Reviews

Book Review: Proof Positive, by Phillip Margolin

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Another negative review for you today. I’ve found a reason in my old age to finish books I dislike. The pain of reading them is balanced (at least somewhat) by the pleasure of insulting the authors, at a safe distance. The petty vengeance of the failed novelist.

Proof Positive is a legal thriller written from viewpoint of the defense side.

It led this reader to root for prosecutors even more than a Robert K. Tanenbaum novel could.

It’s one in a series of novels starring a young female defense attorney in Portland, Oregon named Amanda Jaffe. She’s the daughter of a prominent criminal lawyer.

The story starts with the execution of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. His lawyer, Doug Weaver, observes the death of his gentle, not-too-bright client, consoling himself that the man must have been guilty, because a forensic expert found his fingerprint on the murder weapon.

Later, mobster Art Prochaska is arrested for the murder of a drug dealer. Amanda, whose father has often represented Prochaska’s boss, is retained to represent him.

There’s damning forensic evidence against Prochaska, but by now the author has revealed to us that the forensic investigator who documented the evidence is in fact in the practice of planting manufactured clues.

At the same time, Doug Weaver is retained to defend a psychotic young man accused of murder, also the victim of falsified forensics.

As the attorneys seek the truth, the crooked CSI begins to commit murders of his own, in order to protect himself.

If this synopsis seems a little dry, it’s because I DIDN’T CARE FOR ANY OF THESE CHARACTERS FOR ONE SINGLE MOMENT!

That’s an exaggeration. I found two human scenes in the book. One was where the young psychotic meets with his parents in the jail, and they finally make a connection after many years. The other involved a moment of sexual banter between two lovers.

Other than that, author Margolin took apparent pains to keep us eternally at an emotional distance from his characters. One of his irritating techniques was to always convey his characters’ thoughts at a remove, saying (for example), “He thought that he made a mistake…” rather than, “He thought, ‘I made a mistake.’”

And all the characters do this tedious thinking in the same way. Men and women. Cops and civilians. Professional criminals and solid citizens. There was nothing to distinguish them in their characterizations. They all thought and reacted (at least to my perception) in precisely identical ways.

This was especially annoying in regard to the gangsters in the book. Margolin didn’t seem to care at all that these were very bad guys who make their livelihoods off human suffering. They were targets of the rogue CSI, so they were treated as charming and slightly amusing tough guys.

Margolin obviously wants us to realize that police power can be abused, and that even forensic evidence isn’t always solid. True enough. There have been cases like this, where the system has been abused.

But he undercuts his argument by whitewashing the crooks and (especially) by BORING ME WITH A DULL NARRATIVE.

Margolin is apparently a very successful novelist. I have no idea why, on the basis of this book.

Writing

Write What You Know?

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By his own admission, Michael Snyder doesn’t know anything and yet he writes.

A lady at the library turned to me out of the blue today and asked what I might recommend that she and her husband listen to on a long trip. I thought if I asked a few clarifying questions that I might be able to help her out. It didn’t work. She knew less than I did. That made me feel pretty good. I wondered if I could write about that encounter. Turns out I can’t.

He believes loving your characters is better than actually knowing something to write about. Read on.

Authors

Ad Lib

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A critical point in Steve Allen’s career shines a new light on the current writers union strike. Allen began The Tonight Show in 1954 and originated the concept of modern TV talk shows. When Doris Day did not show up for an interview,

Allen was left to his own comic devices with twenty-five minutes of airtime on his hands, which he filled by interviewing people in the studio audience, lugging an old stand-up mike up and down the aisles. ‘The physical thing of carrying this big mike around the room helped to get laughs. I just horsed around, like with my pals. That opened up a lot of possibilities.’ He later wrote: ‘I don’t recollect what was said during the next twenty-five minutes, but I do know that I had never gotten such laughs before.’ … Allen had discovered his natural ability to play it as it lays, to talk without a prepared script or format. ‘For two years I had been slaving away at the typewriter … with only moderate success. Now I had learned that audiences would laugh much more readily at an ad-libbed quip, even though it might not be the pound-for-pound equivalent of a prepared joke.’

Where are comic talents like this today?

Bookselling

Holiday Book Sale

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The Oxford University Press is having a Christmas sale. They got some Beowulf translations, a Jane Austin illustrated collection, anthologies, you know–the usual.

In other news, let me point out this discipleship series I stumbled across. You Matter More Than You Think, by Leslie Parrott, is a video-based studies series for women which may scratch where you itch.

Reading

Imagine There Are No Readers

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“What are the consequences if America becomes ‘a nation in which reading is a minority activity?‘” National Endowment for the Arts Chair Dana Gioia asks this question out of a concern that our country is discouraging reader among teenagers and young adults. He says,

We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life.

The Hartford Courant reports: “‘Is this a cultural apocalypse? No,’ Gioia said, but noted a paradox — while the number of books published is increasing annually, reading for pleasure is declining.”

