In these troubled times, I don’t often have good things to say about judges anywhere in the world.
Judge Rob Murfitt of New Zealand is an exception.
One small candle in the cultural night.
Repost: The Scarred Man, by Keith Peterson (Andrew Klavan)
(My original plan was to repost all my previous Andrew Klavan reviews before addressing Empire of Lies, but I got carried away. So I’m picking up the reposts now. This is second in the series, and like the previous repost, comes from May 2006.)
Oh, by the way, I forgot yesterday the first Andrew Klavan novel I read (actually it was written under the Keith Peterson pseudonym)–The Scarred Man. This is a psychological thriller with one of the best hooks I’ve ever read.
I love a great “book hook.” Perhaps my favorite is the beginning of The Man Who Wasn’t There by Roderick MacLeish (a much underappreciated novelist). That book (as I recall–I don’t have a copy) began with the main character, who was something of a celebrity, being recognized by a stranger sitting beside him on a plane. Instead of admitting to his identity, he played a trick he liked to play in such situations, claiming to be his own (non-existent) non-famous twin, whose story he made up on the spot.
The next morning he got up and read in the paper that this imaginary twin brother had been killed in a plane crash.
That’s a great book hook.
But the hook in The Scarred Man is almost as good.
Michael North is a young New York reporter who accepts an invitation to spend Christmas in Connecticut with his boss. There he meets the boss’s daughter, Susannah, and falls hopelessly in love in about a nanosecond.
To entertain themselves, the party members agree to tell ghost stories (I thought of you here, Phil). Michael makes up a story on the spur of the moment, telling a tale of a murderous, undead psychopath with a scar down the center of his face.
Susannah goes hysterical, shouting “Stop it! What are you trying to do to me!” She flees back to school before he can discuss it with her.
Later, when he drives up to Susannah’s college to talk to her, he pulls into the entrance and sees, in his headlights–the scarred man. When he finds Susannah, she tells him she’s been having nightmares about this man all her life.
The great thing is, this isn’t a supernatural novel.
Empire of Lies, by Andrew Klavan
I just finished reading Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan, and I’m still decompressing.
I have a hard time imagining how this book can ever succeed commercially. But I sure hope it does.
As the story begins, the hero/narrator, Jason Harrow, a journalist turned realtor, is sitting in the back yard of his Midwestern home, watching his children play. He’s thinking about a girl who worked at his office, who’d made a pass at him. He didn’t take her up on it, but he can’t avoid a (purely hormonal) wistful feeling. Shortly thereafter he’s joined by his wife, and it’s obvious that they have an excellent relationship. She trusts him, and he deserves her trust.
Jason is being entirely honest with the reader. And that’s sort of the point of the whole book. He’s telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even to his cost.
From the very beginning, references and turns of phrase warn us that he’s going to go through a terrible test; that he’s going to become famous, and not necessarily in a good way.
Jason goes inside the house to answer the phone, and (as so often happens in stories of this sort) the caller is a voice from his past. It’s Lauren, the woman he lived with in another life, when he resided in Manhattan, thought he was an intellectual, and was part of a very kinky sex “scene.” Jason is a Christian today. He’s turned his back on all that.
But when he agrees to go to New York to help Lauren out with a problem with her daughter, he doesn’t tell his wife about it. He has to go anyway, because his mother recently died and he needs to empty out her house. He doesn’t plan to break his marital vows. But his motives aren’t entirely pure, and he can’t bring himself to bring it into the open.
When he sees Lauren, he’s somewhat relieved to find that she’s changed. He no longer finds her attractive. But she talks him into looking for her daughter Serena, who has disappeared.
He finds the girl, sick drunk, in a night club and takes her to his mother’s house when he finds that Lauren isn’t at home. The girl is raving, and one of the things she says is, “I didn’t know they were going to kill him.” Continue reading Empire of Lies, by Andrew Klavan
“Specifically About Goodness and Evil”
The Thinklings are blogging about Batman. Jared and Philip have excellent, thoughtful reviews of what apparently is an excellent, thoughtful movie.
Jared notes: “The whole thing about nihilism or whatever just isn’t in there. It’s just not. The Dark Knight is specifically about goodness and evil, virtue and ethics, individuality and the social animal. These aren’t things one has to stretch to find in the movie to make it redemptive; they are actually in the film.”
