I’m reading a very long book right now, and so it’ll be a while yet before I have a review ready. Instead I share the picture above.
This photo was taken way back in the last century, in June of 1994. That young, thin, dark-bearded figure on the ship’s bridge is your obedient servant. The ship is the Fram, the arctic exploration vessel designed for Fridtjof Nansen and later used by Roald Amundsen as well. It’s in a museum all its own in Oslo, not far from the Viking Ship Museum. When I reviewed Nansen’s book Farthest North in January, almost a year ago, I vaguely remembered having this picture, and looked around for it. Couldn’t find it. Today I happened to open a photo album in the basement, and there it was. So I share it with you now, to your wonder and amazement, I have no doubt.
“Fram” means “forward.” It’s Norway’s traditional motto, based on the reported war cry of St. Olaf’s men at the battle of Stiklestad: “Forward, forward, Christ-men, cross-men, king’s men!”
This was my first trip to Norway, and I took it with my dad. My mother had died recently, and Dad proposed that we go together. “I’ll pay for the travel; you cover the rest of your own costs,” he said. Couldn’t say no to that. That was when I first met my relatives over there. It was the first of five delightful journeys.
I continue to yammer to all and sundry about the novel The Last of the Vikings. Today The American Spectator printed a second review by me.
There’s a fascinating section in The Last of the Vikings where the fishermen ask Lars to read to them from A Happy Boy, and they’re all transported by the story: “It had never struck them before that a house and land can be so beautiful despite their being small. They did not know that poor people could have so much sunshine.”
And then another fisherman comes in carrying a radical newspaper called the Dawn. He’s been bringing copies in periodically for Lars to read aloud, and they’ve all enjoyed reviling the greedy capitalists. But now the fishermen’s attitude has changed. They tell the agitator, to his shock, to get out and take his paper with him…
Back in the late Jack Higgins’ heyday, I used to buy all his novels as they appeared, because he wrote a tight, compelling story, and when Christianity came up it was generally treated respectfully. As time went on I got the feeling he was starting to phone it in, telling the same story over and over with different settings and only superficially different characters.
But it had been a while since I’d read a Higgins, so I took advantage of a bargain on one of his early books, Comes the Dark Stranger. I don’t think he’d found his stride yet at this point in his career, but the book was entertaining.
Martin Shane shows up in the English town of Burnham, looking for an old army buddy. But not in a good way. He’d been with a commando group in Korea, all from the same town, and he and his friends were taken prisoner and tortured. One of them, under threat of execution, had broken and given the interrogator what he wanted. Then Martin’s best friend was executed. Martin vowed revenge, but then suffered a brain injury that kept him hospitalized for eight years. Recently he got his memory back. He needs brain surgery to remove shrapnel before it kills him, but before he goes under the knife, Martin is going to identify the Judas and kill him.
Of course, it isn’t as easy as that. Everyone has a story. Somebody’s lying. As Martin endures recurring, crippling headaches, he questions and threatens and gets people angry, hoping the culprit will give something away. At some points, he’s not even sure the things he remembers actually happened. In the end, he’ll get an answer he doesn’t want.
Comes the Dark Stranger touched all the bases as far as thriller plotting is concerned. My problem with the book is that I didn’t really believe in the characters. I didn’t think some of them were responding naturally, but were just doing what was necessary to advance the plot.
Still, the book wasn’t bad. Moderately recommended.
I’ve been following Dan Willis’ Arcane Casebook series about hardboiled runewright/detective Alex Lockerby for some time. The books aren’t high literature, but they’re a rare example of modern urban fantasy that I find entertaining. The latest book is Hidden Voices.
Alex Lockerby is thrust into the turmoil of European affairs when William Donovan, creator of the OSS, asks him to transport to Austria and rescue an alchemist who possesses a valuable secret formula the Nazis want. The job – of course – turns out to be more dangerous than expected, but Alex manages to bring the alchemist home. And then it goes wrong on this end.
Meanwhile, he’s also hired to investigate the murder of a famous vaudeville musician, beaten to death with his own mandolin.
Supported and assisted by his girlfriend, the sorceress Sorsha, Alex comes through (even battling the Aryan Superman) to champion the cause of freedom and identify the guilty.
I wish the author had worked harder to master 1930s diction – he thinks, for instance, that Alex would have called the “#” symbol a “pound sign” rather than a hash mark. But most people can’t remember how they talked in the old days anymore, so I suppose it’s not important. The story was fun and there was no objectionable material. Recommended.
