Fiction, Reviews

‘Drive to Kill,’ by Sam Jones

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There are many ways for a book to be bad, and many different ways for readers to respond to badness in books. (I’m speaking here of bad craftsmanship, not qualities of morality.) In my case, really bad prose will usually kill a book for me – if words are fumbled, I’ll dump it. Weakness of plot I can tolerate a little more, if there are other pleasures in the story. So it was (for me) with Drive to Kill, by Sam Jones. It was weak, but good enough to finish.

Dean Blackwood, the hero of the series that this book kicks off, is a sort of special FBI agent. He’s been their go-to guy for extreme investigations in which overkill and brutalization of prisoners are permitted (not sure how that works legally). But in his last case, his family got caught in the crossfire; they survived, but his wife left him and he was reassigned to a desk job in the northwest.

But now he’s come back to Los Angeles to visit his family, hoping for a reconciliation. He goes to the beach for some surfing with an old friend, and a gunfight breaks out in the parking lot. His friend catches a bullet and is killed, and Dean makes up his mind to investigate this thing, whether the cops, the feds, or his wife approve or not. The trail will lead him to the Armenian mob, crooked cops, and somewhere else where he really does not want to go.

The major weakness in this book was the plotting, which was unusually poor. I’m accustomed to today’s thriller writers employing “movie logic,” expecting us to swallow improbabilities camouflaged with fast chases and violence. But author Jones expects us in this story to believe a ridiculous sequence of coincidences – the gunfight that kills Dean’s friend at the start of the story just happens to be related to an old case Dean worked. And then he goes to talk to a witness, and just happens onto another related murder. There’s a further coincidence too, I think, but I forget the details.

Writing tip: You get one major coincidence per book. One coincidence, especially if it kicks off the action, can be permitted. Pile them on, and you lose credibility.

The prose was fair – I’ve seen worse, though the author sometimes needs his verbiage pruned, and occasionally he mistakes homophones. On the other hand, he included what I considered one good, original figure of speech, and in a couple scenes he employed a nice technique for building suspense that impressed me – I may borrow it in the future.

There’s a Christian evangelist in the story who looks pretty bad, but the character turned out more complex than I suspected, so that’s OK.

But all in all, I give Drive to Kill a thumbs down for shabby plotting.

Publishing

The present is Prologue

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Getty Images, licensed under Unsplash + license.

It may be spring at last now. We’ve hovered around the freezing point, up and down, for several weeks. Just warm enough to make me check what coat to put on every time I’ve gone outside. Last Saturday I attended a wedding. Rain had been forecast, but it turned out bright – though the temperatures were cool. I was able to wear my new suit. Survived a few conversations with human beings, which required some restorative napping afterward.

On Monday I finally did it (I think). I sat down in my makeshift recording studio and recorded the Prologue to Troll Valley. I don’t know how long it’s been since certain friends provided me with a decent mike and earphones, plus peripherals, and I began trying to master the dark art of recording audiobooks. I have taken it slowly, and for longer or shorter periods I’ve had to set it aside for other projects. I’m not sure what accounts most for my slow progress – my fear of technology or my innate ineptitude with anything that involves working with my hands. Perhaps a mixture of the two.

So I’ve taken the cautious route. I have not pushed myself far on any particular day. Practiced until I felt uncomfortable, then packed it up for tomorrow. Tiny increments. Dr. Jordan Peterson tells us that if you’re afraid to tackle something, you break it down into small portions. If you can’t clean your room yet, clean out a drawer. Dust a shelf. Just do something every day.

He says that if you do this, your confidence will grow as you accumulate little successes. Each success results in a small shot of dopamine, and you come to look forward to those little shots, and so you can accomplish more and more – enjoying it more and more all the while.

That doesn’t really seem to work for me. My dopamine delivery system appears to have been suppressed, or overwhelmed by one or more of my myriad phobias.

So I’ve been proceeding purely on stubbornness, buttressed by a guilty fear of disappointing the people who’ve helped me out.

And on Monday I recorded that Prologue. And in spite of all my misgivings, I could not but admit that it was adequate. Adequate is enough at this point. Artificial Intelligence does adequate work, and it’s taking over the book narration business. Adequate will do.

And I actually felt that little spurt of dopamine. It must have been a massive infusion at the source, to muscle its way through all my inhibitions. But I felt a genuine sensation of gratification, of having passed a milestone, of scoring a goal.

My progress will continue to be slow. Chapter 1 is long, and I’m taking it in little pieces.

