In 1958, humor rag Punch published an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Revival or Decay?” in which Lewis criticized broad-brush assessments of his day–the same assessments people still make. Here’s his closing paragraph.
Is there a homogeneous ‘West’? I doubt it. Everything that can go on is going on all round us. Religions buzz about us like bees. A serious sex worship–quite different from the cherry lechery endemic in our species–is one of them. Traces of embryonic religions occur in science-fiction. Meanwhile, as always, the Christian way too is followed. But nowadays, when it is not followed, it need not be feigned. That fact covers a good deal of what is called the decay of religion. Apart from that, is the present so very different from other ages of ‘the West’ from anywhere else?
For some years I’ve been a fan of Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, one of the oddest sites on the internet. Well, just look at it. The humor is the driest of the dry; the sort of thing you either get or you don’t. I don’t always get it, but I enjoy checking to see what’s new each day.
Dr. Boli writes books too. I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of them, so I figured I’d try his newest, The Emperor. It’s rather different from the others.
When I was in college, I encountered a couple of old novels (Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas comes to mind) in which older writer/philosophers told fantastic stories of princes in old times and distant lands as a means to comment on their own times and politics. The Emperor seemed like that kind of story to me at first, but I think I was wrong. Maybe.
The Emperor is a young man, orphaned as a boy, who has lived under the guidance of the Consul and the Tribune most of his life. The empire he rules seems to be Roman, in an alternate world where Rome never fell. The geography doesn’t match our world, but the Christian religion seems to be pretty much the same. They have been at war with an enemy for hundreds of years, and the Sultan (who worships Apollyon and dwells just across the strait) is their most faithful vassal.
The young Emperor is beginning to chafe at the many restrictions that hedge his life around. Every moment of his day is scheduled, every action choreographed. He is never alone. His future is determined – he will marry a princess who was sired by the Sultan expressly for that purpose, once she grows old enough. Any suggestion he makes that it might be a good idea to visit his domains or oversee the war is argued down. The Emperor, it is explained, needs to keep the Empire stable through performing his regular duties in the safety of the Palace.
His only escape (or so he thinks) is at night, when the orchestra that serenades him finally leaves – because he pretends to sleep – and he slips out a window to visit an ancient ruin. One night he gets lost and wanders into an unfamiliar part of the palace grounds. There he meets a young servant woman named Pulchrea, scrubbing a floor. The Emperor immediately falls in love with her, and the rest of the story involves him testing his strength of will against those of the Consul and the Tribune, in order to win the freedom to do what he really wants.
But only at the very end does he learn the Big Secret.
I’m not sure what to say about The Emperor. It started slow – the author indulged himself too long in setting the scene; his character’s constrained life and discontent could have been established much more efficiently. Modern readers won’t generally put up with too much stage-setting. The story was interesting once it finally got going. I’m not sure what to think of the ending.
I’m of two minds about The Emperor. You might try it out if it sounds interesting to you; it’s not expensive in Kindle format.
I had run out of bargain books that I’d picked up through online deals, and noticed a Harry Bauer book by Blake Banner. And I thought, “I haven’t read a Banner for a while. I wonder why I stopped following him?” A check of my past reviews gave no clue, so I bought LA: Wild Justice, the 7th installment in the series. It proved entertaining in a popcorn movie way, but I also was reminded why I’d given Harry a rest.
Harry Bauer is a professional assassin working for an ultra-secret agency called Cobra. His bosses call him in for an assignment: they want him to kill a saint. The saint in question is Sen. Charles Cavendish, a billionaire who famously bankrolls a number of much-needed relief organizations around the Third World. He feeds the hungry, provides clean water, cares for the sick, etc.
In fact, according to Harry’s bosses, he operates those charities only as a blind. The entrée he gets to many corrupt countries permits him to sell drugs, arms, and chemical weapons to some of the world’s worst actors – including Harry’s worst enemy in the world.
But Harry has hardly begun his job when one of his bosses is kidnapped. Now it’s a race against time to complete the sanction and rescue his friend.
Harry is a hero very much in the James Bond mold – and I mean the movie Bond, not the one in the Fleming books. He effortlessly subdues very formidable enemies, even in groups – until the plot points call for a dramatic setback. He suffers traumatic injuries and just fights on. Pain barely slows him.
LA: Wild Justice was fun, mindless entertainment. What annoyed me – and this is probably why I dropped the series before – is that the author likes to leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. That just annoys me. Stand-alone books should wrap up the main plot. There can be larger, ongoing plots over a series of books, but you owe it to the reader tie up the threads on the main problem in the volume in hand.
Still, an entertaining book. Moderately recommended. I’m likely to read the next eventually.
A friend gave me a copy of Cat Jarman’s River Kings out of the blue, and I read it with great interest. I wasn’t always comfortable with the book, but it does very well in the job the author (a Scandinavian-English archaeologist) sets out to do. I believe its sales have been successful, and it deserves them.
