Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having read and reread a lot of John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and Len Deighton—some of the great names in spy novel and thrillers—I noticed another name that often came up when, between their books, I would read about these authors: Eric Ambler. Ambler, an English novelist with a career stretching from the 1930s to the 90s, is often fitted into a crucial place in the history of the thriller between the more romantic adventure style of a Buchan, the hardened but still exciting sensibility of a Fleming, or the grey workaday espionage of a Le Carré or Deighton. Ambler’s name came up often enough, and with serious enough admiration, that it stuck in my mind, and when I ran across a copy of his 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios I eagerly seized the chance to read it.

A Coffin for Dimitrios begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic now subsisting on his surprisingly successful mystery novels, aimlessly whiling away a trip to Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. When he meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer, at a party and Haki expresses admiration for his novels, Latimer is given the chance to look into a real crime, to see the disorder of crime, violence, and death, the incompleteness of real mysteries.

Latimer, intrigued, agrees, and Haki takes him to the morgue. On the slab is the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek master of organized crime. The police had fished him out of the Bosporus that morning, stabbed and drowned.

Haki briefs Latimer on Dimitrios’s record: theft, blackmail, murder, espionage on behalf of parties unknown, conspiracy to assassinate the president of a fragile Balkan state, drug smuggling, sex trafficking. Dimitrios’s crimes, Haki makes clear, are not the equivalent of a tidy poisoning in an English country house, and Dimitrios himself was thoroughly nasty. Unredeemable. And terribly powerful.

After Haki’s tour of the morgue and reading of Dimitrios’s file Latimer tries to move on, to return to work on his next book, but Dimitrios’s true story nags at him—especially its incompleteness. Haki’s file had long gaps in it, with Dimitrios disappearing from Izmir or Athens only to appear again in Belgrade or Paris years later, working another racket. Latimer decides to find out the whole story. He tells himself it’s research for a book.

Latimer’s search takes him from Istanbul to Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally Paris. At first he doesn’t realize what he’s got himself into. Questions about Dimitrios provoke icy silence or outright hostility. Local authorities obligingly try to help, but it’s clear that they have only the thinnest understanding of Dimitrios’s career. Latimer gets his best information from Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster—but he must work to convince them to talk and only slowly realizes that they have angles of their own to play now that Dimitrios is dead.

There is much more to A Coffin for Dimitrios, but to explain more would be to reveal too much. One of the pleasures of Ambler’s sprawling detective tale is the manner in which it unfolds, with Latimer picking up clues, chasing leads, and often stumbling across information that is more meaningful to the criminals he meets than to himself. Simply understanding what he’s uncovered makes up a large part of his work, but his sense that he’s onto something important keeps him searching even as his research grows more dangerous and the surviving members of Dimitrios’s criminal network start to ensnare him in their own schemes.

The novel’s setting proves another of its strengths. This is eastern Europe twenty years after the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of new states like Yugoslavia out of the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Memory of the war and the violence and chaos that, rather than ceasing, grew worse in the aftermath haunt every place Latimer visits and every person he meets. Cops, customs officers, nightclub dancers, and even strangers on trains all have stories to tell. This is the bustling, seedy, multilingual, darkly cosmopolitan world of international crime—imagine Casablanca crossed with The Third Man—and Ambler evokes it brilliantly.

And, like all of the other writers I began this review with, Ambler is an excellent writer. Strong, direct prose and precisely observed descriptions immediately draw the reader in, and, despite the globetrotting plot, Ambler does not waste time on travelogue. In addition to The Third Man, which I enjoy just as much in Graham Greene’s novella as the noir film based on it, A Coffin for Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, another thriller whose plot bestrides Europe just before the Second World War and one of my favorite reads last year. This is a spare, tense story of obsession and revelation, of an ordinary man drawn by his own curiosity into a dark world standing just out of sight in the streets of Europe’s most important cities.

If A Coffin for Dimitrios has any flaw, it is that the pacing flags somewhat in the middle as several characters in a row retell their stories of falling in with Dimitrios, but these chapters are entertaining and interesting in their own right and set up a suspenseful and satisfying final confrontation between Latimer, one of the many crooks he has met along the way, and a figure he never expected to meet when he began his search.

If you like any of the other authors I’ve mentioned above—and if you follow this blog you must surely like a few of them—or if you simply enjoy solid, well-crafted, fast-paced, and suspenseful thrillers, check out A Coffin for Dimitrios. Having read this one, I’ll certainly read others by Eric Ambler.

How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.

John Gardner on art and democracy

Yesterday during my commute I revisited a short radio interview with John Gardner, one of the writers and writing teachers I most admire. The entire interview is worth listening to for Gardner’s trenchant comments on, well, everything, but I found the following exchange most striking.

Considering the way “the rise of middle class literature”—a “bad thing” in Gardner’s view—was satirized by Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, interviewer Stephen Banker goes back to Gardner’s preference for premodern work like Beowulf or Dante or Chaucer and his belief that literature has decreased in quality since then:

Banker: There’s so much in what you said. First of all, are you seriously suggesting that the literature of the aristocracy is the right kind of literature?

Gardner: Yeah, sure, sure. And I think that, as a matter of fact, I don’t think that’s snobbism, I think that every kid in a democracy would like that literature better if he knew it. But of course the thing that happens in a democracy is that the teachers lose touch with what’s good—they don’t know, you know? How many art teachers, you know, in ordinary public schools, have been to an art museum? Just that. How many teachers of creative writing in high schools and colleges for that matter really know what the Iliad is about? I’ve talked with an awful lot of professors. I think there are a handful of people in America who understand the poem Beowulf. And I don’t think there’s even a handful in England. It’s just lost knowledge.

Banker: Well, what—

Gardner: I don’t know anybody who knows about Dante! I don’t know a single person who understands what Dante is doing. I don’t mean that as arrogance, it’s just a fact. They read little sections of it, they talk about the dolce stil nuovo, that’s all.

The reading of great literature in context-free excerpt with a primary focus on formal or—increasingly—political qualities still rings true, as does the well-expressed observation that kids even in democracies will prefer to the adventure of aristocratic literature to middle-class realism. The problem comes in the line “if he knew it.” Many kids today are deprived, often for ideological rather than artistic reasons, and I can see their thirst for this kind of storytelling anytime I describe, in detail and for its own sake, a work of ancient or medieval literature to a class of students. They respond.

I do think there is more cause for hope than Gardner suggests—consider the wave of relative popularity greeting Emily Wilson’s recent translations of Homer—but the situation is dire.

Banker next moves the discussion on to whether old literature is still relevant in a more technologically sophisticated world and Gardner comes out swinging, while also rounding out some of his statements above:

“I don’t think that’s snobbism, I think that every kid in a democracy would like that literature better if he knew it.”

— John Gardner

Banker: I think one could make a case—

Gardner: Mm-hm.

Banker: —that things that happened five, six, seven hundred years ago are not really relevant to the way we live now, that those people didn’t live with machinery, they didn’t live in the age of anxiety, they didn’t live with the kind of tensions, the kind of communications we have today.

Gardner: I think that’s probably not true. I think, in fact, that—pick your age, pick the age, for instance, of Alexandrian Greece, with Apollonius Rhodius writing in an overpopulated, effete, decadent society, he writes a book which is a bitter, ironic, very Donald Barthelme-like book in imitation of the epic form but actually making fun of the epic form and expressing, you know, his ultra-modern kind of disgust and despair and all this kind of business.

Banker: And what period are you talking about now?

Gardner: Oh, I don’t know about dates. Third century BC. One can find at the end of every great period decadent literature very much like ours. The difference is that we have for the first time—and it’s a great thing—real democracy, in which everybody can be educated. And as everybody begins to be educated and as everybody begins to say what education ought to be, then education changes, and so that the kind of values which make first-rate philosophy or art or anything else disappear—or become rare, at least. There are obviously lots of writers in America who are still concerned about great art and are trying to create it but, mostly, that’s not true.

Food for thought.

The interview ranges widely and it’s hard not to transcribe large parts of the rest, particularly, in considering the value of fiction, Gardner’s comparison of the way Nietzsche and Dostoevsky attacked the same philosophical problems, the first in abstract aphorism and the second in concretely realized fiction, and why Dostoevsky’s fictional interrogation of the Übermensch was more successful—and truthful.

Listen to the whole thing.

For more from Gardner on what’s great about Beowulf and what’s wrong with modern “realism,” check out this Paris Review interview from 1979, a year after the radio interview above. It’s paywalled but a generous, tantalizing chunk is available to read before it cuts off. I’ve written about Gardner here several times before, most importantly on his concept of fiction as the painstaking creation of a “vivid and continuous fictive dream.” This is a crucial idea to me, one I often reflect on. I also considered the role of sensory detail in Gardner’s “fictive dream” using the example of the novel Butcher’s Crossing here.

