The Hollywood Writers strike continues (for those who care) and FanLib.com has some silly suggestions for making it without your favorite show. Learn to swing a light-saber or build a Star Trek-type phaser. Read a tie-in novel or visit Scranton, Pennsylvania. Do not attempt your own CSI-style investigation or see if you can get your featured on a show of Stupid Criminals, but you could volunteer at a food bank or take some of your decent stuff to a trift store.
Buying Entertainment for the Children
From the Barna Group: “A new Barna Group study shows that most Christian parents will purchase [CDs, movies, games] for their children despite their misgivings about the content of those products. The result will be stress for many well-intentioned but morally uncertain parents, and inappropriate exposure for millions of morally vulnerable children.”
Not a book review
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
Not just long, long ago, though. I think of Christina Rossetti’s poem every time Christmas approaches and the temperature tumbles. I even used to think of it when I lived in Florida, when Christmas approached and the temperature plunged to something we’d call “brisk” up here. The snow hasn’t fallen, snow on snow, yet, but the spike has been driven down into the bone.
The liturgical question for times like these is, “Cold enough for ya?” to which the liturgical response is… puzzlement. There’s no good answer to “Cold enough for ya?” If you say “Yes,” it’s lame, and if you say “No,” you’re obviously insane. Most of us twist our mouths up (which hurts, because our lips are paralyzed) and try to figure out some kind of clever response. But there is none. Nobody has ever gotten off a good answer to that question. The guy who asked the question has swept all the points. He may be spouting clichés, but at least he hasn’t been struck dumb like you, you poor sap.
Thus do we torment one another on the frozen steppes.
What follows is not a book review. I am not qualified to review this book.
I re-read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer out of desperation. It was early Sunday evening, and I’d just finished Koontz’ Brother Odd, and had no new books in the house. So I went to the shelf and pulled out The Moviegoer. I’m not a Percy fanatic, for reasons that shall be made clear, but I approve of him in principle, and I very much enjoyed The Thanatos Syndrome, his last novel, in which he condescended to write a thriller for common folk like me, and did a bang-up job.
The Moviegoer is the kind of book that makes me feel like Bertie Wooster, when he assumed that Jeeves’ pocket Spinoza was a murder mystery. The book exists on a level far above my poor powers of comprehension. I think I understand it a little better now than I did the first time I read it, but that’s not saying a whole lot.
The story, set around 1960, concerns Binx Bolling, the narrator, who is a scion of an old Louisiana family. He makes his living selling stocks and bonds, and everyone agrees he was designed for better things. Binx isn’t sure of that, and a career isn’t really his primary concern. What he worries about is what he calls the “malaise” which dogs him. He’s a veteran of the Korean War, and the only time he can remember when he felt really alive was the time just after he was wounded. He goes to movies regularly, not because he wants life to be a movie or can’t tell the difference between the two, but because they distract him from the malaise.
Love seems to be his best hope, but he’s gone through several girlfriends (all of them his secretaries; they were more tolerant of that sort of thing in those days), and although they excite him we can tell he’s not genuinely engaged with them. More serious are his feelings for his distant cousin, Kate, who’s more messed up than Binx is. She takes pills and is suicidal. Eventually Binx runs off with her to Chicago, which sets off a crisis that finally decides how he will live out the rest of his life.
How we’re supposed to feel about that ending, I haven’t a clue.
But people I admire say it’s a great book, and I trust them.
Book Review: Brother Odd, by Dean Koontz
Our commenter Aitchmark recommended Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas books to me. I dragged my feet, because I’d read one Koontz and wasn’t terribly impressed. I didn’t think he used language very skillfully.
But I picked up Brother Odd last week, and frankly it turned my world upside down and gave it a good shake.
I still don’t think Koontz is a very good wordsmith. Time and again it seemed to me he was aiming for effects he wasn’t achieving.
But in Odd Thomas he has created a character who won my heart, and I’ll bet he’ll win yours too. You should not pick up this one first, though, but go back to the earlier books in the series to get the tragedies in sequence, because it does make a difference.
Odd Thomas (Odd is his first name. He explains it as a typo on his birth certificate, where it was supposed to say, “Todd.” Koontz doesn’t seem to be aware that Odd is an uncommon but not unknown Norwegian name, a variant of “Odin”) is a young man who makes his living as a fry cook. He is totally unremarkable (disregarding the pain he has suffered in his life) except for his unusual gift. Like the kid in The Sixth Sense and that girl on the TV show, he sees dead people.
But it’s harder for him than it is for them, because the dead don’t speak to him. The ghosts who linger in this world, in these stories, are mute. They are usually the victims of murder, and it’s Odd’s task to figure out their unspoken secrets and give them rest.