But I’m actually producing a recording.

That’s something. Something.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Peterson would agree.

Authors, Religion

C. S. Lewis on Charles Williams

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Here is a portion of a radio talk C. S. Lewis gave on Charles Williams, whose Descent Into Hell I reviewed last night.

I’ve heard the complete talk, which is very short in its own right. I don’t know why they cut it down, except that Lewis starts with an anecdote about the poets Leigh Hunt and Thomas Babington Macauley as an example of bad literary criticism. I suppose nowadays nobody knows who either of them is. (To be honest, I don’t know much about them myself.)

Below, an introduction to Williams by the scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, for whom I recently did some translation work. I did not in fact know she was into such good stuff. Turns out that, counting David Llewellyn Dodds, who comments here from time to time, I know two important Inklings scholars.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Descent Into Hell,’ by Charles Williams

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He could enjoy; at least he could refuse not to enjoy. He could refuse and reject damnation.

With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he rejected joy instead.

Charles Williams’ novels have been a major influence on my own works (partly, certainly, by way of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, but to a great degree on their own account). Of all those books, it’s the 1937 urban fantasy Descent Into Hell that has most kept me company through the years, because I recognize my own vulnerabilities in it.

The book is misleadingly simple to explain, yet complex in the execution. The action centers on the production of a new play by the poet Peter Stanhope, in his home town and residence of Battle Hill, a suburb north of London. Among the actors is Pauline Anstruther, a young woman crippled by constant fear. Occasionally through her life, and increasingly frequently in recent weeks, she has been seeing her doppelganger, a double of herself, approaching her up the street. Her fear of the apparition is increased by her fear that she is losing her mind. She’s ashamed to share the problem with anyone, until finally Stanhope himself draws it out of her. He is surprisingly unsurprised, and explains to Pauline the doctrine of exchange, by which Christians may literally bear one another’s burdens. He promises to carry her fear for her, and the results are immediate. But Pauline learns that this relief is only the first step in her own assignment, that of carrying the burden of yet another person – an ancestor of hers who was martyred under Bloody Mary. (In Williams’ view, as in quantum physics, an effect may precede its cause.)

Meanwhile, we also have the chilling tale of Lawrence Wentworth, a noted but superficial military historian, also a resident of Battle Hill. Wentworth is experiencing what we now call a midlife crisis. He has grown obsessed with Adela Hunt, a pretty and superficial young woman who’s engaged to a young man but likes to flirt with him. Through the machinations of a local witch, Lawrence is presented with a simulacrum of Adela, a soulless automaton which embodies his lustful imaginations of what he thinks Adela ought to be. Under the spell of the false Adela, Lawrence gradually disengages from everything that mattered to him – even some of his petty sins might have offered a roundabout road to salvation, if he desired it, but all he really loves, at bottom, is himself as he seems himself reflected in the false Adela. And so he is damned.

There’s yet another plot thread, touching both Pauline’s and Lawrence’s stories, involving a pitiful ghost who never lived much of a life and died a suicide. He wanders in a sort of limbo in another dimension of Battle Hill, and a way to salvation is offered to him as well.

What I had forgotten about Descent Into Hell was how dense and difficult the prose is. The characters’ actions are fairly straightforward. But the author is constantly informing us what is going on on the heavenly or spiritual level. And that commentary is what makes the book a difficult read. Author Williams goes very deep into his theology and his personal speculations on theology here. I’m more familiar with Williams’ thinking than most people, but I often had trouble following.

And yet it was worth it – for me. I do love Descent Into Hell.

There were interesting points I noticed for the first time on this reading: for instance, Lawrence neglects his scholarship as part of his process of damnation, but Stanhope, in another place, sets aside his poetry, in a different way, and that’s part of his process of sanctification. Nice touch, symmetrical and instructive.

Recommended, if you’re up for a challenge. This e-book edition contains some OCR errors.

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The Collegium Scholare Antiquitatis (COSCAN)

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Here’s the latest news from the Saga Heritage Foundation, the organization that produced the wonderfully translated book, Viking Legacy.

Their next projects, as I understand it, are English versions of the Flatey Book and Tormod Torfaeus’ Latin history of Norway. I doubt there’ll be much work for me in all this, but it’s worth spreading the news.

Prof. Titlestad, who wrote Viking Legacy, is the fellow in the wide-brimmed hat.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Religion

The doctrine of exchange

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Charles William.