2023 in books

This turned out to be big year for our family. We welcomed twins in the late summer and between that, some travel earlier in the year when my wife was still mobile, and a lot of extra work in the fall, things have only just begun to slow down. Despite it all, there was plenty of good reading to be had, so without further ado, here are my favorites of 2023 in my two usual broad categories:

Favorite fiction of the year

This was an unusually strong year for my fiction reading, especially in the latter half, when I had little time and my concentration was strained. I’d recommend most of the novels I read this year but here, in no particular order, are my dozen favorites, with one singled out—after great difficulty choosing—as my favorite of the year:

The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham—A genuinely creepy slow-burn thriller in which a small English village, not noteworthy for much of anything, plays host to a brood of strange, emotionless, hive-minded children who were all mysteriously conceived on the same night. As the children grow—at twice the rate of normal children, by the way—and they manifest powers of mind-control, the people of Midwich are forced to consider what kind of threat the children pose to the village and the rest of the world. Vividly imagined and populated with interesting characters, this is the kind of sci-fi I think I most enjoy. For more Wyndham, see below.

With a Mind to Kill, by Anthony Horowitz—The last and most Ian Fleming-like of Horowitz’s three James Bond novels, this novel picks up threads from Fleming’s final two, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, and develops them into a compelling new story. Having faked M’s assassination, Bond returns to the Soviet Union in a bid to infiltrate and destroy the Russian network that captured, tortured, and attempted to brainwash him. Briskly paced, atmospheric, and suspenseful, with the interesting twist of Bond having to pretend to be the thing he most hates.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima—A story of romance and disillusionment that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. When an officer in Japan’s merchant marine service meets a young widow with an adolescent son, they fall for each other within a few days. The boy is smitten with the officer, too, admiring him as a man of action, adventure, and lofty independence—until the officer decides to give up a life at sea in favor of settling down and raising a family. When the boy relates his disappointment to the savage, cruel gang of schoolboys to which he belongs, they plot to bring the officer down. Briefly told in sensuously dreamlike prose, with a poignant love story and creepy parallel plot involving the boy, this novel totally absorbed me. I read it in a day, a rare feat for me these days.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A richly written, moving, bleak, and wholly engrossing novel in which a small family group of Neanderthals have a disastrous run-in with a band of Homo sapiens. Full review from late spring here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A tense, relentlessly paced thriller set in interwar Europe. When an English hunter sets himself the challenge of stalking and lining up a shot on an unnamed central European dictator—just to see if he can—he is caught, tortured by the secret police, and left for dead. Despite his injuries he manages to escape, but must elude pursuit by a dogged agent of the (again, unnamed) fascist regime, who trails him all the way to southern England. Relentless pacing, a mood of palpable paranoia, the irony of a claustrophobic final standoff in the idyllic English countryside, and the resourcefulness and toughness of the hero keep this book moving from beginning to end. One of my favorite reads from the spring.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel set in the near future, when England is ruled by a king selected at random. The current ruler, Auberon Quin, decides to make a joke of the institution by reintroducing heraldry, elaborate court etiquette, and the traditional subinfeudated privileges and freedoms of London’s separate neighborhoods. It’s all a lark to him until he meets a true believer, a young man named Adam Wayne, who determines to fight for his neighborhood and its people against the plans of the elite. A high-flying hoot, as much of Chesterton’s fiction tends to be, but deeply moving and meaningful.

Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—One doesn’t often associate the name Agatha Christie with historical fiction, and yet here’s an excellent, evocative mystery set in the country house of an ancient Egyptian mortuary priest. Christie constructs a realistic family drama involving the remarriage of the patriarch to a haughty young concubine who threatens the priest’s grown children with disinheritance. When she winds up dead, there is talk of curses, vengeful ghosts, and murder. The priest’s young widowed daughter and his elderly mother, sensing something is amiss, work together to determine who may be responsible for the disasters visiting their home. I’d guess this is one of Christie’s lesser-known books, but it’s now one of my favorites of hers.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger—An eerie and dreamlike fantasy of a peaceful seaside community thrust into bloodshed and destruction by the Head Forester, a violent warlord from the northern forests. Though Jünger insisted that On the Marble Cliffs, which was published as Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was not an allegory of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is certainly applicable to that situation—and to many others in which civilization declines into a scientistic and neopagan barbarism.

Declare, by Tim Powers—A genuinely one-of-a-kind novel: part espionage thriller in the mold of John le Carré, part cosmic horror, part straight historical fiction, part supernatural fantasy, this novel begins with Andrew Hale, an English sleeper agent, being unexpectedly reactivated as part of Operation Declare. He must flee immediately and seek instructions. As Hale returns to regions of the world he hasn’t seen in years and reflects on his career as a spy in Nazi-occupied Paris and the Berlin and the Middle East of the early Cold War, the reader gradually learns his mysterious history and that of the intelligence network of which he has been a part since childhood. The reader also gets to know Kim Philby, a real-life double agent who defected to the Soviets and who continuously and ominously reappears at crucial moments in Hale’s story. I read this on the strong recommendation of several trusted friends and loved it, though I made the fateful decision to begin reading shortly after the arrival of our twins in the late summer. The result was that it took me far longer to read Declare than it should have, and I do feel like I missed some of its cumulative effect. No problem, though—this is clearly worth a reread. It’s that rich.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog—An arresting short fictional portrait of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign for nearly thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Full review from late summer here.

Berlin Game, by Len Deighton—A close contender for my favorite read of the year, this is the first novel in Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, which follows British intelligence agent Bernard Samson as he tries both to help a valuable but endangered asset escape East Berlin and, when that is complicated by the discovery of a double agent in Samson’s own organization, to root out the traitor, whom he may be closer to than he’d like to think. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, and witty. Very much looking forward to Mexico Set and London Match.

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

A man wakes up in a hospital to discover that the world has ended while he was unconscious. I’ve seen at least two zombie versions of this scene—both 28 Days Later and “The Walking Dead” begin this way—but this device originated in the early 1950s in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic survival story The Day of the Triffids.

Two events give rise to the plot of this novel: first, a massive meteor shower, visible worldwide, that blinds everyone who looks at it and, years earlier, the accidental discovery of triffids, walking carnivorous plants apparently developed in a lab (ahem) in Soviet Russia. Having been dispersed all over the world, scientists find uses for the oils produced by triffids and factory farms arise to cultivate them. Others acquire triffids as exotic garden specimens and remove their lethal stingers for safety. Gradually, triffids become part of the landscape, and Bill Masen, a biologist and the novel’s narrator, is partly responsible for their proliferation. Then the meteor shower comes.

Masen, heavily bandaged as he recovers from eye surgery, is one of a handful of people not to be blinded by the meteor shower, and he emerges from the hospital to find London almost silent and filled with the groping, helpless blind. But what begins merely as a grim survival story takes a turn into horror when the triffids appear, preying on the helpless people roaming the streets.

The rest of the novel follows Masen in his attempts to survive and to join others for greater protection. Different groups pursue different survival strategies—the blindness and the triffids offer many a chance to test out their ideal societies—and Masen bounces from one to the other. And all the while, the triffids are learning.

The Day of the Triffids is low-key sci-fi and its emphasis lies squarely on both the practical considerations of escaping and protecting oneself and one’s group from the triffids and on the ethical dilemmas such a catastrophe would produce. Masen witnesses the organization of many—one based on the guidance of academic experts, another based on charity and altruism, and another, the most menacing, based on autocratic paramilitary rule—as well as their failures. There’s an element of social commentary there, but it’s realistically done, not preachy, and also not the point. The point is the nightmare scenario created by the rapidly proliferating triffids and the question of how to survive, find love, and start over in a world ruled by sentient plants.

The Day of the Triffids totally absorbed me and I read it in just a few days. It’s a brilliantly written, vividly imagined, and engaging adventure that also manages to have satisfying depth.

After reading The Day of the Triffids I moved on quickly to Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (see above) and I have The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes on standby for this year. Wyndham’s fiction is my favorite discovery in quite some time and I look forward to reading these in 2024. If you check any of these out, make it The Day of the Triffids, but definitely seek some of Wyndham’s work out.