The report appears to be weak on data for online reading, and some publishers are critical of it for that reason. If people are reading a good bit online, it may offset the study’s results. I’m interested in hearing how much we all read online too, but I don’t think that point of data would change the answer to the survey question asking how much time you spend reading anything for fun. The report claims “15-to-24-year-olds spent just 7 to 10 minutes a day voluntarily reading anything at all” in 2006, according to the Washington Post. That ain’t too good. How much texting did they do?

Reviews

Movie Review: Beowulf

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One line review: I didn’t hate it.

Long, long ago, when I was a small, unpromising child, my brother Moloch and I were given the gift of a ViewMaster for Christmas. If you’re one of our younger readers, you may never have seen a ViewMaster. It was a device for viewing stereoscopic images; pictures in 3-D. The pictures came on cardboard disks, and my favorite set of disks was the one portraying the story of Snow White.

This wasn’t the Disney version. Somebody had gone to great pains to carve and paint a number of posed character figures, and then to place them in dioramas and photograph them. Whoever did the job had a tremendous sense of composition and color, and I found the scenes fascinating and beautiful.

In a way, Beowulf is a lot like those ViewMaster scenes, with the added element of motion. I’ll confess right off the bat that I have a “gee-whiz,” little kid’s response to the novelty of watching a 3-D movie. Even when the effects take you out of the story (which, I must confess, they often do), I enjoy the ride.

The capture motion animation, in my opinion, is less successful. I think the response you’ll get from most people who come out of the film will be, “It was kind of weird.” I liked that the digital painting of the characters made them resemble the figures in my ViewMaster Snow White. And sometimes, particularly in the action scenes, I thought the animation was very effective.

But in the quieter scenes, especially, the ones that involved people interacting with each other, things were strangely off. Hands, facial expressions and body movements often seemed stilted, deformed or awkward, which is odd. If Disney was able to create elegant, naturalistic motions using drawings alone, how is it possible to make figures look less natural when you’re drawing right on top of actual filmed images?

I predict that this kind of animation will continue to be done, and will rapidly improve. Which means that Beowulf will not age well.

How did they treat the story? That’s also kind of weird, though it was far from reaching the low-end benchmark of the recent Canadian/Icelandic Beowulf and Grendel, which I reviewed here a while ago. That movie made the story a parable of European racism and imperialism, painting Grendel as the spotless hero and Beowulf as a Nazi, redeemed only by his profound self-doubts.

Beowulf treats the story with much more respect than that. The script, by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, follows the original poem in its general plot points, with the added bonus of including Beowulf’s last battle with the dragon, which most moviemakers would have omitted. In order to unify the theme, they make some major changes in the plot, though, mostly involving the character of Grendel’s mother, played (you must be aware by now) by Angelina Jolie without no clothes on. (I didn’t find this, actually, more pornographic, done in this kind of animation, than the skin-tight female uniforms so popular on recent versions of Star Trek. On top of that, Angelina J. has never been my idea of an appealing female. Unlike a dragon, she has not the least spot of vulnerability about her. Which, in a way, makes her perfect for the role. The stiletto heels, however, were a little too much; even if they were presumed to grow out of her feet.)

What intrigues me about the changes made in the story is that the authors have taken a Germanic heroic saga (in which the hero is bigger than life and essentially without fault, dying in the end merely because his fate-allotted time has run out) and changed it into a tragedy on the Greek model. The Greek tragedy centered on a hero with a fatal flaw—some weakness or appetite that compelled him to bring his own doom down upon himself. This plot pattern was eagerly taken up by Christian poets and playwrights, who recognized it as an ideal vehicle for expressing the Christian view of original sin.

This means that, in spite of the fact that most of the references to Christianity in the movie (anachronistic, by the way, as Christianity was hardly heard of in Denmark until at least a couple centuries later) are dismissive, and although the primary Christian spokesman in the movie is pictured as extremely brutal to his slaves, the writers have (probably without meaning to) essentially forced a Christian form and sensibility onto the pre-Christian story.

From a historical point of view, the costumes and sets were better than those in The Thirteenth Warrior (also based on “Beowulf,” and all in all a better film, but much debased by ridiculous, anachronistic armor), but not as good as those in Beowulf and Grendel (which tried to redeem its ruthless trashing of the whole saga by punctilious authenticity in its look). I saw some details, in helmets and swords and such things, that pleased me. But the designers, apparently, felt some compulsion to make a lot of the armor look sort of Greek or Roman (perhaps a subliminal nod to the Greek tragedy drift of the script).

I’ve never cared for bare-legged warriors. Real Vikings wear trousers (which leaves completely to one side Beowulf’s totally naked fight with Grendel).

Well, I could go on, but it all works out to the same thing. Beowulf is a bold and ambitious treatment of a classic epic. It’s entertaining and worth seeing (Leave the kids at home, though. It should have gotten a more restricted rating than PG-13).

If you’re not interested in this sort of thing, don’t bother. If you are, see it now before it becomes something we all look back at and laugh.

Fiction

Better to Speak the Language of “Once Upon a Time”

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The Jollyblogger talks about the power of story in connection with Pullman’s Golden Compass.