I’m re-reading Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell. It’s my favorite of his novels, and (I was pleased to learn) often considered his best by critics. If you haven’t read it, it centers on two characters – a young woman who repeatedly meets her doppelganger walking up the street, and a middle-aged historian who becomes obsessed with a young woman and is offered a soulless simulacrum of her. One of them is drawn into the community of God’s grace, while the other “descends into Hell” through self-indulgence. I have an idea I can write an article about this book that might illuminate some current issues.

Because I have my finger, you know, on the pulse of societal change.

Silly, I admit, but I think I may actually be in a unique position to comment, due not to my wisdom but to my failures and sins.

Anyway, it’s also in this novel that Williams demonstrates most clearly his doctrine of exchange, the idea that the Christian teaching that we should bear one another’s burdens is more than a metaphor. He believed that we can pray to literally take on our brothers’ and sisters’ fears, difficulties, and pains, suffering them for them – because it’s lighter to bear when it’s someone else’s. And they in turn can bear ours.

Williiams’ friend C. S. Lewis reported that he attempted this exercise with his wife Joy, when the pain of her cancer was most difficult. He felt some pain, he said, and she told him her own was diminished.

That’s all very subjective, of course. Not nearly as dramatic as what happens in the novel. I made the experiment myself at least once. As I recall, the sick friend I prayed for did report he was feeling better soon. But again, it’s subjective. Not the sort of dramatic outcome we would like to see.

Of course we can always spiritualize it. Regard it in terms of the mystery of Christian community, the fellowship of the saints.

But that wasn’t what Williams believed. He took it literally.

Have you ever tried it? Know anyone who has?

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Current viewing: ‘Maelstrom’

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What is on Walker’s TV as he writes this blog post, America asks.

The TV series above. It’s been my habit for some time to turn to some old TV show or movie at this time of day, as a sort of white noise. Quite often it’s been some old British crime TV series. I watched, for instance, several episodes of an ancient series called “Z-Cars” (pronounced, of course, “Zed cars”), which in its earliest seasons featured a beardless Brian Blessed as a uniformed cop – one of his early acting jobs.

Now I’ve found this 1985 British miniseries set in Norway, entitled “Maelstrom.” It was broadcast in the US, on one of the cable networks, back in the late ’80s, and I recorded it on VHS at the time because, after all, it was set in Norway, and it wasn’t awful.

It stars an English/Swedish actress named Tussi Silberg as a British woman who discovers that a Norwegian millionaire she’s never heard of has left her some property and a dried fish factory. Mystified, she flies over there, where she finds everyone welcoming, and nobody seems to begrudge her a share of the family’s rather large fortune. But strange occurrences… occur, and behind it all there’s the continued puzzle of what possible connection the old man might have had to her.

It’s not bad. The acting’s fair, except for some histrionics at the end. The psychology is pretty naïve. And, of course, there’s the beautiful Norwegian scenery.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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For some reason, perhaps because of the old TV series (which I hated as a kid but quite like now), I never really considered reading a Perry Mason book until fairly recently. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much I’ve liked them. There’s no great writing here – the prose can be pretty shopworn – but Erle Stanley Gardner was a top-notch plotter. One reads these books for the surprises. Today’s review: The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom.

Attorney Perry Mason is putting in late hours in his office one night, when he spots a pair of lovely female legs on the fire escape. He confronts the possessor of those legs, persuading her to come inside. (Mason is certain that she tosses a gun into the alley in the process, but she insists that’s not true.) She tells him that she has been concerned about the oil exploration company that occupies offices directly above his. She thinks someone is up to something shady there, and as a relative is an investor, she wanted to see what was going on. The story’s a little thin, but she manages to escape Perry in the end.

The next day Perry meets the manager of the office upstairs, who wants to hire him on a divorce matter. He recently went to Mexico to get married, not realizing that his first wife, who had told him she had divorced him in Reno, did no such thing – and now she’s trying to use bigamy as a lever against him. Perry learns that she has gotten the police involved, and accompanies his client and the new wife to Mexico, where they can get a Mexican divorce and marry legally.

But when the police put out a warrant for murder against his client, things get complicated.

There are some very nice plot twists in The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom. I especially liked one where Perry tries to get a jump on the prosecution strategy and it comes back to bite him. Lots of lies, lots of twists, and a surprise ending in the Gardner style.

First class, undemanding entertainment. I enjoyed The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom.

