Fiction, Reviews

‘The Spy Who Came In From the Bin,’ by Christopher Shevlin

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‘He’s a hard man to photograph,’ said Lance.

‘But these are good likenesses, right?’ said Lizzie.

‘Sort of. It sounds weird to say, but there are other people who look more like Jonathon than he does himself.’

I’ve been trying to come up with blog topics all week, and I forgot I’d finished a book last week that I hadn’t reviewed yet.

There’s a third book in  Christopher Shevilin’s weird Jonathon Fairfax series, The Spy Who Came In From the Bin. Jonathan Fairfax, if you recall my earlier reviews, is a well-meaning Englishman who bumbles through life, never quite sure what’s going on as adventure swirls around him.

In this book, Jonathon wakes up in a garbage truck in Berlin, being unloaded from a bin, having completely forgotten who he is. He’s taken to a hospital, but manages to escape after an assassin shows up to murder him. Soon he’s taken in by a friendly American student and her Russian boyfriend. They go on the run, pursued by CIA killers, as Jonathon’s best friend and girlfriend rush to rescue him, assisted by other CIA killers, who may or may not actually be on their side.

It’s all very weird, in the style of these books, where there are very few actual gags to laugh at, but the situations are highly comic in cumulative effect.

What I disliked about this book was a lazy European anti-Americanism, that sees the US as the world’s only real problem. I’m not sure whether I can overlook that attitude enough to read the next book, assuming there is one.

But it’s funny. I can’t deny that.

Religion, Writing

Making new friends through novel writing

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Nicolai Cleve Broch as Saint Olav in the annual Stiklestad Play, near Trondheim. Photo by Leif Arne Holme/NRK, 2004.

Enjoyed a minor writer’s pleasure today, as I worked on the new Erling book.

I went over this one scene I’d added during the last revision. I always feel uncertain about inserted scenes, worrying that the graft might not take (even though most of the time I insert them precisely because I feel something’s missing at that point).

But it did work. Quite well, actually. Not only dramatically, but emotionally. The scene moved me, in fact. Which is always a surprise, like playing a practical joke on yourself.

The scene centered on King Olaf Haraldsson – Saint Olaf. Who is, in the great scheme of the series, the villain. In spite of the fact that he’s the patron saint of my second favorite country, the man was a totalitarian. Also a heretic, in my view, because I consider the use of violence in evangelism heretical. So I approached this project prepared to give him a waxed mustache and a black top hat.

But a funny thing happened as I wrote. I started getting under his skin. The first breakthrough came some years back, when I was talking about Olav’s life with a (longsuffering) friend.

I told him about a story from the Icelandic Flatey Book, not included in Heimskringla (the usual source). Flatey Book explains how Olaf was named after an ancestor, a great king called Olaf Geirstad-Elf, believed to have had supernatural powers. In the old heathen religion, naming a child after a recently dead relation was thought to cause a sort of reincarnation. The new baby was believed to be, in some sense, that ancestor reborn. (Yes, they also believed in Valhalla. And they believed the ancestor slept in his grave mound. Consistency played no part in their theology.) So Olaf was raised believing that he was really a wizard who’d lived before. His foster father Rani even dug into Olaf Geirstad-Elf’s grave mound and removed the ancient family sword, Besing, which was then given to young Olaf.

But Olaf sailed abroad as a Viking, saw a bit of the world, and chose to be baptized a Christian. We’re never told what he thought of his supposed reincarnation, in light of his new faith.

But there’s a story in Flatey Book about how he rode his horse one day past his ancestor’s grave mound. And suddenly a terror came over him. He turned his horse around and galloped off, giving orders that no one should stray near that mound again.

As I told that story to my friend, I suddenly felt I had an insight into Olaf’s psychology. He’d had a traumatic experience there at the grave mound. It instilled in him a terror of the old religion, a fear that he’d be sucked back into the power of a horrific ancestral curse. This helped explain his whole approach to Christianization.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an Olaf booster. His actions are too repellant.

But I think I’m beginning to sympathize with him. A little.

Which leads me to the inevitable thought…

After a thousand years dead, this S.O.B. is charming me! No wonder they made him patron saint!