The story begins with a nice narrative “hook” – a carnelian bead found in excavations at a Viking burial site in Repton, England. Carnelian is a semi-precious stone that was popular among the Vikings (especially with Viking women) and was imported from India. That is a long road to come by, and Dr. Jarman follows that road – through known evidence and speculation – to show how the great Viking trade system passed through England to the Baltic, down through Russia to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea region, eventually linking up with sources of carnelian. At each step along the way she describes how people and objects moved, how the world worked, and what social and economic forces impelled trade. She has the professional ability to provide many fascinating details of Viking Age life, and I benefited from reading this book.
My sole real quibble is purely a subjective one. As a woman of the 21st Century, the author looks everywhere for evidence of women’s activity and influence, as well as for signs of what we call today “cultural diversity.” She finds them and emphasizes them.
This is perfectly fair. I do the same in my own studies, though I’m looking for different things. If I disagree with her on some points, she’s the one with the credentials, so the burden’s on me. And I have to admit, she provided evidence I wasn’t aware of on the touchy subject of women warriors. I’m still skeptical about them, but the other side’s argument is stronger than I thought.
I recommend River Kings. It is informative, interesting, and well-written.
“Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” performed by the OCP Session Choir
This Thanksgiving hymn was written by a rector of Aston Sandford, Buckinghamshire, England, named Henry Alford. He seems to have been one of those accomplished scholars who wrote many hymns, taught many students, and passed into history mostly unnoticed. The tune to this hymn was written by George Elvey for another piece, “Hark! The Song of Jubilee.”
Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home: all is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin; God, our Maker, doth provide for our wants to be supplied: come to God’s own temple, come, raise the song of harvest home.
2 All the world is God’s own field, fruit unto his praise to yield; wheat and tares together sown, unto joy or sorrow grown: first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear: Lord of harvest, grant that we wholesome grain and pure may be.
3 For the Lord our God shall come, and shall take his harvest home; from his field shall in that day all offenses purge away; give his angels charge at last in the fire the tares to cast, but the fruitful ears to store in his garner evermore.
4 Even so, Lord, quickly come to thy final harvest home; gather thou thy people in, free from sorrow, free from sin; there forever purified, in thy presence to abide: come, with all thine angels, come, raise the glorious harvest home.
It’s easy to overgeneralize, and when someone is battle-scarred, he may overgeneralize combatively.
I worked at a men’s conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, several years ago, during which a speaker made some mildly controversial points in an aggressive manner. I think this man felt he was under attack because he lacked support for his work. He probably had to argue for his point of view, if not the reality of his experience (it was on the fringe). “Nobody knows what’s happening,” he’d say. “Why doesn’t anyone see this?” he might ask. And at least one time, that question would have been answered with the fact that many of those in the room knew saw what he saw. We agreed. We didn’t need to be persuaded, and we weren’t fighting him on that point.
Too many of us are willing to say no one is talking about something important, when the truth is we only know something of what’s being discussed in our small circle, including the limited amount of news we can consume. The noise or silence on select social media can convince us that everyone is or isn’t talking about something.
The solution, of course, is humility. We know what we know, and even that could be wrong. We walk on to the best of our knowledge coram Deo.
Midwesterners Unite: A review of a new history of the American Midwest. “In contrast to prevailing clichés and the modern platitudes about backwardness, sterility, racial injustice, and oppression, an in-depth look at the history of the American Midwest reveals a land of democratic vigor, cultural strength, racial and gender progress, and civic energy — a Good Country, a place lost to the mists of time by chronic neglect but one well worth recovering, for the sake of both the accuracy of our history and our own well-being.”
Reading: Contrasting styles, subjects, and tones can act as palate cleansers between books. “They have to be short, they have to be relatively undemanding, and if it’s a re-read, so much the better.”
Photo: Old gas station, Odebolt, Iowa. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Happy Friday. Today I saw my doctor, and I was actually eager to see him. Because I was able to show him all the weight I’ve lost (40 lbs. by his figures). It isn’t often a guy my age is able to tell his doctor good things.
Above, Andrew Klavan and Ben Shapiro discuss their 5 favorite movies and books. This clip reinforces my suspicion that Klavan is way, way, smarter than I am.
When I really like a book, I like to post a snippet of good prose from the text up above my reviews, just to give the reader a taste. Oddly, I didn’t find any snippets in Racing the Light, Robert Crais’s 19th Elvis Cole novel, though I was much impressed with the writing. I guess what I appreciated was the effectiveness of the narrative, its efficiency and power, rather than any storyteller’s flourishes.
Elvis Cole, Los Angeles private eye, contemporary Philip Marlowe in a Hawaiian shirt, gets a drop-in visitor in his office. It’s an elderly woman named Adele Schumacher. She wears very inexpensive clothes, but on the other hand she has two armed security guards escorting her.