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Saga reading report: ‘The Tale of Ogmund Bash,’ and ‘The Tale of Thorvald Tasaldi’

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The Viking knarr “Snorri,” at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. My photo.

I have read a couple more stories from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and I shall describe them for you. These two are not sagas in the proper sense of the word, but Þátturs, a word that more or less means stories or anecdotes. They are generally found as appendages to longer sagas – this particular pair were attached to the last major saga we considered, “Killer-Glum’s Saga.”

The first is “The Tale of Ogmund Bash.” Ogmund is a freedman of Killer-Glum’s. He has prospered better than one would expect, having the resources to buy himself a merchant ship (knarr) for a business voyage to Norway. Freedmen, former slaves, remained in a dependent relationship with their former masters, so he appeals to Killer-Glum for his endorsement, which he receives, and Glum’s son comes along.

Arriving in Norway, Ogmund makes a rookie sailing mistake, entering a harborage at night and colliding with another merchant ship, which sinks. The ship’s owner responds angrily, and their conflict ends with the man boarding Ogmund’s ship and knocking Ogmund senseless with the hammer of his axe. Ogmund takes no action to avenge his honor, so that though he comes home with profit, his reputation is ruined. Killer-Glum cuts off their relationship, saying, in spite of Ogmund’s protestations that he was only trying to protect Killer-Glum’s son “You shouldn’t have considered that… when he didn’t want to himself. It would have seemed worth it to me to have you both dead, provided you’d shown your courage by taking vengeance.”

Ogmund, however, is just biding his time. In a few years he goes back to Norway, encounters King Olaf Trygvesson, and kills the man who humiliated him.

In an odd sequel, a new character introduced into the story, wrongly accused of the killing, flees to Sweden, which is still heathen, and falls in with a priestess of Frey. He accompanies her on her annual rounds, transporting an idol on a wagon. In time the idol gets broken, and Ogmund himself pretends to be the god. He and the woman collect a lot of treasure, and in time she accompanies him back to Norway, where he renews his faith, she converts, and they live happily ever after.

The next Þáttur is “The Tale of Thorvald Tasaldi” (the editors might have done us a favor by informing us what “tasaldi” means. I can’t find it online either). Anyway, Thorvald is the nephew of Killer-Glum, and he also travels to Norway in the time of Olaf Trygvesson. There, as every young Icelander must in every saga, he is met with honor and favor by the king. King Olaf gives him a place at his table between two of his men, one of whom is friendly, the other hostile. The hostile one maneuvers a situation where Thorvald feels obligated to go on the king’s behalf on a mission to try to convert an obstinate, rich heathen. Thorvald goes, accompanied by the friendly table-mate.

On arriving at the rich man’s estate, they find that he has no visible help running his farm – it’s just the farmer and his daughter there. When Thorvald and his friend explain their errand, they end up wrestling with both the father and daughter, but Thorvald prevails because he has heeded a dream he had, telling him to bind a letter containing the names of God onto his chest. So the farmer summons up “those who live in the undercroft” (the elves, the Underground Folk as I call them in my novels) who have been the ones doing the farm work here. Those powerful beings capture them, but the farmer lets them go. They leave, then return, determined to fulfill their mission. They finally succeed, and return to great honor from the king.

My general impression of these stories is that when a man had voyaged to Norway, he was expected to have a fine tale to tell. And when his descendants re-told that story, they were expected to embroider it. The saga accounts of life in a king’s court tend to follow familiar patterns that recur from story to story. The tale of the man masquerading as the god Frey, too, mimics other similar accounts (which likely have some factual basis, as we know such ceremonial circuits were part of the old religion).

Music

Sunday Singing: Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness

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We’re approaching Easter, friends. Today’s hymn comes from German hymnist and missionary Nikolaus Ludwig, Reichsgraf von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf (1700-1760). It was translated into English by the great John Wesley (1703-1791).

“. . . justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” (Romans 3: 24-25 ESV)

1 JESUS, Thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.

2 When from the dust of death I rise,
To claim my mansion in the skies–
E’en then this shall be all my plea,
“Jesus hath lived and died for me.”

3 Bold shall I stand in Thy great day,
For who aught to my charge shall lay?
Fully through these absolved I am
From sin and fear, from guilt and shame.

4 This spotless robe the same appears,
When ruined nature sinks in years;
No age can change its glorious hue;
Thy blood preserves it ever new.

5 And when the dead shall hear Thy voice,
Thy banished children shall rejoice;
Their beauty this, their glorious dress,
Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness!