Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Uncle Fred in the Springtime,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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The Duke shot back in his chair, and his moustache, foaming upwards as if a gale had struck it, broke like a wave on the stern and rockbound coast of the Dunstable nose. A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonized explosion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots.

I recently reviewed P. G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Dynamite, which I enjoyed immensely. So I was happy to see Uncle Fred in the Springtime show up on sale soon after, and I snapped it up. I knew I’d read it before, and had been somewhat disappointed. I consider the classic short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By,” the funniest story ever written, and I felt (this was many years ago) that “Springtime” was just a little below the Plimsoll line. Perhaps, I thought, a re-reading would show me the error of my judgment.

Alas, no. I won’t say Uncle Fred in the Springtime is a bad book (a bad Wodehouse book is an oxymoron), but I still felt just a tad disappointed, like a lion in the Coliseum (as Wodehouse might have put it) sitting down to devour his daily Christian, and suspecting that someone has substituted a Gnostic in heavy French sauce.

The plot is the sort of thing you’d expect, and features the added pleasure of taking us to the familiar precincts of Blandings Castle, where the wooly-headed Earl of Emsworth desires nothing more than a quiet life in contemplation of his prize fat pig, the Duchess of Blandings. But he’s bedeviled by a neighbor, the Duke of Dunstable, a choleric and officious busybody who’s convinced the earl’s pig fixation is unhealthy, and who demands that Emsworth give it (the pig, that is) to him.

Meanwhile, Uncle Fred, himself an earl, is concerned about the fortunes of Miss Polly Pott, daughter of his friend Claude “Mustard” Pott, a former bookie and confidence man. Polly wants to marry a poet who’s looking for 250 pounds to enable him to purchase an onion soup bar in London. Uncle Fred, who is kept on an allowance by his wife, is hunting for a way to find her the money. This leads, through complex narrative paths and byways, to Uncle Fred and his nephew Pongo traveling to Blandings Castle, where Fred, as is his custom, takes up residence under an assumed identity, in this case that of the esteemed brain disease specialist Sir Roderick Glossop. The theft of the pig becomes a central theme.

My problem with this story – and it may just be me – is partly that it contains about one more main character than I can easily keep straight in my head. Also, though it’s always a delight to watch Uncle Fred lie with a straight face when caught in a previous lie, this time out I thought his prevarications sometimes a little thin. I had trouble believing anyone would fall for some of them, in spite of the old man’s charm.

Nevertheless, it’s Wodehouse, so it’s fun to read. Recommended, but a little less than other books from the Master.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Justice Without Mercy,’ by Blake Banner

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Looking at my old reviews on this blog, I see that I stopped reading Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer books mainly because they featured cliffhanger endings, which I hate. I absentmindedly picked up Justice Without Mercy, and was relieved to find that it did not end with a cliffhanger. So that’s good. But I still wasn’t entirely happy with it.

Harry Bauer works with Cobra, one of those super-secret semi-governmental security organizations so vital to the survival of the thriller genre. In Justice Without Mercy, he is sent to the small island of I-Takka, between Guyana in Surinam. The island, he is told, is essentially ungoverned. Control is in the hands of a mysterious corporation mining lithium and (according to rumor) carrying on mysterious human experiments. There are reports that children are being abused and murdered. Harry’s brief, which he welcomes, is to see if it’s true – and if it’s true, to take out the main people with extreme prejudice.

Harry Bauer suffers as a character from his extreme aptitude for his job. He’s big, strong, fast, trained to the limit. Throughout the story, whenever he needs to kill somebody (which happens with increasing frequency), he has so little difficulty that the author has to throw in a dozen hyperdeveloped mutants at the end to give us a dramatic climax. Harry is given a few meditative moments in which he ponders the morality of killing, but to someone who just finished reading Mark Helprin’s Elegy in Blue, it was pretty perfunctory. Also, the ending was a little incoherent, I thought.

I’m getting old, after all. I don’t enjoy high body counts as much as I used to. The Harry Bauer books are actually quite well-written (I liked the prose), and they fill the much-needed market niche of books tailored to male readers. So I shouldn’t complain.

