Orwell’s failure

I’ve almost finished reading George Orwell biographer DJ Taylor’s new guide to Orwell’s work, Who is Big Brother? It’s been an excellent short read so far, capably tracking the changes in Orwell’s life, views, and writings and insightfully linking them to each other as well as judging the man’s character fairly but not uncritically.

Of special interest to me, considering the way Orwell’s dystopian novel is so often compared to Aldous Huxley’s, was a line Taylor quotes from Orwell’s review of Brave New World. Faulting Huxley for his overemphasis on shameless hedonism in the society of Brave New World, Orwell asserted that “A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.”

This comment made sense of an aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I’ve puzzled over since first reading it in college twenty-something years ago. Reading CS Lewis’s 1954 review of that novel a few years later focused and sharpened that puzzlement. Here’s Lewis on what he regards as the biggest flaw in Orwell’s dystopia:

In the nightmare State of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite.

Now it is, no doubt, possible that the masters of a totalitarian State might have a bee in their bonnets about sex as about anything else; and, if so, that bee, like all their bees, would sting. But we are shown nothing in the particular tyranny Orwell has depicted which would make this particular bee at all probable. Certain outlooks and attitudes which at times introduced this bee into the Nazi bonnet are not shown at work here.* Worse still, its buzzing presence in the book raises questions in all our minds which have really no very close connection with the main theme and are all the more distracting for being, in themselves, of interest.

Lewis, in a rare moment of Bulverism for him, chalks this up to Orwell’s coming of age in the “anti-puritanism” of the DH Lawrence era. Maybe. But Lewis is right that the sexual repression of Big Brother’s state does not mesh organically with everything else—the state-mandated calisthenics, the brainwashed children, the mass surveillance, and most especially the manipulation of language.** Why would Big Brother care who’s doing it to whom and in what way as long as neither party engages in wrongthink?***

He wouldn’t. What Orwell failed to see is that the “strict morality” required of a tyrannical ruling clique need not be sexually traditionalist. It could indeed be the opposite, granting total sexual license but fastidiously and ruthlessly policing the terminology surrounding it, or by concentrating on some other occasion of sin—the accused’s carbon footprint, perhaps, or how much privilege they have, or what kind of ancestral sins they owe amends for. “[T]hough Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930),” Orwell wrote, “it probably casts no light on the future.” On the contrary, George.

But to return to the point of comparison between Huxley and Orwell, a tyranny is, in fact, often better served by an out-of-control libido, which more than just about any other appetite has the power to distract and enervate. This is what Huxley saw that Orwell could or would not.

I should have more to say about Who is Big Brother? in my spring reading list later this month. In the meantime, check out Theodore Dalrymple’s review at Law & Liberty, which is what convinced me to read the book.

* “At times” is the right way to address this. The Nazis were not much concerned about sexual morality beyond guarding racial boundaries. Look into the private lives of Ernst Röhm, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and especially Joseph Goebbels sometime.

** The Soviet-style manipulation of language is, I think, the real point of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a point easily lost among the book’s other terrifying visions. Cf. Fahrenheit 451, which Bradbury intended as a critique of TV rather than censorship.

*** Combining licentious sexual behavior with mass surveillance is also a useful source for kompromat, something the Soviets knew and that Orwell surely must have as well.

Keeping adventure within hailing distance

John Buchan on the quality that makes a story “romantic”—i.e. an adventure—in Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works:

Scott transforms life, as is the duty of a great artist. He enlarges our view and makes the world at once more solemn and more sunlit, but it remains a recognisable world, with all the old familiar landmarks. He has that touch of the prosaic in him without which romance becomes only a fairy tale and tragedy a high heeled strutting.

That’s Buchan on Scott specifically, but Buchan continues with a more general observation on storytelling:

“For the kernel of romance is contrast—beauty and valour flowering in unlikely places, the heavenly rubbing shoulders with the earthly. All romance, all tragedy, must be within hailing distance of our humdrum lives.”