This all sounds very New Age, but it’s anything but that. Odd is a devout, practicing Roman Catholic.
In Brother Odd, in fact, he has left his California home and entered a Colorado monastery, overwhelmed by the personal losses he experienced in earlier adventures. It’s fairly quiet there for him—the only resident ghost is a monk who hanged himself in the bell tower and appears only occasionally.
But it doesn’t stay quiet. Besides ghosts, Odd is able to see spirits he calls “bodachs,” dark, shadowy figures that always gather in advance of acts of massive death and violence.
At the beginning of the story, Odd sees three of them. And they head straight for the monastery’s associated school, where the nuns care for retarded and handicapped children.
In his efforts to prevent whatever unknown horror is threatening the children, Odd must uncover the secrets of the monastery residents.
But these aren’t the kind of secrets you expect in a contemporary thriller. The monks and nuns are not practicing secret sexual rituals, or abusing the children, or plotting the overthrow of democracy. They are, by and large, sweet souls, the kind of people you can believe have given their lives in service to God and their fellow man. (I have to give Koontz tremendous props for these characterizations. As C.S. Lewis noted [I think] in The Four Loves, good characters are “the very devil” for an author.)
No, the secrets are deeper than that, and the evil resides in a place Dan Brown would have never imagined.
Koontz got completely past my reservations about his style, and grabbed me with the characters and the story. I don’t often cry over a book, but Brother Odd got to me.
Highly recommended. I’ve got to read the earlier installments, Odd Thomas and Forever Odd.
A couple neat links
I think these are nifty. Both come via Mirabilis.
This one’s a virtual whale. You set the inset on a spot on the whale’s body, then watch him swim by, life-sized.
This is a story that needs to become a novel. See, there’s this important antique clock in Paris, and the authorities were just letting it rust away. So a group of “guerilla” restorers broke into the museum, set up a workshop, and worked for a year to restore the thing. Only then did they alert the government to their act of reverse sabotage.
It seems to me there’s a parable there.
Thanksgiving vignette
This happened at the Walker Thanksgiving:
My brother Moloch and his wife brought the Korean exchange student they recently acquired. His name is Han. (Or Hon. I never asked him to spell it.)
When he was introduced to one of my nephews, this bit of dialog occurred:
Moloch: “Han, meet Luke.”
Me: “I think I saw this scene in a movie once.”
Book review: Web of Evil, by J. A. Jance
I’d read one J. A. Jance novel before, I think, and hadn’t been terribly impressed (I thought I’d reviewed it, but can’t find it in the archives, so I guess I didn’t). If I remember correctly, it had a male protagonist and, like so many female authors (in my opinion) she didn’t write a guy very well. No doubt we male writers have the same trouble with female characters.
But Web of Evil is one of Jance’s Ali Reynolds books, stories about a woman amateur detective, and I found it a lot of fun.
Ali Reynolds is a former Los Angeles news anchor. Today she lives in a double-wide mobile home (though a nice one) in Sedona, Arizona, where her parents run a diner. She’s in the midst of a bitter divorce from her husband, Paul, a network executive, and also an unfair dismissal suit against her old TV station (the two facts are not unrelated).
One day she gets in her car to drive to L.A., where she’s going to sign her final divorce papers. But there will be no signing. Her husband turns up dead, locked in the trunk of a car which was then left on the railroad tracks to wait for the next train.
As it happened, the murder occurred near the highway Ali was driving, just about the time that, by her own account, she was passing through the area. Suddenly the police are looking very closely at her movements and personal affairs.
This mystery was one of the most tech-savvy I’ve read. Ali is a blogger, and her blog, as well as her cell phone, are important parts of the plot.
I especially liked Ali’s parents, who bear the fine Scandinavian name of Larson. They are decent, caring people and unabashedly conservative (how often do you see that in a novel these days?).
Ali herself is a classic female detective. She’s smart, beautiful and spunky. Like all amateur detectives, she goes where the police say she shouldn’t go, and does what the police say she shouldn’t do, and yet doesn’t get locked up long enough to keep her out of the action. When you sit down to analyze the plot, the whole thing is a little far-fetched, and Ali’s close involvement with the investigation improbable, but Jance keeps the story moving so skillfully that you don’t notice. She kept me turning the pages, and I found it a very entertaining read.
Not great literature, but a lot of fun. Worth the price.
Short movie review: No Country For Old Men
Thanksgiving went just fine. My turkey was once again a success, and nobody got food poisoning (or if they did, they’re thoughtfully keeping the fact from me).
At the end of the day my brother Baal and I found ourselves alone here, and we decided to see a movie. So we went to see “No Country For Old Men.”