Philip writes:
This the Batman the world has been deprived of for so long by all the other attempts. Batman is not a superhero, so much as he’s the anti-anti-hero. Batman, as we fanboys know him, is a dark, conflicted character that escorts us into a journey into human nature that is so scary that we’re glad to have him as a guide, even though we know he’d never let any of us actually be friends with him. . . . This is a movie that grapples with original sin and the nature of evil. What makes us good? What makes us bad? The Joker, like Satan in the book of Job, says that good people are only good as long as the circumstances are right. But if you change their circumstances… they’ll be evil like him. His motive for his badness (and there’s A LOT of badness) seems to be to force humanity to look at itself in the mirror only to find the Joker’s face (as a symbol of evil) staring back.
Weekend movie report
I know I should have gone to see The Dark Knight, and I really want to see Hellboy 2, too. But instead I watched DVD movies this weekend.
Two were silents from my new Douglas Fairbanks collection. The first was Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), which is notable for featuring Warner Oland (the Swedish actor who later became Charlie Chan) in a character role, and Mary Astor, who would later play the dame fatale in The Maltese Falcon. I always found her kind of brittle and uninteresting in TMF, but here, as an ingénue, she’s completely adorable.
Then there was Robin Hood (1922), an impressive epic-scale effort by Fairbanks which is completely sabotaged by some idiot’s decision to have the Merry Men actually skip and prance everywhere they go in Sherwood Forest. Now I know what Mel Brooks was lampooning in Men In Tights. It looks unbelievably silly and fey. Oddly enough, Little John is played by Alan Hale, who would reprise the role in the far superior Errol Flynn vehicle in 1938.
I capped it off with a viewing of Master and Commander / The Far Side of the World with Russell Crowe. I’d only seen it once, back when it first ran in theaters, and remembered that I liked it. But I’d forgotten how good it was. I’m crazy about that whole tall ships thing. Maybe it’s genetic. One of my great-great-grandfathers sailed on a merchant voyage to China around the turn of the 19th Century, and one of my great-grandfathers was a cook on a whaling ship.
Of course you can’t help wanting to scream, “What in the living color were they thinking of, putting those little boys in harms way?” But that’s the way it was. It’s still a rousing seafaring movie, maybe the best ever made.
Tomorrow, back to Andrew Klavan.
Points of Reality in Publishing
Mary DeMuth has three posts on what she calls publishing reality.
- Fewer books are being published, so more pressure to perform is on authors.
- People are changing jobs within publishing houses as well as leaving the industry.
- Writers should serve their readers. Readers will buy a book for their own reasons, not to do writers a favor.
It’s an Expedition
Author Rich Wagner tells Christian men “if you allow your heart to be captured by career and church, you put your kid’s spiritual lives at risk.” He argues that the answer to life is not balancing family, career, and church. It’s about limiting career and church in order to lead the family whole-heartedly.
Hancock, A Human Story
My wife and I saw “Hancock” Saturday evening. The prelude to it was a delicious Roasted Sirloin Focaccia Sandwich at Outback Steakhouse. I want to try to work out something like that at home–sliced steak or roast beef, provolone, and herbs in garlic focaccia bread with French Onion soup for dipping. Good food.
But in the movie, Will Smith plays the down and out superpowered man who gets a grip on himself. He begins as a self-centered jerk and ends as a respectable hero. It’s the same story we’ve told a thousand times. Someone moves from self-destruction to productive citizen, overcoming alcohol, drugs, abusive behavior, doubt, fear, and anything keeping him from his full potential. “A life lived in fear is only half lived,” as the lead dancer’s father said in “Strictly Ballroom.” Hancock is the same story within a superhero fantasy. That’s why it’s a strong movie.
“Hancock” is essentially a comedy. That’s why it ends the way it does. Even in the serious tension of the final scenes, you can see comedy elements at play. They aren’t funny, but they are more lighthearted than the atmosphere and action call for. What themes are in the story are not heavy handed, so they could be missed, but I think it would be a good film for youth leaders and professors to watch with a group and talk through the messages afterward. Continue reading Hancock, A Human Story
More Reading for Guys
Amazon.com has a list of reading material for boys; at least, that’s what my email told me. I see know the list mixes boy and girl interests.
Who’s the greatest Christian fiction writer?
In case you don’t monitor The Thinklings blog, you may want to contribute to Bird’s post asking who is the greatest Christian fiction writer.