Better authors and critics than I have pointed out that, in the best and most vividly realized fantasy or adventure stories, the protagonist ventures away from an ordinary life into one of excitement and danger, in which everything is different. As Buchan lays out here, that link to the ordinary provides contrast and keeps the story grounded no matter how wild it may get.

One thinks immediately of the hobbits who, as Tom Shippey has noted in detail, Tolkien made just about as characteristically English as he could—Bilbo with his tobacco and brass buttons and greedy cousins, Frodo going off to war with his gardener-turned-batman, and the whole Shire with its tavern gossip and detailed genealogies. Or perhaps the Pevensies, swept from a stately—or, to them, boring—country house during an unfortunately ordinary total war through a seemingly ordinary piece of furniture into another world. One could multiply examples. Buchan’s own books offer plenty.

Neglecting contrast will result in stories that are all weirdness, all bleakness, or mere chaos. Think of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies’ descent into the maelstrom. The first film had an actual toehold in reality that made the intrusion of a ghost ship, voodoo, and cursed Aztec gold exhilarating, but by the third film the fantasy elements had completely overwhelmed anything “humdrum”—Will Turner’s blacksmithing, say—and this combined with its visual grotesquery robbed the series of what made it feel like an adventure in the first place.

Carefully providing contrast, on the other hand, will not only keep the reader grounded but suggest to him that adventure—the dangerous, the uncanny, even the “heavenly”—is nearer to him than he may have thought.

On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.

Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

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.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

The Mysteries

“‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’
‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’”

— CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I feel like the publication of a new book by Bill Watterson, whose “Calvin and Hobbes” ended its run twenty-nine years ago and who has remained almost entirely quiet since, should be more of an event than the release of The Mysteries has proven. But then, given the book’s title and most especially its subject matter, maybe that’s appropriate. Call it a mystery, but not one of the Mysteries.

The story is simple enough. This blog post will probably end up several times longer than the entire book. The Mysteries introduces the reader to a medieval-ish world of castles and half-timber towns in which the people and their king are bounded by dark forest. The forest is the domain of the Mysteries, whom no one has ever seen but everyone knows have terrible powers. At first the people strive not to understand but to protect themselves from the Mysteries, putting huge efforts into building walls and chronicling the long history of their fears in tales and art.

Then one day the king decides to strike back against the Mysteries, dispatching knights into the forest on a quest to capture and bring back a Mystery. After a long stretch of futile searching, one knight succeeds, returning with an iron box chained to a cart.

At last, a Mystery is revealed—and the people discover that there’s not, apparently, very much to them. Their fearful powers turn out to be “mundane.” And capturing one Mystery opens the way to capturing others, to the point that the people not only lose their fear of the Mysteries but come to find them boring. One clever illustration shows a medieval newspaper stall full of headlines like “YAWN.”

Then, the Mysteries understood and no longer feared or the object of much attention at all, the people demolish their walls, cut down the forest, and overspread the land. They mock the old paintings inspired by the Mysteries. They now live in a world of jet aircraft and skyscrapers and the king no longer appears on the balcony of his castle but on TV or behind the wheel of a car on a busy freeway, drinking a Big Gulp. At last, the narrator tells us, they control everything.

Or do they? The sky turns strange colors and, ominously, “things” start “disappearing.” The king assures them that this is normal, wizards study the phenomena, and life continues apace. Then, “too late,” the people realize that they’re in trouble. An indifferent universe wheels on.

In the final pages the viewpoint of the illustrations pulls back farther and farther from the people and their conquered land, into space, beyond the solar system and the Milky Way. “The Mysteries,” the story concludes, “lived happily ever after.”