Uncategorized, Writing

The transmission lockdown, continued

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I’m reading a book right now that I’m enjoying very much. But it’s long. Looooooooong. So the stream of consciousness blogging must continue, regardless of the cost in pain and suffering to our audience.

On the automobile front, my car, Miss Ingebretsen, yet languishes in durance vile, in the transmission shop. I learned today that the transmission itself is all right. It’s the shifter that’s broken. They’re trying to find me a used shifter, and I guess those things must be harder to find than you’d expect. Maybe tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll have to use Door Dash for groceries again.

If you skipped the video above, take a minute to watch it. It’s not much longer than that. It’s the Dragon Harald Fairhair, the big Viking ship I hoped to see in Duluth a few years back, but was disappointed. Seriously, was anything ever more romantic than that graceful ship cutting through a stormy sea? That (or the idea of it, anyway) was what surprised me by joy nearly 60 years ago, making me a lifelong Viking nut, and pointing me to my destiny, as a highly peripheral figure in the world of Norwegian history, literature, and entertainment. And, oh yes, a novelist.

I can report that I’m still working on the new Erling book, King of Rogaland. Its current status hovers in a weird space where the book is essentially written, but far from finished. We speak of “polishing” a manuscript, and that’s what it is. Very like sanding wood. Going over the same surface again and again, smoothing out the rough spots. I’ve got a few passages where I’ve left out place names I still need to select, with a map. And there are joints that aren’t tight. Once this current pass is finished, working onscreen, I think I need to print the next draft out, and labor over it on paper. Some things work better with a red pen and notes and swoopy arrows. Especially when you need to hunt through the pages multiple times.

Also, I’ve never gotten a splinter polishing a manuscript.

Fiction, Reading

Culling the Shelves of Bad Books

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Sometimes I browse a bookstore as I would other stores I visit while playing the tourist. I look at the many curious spines, letters, and colors, seeing the curiosity of one, the value of another, with little intension of buying either. Sometimes I go to a bookstore in hope of finding a few, specific titles or types of books or maybe anything by that guy who wrote those stories–you know the ones–about that cool thing, remember, and though I enter with hope, I must put it on a table somewhere to pick up something else, because I gradually despair of finding anything I want.

But there are times when I take a chance on a book I know nothing about. That’s when I run the risk of having my wife read it.

I’m a slow reader. If I wasn’t so good-looking, I’d be notably less successful than I am. My wife is fast reader, and I don’t mean by comparison to me. I can buy her a promising title from the used bookstore, and in two days, having read it through, she’ll ask me to take the trashy thing back.

I went to the used bookstore a couple weeks ago, carrying a mug of hope for reasons I don’t recall. Maybe it was our recent collection of trade-ins and having avoided the store for about a year. Inspired by Lars’s recent urban fantasy reviews, I wanted to find something fun and maybe good to try. So I went home with a steampunk novel, first of a series. Saying she needed to screen it for the kids, my wife read it immediately.

I think I read somewhere that nothing in steampunk was worth reading. It was all fan-fiction, heavily derivative. This book has to be step aside from that, because it was traditionally published by an author who has many other published books, but it isn’t good.

Getting all of this from my wife, the dialog is awful, particularly everything the heroine says. The plot is dragged down by her constantly wrestling over marrying someone instead of doing the adventure thing that you’d expect from a novel like this.

The devices and contraptions are interesting, even though they don’t move the story. The pirates are vile, needlessly dark, and disappear after their initial scuffle, which may be realistic but not fun. The zombie disease doesn’t make sense, and I don’t need to go on.

That’s the risk I run plucking a book off the shelf, being too kind to the cover art, and even reading the description or a random page. I’ve done that before to positive effect. More than that, I don’t need to buy books. I have many good ones on my shelves and more on that little Kindle thing that could spy on me if I didn’t put it to sleep with no wi-fi every day.

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After-inaction report

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[Imagine a picture of Saturday’s events here. I neglected to take one. My brain was overheated, I think.]