Christian apologists have spent years and years attempting to show the reasonableness of Christianity, and have claimed many victories. Yet the religious landscape around us suggests that whether or not we have persuaded many heads, we continue to lose ground in capturing hearts – so let me join the chorus of those who are saying that we need to learn better to speak the language of “once upon a time.”

Religion

The 50% solution

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I nearly hit a deer tonight, while driving home from work.

It should be noted that my commute is not a rural one. It’s not even outer-ring suburb country, with lots of big, wooded lots. I drive from one inner-ring suburb to another inner-ring suburb, with one or two inner-ring suburbs in between. This deer jumped from behind a wooden fence at the edge of a tiny little park along 42nd Ave. in New Hope. Fortunately, my tiger-like reflexes allowed me to jam on the brakes before I hit it, and the driver behind me’s tiger-like reflexes allowed him to avoid rear-ending me.

I think maybe we need to re-think this whole business about restricting deer hunting to a limited season. I say we’ve got plenty of deer, and people who need cheap protein should be able to shoot ‘em any time they like.

I hasten to add that I don’t think we should be allowed to take our hunting rifles to urban deer, such as the one who touched my life this afternoon. Those stray bullets are made of a toxic substance, you know, and might be bad for the environment.

We might give bowhunters a shot, at them, though.

Speaking of mayhem (and that’s an unusually labored transition, even for me) I have a thought about mysteries and solutions tonight.

I’ve gotten into the habit of watching CBS’s “48 Hours Mystery,” which runs on Saturday nights, often after a re-run of “CSI.” The juxtaposition of the two shows intrigues me, mostly because of the differences between the fictional mysteries and the real ones.

What strikes me about the real mysteries covered on “48 Hours Mystery” is that they generally lack a really satisfactory resolution. In a fictional mystery, you almost always end with a solid solution to the problem. The detective brings out his damning evidence, and the accused can do nothing but hang his head and say, “Yes, I did it and I’m glad. She made my life a living heck” (or something equivalent).

But in real life, to judge from “48 Hours,” that scene almost never happens. The detectives gather evidence that they consider conclusive, and they arrest the suspect, who generally says nothing except to ask to call his lawyer. As the court proceedings go on, every piece of evidence is contested by the defense, and plausible explanations are put forward. The evidence against the accused may be strong, but it’s almost never absolutely, 100% definitive.

So in the end, the jury is left with a judgment call. Has the prosecution proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? In real life, it seems there’s always some room for doubt. Often it comes down in part to a subjective impression—“I just didn’t trust him.” “He gave me the creeps.” And you’re always left with a nagging doubt. “Maybe we condemned an innocent man.” Or, “Maybe we let a guilty man loose to kill again.”

You know what? That’s life. It’s very, very rare that you get to make a choice where you have absolute, 100% proof of the right way to go. (If you did, would it really be a choice?)

I think that goes for matters of faith too. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think truth is relative, or that the Bible isn’t God’s revealed truth.

But those who look for 100% certainty—an argument that will answer all objections and silence all doubts—will hover forever at the crossroads.

Choices—including the choice to believe—ultimately come down to a conviction in one’s soul; “the testimony of the Holy Spirit.” Perhaps that’s another name for what’s theologically called Election.

And even then, don’t expect all doubts to disappear. They won’t.

We see through a glass, darkly.

Writing

Small minds talk about people. Teeny-weeny minds talk about themselves.

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Sent a new column to The American Spectator Online last night. I’d thought the piece a lost effort, an orphan, but it was saved, oddly enough, by a prominent Democrat.

I’d written this timely column in response to a news story with Christian implications which raised a fair stink last month. But by the time I got it into something resembling a publishable form, the editor (and with him the world) had moved on to new and better things.

That’s why I don’t generally do topical columns. I have the greatest respect for those people who can watch a new story developing on CNN, do quick research on the net, and have a polished opinion ready the following morning.

Me, I generally don’t even know what I think for the first couple days. And if I come up with some kind of encephalogram worth transcribing, I’ve got to

A) Compose a first draft.

B) Revise and cut.

C) Revise and cut some more.

D) Put the thing away for a month to get some emotional distance on it.

E) Forget all about it.

F) Discover it while looking for something else on my hard drive.

G) Read it over, appreciating once again how really bush league my prose is.

H) Give it another revision.

I) Put it away again.

J) Remember it once more, when I notice how low my checkbook balance has fallen.

K) Revise it again. Realize it’s hopeless.

L) Send it off anyway, on the assumption that, since I thought it was good in the first place, I must be no judge of quality.

M) Wait for publication, or rejection, whichever comes first.

N) Overeat.

That’s why I prefer to do leisurely, trivial columns on subjects like “Why the End of Analog TV Portends the Demise of Civilization as We Know It.”

In any case, the Democrat (who I’m not going to name here, since I want it to be a surprise when and if the thing gets published) raised the same issue (or an issue close enough to enable me to add it in, like an Almost-Invisible Hair Weave) the other day. I re-wrote the article and sent it off.

Now, time to overeat.