Contest: The Rap Sheet will “give a copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing to the person who can send us the cleverest Leonard-related five-line limerick.” See The Rap Sheet for details.
Pale Horse Coming, by Stephen Hunter
Perfect fall day today. The rains finally ceased, and Saturday was pretty nice, giving me the chance to do some maintenance jobs outside. Today was crisp and bright, with gumdrop colors in the foliage.
Which makes it all the sadder to hear about the fires in southern California. Our prayers go out to you folks in that area.
Stephen Hunter’s Pale Horse Coming is another thriller so good, so deeply satisfying on so many levels, that it makes me want to just hang up my laptop and give up telling stories. I’ll never be this good.
Pale Horse Coming is set in 1951 and is a story about Earl Swagger, the father of Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of Point of Impact and other novels. Hunter is as canny at triangulating his market as he is at plotting and characterization. For the liberal reader he offers two of their favorite villains, southern racists and McCarthyites. But that’s not what the heart of the book is. The heart of the book is heroism, and endurance, and keeping promises, and knowing how to defend yourself, and the conviction that sometimes you just have to employ violence to deliver the oppressed.
The story begins with Sam Vincent of Blue Eye, Arksansas, Earl’s lawyer friend who will someday be Bob Lee’s mentor, getting an offer from a Chicago law firm to run what seems to be an unusual but innocuous errand. A black man who once worked for one of their clients has been mentioned in a will, but can’t be contacted. Would Sam go to his last known address, Thebes, Mississippi, to see if he can get legal verification of the man’s death? They prefer a southerner to make the trip, they say, because he’ll understand the local culture better.
The money’s good and Sam needs the work, so he makes the trip. What he finds is an insane and frightening situation. A tiny town stuck in the 1850s, almost cut off from the outside world, where the only local industry is a “colored”-only prison, and where the black residents, even outside the prison walls, are entirely dominated by the white guards.
When Sam’s conscience forces him to protest what he sees, he finds himself in big trouble. Without spoiling the rest of it for you, I’ll say that Sam’s big trouble becomes Earl’s big trouble. Then follows a tale of unspeakable cruelty and incredible endurance, capped by Earl’s retribution, which is epic in scope.
A delightful element toward the end is Earl’s assembly of a commando force made up almost entirely of “old-timers”—famous shooters of the 1920s, all of them based on real characters who will be familiar to any gun enthusiast, and some of whom even I could identify behind their fictionalized names. The name “Seven Against Thebes” is employed a couple times.
Could not put the book down. It grabbed me from the beginning, and Hunter timed his plot twists and setbacks expertly to keep me on the hook all the way.
And behind it all, I was never allowed to forget that Earl will not live long. All his resolve to care for his family and raise his boy will come to an untimely end, an end Hunter has already chronicled. So there’s irony and tragedy too as seasoning in the stew.
Hunter lifts the thriller form above the level of popular fiction. I suspect he’ll be read and loved for a long, long time.
Piccadilly Jim Doesn’t Burn It Up, As It Were
calon lan (Bonnie) of Dwell in Possibility reviews P.G. Wodehouse’s Piccadilly Jim–not the best. She loves Wodehouse, but this one just doesn’t burn it up, if you see what I mean. The problem? “There’s just too much going on. I couldn’t keep track of the characters, and frankly didn’t find them interesting enough to keep track of.”
Warning on following the link: music automatically plays (but at least the controls are easily found at the top of the page).
Rowling: Dumbledore is Gay, Books Are Christian Inspired
J.K. Rowling has been talking about her books lately, and in New York someone asked a question about Professor Dumbledore’s, the headmaster of Rowling’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, love life. The author answered hesitantly, “I always saw Dumbledore as gay.”
According to at least one report, the audience loudly applauded that revelation, to which Rowling responded she would have revealed it earlier had she known it would be well received.
Of course, this doesn’t sit well with me, but I guess we’ll have to live with it. Rowling appears to be in her right mind and not slipping into loony post-story “revelations,” ala George Lucas. When I first heard of this news, I doubted it. Even if she did say Dumbledore is gay and it isn’t an inference drawn from an unclear statement, I thought we may have to wait to hear what other statements she makes about her wildly popular series. If next year we hear her tell readers the hero of her stories is actually Hagrid, then we’ll know she’s flaky. But this appears to be genuine backstory, never before guessed or hinted at in the books. In a few decades if these books are still popular, many readers will probably doubt Rowling ever said this.
In related news, Rowling said the books have Christian inspirations. The Telegraph reports:
At one point Harry visits his parents’ graves and finds two biblical passages inscribed on their tombstones.
“They are very British books, so on a very practical note, Harry was going to find biblical quotations on tombstones,” [Rowling] said.
“But I think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones …they sum up, they almost epitomise, the whole series.”
She confessed that she does have doubts about Christianity and the afterlife, but she has not given up on her faith. To the reader who responds to this by asking how she could be Christian and have a major character, admirable in many ways, be a homosexual, I recommend practicing a bit of Christian tolerance. Did the Lord say, “Ye will know my disciples by their stance of current issues?” No, he said his disciples would love each other, even when we disagree.
Holding Back
I felt I should confess what is probably obvious to all of our regular readers. This blog could be in the top 10 of the blogosphere, if Lars and I weren’t holding back. As an illustration, I offer this poem by Holmes:
I WROTE some lines once on a time
In wondrous merry mood,
And thought, as usual, men would say
They were exceeding good.
They were so queer, so very queer,
I laughed as I would die;
Albeit, in the general way,
A sober man am I.
I called my servant, and he came; Read on
from “The Height of the Ridiculous,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Cornish’s Foundling
A while back I meant to link to a review Mr. Holtsberry did on his jolly good blog, which could only be improved by short, coffee-related posts, IMESHO. Since I’ve been making good on my thoughts lately (note the radio interview Dr. Bertrand landed after I thought about suggesting it. (I didn’t know he was a doctor. Did you know he had a doctorate?)) Anyway, I saw this review of Foundling, by D. M. Cornish, and having seen the book before, I have faith it’s a good one.
Kevin says the book is both Dickensesque and Tolkienesque. “The Dickens reference obviously comes from the orphan plot line and the semi-Victorian feel. But also from the strong characters,” he writes. “The Tolkienesque aspect comes from the complexity and detailed nature of Cornish’s creation. The world of the Half-Continent has a depth and level of detail that is rare in YA fantasy.” Very interesting, though the hardback has a scary cover. The website is Monster Blood Tattoo, which has a short excerpt from the book.
Losing face
In my ongoing campaign to raise the intellectual level of the blogosphere, and indeed of the world at large, I ever strive to draw your attention away from the trivial, the evanescent, and the superficial, to matters of universal relevance and substance.
Today, the subject is my face.
The spark for this meditation was a couple conversations I had in Minot (I expect I’ll be milking Minot for months in this space, since I don’t actually interact with my fellow man much in ordinary life, and that plays hob with a guy’s stock of anecdotes).
An older gentleman approached me in the Viking village on (I think) the first day. He asked me if I was Icelandic.
I told him I wasn’t, but that I’d once spent a couple days in that delightful country.
He said, “You’re a fine looking man. Handsome enough to be an Icelander. In fact you look like you could be a member of my family.”
At that point I realized I’d had this exact conversation two years ago, on my last visit to Høstfest. The same man had approached me then, and said the same thing.
I figured he was about the only Icelander at the festival, and was desperately trying to connect with someone. In his loneliness he felt compelled to go around and confer Icelandicity on random Norwegians like me.
Poignant, no?
That in itself wouldn’t have led to this post, but later on I was approached by two middle-aged ladies. They said, “We recently lost our dearly beloved brother, and you are his spitting image.”
At that point I thought, “Oh no. My old face is coming back.”
As a visual aid at this point (and against the advice of counsel), I shall re-post a picture of myself in high school which I used a while back:
I looked pretty much like this through my college years too, except that I changed to wire-rimmed glasses as a junior.
You’ll note the utter lack of distinction in this face. Ordinary brown hair. No particular bone structure to speak of. The nose, though large, is not of any identifiable shape. Is it a long face or a round face? Somewhere in the middle. Could go either way. It’s a blank slate face.
Back in those days people used to tell me all the time, “You look just like my cousin So-and-so.” Or their nephew. Or some guy they went to school with. I remember walking through Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis one afternoon while a drunken Native American yelled at me for minutes from across the grass, trying to get the attention of some buddy he’d mistaken me for.
As I grew older, and especially after I grew my beard, that sort of thing stopped. Stopped completely. I figured that the wrinkles and spots installed by Time’s little Mr. Potatohead game had finally given me an aspect that was also an artifact (Lincoln once said, “Any man over forty is responsible for his own face”).
But now I seem to be losing it. As we age, it’s well known, we start reverting to our baby faces, and it looks like my short run as a figure of distinction is coming to an end.
On the other hand, if I can get these people who think they’re related to me to co-sign a loan or two…
Stories to Go
I just found a blog with MP3 of stories, called Stories to Go. Here’s a link to “The Unstrung Harp,” by Edward Gorey.
Mark Bretrand on Moody’s Prime Time America
I hope you trust I don’t lie to you for whatever perceived gain I could get. I have no idea how I could gain from false claims on a blog, but you and I are honest with each other, right? Good. So I’m not lying when I say that yesterday I thought about writing Prime Time America to ask about doing book reviews, mostly of Christian fiction, and maybe they could also interview Mark Bertrand about his new book, Rethinking Worldview. I didn’t, and yet Mark will be on the radio today during the first hour of Prime Time America. I’ll be listening.
Global dampening
Somehow I seem to have been transported, all unbeknownst to me, to Seattle, Washington. Or Bergen, Norway (not that that’s a bad thing). It was raining when I left for Minot, and it was raining when I got back, and it’s raining still. We’re sopping around here. I keep flashing back to the Marx Brothers movie, “The Coconuts.” This was one of the first sound movies, and (I believe) the first fully sound-equipped musical ever filmed. They discovered paper was a problem. Paper crinkled loudly in the mikes whenever anybody picked it up, and the sound technicians (whose experience had generally begun that morning) couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So they just soaked all the paper in water. Every piece of paper in the movie looks like something lifted out of a washing machine, mid-cycle.
That’s how pretty much everything feels in Minnesota today. I heard on the radio this morning that we’re about 1/8” away from the record for the rainiest fall in history, the previous champ being 1902 or something.
This, we are sure to be told, is the fault of anthropogenic global warming.
This summer it was dry. That, apparently, was global warming too.
My question to global warming alarmists is this: “Is there any possible weather pattern that could conceivably occur that wouldn’t prove global warming to you?”
Of course not. If the weather every day next year were identical to the weather every day this year, that would be taken as proof of global warming too.
This reinforces my belief that global warming theory is, in essence, a religion. Just as there is no possible event, pleasant or unpleasant, that Christians can’t work into a general theory of the Providence of God, so there’s no conceivable weather cycle that the GW believer can’t harmonize with his doctrine.
The difference, I think, is that I admit my belief system is a religion.
And I don’t accuse people who disagree about it of being paid stooges of greedy corporations, who apparently think a planet laid waste and depopulated will present excellent marketing prospects.