It is one of the anomalies (I think that’s the word for it) of historical reenactment, that many of us impersonate people from the history of northern Europe, where it’s cool most of the year and most people historically wore wool. But we do it at events in America in the summer, where big wool costumes with cloaks are borderline dangerous if you don’t keep carefully hydrated. (And those who don’t reenact European stuff generally do the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, where wool is also de rigeur.)

Minnesota Military History Days, an annual event held in Dundas Minnesota (where my grandfather was once town constable for a year, as I kept telling people), was originally scheduled for May. But the weather was cold and wet in May, so they rescheduled for the first weekend in June. June is usually real nice in Minnesota.

This year the temperature hovered up just below 100˚. If I can trust my car’s thermometer, it actually hit 100 in the Cities. (Another thing I often tell people, whether they like it or not, is that I spent 11 years on the east coast of Florida, and never saw 100˚, but I’ve been through many such days in the North Star State.) I figured that after the long lockdown, people would want to come out to a public event in spite of the heat – but that was not the case. Attendance was sparse, much below normal levels, according to the old hands.

This was the first year anybody from The Viking Age Club & Society of the Sons of Norway had been to the event. (It was a three-day event, but we only did Saturday.) It’s what’s called a timeline event, where reenactors from various periods all come together to provide a walking (and camping) history lesson. There was a big World War II battle in the afternoon (America won again, I’m proud to report), but our Vikings did a couple combat shows too (I left that to others). And we had a good turnout of members, all of them young people – except, of course, for me.

I brought my tent and awning shade (we did need the shade), and it was good to have a lot of youthful free labor to do the bulk of the putting up and tearing down. Even so, I had occasion to ponder the fact that it had been more than a year since I’d done this stuff, and in the interim I’ve arguably become too old for it. Especially on really hot days.

I comfort myself with the thought that it will be better if I lose some weight. (Though that’s less comfortable when I remember that losing weight requires effort and self-control.) I got a fair amount of exercise in, though, walking back and forth to the water tap.

It was a fun event in spite of the sparse crowds. We (by which I mean mainly the other Vikings) made a lot of contacts. Invitations to other events and possible new group members came up. It was a good time.

In which I didn’t sell a single book, because we weren’t allowed to display any modern stuff.

However, another event was coming Sunday. Danish Day at the Danish-American Center in Minneapolis. Granted, I almost never sell any books at that event, but at least I’d be able to display them, and who knows?

As an added attraction, the temperature would be about the same as Saturday.

However, I was denied the joys of another tropical set-up and tear-down, when I went into my garage to start my car on Sunday morning, and the transmission wouldn’t function. Bummer. I unloaded my car and spent the day rehydrating and recovering from Saturday.

This morning I got AAA to tow my car to my regular transmission place (I have a regular transmission place because – as I have learned to my chagrin – PT Cruisers are prone to those kinds of problems.) If it’s the same thing it was the last time, it’ll be easily fixed. But they haven’t gotten back to me yet. Which leads me to worry.

On the high spiritual plane which I inhabit, we call this “opportunities to increase our faith.”

Fiction, Reviews

Starting Inspector Rebus Series in the Middle

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I think I picked up of Ian Rankin’s A Question of Blood at a library sale. I remember bringing it home along with a Brad Meltzer book. I didn’t know anything about the series, not even that this is the 14th in a total of 23 (which was released last October). A Question of Blood was published in 2004. It may be the third novel that features Siobhan Clarke as a main character.

Rankin doesn’t punish new readers for starting in the middle. Even with Siobhan’s name (which I looked up as I began reading), Rankin explains the Irish pronunciation (Shi-VAWN) and makes a point of it with character interaction to help us along. All of the characters are introduced appropriately so that new readers will not be lost among many names.

As Siobhan’s name is foreign to the Scottish characters in this series, so are many of native elements foreign to me. I loved various Scottish words and details that cropped up as I read. At least, I attributed them to Scottish culture. Maybe I’m just ignorant. The writing is tight and suspenseful, perhaps even restrained.

In A Question of Blood, Rebus gets called to Queensberry to offer perspective on a murder-suicide at a private school involving a former army special forces soldier, the son of judge, and the son of an MP. It’s clear the soldier snapped and decided to kills some school kids, but why those kids in the common room of Port Edgar Academy and not any of the students he passed on the way? Was there some vendetta? Did they know each other?