Favorite non-fiction

If 2023 was a good year for fiction my non-fiction and history reading flagged somewhat, especially after the twins were born (I read only three of the books below after that point). Nevertheless, there were some clear highlights, and what follows, in no particular order, are my thirteen favorites—a baker’s dozen this time, with one favorite of the year:

Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, trans. by Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Ed.—A readable new translation of Beowulf by a master scholar of early medieval Germanic literature with a detailed and insightful commentary on everything from word choice and textual problems to characterization and theme. An ideal text for students who want to dig deeper into this great poem.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A very good short biography from Yale UP’s new Ancient Lives series. Crassus is a difficult figure to understand because he is simultaneously involved in seemingly everything going on in the late Republic and is poorly attested in our surviving sources. Even Plutarch focuses primarily on Crassus’s failed campaign against Parthia. A full portrait is probably impossible to reconstruct, but Stothard does an excellent job of piecing together what we can know about him, his career, his wealth, how he used it, and his disastrous end in the Syrian desert.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—An excellent account of the First World War’s mostly forgotten Italian Front, where mountainous terrain, terrible weather, and the politics and mismanagement of the Italian army resulted in protracted and needlessly bloody campaigns. Focuses far more on the Italians than the Austro-Hungarians, but still offers a good overall picture.

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk—Trenchant observations on the American political, cultural, and educational scene from the early 1980s. Owing to its context, some of the examples Kirk uses are quaintly dated (e.g. complaints about the show “Dallas”) but the substance of his arguments is sound and quite prescient.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—Exactly what it says on the cover: a good brief history of a fascinating place and its people. Clements takes the reader from the Finns’ first mentions by the Romans—who were aware they were out there but probably never traveled to Finland—through conversion to Christianity, the Reformation, life under Swedish and Russian hegemony, and finally through both world wars to a hard-won independence and an important place in the modern world. A timely read considering the surprising Finnish decision to join NATO, and I recommend it in conjunction with Clements’s excellent biography of Marshal Mannerheim, which was my favorite non-fiction read of 2021.

The First Total War, by David A Bell—My closest runner-up for my favorite non-fiction read of the year, this is an excellent history of how European warfare changed in the 18th century. From wars fought by small professional armies for limited objectives, often ended through negotiation, and governed by an aristocratic code of honor, the French Revolution—which was partly rationalized, ironically, by the supposed pointless brutality of the old regime—ushered in an age of mass mobilization, unattainable ideological objectives, and an embrace of pragmatic and amoral brutality, especially against fellow citizens who have declined to join the new order. Bell’s chapters on the shockingly violent war in the Vendée and on Napoleon are especially good, and I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in how warfare and its conduct have evolved—or perhaps devolved—in the modern era.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A dual biography of two Georgians whose friendship, despite sometimes major political differences, proved crucial to both their homestate and the Confederacy. Through his portrait of Stephens and Toombs Davis also offers a good glimpse of the inner workings of secession and the dysfunction of the Confederate government as well as the course of the Civil War mostly away from the frontlines.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—A fun little book that works both as a paradoxical self-help guide focusing both on Poe’s strengths and his self-destructive weaknesses and as an approachable mini-biography of a great writer.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—I finally got around to reading this short biography from the Penguin Lives series following Johnson’s death in January. I’m glad I did. This is a bracingly unromantic look at the first great dictator of the modern world, a remedy to longer, more detailed, but worshipful accounts like that of Andrew Roberts. Johnson, a master of the character sketch, the elegant and razor-edged summary, and the telling detail, brings all his skills to bear on Bonaparte and crafts a convincing account of him as an ingenious brute. Not only did I like Johnson’s perspective on Old Boney, this little book was a joy to read. I strongly recommend it if Ridley Scott’s mess of a cinematic portrait got you interested in its subject at all. You can read a memorial post I wrote for Johnson last January here.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another in the Penguin Lives series, this one by an eminent Jacksonian era scholar. Remini does an excellent job not only narrating what we can know of Smith’s life, hedged about as it is by pious Mormon legend, but also contextualizing him in a world of fevered religious emotionalism, private revelations, and even mystical treasure hunting. I was most surprised by the chapters on Nauvoo, having had no idea that Smith had such a powerful private army at his disposal near the end of his life. An excellent read that I’ve already recommended to students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson—The biggest surprise of my reading year, I looked at the first chapter of this book on a table at Barnes & Noble and was hooked. Part naturalist study of a familiar but strange animal, part history, part memoir, Svensson’s account of what we know—and, more intriguingly, all that we don’t know—about the European eel was informative and enjoyable.

Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan—A posthumously published memoir by a great novelist and good man, this book is full of warm remembrances of places Buchan loved and elegies for the many, many men of his generation who were lost in the First World War. Expect a full review for this year’s John Buchan June. In the meantime, here are my extensive Kindle highlights and notes, courtesy of Goodreads.

Best of the year:

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.

This was a tough choice, but in the end I just enjoyed this new volume of Tolkien’s work more than any of the other excellent non-fiction I read this year. Since reading it and blogging about it a few times this summer, I’ve also continued to reflect on it.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragment of several hundred lines of an Old English epic composed to commemorate a disastrous fight against Vikings in the year 991. During the battle, the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, was killed when he allowed the Vikings to come ashore and form for battle, a decision the wisdom of which has been debated ever since. The poem relates the story with great drama and sympathy, and with moving vignettes of Beorhtnoth’s doomed hearth-companions as they commit themselves to avenging their lord or dying in the attempt.

This book collects a large miscellany of Tolkien’s writings on the poem, including his own translation in prose, an alliterative verse dialogue designed as a sequel called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, multiple earlier drafts of the same showing how the poem evolved both formally and thematically as Tolkien considered and revised it, an essay on Beorhtnoth’s famous pride, and—best of all—extensive notes and commentary from Tolkien that provide a lot of insight into the poem, its context, and broader topics like history, legend, warfare, and human nature.

Anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England or the literature of the period knows The Battle of Maldon, and it unsurprisingly occupied a large space in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. This book—given my own interest in the poem, the event it describes (which was one case study in my master’s thesis), and Tolkien himself—is a most welcome addition to my Tolkien shelf and my favorite non-fiction read of the year. I highly recommend it.

I posted about this book twice during the summer, first on the topic of tradition and the transmission of poetry and culture, and second on the false modern assumption that anything literary in history is necessarily fictitious.

Kids’ books

Here, in no particular order, are the ten best of the kids’ novels and picture books that we read this year, many of which were excellent family read-alouds:

• The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A novelistic adaptation of legends surrounding Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion, told from the perspective of a lesser-known character from Greek myth: Helen’s young son Nicostratus.

• The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A fun historical kids’ adventure set among the trappers of French Canada and the Great Lakes.

• You Are Special, by Max Lucado—A beautifully illustrated and moving picture book about how it is our creator’s stamp, rather than any aspect of ourselves, that gives us worth.

• The Easter Storybook and The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Two nicely illustrated Bible picture books, one for the Lenten and Easter season and the other based on the Book of Acts.

• Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—Probably my favorite kids’ read of the year, this is a charming simplified adaptation with illustrations showing the characters as anthropomorphic animals. Though simple and kid-friendly, it hit hard—I ended up crying several times while reading it to my kids.

• A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David A Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A good short life of Crockett told accessibly but with commendable attention to the details and complexities of his life.

• The Phantom of the Colosseum and A Lion for the Emperor, by Sophie de Mullenheim—The first two volumes of a fun historical series about three young friends and their adventures in the Roman Empire. My kids adored these and I look forward to reading more.

• War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo—A simply written but powerfully moving look at the First World War from an unusual perspective.

Rereads

Everything I reread this year. My favorites were certainly my revisits with Charles Portis, especially Gringos, which I read for the third time while on a trip to Mexico in the spring. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

• The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, by Patrick F McManus*

• Never Sniff a Gift Fish, by Patrick F McManus*

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

• The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

One of my own

Of course, another big event for the year was the publication of a new book of my own, my World War II action novella The Snipers.

Set during the ferocious Battle of Aachen in the fall of 1944, months after D-day and the breakout from Normandy but still long months away from victory over Germany, The Snipers is the story of one bad day in the life of Sergeant JL Justus. A scout and sharpshooter in the 1st Infantry Division, Justus is tasked by his battalion commander with finding and eliminating a German sniper who has bedeviled the division’s advance into the city. Justus thinks finding the sniper will be tough enough, but the men he joins up with to enter the combat zone assure him that there is more than one. Discovering the truth and completing his mission will test Justus and his buddies severely, and give him a shock that will last years after the war’s end.

I wrote The Snipers in a three rapid weeks this spring and revised it in the early summer. The climactic action and its surprising revelation came to me first. After a vivid and disturbing dream of World War II combat, a dream the dark mood of which I couldn’t shake off, I decided to sit down and turn it into a short novel or novella. The rest came together very quickly.