As you’ve noticed, I am working my way (happily) through the old John D. MacDonald paperbacks re-issued for Kindle by The Murder Room. Deadly Welcome was a particular pleasure, because it’s one I hadn’t read before.
Alex Doyle works in sort of troubleshooting capacity (never really explained) for the US State Department. But one day he’s ordered to the Pentagon and informed he’s now on loan to the military. They have an assignment for him, one he’s uniquely qualified to carry out.
There’s a Colonel M’Gann who’s been doing important defense work. A while back he got married to a woman named Jenna Larkin, originally of Ramona Beach, Florida. She seemed to be a good wife, and nursed him back from a stroke. They moved to Ramona Beach together. Then she was murdered, strangled on the beach. Now Col. M’Gann has withdrawn from the world. The military wants him back. They’d like Alex to go down there and see if he can solve the murder. That might bring the Colonel back.
Alex doesn’t want to do it. The very reason they chose him is because he originally came from Ramona himself. He even knew Jenna Larkin (all the boys did). Back there he was considered white trash. He got framed for a theft and only avoided prison by enlisting in the Army. He expects no great welcome in his home town.
Indeed, once he arrives, pretending to have money he wants to invest in a local business, almost his first encounter is with the deputy sheriff, who works him over with a truncheon just to show him who’s in charge. Alex pretends to be properly cowed, but he’s not the same guy who got run out of town so long ago. He’ll get his own back in his own time. Along the way he’ll meet Jenna’s sister, a beautiful woman with a traumatic past. And he’ll uncover a possible motive for the murder, which helps him come up with a way to trap a killer.
Deadly Welcome isn’t a terribly memorable book. There’s a little too much amateur psychology here, perhaps. But it’s a well-crafted, plausible story with a satisfying conclusion. Journeyman work, and well worth the price.
“Behold! The Mountain of the Lord” performed by Godfrey Birtill at a live concert
Who wrote today’s Advent hymn, “Behold! The Mountain of the Lord,” appears to be a controversy. Scottish Minister John Logan (1748-1788) got it published in a collection of hymns in 1781, but the words may have come from his friend Michael Bruce (1746-1767). Given the family’s accusations and Logan’s track record with his definitely original material, it seems Logan passed some of Bruce’s hymns off as his own.
The tune called “Glascow” comes from Thos Moore’s Psalm Singer’s Pocket Companion (1756).
The performance above doesn’t include all of these verses and makes a good modification to the final verse.
1 Behold! the mountain of the Lord in latter days shall rise on mountain tops above the hills, and draw the wondering eyes.
2 To this the joyful nations round, all tribes and tongues, shall flow; up to the hill of God, they’ll say, and to his house we’ll go.
We watched a new superhero comedy/drama called “The Hyperions” over the holiday. It’s the story of a super-enabled family that has broken up, because though they talk about being family, they have been managed more like a business team. Two of the original team members are young adults now, and they want their powers back.
The trailer leaves the impression the movie is pretty darn funny, but it doesn’t quite bring the laughs. It’s funny, just not that funny. Instead it leans into Vista Mandulbaum’s anger against her inventor/showman father, Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum, who seems to have wounded her and damaged the whole team only after she rebels and leaves. That makes this more a feel-good family drama with superhero comedy thrown in.
Cary Elwes carries the story as the absent-minded, perpetually frumpy Professor Mandulbaum. Penelope Mitchell Vista, the first of the Hyperions, conveys most of the story’s emotional weight, and everyone else is fine.
I chaffed most when the characters couldn’t talk honestly with each because of issues. One of my daughters thought the story could have shown us happy family moments in order to help us care about their pain more. Most of the violence is muted and sometimes light-hearted. It’s not really a superhero story. It’s a family-business story about superheros, and overall I enjoyed it.
What else to do we have?
Western Civilization: Susannah Black Roberts responds to an argument in Stephen Wolfe’s book on Christian Nationalism. He says no one seeks the well-being of everyone around; he only seeks that for himself and his own kind. The idea that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applies to all mankind is not sound. We only seek that for those in our own ethnicity. To support this thesis, Roberts writes, Wolfe cherry picks from a wide range of author in the western tradition. And then she quotes Chesterton.
Thomas Jefferson: World News Group’s book of the year is Thomas Kidd’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. “In this biography, Kidd shows us an original thinker attempting to cobble together his own brand of spirituality. Jefferson held unorthodox views long before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he wasn’t a Deist who saw God as an uninvolved Creator. He believed in God’s providence, but he saw that providence at work in America’s founding rather than in the saving of souls or the creation of the Church.”