At the same time, Siohban has been stalked by a man she tried to put away for assault. She’s started scanning for him out of windows and watching her back more than usual. It’s been going on for three weeks, and suddenly the stalker’s house burns, killing him. A coincidental accident or is someone seeking revenge on her behalf?

I plan to pick up the first Inspector Rebus novel next to see if Rankin started off as strong a writer as he is in this book or grows into it latter on.

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

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Breakout week

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A past Viking event. My tent is in the background. This madness is about to resume.

Mystery solved. Dentally speaking.

As I told you yesterday, I went to the dentist, pleading emergency, because I was having intermittent tooth pains. The dentist, finding nothing amiss, asked if I was experiencing stress. Might be grinding my teeth at night, for instance.

Last night, after midnight, I was on the couch finishing up the translation of a script, due today (Oslo time). And I noticed that my teeth were clenched like an alligator’s. (Did you ever read the tip I saw somewhere when I was a kid? About how if you find yourself wrestling an alligator – which would generally be an involuntary arrangement, I’d imagine – you should grab his jaws while his mouth is closed, and just hold them closed. Because an alligator has tremendous power to bite down, but his mouth-opening muscles are relatively weak. This, of course, still leaves you with the problem of the alligator’s tail, which is also very powerful (according to what I’ve read. I have no personal experience in the area). And I don’t think there are any tricks to restrain an alligator’s tail. (Personally, I wouldn’t chance it. One of the reasons I moved out of Florida.)

So it was the stress of the deadline and the late hours that had me wound up. I hope I didn’t convey the wrong idea yesterday. I’m happy about all the things I’ve had to do this week. It’s just their coming all at once that keyed me up. I really liked the script I was working on, and I enjoyed being interviewed on the radio. And I’m looking forward to stretching my Viking muscles again (probably pulling some while I’m at it) in the two events I’ll be doing this weekend.

Part of the pressure, I just realized, comes from the end of the lockdown. Going out in public and interacting with genuine human beings has been a challenge for me ever since I was a kid. I do the Viking events because a) it’s fun to dress up and play, and pretend to be an expert, and b) it’s a good way to sell books. But it’s also a challenge. Essentially, I see people as dangerous animals. Going to a public event is equivalent to visiting one of those wildlife safari parks. If you don’t stay in the jeep, the management cannot be responsible for your safety.

This past year has been a guilty pleasure for me. I began to suspect some time ago that I’ve got some agoraphobic tendencies, and those tendencies got coddled like an egg all through 2020. I grew a whole new shell. Now I’ve got to break out of that shell again, and it’s got me a little nervy.

But being a Viking is all about courage. Even if you’re only battling yourself.

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Taking care of business

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Weird week. Good, but weird. I am a dull man leading a dull life, but occasionally things pick up. They’re up right now.

Saturday I’ll be doing the first actual Viking event I’ve done in over a year – not strictly a Viking event, but a military history timeline thing at Dundas, Minnesota: Minnesota Military History Days. I’ll only be there Saturday. But it’s an event, and I’ll be setting up the tent, so I’m feeling the “tension.” (“Tent,” “tension,” get it? They actually do come from the same root.) Sunday is another event, but that’s not open to the public, so I won’t tease you with it.

(I probably won’t be posting anything Friday, because it takes me at least a day to do anything.)

And then translation work showed up. Fairly big project, fairly tight deadline. On top of that, it’s got a subject that really appeals to me (can’t tell you what). So I’m busy with that right now (should be working on it this minute, in fact).

And I got an invitation to be interviewed on a talk show a good friend does on a station in Des Moines (Truth 99.3). I can’t find a way to link to the recorded interview yet, except through Facebook. I’ll let you know if I find it (or, more likely, if somebody points it out to me, as one directs an elderly tourist to local points of interest).

Last night, I got a toothache. Went in to the dentist today on an emergency basis. He looked inside my maw and found nothing. He asked, “Have you been tense lately?”

I hadn’t thought I had, but maybe I have.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Straight Shot,’ by Jack LIvely

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“You’re using yourself as bait, Keeler. Is that wise?”

“Probably better to think of me as a carnivorous plant with legs. If they’re wise, they’ll just give up now, immediately. At least they’ll have a chance of staying alive.”

I think the idea with Tom Keeler, hero of Jack Lively’s Straight Shot, is to emulate Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tom is newly retired from US Air Force Search and Rescue. But he belonged to a special unit, one trained for weapons, tactics, and covert operations. He’s a very dangerous man. Right now he’s touring Europe. He stops off at the town of Alencourt, France, because his mother’s family came from there. Maybe he can scare up some relatives.

He’s hardly off the train before somebody tries to murder him. He handles that situation with aplomb, killing his assailant, and the police give him no trouble – in fact one of them, Officer Cecile Nazari, strikes some romantic sparks. When Tom learns that a local citizen who may be his cousin has been crippled by a similar attack, and that various murders are happening around town, he starts investigating. He finds clues relating to human smuggling and official corruption. So he makes up his mind to clean the town up.

What I liked best about Straight Shot was the writing. Jack Lively knows how to put a sentence and paragraph together. The final action seemed to me kind of predictable – the previously invulnerable hero suddenly becomes vulnerable, to increase dramatic tension. And female fighters are brought in for equal opportunity or something.

But all in all I thought Straight Shot a pretty good read. I might go on to the second book.

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A Soldier’s Only Hope

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Lars’s Memorial Day post on Friday reminded me of a book I picked up several years ago in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It’s From the Flag to the Cross: Scenes and Incidences of Christianity in the Civil War, by US Army Chaplain Amos S Billingsley. The book has many notes and expressions of faith from those who came in touch with the Union chaplaincy during the war. Billingsley includes records of his own ministry and the people he spoke to in hospitals, prisons, and camps.

He tells the story of visiting the gangrene camp next to Hampton Hospital in November 1864-65 about midnight. He entered one soldier’s tent in the dim light of the moon, noticing a small candle burning within.

On approaching him, he warmly grasped my hand, and, upon inquiring how he was, he replied, “I am very weak; I don’t think I’m going to live long; and I have sent for you hoping you could administer a word of comfort, and write a letter of sympathy and consolation to my wife and children.” “I trust you were not without hope?” “Oh no! I have a glorious hope. Christ is my only hope, and he is growing more and more precious every hour.”

“The pious, heroic John Lambert, with his legs burned to the stumps, with his body pierced with ruthless halberds, with his fingers flaming with fire, with dying breath exclaimed, ‘None but Christ! NONE BUT CHRIST!’ Think you would be afraid to die?” “No, I think not. I die for my country, and, dying for Him who died for me, I have nothing to fear; I don’t fear death, thank God! I trust he will give me the victory over it.” “You seem to have it already.” “I have got the victory!” said the dying Rutherford and he left the world shouting glory. I asked him, “What word shall I send to your wife and dear children?” “Tell them I died happy in Christ. He lingered a few hours, and God took him home. How striking the transition! How glorious the change! From a lonely, dreary gangrene camp to the throne of God in heaven! Here, he wore a soldiers garb; there, robed in white, he wears a crown of glory, and bears palms of victory. I visited two other patients at the same call; one of which was so far gone, it was then too late to get his dying message to send home to comfort his bereaved friends. He was a good man. Such were my visits to this suffering camp.

Whether we spend our days on anger, reacting to the latest news prompt, or on sentimentality, wanting to get the family together for smiles and meals, or on kindness, building or rebuilding our communities, we have only one hope. Maybe we’ve lived constructive lives, earning the praise of our peers. Maybe we’ve wasted our lives on self-indulgence, which could also earn the praise of our peers. Nothing we do opens or closes more avenues of hope. We have only one, the work of Christ Jesus on the cross.

Because this is true, we can take comfort when someone professes new faith on his death bed, despite the life he leaves behind. We cannot judge a spiritual transformation when the subject has no opportunity to bear the fruit of his faith. Even then, we cannot judge a man’s heart perfectly. What we can do is look to Christ and point others to Him as well.