But personally I found it rather dreary. It’s fine for its target audience. though. Cautions for lots of violence, rough language, and sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Elegy in Blue,’ by Mark Helprin

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If I cast back over the wars, famines, pandemics, and plagues, all the afflictions of nature and human nature, it seems clear to me that, as a necessity like breathing, the greater command of existence is to look beyond existence itself. Somewhere in the most delicate and invisible abstract is a point where all things come into balance, time stops, pain vanishes, and love and light are the same.

Imagine Death Wish, but recast in the form of a Baroque oratorio. That’s one way to attempt explaining Mark Helprin’s luminous latest novel, Elegy in Blue. Baroque is an appropriate adjective, because he has a very baroque style – he delights in lists, and catalogs, and endless iterations of ever-increasing granularity in detail, so that finally your brain surrenders and you just get caught up in the beauty of the words. And the beauty of the words is a major element of the meaning.

It’s also a hymn to the borough of Brooklyn, which the narrator loves even as he watches it being corrupted.

This narrator is a retired New York investment banker who never divulges his name. Aside from service in Vietnam and the loss of his son in Iraq, he has generally had a privileged life, especially in his marriage to his wife Clare, whom he loves profoundly.

Then he happens across an act of evil in process, and he does the only decent thing, the thing any man should do. As a result, he loses everything and becomes a pariah, a broken man. When he learns of another evil act which he has the power to stop, will he have the courage to act again, knowing the price of virtue?

In a previous book, A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin gave us what I consider one of the great antiwar novels. But that should not be misunderstood as an affirmation of pacifism. The pacifists are some of the main villains of Elegy in Blue, cowards who resort to bromides like “cycle of violence” because they haven’t the guts to act against manifest evil.

Elegy in Blue is presented in intertwined chronology, so that sad endings are often described before happy beginnings. I steeled myself at first for the pain that was clearly coming, but on balance the story was mostly about love and joy, and the things that outlive us in the end.

As always in Helprin books, there was also a lot of humor. Dealing here with New York corporations and legal firms, he disports himself with monickers like Angier Francis Diphthahng, Bradford Pear, Simon Yachtsman, Hodgkins Chalmers, and Chalmers Hodgkins.

A Helprin book is a literary experience, intended to be savored and revisited. I loved Elegy in Blue and recommend it without reservation.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough,’ by John J. Ross, M.D.

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Those who claim that Shakespeare did not write his plays often argue that only some wealthy, privileged, and highly educated person would have been capable of writing them. The premise of this argument is fundamentally mistaken. Literary genius more often arises from disappointment and chagrin than comfort and complacency; the rich and content have no need of imagination.

The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have remarked that no man is a hero to his valet. No doubt there’s some truth to that – familiarity, especially regarding a person’s phobias, thoughtlessness, and hemorrhoids, has to take the shine off their glamor, however eminent they might be. Nevertheless, there’s another way to look at it.

Years ago, I read a book called Napoleon’s Glands, by Arno Karlen (unfortunately out of print now). I found it fascinating, and learning about famous people’s physical frailties did not generally lower my opinion of them (even if, as in the case of Napoleon, I disliked them from the onset). I had a similar experience with John J. Ross’s Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough, which applies very much the same analysis to great English-language authors.

The book deals with William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, The Brontë sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, Jack London, and George Orwell. We learn that Shakespeare might have contracted syphilis (which was endemic in England in his time), though it’s not certain, and the author describes the harrowing medical treatment (surprisingly not worthless) he might have undergone for it. More solidly, the Bard’s deteriorating handwriting indicates essential tremor, a common malady in aging people (we have it in my own family).

Milton suffered detached retinas; Jonathan Swift probably had Ménière’s Disease and certainly died of dementia. Tuberculosis, probably contracted in a horrific private school, plagued the Brontës. Nathaniel Hawthorne may have had Asperger’s Syndrome, and probably died of stomach cancer. Melville looks like Bipolar Disorder. Yeats seems to have suffered from brucellosis; Jack London had scurvy and yaws, and probably died of an accidental drug overdose. James Joyce looks like a case of reactive arthritis, a condition related to venereal disease, and suffered greatly from deteriorating eyesight. Orwell was (probably) another victim of tuberculosis, aggravated by bad lifestyle choices.

Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough may be an unpleasant read for sensitive readers (I myself grew up on a farm and am son and brother to nurses, so my threshold of nausea is pretty high). But I found the book absolutely riveting. And rather than inspiring contempt for these remarkable artists, my admiration for their achievement, in the face of such suffering, only rose.

The book did make me wonder, though, whether my lack of literary success might be due to insufficient craziness in my makeup.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Common Tragedy,’ by Alan Lee

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I never hesitate about buying one of Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August books (though apparently I’ve missed a couple in the series. I’ll have to remedy that). Common Tragedy is 15th in sequence. Mack August stands in the hardboiled tradition, but he’s taken Robert B. Parker’s sunnier approach and turned the dial up to “cheery.” If Raymond Chandler is “Noir,” Alan Lee has to be described as “Blanc.” Mack August is a big, strong, happy man who loves his life, loves his wife and kid, and enjoys company so much that he lives in a house with his father, his father’s girlfriend (the sheriff), his US Marshal friend Mannie Rodriguez and Mannie’s girlfriend Noelle, his own wife, and his dog, and they take an “it takes a village” approach to raising the kid.

They live in a house in a nice neighborhood, complete with a Home Owner’s Association. One evening, the HOA president hosts a meeting/picnic for the board in his yard, next door to Vickie Plemmons, the past president, a woman with a drinking problem and a rebellious, drug addict daughter. When Vickie disappears inside her house and doesn’t return, a neighbor woman goes inside to check on her. She finds Vickie and her daughter both dead of drug overdose.

It looks like a double suicide. The police want it to be a double suicide. But Mack is dubious. For one thing, it’s unclear how the drugs were administered. Working without a client, just out of a sense of community obligation, Mack starts asking questions. And it’s clear that a lot of his neighbors have things to hide.

Mack’s work is both hindered and helped by another neighbor, a crime podcaster, who has been secretly filming and recording his neighbors for some time, and soon starts racking up followers for his viral podcast.

On top of that, it turns out that Mannie’s girlfriend Noelle is pregnant, and she’s reluctant to tell Manny about it.

Common Tragedy is a fast-moving, amusing, and tragic story with a deeper message. I think the author may be a Christian, though his characters don’t always act like it. Highly recommended, with cautions, mostly for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mildred Pierced’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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By now I’ve read and reviewed the majority of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s amusing Toby Peters novels. Mildred Pierced is the second to last in the series, and I’m pretty sure I’ve covered the final one already. But I don’t read them in order. I read them based on how much I like (or am interested in) the celebrity client involved in each mystery. Mildred Pierced must – as any old film afficionado will guess – involve Joan Crawford, an actress who has never appealed to me in any way. Hence my delay in reading it (though she nosed in ahead of that Commie, Charlie Chaplin).

Mildred Minck is the unfaithful, abusive wife of Sheldon Minck, LA’s worst dentist, who shares an office with PI Toby Peters. Somebody killed her in a park with a crossbow bolt, and it is Sheldon’s great misfortune to have been seen standing near the body, holding a crossbow. Sheldon swears to Toby that he didn’t do it (and it’s hard to imagine a putz like Sheldon successfully murdering anybody) and asks Toby to prove his innocence. Therefore, Toby must question the witness, who just happens to be movie star Joan Crawford. To his surprise, she wants to hire him too – to keep her name out of the papers.

Now Toby has to investigate the people who put a crossbow into Sheldon’s hands – a crackpot group of proto-survivalists. Meanwhile, Toby’s sister-in-law is dying of cancer, and his cop brother Phil is contemplating retiring from the force.

Snappy, fast-moving, full of oddball characters, Mildred Pierced keeps faith with the template of the Toby Peters novels. I liked it a lot, even if I don’t like Joan Crawford much. Recommended. No serious content warnings are called for.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mission 37,’ by Michael Berk

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In England after World War II, Jack Monroe is a doctor in the US Army Air Corps. To his surprise, he’s ordered to go to Germany and observe a top-secret autopsy along with an international group of physicians. The subject of the procedure is supposed to be an obscure German named Martin Bormann. Jack considers the autopsy perfunctory and unprofessional, as if somebody is covering tracks. Afterward he can’t resist going see the English doctor who was also present, only to learn that the man has been run down by a car.

Inquiring further, he gets into contact with Simon and Dionne, a couple of young people who turn out to be agents for a shadowy organization of Holocaust survivors. And that leads to all the intrigue and adventure that follow in Michael Berk’s Mission 37, first volume in a series.

The book wasn’t bad, all in all. It was more like a mystery than the usual thriller nowadays, as the main focus is on the puzzle of Martin Bormann’s fate rather than on action and violence. There is action and violence, but our hero is more often rescued than active in the fights. (The solution to the mystery, I ought to mention, did surprise me.)

There is romance and sex in this book, but the sex happens offstage.

The writing was passable, better than a lot that I see these days. My main complaint was typesetting – there are whole sections where the quotation marks disappear for no apparent reason, making the dialogue hard to understand. I suspect the fault is in A.I. proofreading.

I did appreciate the book’s pro-Israel slant, which is not only rare but brave nowadays.

I recommend Mission 37 moderately.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Medusa Protocol,’ by Rob Hart

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A friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran, used to talk about a war buddy of his. “He loved the war,” my friend said. “He was addicted to the action. He never wanted to go home – and he never did.”

If violence can be an addiction, can it be treated like other addictions, with a 12-step program? That’s the original conception behind Rob Hart’s The Medusa Protocol, book 2 in his Assassins Anonymous thriller series.

Astrid is a new member of Assassins Anonymous, which is like Alcoholics Anonymous but way more secretive, because all the members have mortal enemies looking for them. She’s on her way to a meeting one night when she’s abducted, ending up in a remote prison on a South American island.

She’d been brought into the group by Mark, her sponsor. Using the CIA resources he still maintains, he manages to figure out where Astrid has been taken. He and another group member pack up their kits to go after her. Only one thing is unusual for men like them – they’ve made a commitment not to kill anyone along the way.

In some ways, I found The Medusa Protocol a very satisfactory adventure story. The characters were interesting and the theme – personal redemption – was appealing and sometimes inspiring, occasionally skirting close to Christianity.

My big problem with the book, though, was plausibility. The willing suspension of disbelief. We’re supposed to believe that it’s possible to renounce killing and go into firefights relying on paintball guns, tasers, and martial arts skills, and hope to prevail. I’m only a (former) playacting fighter in the medieval sword fight field, but I’m pretty confident that when you enter “kinetic” situations like that, people tend to get killed whatever you do. The idealists first, of course, but where bullets fly, “friendly fire” tends to happen.

I’m also expected (yet again) to believe in a small woman who somehow awes much larger and stronger men possessing equal training, on the basis of her amazing Girl Power, or something. Also she employs one life-and-death trick that seemed pretty darn iffy to me.

Still, if you’re looking for a thriller on a higher moral level, The Medusa Protocol is pretty entertaining. (I might note that the author employs the annoying [to me] present tense for most of the story.)

Non-fiction, Reviews

’24 Hours in the Viking World,’ by Kirsten Wolf

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I run into many people who are looking for books to introduce them to the Vikings. Kirsten Wolf’s 24 Hours in the Viking World isn’t a bad book for the purpose, in spite of some weaknesses.

The plan of the book is a little strange, but it’s part of a series of similar books set in various historical periods and places, so readers must appreciate it. Each chapter is devoted to a single hour of the day. For each hour, we focus on one Viking Age character. These characters’ locations and historical dates are not coordinated – the reader is shuttled back and forth in time and space.