As best as Elvis can figure out, the woman’s a crackpot. She raves about government wiretapping, and drone surveillance, and aliens at Area 51. But she has a big envelope full of cash, and she offers Elvis whatever he wants to locate her son Josh, who has disappeared.
Elvis is ambivalent, but he agrees to at least look into it. He finds that Josh is the host of a podcast. Most of the time his subject matter is UFOs and that sort of thing, but lately he’s been talking to a porn star who claims to have explosive information about the real estate shenanigans of a number of city council members. And they, in turn, have connections to Chinese criminals. It appears that Josh was wise to drop out of sight. But he’s in way over his head, and he’s going to need a friend to protect him.
Meanwhile, Elvis has gotten a call from Lucy Chenier, the love of his life, who left him a few books back to return to Baton Rouge with her son. Life with Elvis was too dangerous, she said. She had her boy to protect. But now she wants to talk. Elvis dares to hope, but is prepared for disappointment.
What I liked best about Racing the Light was the characters and relationships. There was a lot of wisdom here about families and friends, and learning to trust and take risks.
Highly recommended. Elvis’ dangerous friend Joe Pike is around too, which is always fun.
The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this—into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.
Another deal on a Travis McGee e-novel by John D. MacDonald pops up, and it is for me but the work of a moment to seize on it and make it my own. This one is Dress Her in Indigo, one of the most memorable installments, I think, in that memorable hard-boiled series. It poses certain challenges for me in reviewing it in this space. This is one of the books, in a series where sex is not infrequent, in which sex is particularly central. The book is an interesting artifact in that it arises from that moment in social history when the Swingin’ Sixties were morphing into the Hippie Era, and will be useful to future historians, if only as an expression of its time.
In general, Travis McGee, “salvage specialist,” makes his living finding lost money and property for people. But this job is different. His best friend, the ursine, affable economist known only as Meyer, asks him to help him do a favor for another friend.
T. Harlan Bowie is an investment counselor who grew very rich almost inadvertently, and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife died not long ago, leaving him with an adult daughter he barely knew. The girl, “Bix,” was extremely beautiful and a very lost soul. A while back she headed off to Mexico with some friends in a camper, and now word has come that she died in an auto accident on a mountain road. All T. Harlan wants is to find out is what her life was like down there. Was she happy? Did she have good friends?
McGee has a bad feeling about this job from the outset, but he and Meyer set out for Oaxaca, her last known address. What they discover leaves them wondering whether they should just lie to the old man. Because Bix’s circle of friends were not nice people at all. They were involved in drug dealing and drug smuggling, and some pretty kinky sex games too. And murder, in the end.
But wait, it gets worse. The big secret is yet to be discovered, and when it is, McGee will be faced with one of the most difficult moral decisions he’ll ever have to make.
But back to the sex. Travis McGee is very far from being a role model, especially for the Christian reader. And one of the most interesting aspects of this book is a stark – comic in places – contrast that’s set up between his experiences in the sack (well-written without being explicit) with one woman who is extremely seductive and experienced, and another woman who is relatively innocent (at least by comparison). Spoiler alert: the innocent one comes out way ahead. If one were to think this out to the end, it might lead to possible arguments for lifetime monogamy, but of course no such argument is made here. Let the reader understand.
Anyway, Dress Her in Indigo is one of MacDonald’s best. Recommended, with cautions as noted above.
A deal came up for a Louis L’Amour book on Kindle, and I thought, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read L’Amour. I really dug him, way back when I was in radio. Let’s see how he holds up.”
Sadly, for this reader, Monument Rock didn’t stack up all that well.
The book is actually a collection – six short stories plus the novel, Monument Rock, which is the final installment in the “Kilkenny” series. This volume is billed as the final published collection of previously unpublished L’Amour western stories.
I was a bit disappointed. My first complaint was the seemingly formulaic quality of the stories. Each of them (at least in memory) was built on the same basic plot – a mysterious, dangerous stranger rides into town (or onto the ranch), where bad guys are doing bad things. Often a woman is threatened. Often the stranger has a secret connection to the place, to be revealed at the end. The stranger (who is exactly like all the other stranger heroes in all the stories) is dangerous and fast with a gun, and can’t be intimidated. The climax is a shootout, where he triumphs.
Of course, there’s a reason narrative formulas exist. They work. It’s just that when you clump them all together like this, the upholstery looks a little threadbare.
Also, the writing wasn’t as good as I hoped. L’Amour was a great storyteller, but he wasn’t a top wordsmith. (I suppose I’ve become a literary snob in my old age.)
The final novel, Monument Rock, pleased me more than the stories. The longer form provided scope for some narrative variety.
There’s nothing really wrong with Monument Rock. L’Amour fans will enjoy it.