I’ve been pleased with this book’s reception but, most of all, I’m pleased with the book itself. Every time I give a friend a copy I end up sitting down and rereading long sections of it. It’s always satisfying to find enjoyment not only in the work of writing but in the finished product, and The Snipers ranks with Griswoldville in those terms.

I’m grateful to those of y’all who’ve read it, either in draft form or since its publication, and I hope those of y’all who haven’t will check it out and let me know what you think.

Looking ahead

After a busy and chaotic fall things mercifully slowed down, albeit only briefly, for Christmas, and then revved right back up again with surgery and sickness in the family and prep for a new semester at work. But all is well, and I’m hoping for even more good reading in 2024. Right now I’m partway through an excellent study of Eastern Native American warfare and a short biography of Ramesses II, and there are so many novels jostling at the top of my to-read stack I don’t even know how to choose.

Whatever I end up reading, you can count on hearing about it here. And in the meantime, I hope y’all will find something good to read in this list, and that y’all have had a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for reading!

Literary cameos

Yesterday Alan Jacobs posted a longish recommendation of Francis Spufford’s latest novel, an alternate history detective noir titled Cahokia Jazz. I’m intrigued. But I especially enjoyed this minor note from the end of Jacobs’s post:

At one point, late in the story, our hero is at Cahokia’s railway station and happens to see a family, “pale, shabby-grand, and relocating with their life’s possessions”—including, curiously enough, butterfly nets: “white Russians on their way to Kodiak, by the look of it.” One of them, “a lanky twenty-something in flannels and tennis shoes,” is called by his family Vovka, and he briefly assists our hero. Then off they go, leaving our story as abruptly as they had arrived in it. Assuming that they made their way to Kodiak—or, more formally, as our map tells us, NOVAYA SIBIRSKAYA TERRITORII—it is unlikely that their world ever knew Lolita or Pale Fire.

This is “one of several delightful cameos” in the novel, and Jacobs’s recommendation and praise got me thinking about such cameos in fiction.

I haven’t read Cahokia Jazz yet, though I intend to, but I’m willing to take Jacobs at his word that Spufford does this well. The example he cites certainly sounds subtle enough to work. But done poorly, such cameos awkwardly shoehorn a well-known figure into the story and call unnecessary attention to themselves. Think Forrest Gump in novel form. They can also, if used to denigrate the characters in the story, turn into the kind of wink-wink presentist authorial irony that I deplore.

I think the best version of the literary cameo functions much like a good film cameo—if you spot the cameo and know who it is, it’s a nice bonus, but if you don’t it doesn’t intrude enough to distract. And, ideally, it will work with and add to the story and characterization of the main characters.

A good and especially subtle example comes from Declare, which I’m almost finished reading. Early in the novel we read of protagonist Andrew Hale’s background, specifically where he was in the early stages of World War II before embarking on his first espionage assignments in occupied France:

In November he successfully sat for an exhibition scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and in the spring of 1941 he went up to that college to read English literature.

His allowance from Drummond’s Bank in Admiralty Arch was not big enough for him to do any of the high living for which Oxford was legendary, but wartime rationing appeared to have cut down on that kind of thing in any case—even cigarettes and beer were too costly for most of the students in Hale’s college, and it was fortunate that the one-way lanes of Oxford were too narrow for comfortable driving and parking, since bicycles were the only vehicles most students could afford to maintain. His time was spent mostly in the Bodleian Library researching Spenser and Malory, and defending his resultant essays in weekly sessions with his merciless tutor.

A Magdalen College tutor ruthlessly grilling a student over Spenser and Malory? That can only be CS Lewis.

They’re not precisely cameos, but I have worked a few real-life figures into my novels in greater or lesser supporting roles: David Howarth in Dark Full of Enemies, Gustavus W Smith and Pleasant Philips in Griswoldville. I’ve aimed a little lower in the name of realism, I suppose. But the precise dividing line between a cameo of the kind described here and a real person playing a serious role in a story is something I’ll have to figure out.

At any rate, a well-executed literary cameo is a joy. Curious to see who else might surprise us in the pages of Cahokia Jazz.

Summer reading 2023

This proved to be a pretty momentous summer. I published my fifth book and my wife and I welcomed twins, our fourth and fifth children, a few weeks ago, not long after I first announced it here. And somewhere in there were work, looking for more work, preparing for the babies’ arrival, a little bit of travel, and reading. I’m glad to say it was all good, the reading included. So here are my favorites from this busy but blessed summer.

For the purposes of this post, “summer” is defined as going from mid-May to last week, just before fall late-term courses began at my school. The books in each category are presented in no particular order and, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite non-fiction

Looking back over the summer, I read a pretty good and unintentionally wide-ranging selection of non-fiction—history, biography, memoir, literary criticism, and, most surprising for me, self-help! Here are the best in no particular order:

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—A well-written and comprehensive history of the Italian Front in the First World War, a front fought over unforgivingly rugged mountain terrain. Thompson focuses primarily but not exclusively on Italy: its history from the Risorgimento to 1914, the role of nationalism and irredentism in its rush toward an unpopular war of aggression against Austria-Hungary, its appalling mismanagement of the war, and the effects of the war on its politics, military, culture, literature, and, most painfully, its people. Though little-known or understood in the English-speaking world today—outside of high school lit classes forcing A Farewell to Arms down a new generation of unreceptive throats—the Italian Front was a continuous shambles, with proportionally higher casualties per mile than even the Western Front. Thompson gives less detailed coverage to the Austrian side, which is what I was actually most interested in when I picked up this book, but the book is so solidly researched and well-presented that this is not a flaw. Highly recommended if you want to round out your understanding of the war in Europe.

Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey—A charming, funny, and genuinely sweet memoir of a unique family and its colorful, larger-than-life father. I read this to my wife a chapter at a time before bed and we both loved it.

The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times, by Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria—A short introduction to a great old family, its history, its faith, and its methods. Far from a relic of a bygone, outdated world of monarchs and arranged marriages, the Habsburgs still have things to teach us, especially as the world since the demise of Austria-Hungary has so spectacularly lost its way. The “rules” in this volume range from the dynastic and political to the individua and spiritual: marriage and childrearing, the principle of subsidiarity, living a life of devout faith, courage, dying a worthy death. Habsburg writes with warmth and humor, using his family’s rich past as a mine of stories supporting his points, making this one of the best surprises of my summer.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—This book’s thesis might have been Chesterton’s line that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” That a figure like Edgar Allan Poe—born into and marked by tragedy all his days, with a doomed love life and bottomless wells of both self-promotion and self-sabotage—could still be the object of admiration over 170 years after his death is a sign that he did something right. Baab-Muguira, in a series of wry how-to chapters, lays out both Poe’s tragicomic life story and how he succeeded despite his failures. I had hoped to write a full, more detailed review of this wonderful and fun little book—and maybe I’ll have the time sometime soon to do so—but please take this short summary as a strong recommendation.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A good short biography of an important but elusive figure from the end of the Roman Republic. Considering the role Crassus played in the careers of Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, and even Catiline, it is striking that his life does not have the extensive coverage accorded to any of those other men. Stothard gathers what information we have about Crassus and interprets it judiciously, leaving plenty of space open for the unknowable, and concludes with a good detailed history of Crassus’s fatal campaign into Parthia.

The Battle for Normandy 1944, by James Holland—The ninth entry in the beautifully illustrated Ladybird Expert series on the Second World War, this little book covers everything from the Allies’ preparations to breach Fortress Europe through D-Day and the bloody battles in the intractable Norman countryside that followed to the breakout in late summer. It reads like a fast, sharp precis of Normandy ‘44, Holland’s much longer history of the campaign. This is a great little series and Holland has done a good job of summarizing such vast and complicated events. I look forward to the three remaining volumes.

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.—A wonderful new addition to my Tolkien shelf, this volume collects a miscellany of texts related to the fragmentary Anglo-Saxon epic The Battle of Maldon, which relates a tragic defeat at the hands of the Vikings in 991. Included are Tolkien’s own translation of Maldon, a selection of his notes on the poem, relevant excerpts from a number of his critical essays, and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” a verse composition for two voices designed as a sequel to Maldon. Whether you love Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon history and poetry, or all three, this is a welcome treasure trove. I blogged two excerpts here: one about the transmission of poetry or any other tradition across generations, and one about those times—more common than skeptics care to admit—when the literary and the real coincide.

No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, by Anthony Esolen*—Part paean, part elegy, part polemic. Esolen forcefully argues that saving masculinity—and, inextricably, femininity—from gender ideology is not only desirable or correct but a necessity. I think I agree with everything Esolen sets out, but I kept wishing for more effort toward persuasion for the many who will be hostile to his message. Then again, simply reaffirming the obvious and reinforcing those struggling to live out the truth is a difficult enough task now, and quite necessary and welcome on its own.

Favorite fiction

My summer was pretty light on good fiction—with the exception of John Buchan June, which I summarize in its own section below—but here are five highlights in no particular order:

Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne, trans. Frank Wynne—A fun diversion, and the first Verne I’ve read since childhood. And it also prominently features Iceland! This is a convincing and involving if not remotely plausible adventure, and the effort Verne puts into situating the story within the cutting-edge scientific knowledge of his day made me realize his place in Michael Crichton’s DNA. I began by reading a reprint of the original English translation but switched to the new translation available from Penguin Classics, which is more accurate and apparently restores a lot of material cut from or modified by the original translators.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel I’ve been meaning to read for years. Worth the wait. Taking place in a near-future London in which very little has actually changed, the one major difference is that the monarchy has become a randomly elected lifetime position. When the eccentric and flippant Auberon Quin is elected and decides to refortify the neighborhoods of London, prescribe feudal titles and heraldic liveries for their leaders, and insist on elaborate court etiquette—all purely ironically, as a lark—he doesn’t count on one young man, Adam Wayne, becoming a true believer in this refounded medieval order. All attempts to crush Wayne end in cataclysmic street violence, and the novel concludes with a genuinely moving twilight dialogue on the field of the slain. This is Chesterton at his early energetic best, with some of the verve and freshness of The Man Who was Thursday about it. I reflected on a short passage from the beginning of the novel here.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog, trans. Michael Hofmann—A hypnotically involving short novel about Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign in the Philippines from 1945 to 1974—decades after the end of World War II. Herzog evokes the isolation and paranoia of Onoda and his handful of comrades, who always manage to find a reason to believe the war has not ended, as well as the passage of time. An epic story briskly and powerfully told. Full review on the blog here.

The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw* and Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink,* by Patrick F McManus—Two collections of hilarious articles and tall tales from the late outdoor writer Patrick McManus. His stock of humorous characters like cantankerous old time outdoorsman Rancid Crabtree or childhood buddy Crazy Eddie Muldoon is especially rich, and all of his stories are written with a wry, self-deprecating irony that makes them doubly enjoyable. The title story in The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. My wife and I listened to the excellent audiobook versions performed by Norman Dietz during 1:00 and 4:00 AM feedings for the twins.

John Buchan June

For the second annual John Buchan June I didn’t manage to make it through as many of Buchan’s novels as last year, reading only seven, but they were a solid assortment from the middle of his career and included serious historical fiction, espionage shockers, a wartime thriller, a borderline science fiction tale, and the first of the hobbit-like adventures of retired grocer Dickson McCunn.

The seven I read, in order of posting about them, are below. My full John Buchan June reviews are linked from each title.

• Witch Wood (1927)

• Huntingtower (1922)

• The Dancing Floor (1926)

• Mr Standfast (1918)

• The Blanket of the Dark (1931)

• The Gap in the Curtain (1932)

• The Three Hostages (1924)

Of these, I think my favorite was certainly Witch Wood, a seriously spooky historical folk horror novel set in 17th-century Scotland. The two Sir Edward Leithen adventures The Dancing Floor and The Gap in the Curtain, with their own hints of the supernatural or uncanny, as well as the first Dickson McCunn novel, Huntingtower, were strong contenders as well, but Witch Wood also has great depth and therefore that much more power. I hope to reread it sometime soon.

Kids’ books

A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A short kids’ biography of Crockett with fun storybook illustrations that manages to give a surprisingly detailed and nuanced version of his life story and historical context. I was pleasantly surprised by this book and intend to seek out more in Adler’s series of picture book biographies.

The Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen L Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—An adaptation of John Bunyan’s classic for children, with simplified language, a streamlined plot, and anthropomorphic animals instead of people, this still powerfully evokes the richness and pathos of the original. I wept at least twice while reading it out loud to my kids, who loved the whole thing and still talk about the characters. Sutphin’s illustrations are also beautiful and kid-friendly. I very much look forward to his graphic novel adaptation of Watership Down, which comes out this fall.

The Phantom of the Colosseum, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The first volume of the In the Shadows of Rome series, this is a fast-paced, suspenseful story set during the reign of Diocletian. Three Roman boys—Titus, Maximus, and Aghiles, Maximus’s Numidian slave—break into the Colosseum in search of a thief and find themselves involved in the efforts of Christians to survive persecution. Though none of the main characters converts—a rarity in a Christian novel—they find their assumptions about the believers challenged and their consciences pricked. My kids greatly enjoyed this adventure and we’re now reading the sequel, A Lion for the Emperor.

The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—The third in a series of beautifully illustrated picture books by Richie and Dale, this one covers a large part of the Book of Acts and tells the stories of the first apostles and the spread of the Church beyond Judaea all the way to Athens and Rome. It’s rare to get such detailed coverage of this material in a children’s book, which I greatly appreciated, and it afforded many opportunities to talk about history and the Church with our kids.

Looking ahead

You won’t be surprised to learn that my reading has slowed down a bit over the last month or so, but I’m glad to say I’m still enjoying plenty of good stuff. In addition to the historical kids’ adventure novel set in Rome I mentioned above, right now I’m working on a supernatural espionage thriller by Tim Powers and War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo, which my daughter thoughtfully brought me from her classroom library. There’s more, and there’s always the to-read list. You’ll hear about the best of it after this semester ends, a respite I already look forward to.

Until then, I hope y’all will check some of these out and that whatever you find, you’ll enjoy. Thanks for reading!

The Twilight World

Filmmaker Werner Herzog and Japanese soldier HIroo Onoda (1922-2014) upon his surrender in 1974

Werner Herzog is a filmmaker famously drawn to the obsessive, the fanatical, and the single-mindedly self-destructive. He also, based on my limited engagement with his filmography, appreciates grim irony but can tell ironic stories with great sympathy. So the story of Hiroo Onoda—a man we’ve all heard of even if you don’t know his name—is a natural fit for Herzog’s fascinations as well as his set of storytelling skills.

Onoda, a junior officer in the Imperial Japanese Army stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines near the mouth of Manila Bay, took to the jungles after the American invasion began in late 1944. He had been specially detailed for acts of scorched earth sabotage—dynamiting a pier, rendering an airfield useless—and, having completed those objectives, to carry on the struggle against the enemy using “guerrilla tactics.” He had three other soldiers under his command. One turned himself in to Filipino forces in 1950, five years after the end of the war. The other two were killed, one in the mid-1950s and the other in 1972. Onoda held out alone until 1974, the next to last Japanese soldier to surrender.

Herzog met Onoda during a trip to Japan in 1997. This novel, The Twilight World, published in 2021, seven years after Onoda’s death at the age of 91, is the result of that meeting and Herzog’s enduring fascination.

Herzog explains, by way of prologue, the embarrassing circumstances that led to his meeting Onoda. He then begins Onoda’s story in 1974, with Norio Suzuki, a young adventurer whose stated goal was to find and see Hiroo Onoda, the yeti, and a giant panda, “in that order.” Suzuki camped out on Lubang until Onoda found him. Suzuki convinced Onoda to pose for a photograph and insisted that the war was over—long over. Onoda agreed to turn himself in if Suzuki could bring his commanding officer from thirty years before to Lubang and formally order him to stand down.

The novel then returns to the fall of 1944, the fateful days when a twenty-two-year old Onoda received his orders. Frustrated in his attempts to carry out his acts of sabotage, Onoda and his three subordinates move into the jungles and slowly figure out how to survive as guerrillas. They give up their tent, set up caches of ammunition, move repeatedly from place to place, crack coconuts, and attack isolated villages for food and supplies. Onoda broods. He lost his honor in failing to complete his objective, and the bravado of a final banzai charge would be absurd. What to do?

Herzog narrates this story dispassionately and without embellishment. His style is minimalistic but deeply absorbing. Michael Hofmann’s English translation reads like a cross between a screenplay—I wondered often while reading if this novel hadn’t begun life as a screenplay—and the stripped-down style of late Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men and, especially, The Road. Herzog evokes mood and character through small, telling details and sharply observed environments.

This simple, direct approach proves richly rewarding. Most interesting to me were the ways in which Onoda and his comrades try to make sense of their own situation as the years pass. Evidence that the war is still going on are, from their perspective, plentiful and obvious. The Filipinos are still trying to kill them, aren’t they? And Onoda and his men regularly spot squadrons of American warplanes—ever larger and more sophisticated as the years pass, but still headed northwest toward mainland Asia. Herzog is here able to use the dangerous tool of dramatic irony for maximum pathos.

Most interesting, to me, were Onoda and company’s wrestling with repeated rumors that the war had ended. The American and Philippine militaries dropped leaflets explaining that the war was over. Onoda and his men interpreted mistakes in the leaflets’ Japanese typography as evidence that they were fake—a ruse. The Filipinos left a newspaper in a plastic bag at one of Onoda’s known resting points as proof that the war was long over. This, too, Onoda interpreted as a fabrication—what newspaper would ever print so many advertisements? Thus also with news heard on a transistor radio. Even when relatives of the holdouts travel to Lubang and call to them to come out over loudspeakers, Onoda finds reasons to believe they are being lied to. The Twilight World is, in this regard, one of the best and most involving portraits of the insane logic of paranoia that I’ve read.

But Herzog is, thematically, most interested in the passage of time. The scale of Onoda’s tenacity is almost unimaginable—twenty-nine years in the jungle. Twenty-nine years of surviving on stolen rice, of annual visits to Onoda’s hidden samurai sword to clean and oil it, of eluding Filipino police and soldiers, of watching American aircraft fly north, of attacking villages and avoiding ambush. What is that like?

In Herzog’s version of this story, after his initial commitment to his guerrilla campaign Onoda settles into a routine in which the years pass like minutes. In the jungles of Lubang Island, Onoda comes into some kind of contact with eternity. One is tempted to call this contact purgatorial, but Onoda is neither purged nor purified by his experience. Neither does this timelessness offer the beatific vision or even an experience of hell—if it had, Onoda might have surrendered in 1950 like his most weak-willed soldier. Instead, this eternity is an impersonal, indifferent one of duty lovelessly and unimaginatively fulfilled, forever.

I’ve seen The Twilight World accused of making a hero out of Onoda or of reinforcing a preexisting impression of Onoda as a heroic romantic holdout—an absurd accusation. As with many of Herzog’s other subjects, whether the self-deluded Timothy Treadwell or the innocent Zishe Breitbart, Herzog relates this story out of pure interest. Herzog, laudably, wants to understand. That he presents Onoda sympathetically does not mean that he condones his actions. If anything, the intensity with which Herzog tries to evoke Onoda’s three decades in the jungle is an invitation to pity and reflection. That’s certainly how I received it.

I’ve also read reviewers who fault Herzog for either downplaying or refusing to acknowledge Onoda’s violence against the Filipinos of Lubang Island. Onoda and his men’s depredations have quite justifiably received more attention in the last few years, notably in this spring’s MHQ cover story, rather provocatively if misleadingly titled “Hiroo Onoda: Soldier or Serial Killer?”

But Herzog does acknowledge this side of Onoda’s story. An early incident in which Onoda and his men attack villagers and kill and butcher one of their precious water buffalo is especially vivid. By the end, Onoda is walking into villages and firing randomly in the air, just to remind them he’s around. None of this is presented as heroic or even necessary. When Filipino troops try to ambush and kill Onoda and his men, the reader understands why.

Perhaps all of this is why Herzog begins his novel with a curious—but quintessentially Herzog-esque—author’s note:

Most details and factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Seen in this light, and not forgetting that The Twilight World is a work of fiction—based on a true story—Hiroo Onoda’s bleak years in lonely touch with eternity are a fitting subject for a filmmaker who has spent his career teasing the mythic out of the real. The Twilight World is one of the most interesting and most involving books I’ve read this year, a testament not only to the strength of the dark and ironic story it tells but to the skill and cleareyed compassion of its storyteller.

The Three Hostages

Today we conclude John Buchan June with the fourth Richard Hannay adventure, a tale of kidnapping, hypnotism, international intrigue—and the beauty of domesticity. The novel is The Three Hostages.

A few years after the First World War General Sir Richard Hannay has retired to a house in the Cotswolds, married Mary Lamington, whom he met and worked with against the plots of Count von Schwabing in Mr Standfast, had a son, and embraced the life of a settled country squire. The detached, drifting mining engineer we first met in The Thirty-Nine Steps is utterly changed, not only by his adventures and the war but by the goodness of marriage and family life. So when two separate visitors arrive on the same day with the same offer of adventure, Hannay, surprisingly for us readers, is irritated.

The first of the visitors is Julius Victor, a wealthy Jewish banker who had emigrated from the United States and helped finance Britain’s war effort. His daughter Adela, his only child, has been kidnapped. Scotland Yard have done all they can do. Hannay is sympathetic but declines to help in the search, thinking he would only complicate and frustrate matters. After Victor’s departure Macgillivray, intelligence chief Sir Walter Bullivant’s aide, arrives wanting to speak with Hannay about the same thing. But it turns out that Adela Victor is only one of three high-profile hostages held by a powerful “combine” or crime syndicate. The others are Lord Mercot, an Oxford student and wealthy heir, and—most painful of all to Hannay and Mary—David Warcliff, a ten-year old boy and the only child of his widower father. The kidnappers have made no demands, only mailed a strange six-line poem to each of the families. Bullivant wants Hannay to pitch in. Hannay, again, refuses.

But Hannay’s conscience will not let him rest—and neither will Mary. In the first of many crucial interventions in the novel, Mary appeals to Hannay’s love for their own son, John Peter, and Hannay’s sense of duty and sharp new fatherly instincts do the rest. He heads to London to begin his own unofficial search.

An analysis of the strange allusions in the poem—blindness, fate, Eden, the midnight sun—lead Hannay into the circle of Dominick Medina.

Medina is a charismatic Irishman and a rising star in London social life and British politics. Civilized, well-educated, charming, athletic, a well-reviewed poet, a sparkling conversationalist, and “the handsomest thing in mankind since the Greeks,” Medina fought in Russia for a White partisan group during the war and has had nothing but success since his return. He seems an unlikely candidate for the leader of an international criminal conspiracy. And Hannay finds himself as charmed as any of the other Buchan familiars with whom Medina associates. Even Sir Edward Leithen is one of Medina’s friends and admirers. Everyone likes and respects Medina—everyone but Sandy Arbuthnot, Hannay’s old friend from Greenmantle. Sandy, a gentleman, a scholar of Oriental languages, and a man more far-travelled and adventurous than Hannay, is deeply suspicious of Medina. Though Hannay thinks Sandy is merely jealous, he still takes note.

But Sandy is vindicated when Medina, after dinner at their club one night not long after they first meet, tries to hypnotize Hannay.

It doesn’t work—Hannay, strong-willed and not given to introspection, as even Mary admits, is a poor target for mind control—but Hannay’s suspicions are aroused. Why would this handsome, successful young man be preying on his peers?

Hannay determines to work deeper into Medina’s confidence by playing the biggest part of his career of playacting. He feigns being under Medina’s sway and becomes more and more a toady to the man, who reveals more and more of his life beneath the glossy veneer of charm, wealth, and sophistication. Hannay discovers a grasping striver, a dabbler in mysticism, diabolism, and manipulation who is not above demeaning and using others to achieve power over them. He also meets Medina’s mother, a blind old woman and an even more powerful hypnotist than her son, and Kharáma, an Indian guru and Medina’s mentor.

But as widely respected as Medina is, Hannay cannot reveal his suspicions without betraying his own plot. He thus takes only a handful of people into his confidence—among them Sandy and, crucially, Mary—and doesn’t even reveal to Bullivant what he is working on.

Hannay’s investigations ultimately take him to Norway, to a seedy London jazz club, to a curiosity shop where nothing is for sale, to a slum where a Swedish masseuse treats patients referred by Medina’s doctor, and to a suspenseful and violent one-on-one showdown among the crags and cliffs of the Scottish highlands.

There is much, much more to The Three Hostages than I can adequately summarize here, and one of the pleasures of the novel is just how much of it there is. With its vaguely foreign villain with an unusual deformity (Medina has an almost-spherical head that he conceals with artful coiffure), its villain’s unclear aims but dangerous and far-reaching plot, its globetrotting, and its venturing from black-tie dinner and manor house to slum and nightclub, it is also the most James Bond-like of the Hannay stories. When reading about Medina I found myself thinking more than once of Auric Goldfinger and Hugo Drax. Last year I broke down the place of The Thirty-Nine Steps in the genealogy of the action or espionage novel. The Three Hostages, which CS Lewis, in a 1933 letter, accurately called “a real modern thriller,” is another clear link to the future of the genre.

One of The Three Hostages’ strengths, and one of the things that surely made it more influential than similar novels like Bulldog Drummond, is the quality of Buchan’s writing, especially in this novel’s plotting and pacing. After the sprawling, loosely constructed, somewhat unfocused Mr Standfast, Buchan here gives Hannay a single straightforward mission that unifies and gives form to every aspect of the adventure, whether flying across the North Sea with Sir Archie Roylance or mountaineering in Norway and Scotland.

Most importantly, the mission to find and save the hostages gives powerful emotional stakes to Hannay himself. Early in the novel, as Macgillvray presents what he knows of the kidnapping plot to Hannay, he says, “I should have made you understand how big and desperate the thing is that we're out against . . . You know as well as I do that cold blood is not always the most useful accompaniment in assessing evidence.” Hannay, always more intuitive a hero than Sir Edward Leithen, must surrunder totally to bone-deep bonds and instincts. What drives Hannay throughout The Three Hostages is not only his duty to England and civilization but his deep, sub-rational—and therefore transcendent—love of family.

This focus on the power and beauty and mystery of domesticity is the surprising key to The Three Hostages. Medina, in kidnapping children, has disrupted three vulnerable families and threatens to destroy them. Whenever Hannay faces renewed difficulty or a new obstacle, Hannay remembers Mary and their son, John Peter. His understanding of what the fathers of Adela Victor and Davy Warcliff are going through motivates him. Mary urges him on and sustains him, and takes no small role in bringing down Medina herself.

I say that this is a “surprising” theme because of what I’ve previously noted about Buchan protagonists. They are often young, unattached men, wandering if not totally adrift, and usually bored of routine. That Hannay has married and settled down and loves the chores and maintenance of his farm was a brilliant change. And Hannay’s resistance to returning to the life of danger and instability born of espionage and undercover work, a resistance rooted not in cowardice but care for the little bit of the world under his stewardship, feels genuine and gives both a new maturity to Hannay and emotional weight to the rest of the novel. The unwanted call to “one last mission” may have become a spy thriller cliché in the 99 years since The Three Hostages was published, but it’s seldom been done better.

The result, in the end, is a novel with the most of the strengths and all of the themes of Buchan’s earlier adventures. It revisits the theme of the crackup or madness of civilization, a vulnerability easily exploited by men like Medina—a theme elaborated as early as The Power-House.

But here the plot is richer and more complex, and Buchan leavens it one extra element that sets it apart: love. Buchan, through Hannay, offers a vision of devotion to family and home, of the strength of a well-matched husband and wife, and of how civilization, though perhaps not saved, can be shored up and passed on through these humble means.

* * * * *

I’m sorry to see this second John Buchan June draw to a close. For various reasons I feel like I’ve only just gotten into the swing of things. So I’m looking forward to next year, especially since I have more Dickson McCunn and even some Buchan short stories arriving later today. I hope y’all have a restful July, and that these reviews have piqued your interest in one of this great old writer’s novels. Give one a look this coming month. Thanks as always for reading!

The Gap in the Curtain

We begin the final week of John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s strangest and most surprising novels. In the introduction to the Authorised Edition I read, journalist Stuart Kelly aptly describes it as “an odd novel—a hybrid of social satire, political intrigue and science-fiction thriller, as if H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and the Anthony Trollope of the Palliser novels had attempted a collaboration.” And yet, despite this, it is also “the most quintessentially Buchan-esque of his novels.” The book is Sir Edward Leithen’s fourth adventure, The Gap in the Curtain.

The novel begins during Leithen’s visit to the country house of Lady Flambard, an enthusiastic hostess who has gathered a bewildering assortment of people for a Whitsuntide holiday in the Cotswolds. Leithen would rather go riding in the hills than be trapped in her engineered salons, but during dinner one night he notes that the guests, for all their differences in background, profession, age, and political persuasions, fall into two types—untroubled souls who can unthinkingly relax as part of Lady Flambard’s collection of conversationalists, and the melancholy, the preoccupied, the withdrawn. He will have cause to think more deeply about this division with the arrival of one final guest.

The guest is Professor August Moe, a European physicist and mathematician and one of the few on the same intellectual plane as Einstein. Moe, an enormous and cadaverous old man, requests that Leithen attend a private meeting with a few other hand-selected guests. Once all have assembled for Moe’s talk, Leithen realizes that the professor has somehow picked exactly the half of Lady Flambard’s guests he had marked as the somber and pensive. Something is up.

Moe describes a theory of time as a system of coexisting coils, with past, future, and present not separate but overlapping, and reveals that he has discovered a method of peering into the future—scientifically, objectively. Through his method, which is something like remote viewing, the properly trained mind can look across time’s structure and see short glimpses of the future. He wishes them to join him in his first test. With a few days of preparation, including a vegetarian diet, abstention from alcohol, a mild dose of an unnamed drug, and, most importantly, dedicated study and concentration upon a familiar object, a copy of The Times, they will be ready to receive a glimpse of the same object exactly one year on. They will be able to read next year’s headlines.

It works.

But it works because Moe, an ailing man, dies at the moment of the experiment. This is the hidden final part of the formula. When he collapses and breathes his last it sends Leithen’s friend Sally Lamington into a panic and Leithen, in responding to her swoon and to the Professor’s death, misses his glimpse of the future.

But the others get their one-second view of next June’s Times. Arnold Tavanger, a financier with his eye on the market, sees a story about the merger of two major mining corporations. David Mayot, a young politician on the rise, sees an article naming an unexpected new prime minister. Reggie Daker, a wealthy young homebody and book collector, sees an article about his imminent departure for the Yucatán. Sir Robert Goodeve, a promising young MP of an ancient noble family, and Captain Charles Ottery, a veteran of the Great War now working for a London business, see their own obituaries.

The rest of the novel relates what each man does with his scrap of foreknowledge over the coming year. Tavanger, equipped with what he thinks is a foolproof bit of inside dope, sets off on a globe-trotting adventure to buy up shares in one of the companies that will merge in a year. Mayot, an unprincipled political operator, maneuvers to place himself as near the top as possible in the coming change of prime minister. Reggie Daker, who doesn’t even know where the Yucatán is (“He fancied it must be in the East; places ending in ‘tan’ were always in the East; he remembered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Gulistan…”), is convinced Moe’s method was erroneous and lets himself be swept up in a one-sided romance with a ferocious girl and her domineering family, who turn his antiquarian interest in books into an exhausting commercial enterprise. As for Goodeve and Ottery, the knowledge that they will be dead in a year produces radically different effects.

I don’t want to risk giving too much away. This oddest of all of Buchan’s novels may also benefit most from reading it cold, spoiler-free. When the late Sir Roger Scruton wrote that “The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament,” he might have been stating The Gap in the Curtain’s thesis.

Each of the five sections presents a different style and tone of story, all related through Leithen, who chances to run into each of the five men at various points through the political and economic upheavals of the next year. The stories also escalate in seriousness.

Tavanger and Mayot, seeking a profitable deal and political prominence, respectively, prove themselves unserious and worldly. Their stories come across as petty wheeling and dealing when eternity is at stake. Mayot is particularly unpleasant, a self-serving striver and user, a creature of political gossip and the smoke-filled room—a type with which Buchan, as an MP, would have been familiar. Tavanger, at least, has the saving grace of not taking it too badly when his understanding of the future turns out to be incomplete and misleading. Unlike Mayot, he can laugh it off.

Reggie Daker offers a comical interlude. A hobbit-like lover of quiet pursuits, of angling and riding and contentedly browsing his books in an armchair, he finds his life turned upside down. As with Tavanger and Mayot, what he saw in next year’s Times turns out to be true—sort of. The reader sees where Reggie’s story is going pretty quickly; the joy comes in seeing Reggie trying to keep up and finally rushing into his surprising, last-minute fulfilment of what he saw through Moe’s technique. This section shows Buchan at his most playful. Reggie, whom Kelly explicitly compares to Bertie Wooster, could also be one of the kindly but clueless side characters of Evelyn Waugh. His aggressive fiancée and her horrible family are even more Waugh-like.

But the meat of The Gap in the Curtain is in the final parallel sections concerning Goodeve and Ottery. Faced with death, they follow opposing tracks. One man feels himself invincible—at first. Then he succumbs to passivity and despair. The other goes from wrath to resignation before finding a redeeming courage through love. One isolates himself, retreating more and more into himself as the fatal date approaches. The other indulges himself before turning outward, toward another, to face the future together. Through relationship he discovers courage.

The Goodeve and Ottery stories, coming after the dull and laborious self-centeredness of Tavanger and Mayot and the hapless comedy of Reggie Daker, astounded me. As meditations on death and fate, despair and courage, they prefigure Leithen’s final adventure in Buchan’s final novel, Sick Heart River. But juxtaposed as they are in the last third of this novel, they take on an exceptional power. The last section’s love story is one of the best and most surprising in all of Buchan’s works, and lies at the heart of the books hopeful vision.

I wish I could say more and in greater detail but, again, I don’t want to give too much away.

The Gap in the Curtain can be straightforwardly read as a story about fate and predestination. Certainly, the characters themselves argue about what they’ve seen in next June’s Times and debate the meaning of free will—most pointedly in that final story—and the unresolved ironies of the way the predictions are and are not fulfilled is a key part of the novel’s power. The novel also suggests that the certainties of science, with all its pretensions to mathematical objectivity, are illusory, or at best incomplete. The characters who trust most in Professor Moe those driven deepest into greed or despair.

These themes place it in good company among science fiction and time travel stories. But The Gap in the Curtain is also a story about character and virtue. Assuming you could get a glimpse of the future, what would you do with it? Self-advancement, distraction, brazenness and courage, despair and hope—these are responses brought forth and sharpened by knowledge of the future, not created by it. And, most especially in the final section, Buchan dramatizes the necessity of love as a response to whatever the future holds.

The Gap in the Curtain is a bold experiment in concept, structure, and theme, and it’s uncommonly rich for the kind of tale it is. Just note that Leithen and the rest undergo this experiment during Whitsuntide, the Pentecost celebration commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost. But it is also a fun, surprising, and deeply moving novel about something all of us will face, though without Professor Moe’s method—the future, and death. The Gap in the Curtain also suggests the best way to face them.

The Blanket of the Dark

“[Peter] hated him, for he saw the cunning behind the frank smile, the ruthlessness in the small eyes; but he could not blind himself to his power.”

John Buchan June continues with one of Buchan’s late historical novels, a masterfully crafted story of intrigue, paranoia, religious upheaval, dynastic chicanery, and tyranny in Tudor England. The novel is The Blanket of the Dark.

The hero of The Blanket of the Dark is a classic Buchan “scholar called to action,” in this case quite literally. Peter Pentecost is a teenaged clerk at Oseney Abbey outside Oxford on the cusp of taking his vows to become a monk. The year is 1536. Peter, like his mentor, a priest named Tobias, is a faithful son of the Church and a “Grecian,” a humanist scholar of the classics like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who just a year earlier was beheaded for refusing to affirm King Henry VIII’s annulment, remarriage, and authority over the Church. For this, More had been branded a traitor. Peter has, so far, observed all of this passively and with little interest. But as the novel begins, the smothering darkness lying over England comes for him.

Peter learns that he is, in fact, the only surviving son of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a rival of Henry who was executed for treason fifteen years earlier. Peter’s earliest memories—of being raised by an old widow woman, of being handed off to monks at a rural abbey for his education—turn out to be memories of a life in hiding, the rightful heir being protected until the time is right to return. The disaffected noblemen who approach Peter and reveal his true identity to him believe that time is now. They mean to challenge “the Welshman’s” tyranny and offer Peter their support.

Peter finds himself swept from his well-ordered life of prayer and study to a life of clandestine travel among the men of “Old England,” commoners who sneak him from place to place in the shelter of the woods, and landed aristocrats who shelter him in their manor houses. He also begins a remedial course in kingship, learning to ride and wield weapons properly, and makes the acquaintance of the first noblewoman he has ever known—the beautiful niece of one of his supporters, Sabine Beauforest. As the anti-Tudor conspiracy slowly moves forward and Peter moves from hiding place to hiding place, his desires—for the treasure needed to fund his attempt at the throne, for the power that will come with possessing the crown, for Sabine—grow stronger and stronger.

At first Peter justifies himself. He views his power and position as a means to good ends and intends to use it wisely: to restore the Church and the ancestral rights of Englishmen. But Peter—a bookish student and erstwhile celibate—is also uncomfortable with the worldly rewards being paraded before him, and so his pursuit of the throne also becomes both a pilgrimage and a series of tests.

One by one the chance to fulfil his desires come to Peter and one by one he learns something new about both the world and himself, until the final, climactic temptation—the launch of the coup aimed at kidnapping the King and placing Peter on the throne, culminating in a deadly confrontation with King Henry VIII himself.

The Blanket of the Dark reminds me a great deal of Buchan’s earlier novel of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Midwinter. Both take place during an uprising against a monarch believed by the plotters to be an illegitimate tyrant; both take place largely on the margins of the plot, away from the fighting and seemingly decisive action; and both involve the men of “Old England,” a traditional and continuous community outside the rise and fall of dynasties and world powers. Both evoke their period and locations with great care and attention to detail and feature convincing cameos of real historical figures—in The Blanket of the Dark, Henry VIII and his dread agent Thomas Cromwell. Both are also excellent novels.

But The Blanket of the Dark, through Buchan’s care for what is at stake spiritually, the danger of pursuing power even for good ends, achieves an unusual weight, what Sir John Keegan in writing of The Thirty-Nine Steps called the “particularly elusive” quality of “moral atmosphere.” Buchan’s portrait of England after Henry’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Act of Supremacy, the execution of dissenters under the Act of Treason, and the elevation of Cromwell as Henry’s hatchet man, is pervaded by threat and paranoia. The great threat to ordinary people and their traditional loyalties is chicanery in high places. As one character, one of Peter’s rivals for Sabine’s attentions, puts it: “‘Tis a difficult time for a Christian. . . . If he have a liking for the Pope he may be hanged for treason, and if he like not the mass he may burn for heresy.”

Peter’s pilgrimage toward the throne occupied by Henry places him in the path of the worldly-wise and powerful, and through the testing of his own desires—lust, greed, pride—he comes to see the emptiness and ulterior motives of those who claim to be resisting Henry’s tyranny. Snatched from the cloister and the scriptorium in order to overthrow a heretical despot, he comes to see little difference between Henry and his own supporters. By the time of the attack on Henry, the choice Peter is presented with, both figuratively and, in the person of the King himself, literally, is whether to pursue power or the things his supporters ostensibly want him to use his power to protect.

Perhaps, rather than anything it is used for, the power is the danger. In making his final and greatest choice, Peter does not get everything he desires, but The Blanket of the Dark suggests that he gets something far better.

The Blanket of the Dark was well reviewed at the time Buchan published it in 1931, with praise from CS Lewis and the elderly Rudyard Kipling among others. More recently, the historian of Christianity and biographer of Thomas Cromwell Diarmaid MacCulloch, in a 2019 interview, said of it, “It’s chilling. Brilliant.” With its effortless plotting and pacing, its strong and often beautiful writing, its brilliantly-realized historical setting—with everything from the spoiling of the monasteries to the Pilgrimage of Grace informing the action from a distance—its vivid characters, and its surprising but satisfyingly poignant ending, I strongly agree.

Buchan’s storytelling and craftsmanship alone make The Blanket of the Dark still worth reading. But that this novel also touches on the threats to conscience, tradition, and faith posed by the self-serving and powerful, who may talk about protecting and restoring all of those things but only aim to use them for their own ends, makes it an exceptionally rewarding and still-relevant adventure.

The Snipers has arrived!

No, that’s not a subject-verb disagreement. The Snipers is my latest published work, a short novel set during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944. I’m pleased to announce that, after the final rounds of proofs and revisions, it is now available on Amazon!

I announced The Snipers and its subject here earlier this month. Last week I posted a recommendation of the three non-fiction books I acknowledge in the author’s note at the of The Snipers. Check those posts out if you’d like to know more or look at the book’s page here. In the meantime, here’s the description from the back cover:

October 1944—It has been four months since D-day and the Allies are pressing through Germany’s last defenses. As the US Army makes its first move against the historic German city of Aachen, one unit finds itself stymied by a tenacious German sniper. With losses climbing, the commander calls up sharpshooter Sergeant JL Justus. His job: find and kill the sniper.

Weary from four months of fighting, Justus wants little more than a good smoke and some hot chow. But the assignment bothers him for other reasons. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how does he shoot so accurately and quickly? Can Justus and his buddies find him before many more men are killed? And in a battle like the one for Aachen, is finding the sniper even possible?

The Snipers is an evocative, thrilling, and moving short war tale from Jordan M. Poss.

One certainly hopes, anyway.

You can add The Snipers to your Goodreads reading list here. And if you’d like to order a copy, either in paperback or Kindle format, please use the buttons below.

I’m quite excited about this short novel. My hope is that it will be an exciting, entertaining, and thought-provoking short read. Please give it a look and let me know what you think. Hope y’all enjoy!