Brilliant writing, brilliant dialog, brilliant acting. And an ending designed to make ordinary people want their money back, while critics at Cannes applaud their manicures loose.
My one-line review goes like this: “No Country For Old Men” is an elegant, three-hour shaggy dog story.
And do you think Tommy Lee Jones will ever get tired of being the Texan Steppin Fetchitt? I’m sure there’s a lot of money in being the go-to guy whenever Hollywood wants to show how bigoted, hateful or irrelevant (irrelevant in this case) white Texan males are (Billy Green Bush made a good living in the same gig back in the 70s. Maybe you’re required to have three names to get the job), but do you think he ever feels a little embarrassed about it?
Review: Viking Warrior, by Judson Roberts
If you want to read a good Viking novel, your choices are pretty few. There’s me, of course, but I’m out of print. Bernard Cornwell is doing a series about Vikings and Saxons in Alfred’s England (I’m avoiding them, though, because, from what I read, he’s trashing Christianity again. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I really like Cornwell otherwise). There’s Tim Severin’s new series, which I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, mea culpa. You can sometimes find a copy of the English translation of Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships here or there.
But the field is pretty sparse. Which is why I’m delighted to welcome Judson Roberts to our small but elite club.
Viking Warrior is a Young Adult novel which will be enjoyed by older readers as well. It begins the story of Halfdan, who, as the story opens, is a young slave on a large farm in Denmark. He is actually the natural son of the chieftain who owns the farm, but his mother is a slave from Ireland. So all his life he has known only hard work and bitterness.
Everything changes when his master and the master’s son return from an abortive raid in England. His master is dying. On his deathbed, he makes a bargain with Halfdan’s mother—he will acknowledge Halfdan, free him, and make him an heir. But in return Halfdan’s mother must make a terrible sacrifice. She does this willingly, in a deeply moving but troubling segment of the story.
Suddenly Halfdan’s life is changed out of recognition. Harald, his master’s freeborn son and chief heir, befriends him and begins to teach Halfdan the skills of a warrior. Harald is extremely likeable, and Halfdan grows in character as he learns to set aside old angers, even as he is learning a whole new way of living.
One thing Harald does not need to teach Halfdan is the use of the bow. Halfdan has been learning the arts of the bowyer and the fletcher for years, and has been hunting in secret. His skill with a bow is already formidable, and it’s a skill he’ll come to need very much, very soon.
Because there is an enemy out there—a vicious and ruthless enemy who wants the whole family dead; one who cares nothing for honor or fair dealing, nor for how many murders it takes to achieve his goal.
I can hardly think of a way this book could have been better. If I’d written it, I’d have taken pains to anglicize the speech a little more—to avoid words with Latin roots, but that’s my own bugbear, and probably means little to the average reader. The prose was tight, the characters well-rounded, the emotions rang true, and the plot was compelling. I wished it were longer—but fortunately there’s a sequel for me to order.
References to Christianity were generally negative, but that was appropriate to the story. Although Halfdan’s mother is a Christian, she doesn’t seem to have conveyed much of it to her son, so Halfdan’s opinions are those of the average Scandinavian heathen of the time. There is a ceremonial matter toward the beginning of the story that was extremely conflicting for me to read, but it was in no way unreasonable in the time and place.
The only false note (in my opinion) was a scene later in the book, where Halfdan, having killed his first man, is troubled not to feel any guilt about it. I think that’s a projection of modern and Christian values. I don’t believe a Norse pagan in the 9th Century would have been bothered by that at all. I think he would have been pleased.
But that’s the sort of thing it’s almost impossible to avoid, when moderns write about the past. I’m sure I’ve done the same in my own books.
I strongly recommend Viking Warrior. Cautions for violence and sexual references (but no explicit sex scenes). It would make a much-valued Christmas gift for that Viking aficionado on your gift list (and who doesn’t have one of those?).
Thanksgiving day semi-comatose blog
I’ve spent the day alternating between stretching out on the sofa with a book and cleaning the house (or vice versa) in preparation for Saturday’s invasion. I took time this evening to do my bill paying, which I usually do on Thursdays. Since I’ll be able to put them in the mail again tomorrow, I thought I might as well keep up my usual routine.
I have a cheap pocket knife that I’ve been using as a letter opener ever since the old pewter letter opener that belonged to my dad disappeared unaccountably.
I was in the midst of bill paying when I got up to do something (I went to the bathroom, actually, but you don’t want to know that).
When I got back to the desk, the pocket knife was missing. I retraced my steps on the very short trip, and checked all around the desk, and I can’t find the bloody thing anywhere.
I know whom to blame, of course. It’s the elves (or nisser, in Norwegian). It’s always the elves (or nisser, in Norwegian).
What troubles me is that it appears they’re arming themselves…