We see men commit murders, build ships, and compose poems. We see women give birth, prepare feasts, and take up unaccustomed weapons in defense. Each situation is described in detail, so that some aspect of Viking life is illuminated. New Viking enthusiasts will learn much here.

The weakness of the book is in the dramatizations The author, an academic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows her material but is not gifted in scene-setting or dialogue. The dialogue is too modern (in my view), with characters delivering lines like “Hang in there.” And the characters – especially the men – are generally more sensitive in their conversations with their wives than I suspect real Viking men were. The characters, in short, talk like modern people dressed up in Viking clothes.

On the plus side, author Wolf is not a partisan of the “Lagertha Party” in Viking studies. When she recounts the famous Vinland episode where Leif Eriksson’s sister Freydis brandishes a sword to scare off the “scraelings,” we’re told she has no idea how to use a sword. I’m not sure I’d have gone that far myself, sexist though I am. Ditto for her statement that Icelandic women had “no legal rights.”

One chapter involves a baker at Hedeby in Denmark. Oddly, his name is given as Hans Jensson. That’s a bizarre name choice for a Viking, as both “Hans” and “Jens” are colloquial versions of the Christian “John.” And it took time for those adaptations to evolve. I don’t think those names existed as such in the Viking Age.

Still, 24 Hours in the Viking Age isn’t a bad introduction to Viking everyday life. I recommend it moderately.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty’

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It is my custom sometimes, during Viking events, to read sagas from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders instead of something off my Fire device, as if that made me more historically authentic. This past weekend, at the iFest in St. Paul, I read The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty. Finnbogi’s Saga is not one of the great ones, but it does (as Sherlock Holmes used to say) present certain points of interest.

All the sagas tend to settle into what I would call tropes (scholars no doubt have a better term for them). But the later sagas become both implausible and predictable. Finnbogi’s Saga contains a number of boilerplate elements, combined with what seem to be genuine family anecdotes.

We begin in fairy tale (or even mythological) mode with the familiar theme of the abandoned child. The hero’s father, miffed at his wife, orders her to “expose” their next baby (that means to leave the child out on a hillside for wild animals to kill; it was a common choice for deformed babies or ones whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them). Sorrowfully she does so, building a sort of hollow cairn on a scree-covered hill and leaving the child inside. Of course a poor couple discover him and raise him as their own. They name him “Urdacott” (Scree-cat). However, no one believes this strong and handsome baby could be theirs – from the beginning people suspect who the real father is. Eventually, the real father’s brother convinces him to accept the boy. Later on, Urdacott is fortunate enough to rescue a shipwrecked Norwegian merchant who – when he later dies – leaves both his wealth and his name – Finnbogi – to the boy.

Then young Finnbogi, like most saga heroes, sails off to Norway (this is in the time of Jarl Haakon), proves his strength and courage in various fantastic adventures, and gains the jarl’s favor along with more wealth. After that he goes home to Iceland, where his exploits gradually become more prosaic. He gets involved in a long feud but is eventually reconciled with his enemies.

An intriguing element here is that Finnbogi’s final feud is also dealt with in another saga, Vatnsdal’s Saga. Some scholars believe it was composed in response to Finnbogi’s negative portrayal in that story.

There was a scene that amused me in the section describing Finnbogi’s time in Norway. In one adventure, Finnbogi comes up against a dangerous bear that’s been marauding in a certain neighborhood. The local residents begin their countermeasures with a legal proceeding:

So it came about that Bard called together an assembly, outlawed the bear, and placed a price on his head.

The bear is in fact treated as semi-human. It would be fun to draw the conclusion that people in those days thought of bears as a wilder kind of human being, but I suspect it’s just a narrative device.

I also noticed that in a couple cases, over the course of the feuding, people are killed, but nobody bothers to prosecute for homicide, because the victims didn’t have enough status to make it worth anyone’s trouble. A reminder that the majesty of the law becomes injustice when everyone isn’t equal in its sight.

Not a great saga, The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty is nonetheless intriguing in many ways.