They worked in the herring fisheries in the autumn, and in the winter sailed hundreds of miles in open boats up to Lofoten, perhaps tempted by the hope of gain, but perhaps too because on the sea they were free men.
More than once over the years on this blog I’ve mentioned Johan Bojer’s novel, The Last of the Vikings, which I read in Norwegian (Nynorsk). I even translated a section and posted it once (though I can’t find it now), because I dearly wished to share this book with others, but the English translation was out of print.
I’m delighted to report that this has changed. You can now get The Last of the Vikings in translation for Kindle.
First of all, I must inform you that this book isn’t about Vikings. It’s about the cod fishery in Lofoten sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, when steam was beginning to replace sail. If you see a picture of one of the old Nordland boats, the kind used in this book, you’ll think for a moment that it’s a picture of a Viking ship. That’s because the Nordland boats were descended from Viking boats through unbroken evolution over centuries.
Kristàver Myran is a small farmer (although the text doesn’t say it, his home is in the Trondheim area, where author Bojer grew up). Every winter, like most of the able-bodied men of his neighborhood, he makes the long sail up to Lofoten to participate in the cod fishing, gambling that he can make enough money to get ahead a little in the world. But this year he has great hopes, because he finally has his own boat (purchased on credit). He wondered why the boat was going for such a low price, but only learned after the sale that it’s jinxed. Over the last three winters it has capsized every year. Well, nothing can be done about that now.
Coming along for the first time is his son Lars, proud to be a Lofoten man at last. Lars idolizes his father and dreams of following in his footsteps, but also likes to read and has educational aspirations. He is the main point-of-view character in the book.
Other crew members include Elezeus, Kristàver’s brother-in-law, an abusive, self-loathing husband. And Kaneles (Cornelius), a fun-loving bachelor who’s the sole support of his young sister and blind father. And Arnt, another first-year man, a bad sailor terrified of the sea.
Another skipper from the neighborhood is old Jacob, a limping, black-bearded, drunken, cheerful force of nature. A man with no family and no home on land, who knows nothing but the sea, but knows it like no other.
The men will face many challenges over the winter. They’ll face conflicts with other crews over tangled nets and regional rivalries in drinking shops. They’ll face long hours rowing, and days and nights without sleep when the shoals of fish come in, and boredom when they don’t. They’ll face daunting competition from the new steam-powered boats, along with the arrogance of the authorities. But most of all they’ll face the weather, the killing storms of the arctic sea. They will look in the face of death itself.
I’ve rarely read a book that affected me more than this one. I don’t think it’s just because some of my ancestors must have been involved in this fishery. This is the story of all the poor men over the centuries who’ve taken the poor man’s gamble – risk your very life in the hopes of making a better future for your family, even at the risk of leaving them without a provider. I cared deeply about these characters, and mourned and rejoiced with them.
I have to say I don’t consider the translation first rate. It’s over-literal, in my opinion, which makes the dialogue, in particular, sometimes awkward. But the scenery descriptions were vivid, and the storm sequences sublime.
The Last of the Vikings gets my highest recommendation. It’s unforgettable.
I hope everyone here, there, and elsewhere has had a happy Thanksgiving. I realize this is an American holiday, but it’s just one more way you should allow America into your hearts and lives for your own and your country’s flourishing. I’m talking to you, United Kingdom. You never should have let all the good people leave your empire, you sick tyrant.
Okay, what else have we got?
First Thanksgiving: “After a rough two-and-a-half months on the Atlantic, [the Margaret, a 35-foot-long ship with 36 settlers and crew] entered the Chesapeake Bay on November 28, 1619. It took another week to navigate the stormy bay, but they arrived at their destination, Berkeley Hundred, later called Berkeley Plantation, on December 4. They disembarked and prayed.”
Ben Franklin: In a new biography, D. G. Hart presents Benjamin Franklin as an example of a “spiritual, but not religious” American Protestantism. “As much of a cliché as pulling himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his wit and striving say as much about Protestantism as it does about American character.”
Cultural Elites:Carl Trueman is thankful for David French‘s articles supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. “Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.”
The Ends of History: Michael Bonner has written a defense of civilization. “All this is to say that the ‘whole new world’ we were promised in the 90s is much like the old one, only worse. The theory of irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible. It seems that anyone of any walk of life or partisan stripe could agree with Livy that ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their remedies’.”
Education:Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course? “I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of Mainline Protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time.”
