in.
I look forward to ‘Narvik’ with great anticipation. Not only does it tell the story of a nearly-forgotten, epic moment in the story of the war, but it gives proper credit at last to the Norwegian General Fleischer, who had the honor of being the first commander to defeat the Germans on land in that conflict. And who’s story was tragically suppressed.
“You do realize that by limiting yourself thus you are depriving your family of comfort and riches?”
“Oh, you third-reachers!” laughed Siloán. “You have so much that your hearts have become small. You can live very well with very little. Sometimes, it is better this way.”
It isn’t immediately apparent that Nicholas Kotar’s The Song of the Sirin is not typical English-oriented fantasy. Somewhere after the hunt of the white stag, the interaction with the otherworldly wolf, and everything the Pilgrim says, I began to think I didn’t know the terms the writer used. Not knowing anything about Russian folklore, I had no knowledge base to foresee the possibilities in a name or type.
The kingdom of Vasyllia is in decline with an elderly monarch, called the Dar. Three castes of people stir up plenty of political tension, having little more to do than look out for themselves. The young man Voran and his teenaged sister Lebía are orphans of a wealthy family, but their opportunities are limited by the suspicious circumstances of their parents’ deaths; their father, Otchigen, may have betrayed the king to save himself when the people in a distant embassy were slaughtered.
Voran draws more suspicion to himself when he brings a Pilgrim into the city and professes to believe everything he says. The old stories about the divine Covenant and mythical beasts like sirin (an eagle with feathers like gems and the head and torso of a woman) were just a nice cultural basis. There was no living water dripping from a weeping tree. No Raven monster seeking that water along with the destruction of all mankind.
But, of course, the old stories are true, and Voran will be accused by the ignorant and deceived by wily spirits before he begins a long trial of endurance to set the kingdom right again.
Some dark moments in the story are handled carefully, which I appreciate. My main quibble with the writing is the sentences that push toward colorful language where sparse prose would fit the scene better.
The Song of the Sirinis book one of the five-book Raven Son series. While it ends satisfactorily, there’s still a lot of ongoing conflict. I don’t know what to expect in book two, which I picked up with the first one.
Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe,
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free;
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Big news in the literary world today – as this article from the Chicago Sun Times reports, Sherlock Holmes will finally be wholly in the public domain as of tomorrow, the last copyrights for his stories having run out. (If I understand correctly, most of the stories are already out of copyright, but Doyle was still cranking the things out – reluctantly – in 1927).
That was two years before he was filmed doing the interview above. It’s ten minutes divided into two halves. The first half – the interesting part – tells how he came to write Holmes, and discusses the character’s fame. In the second half, Doyle climbs up on his perpetual hobbyhorse, Spiritualism. You, like me, might want to give that part a miss.
I think Doyle underrates himself as a writer in this monologue. He suggests that the great appeal of Sherlock Holmes was the logical, “scientific” approach to problem solving. I think the great draw was always the inherent interest of the characters, especially the friendship between Holmes and Watson.
One of the little stock speeches I often employ to repel prospective acquaintances involves a comparison between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. If you watch very old Holmes movies (and I’ve viewed a few lately), you might be surprised to see that they’re always set in the years when the film is made. Thus we see him and Watson tootling around in automobiles and talking over phones. (In one strange film, The Speckled Band [1931], Raymond Massey plays a youngish Holmes employing a stable of secretaries to continually collate information for him, like a primitive database.)
I like to point out that people in the early 20th Century saw Holmes just the way we see James Bond today. The Bond stories were originally written in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the movies began in the ‘60s and have gone on from there. Thus we think of Bond as a contemporary. We assume he’s operating in 2022 (soon 2023), and that he carries a cell phone and uses a PC, among other things. The fact that this is a very different level of technology from what’s found in Ian Fleming’s original stories doesn’t bother us at all.
In exactly the same way, people in the 1920s thought of Holmes as a man of their time. They expected him to drive a car and use a phone (and in fact, in the later Doyle stories he actually does those things). The idea that Holmes should be stuck in the late 19th Century only came later. The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone (1939) was the first movie to put him back in period, and that was an innovation.