One notable aspect of The Mysteries is that although Watterson wrote the story, it is illustrated by caricaturist John Kascht. Watterson and Kascht worked on the pictures in close collaboration for several years, experimenting with and abandoning many styles before arriving at an atmospheric, unsettlingly dreamlike aesthetic combining clay figures, cardboard scenery, and painted backdrops. The effect is powerfully eerie, especially as the pace of the story accelerates and the fairytale world at the beginning of the book gives way to one that resembles, disconcertingly, our own.

If the pictures are murky, moody, and ambiguous, often more allusive than concrete, so is the story. This, according to Watterson, is by design. I’m not typically one for deliberate ambiguity, but it works brilliantly here. This “fable for grownups,” as the publisher describes it, achieves a timelessness through its strangely specific soft-focus art and a broad applicability through its theme.

And what is that? The most obvious and easy referent to the consequences the people face in the book’s closing pages is climate change, whether anthropogenic or not. But The Mysteries is not an allegory but a fable. To narrow its message, if it has one, to a policy issue is to cheapen and limit it.

The core theme of The Mysteries is disenchantment. Since the Scientific Revolution uncovered the wheels and levers of the universe and the Enlightenment insisted that the wheels and levers were all there is, was, or ever will be, the mysteries of our own world have retreated further and further from our imaginations and the place we once gave them in our daily lives. The powers that once kept people within their walled towns have been banished—or rather seized and repurposed, put to work for the people’s desires. Fear or, to put it more positively, awe of the world has given place to self-assured technical mastery. We control everything.

Or do we?

The Mysteries is probably not what anyone anticipating the return of Bill Watterson would have expected. I was certainly surprised, but pleasantly. As befits the creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” a work that prized imagination above all else, The Mysteries treads lightly but surefootedly across deep ideas, and powerfully suggests that whatever Mysteries once lived in the forest, we have not sufficiently understood them to warrant our boredom, apathy, and self-indulgence, and we certainly are not free of them. We are, in fact, in graver danger through our indifference to the Mysteries than we ever were when we feared them.

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!

End-of-semester book recommendations

I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?

Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.

In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.

I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates

A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.

Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz

John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)

The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.

I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands

For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.

The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis

One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.

Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne

This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)

Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.

A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson

Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.

Others

Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.

• Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.

• Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.

Conclusion

This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!

Tim Powers on the danger of chasing trends

Over the last few weeks I’ve been (very, very slowly) reading Declare, a supernatural Cold War espionage thriller by Tim Powers. I reached the halfway point the other night and it’s so continuously involving and intriguing, so brilliantly imagined and deeply realized, and so different even from the science fiction that I occasionally read that I looked for some interviews with Powers. I found several recent ones on YouTube and they haven’t disappointed.

Here’s an excellent exchange from a 57-minute interview with a channel called Media Death Cult. After discussing Powers’s love of Robert Heinlein and the contemporary obsession with how “problematic” he is, Powers and the interviewer consider whether it is possible to write old-fashioned fiction in a world that adheres so dogmatically to the prevailing political pieties:

Media Death Cult: I think it’s easy to pick on [Heinlein] because his heart was in the right place. You know what I mean?

Powers: Yeah, and he suffers from, uh, being dead, uh, in that the current standards of acceptability move on. Harlan Ellison was certainly progressive, liberal, cutting edge in his time, but now being dead, the standards, acceptable norms, have moved on.

MDC: So you think someone like Heinlein or Ellison, if they were to pop up now and want to write like that, it’s just not going to stick because of this weird situation that the Western world seems to be in with the microscope that you’re put under? I think you’d be a fringe writer, wouldn’t you? Which I think is a shame. I think if we can’t get that kind of thing going again it’s a bit of a shame.

Powers: Yeah. I mean, there’ve always been trends, which I think any writer is wise to ignore. Cyberpunk, nanotech, steampunk, uh, have all been flurries that briefly inspired lots of imitations and, you know, follow-alongs, and I always think it’s a big mistake for a writer to do that—to clock what is acceptable right now, what’s popular right now? I will do that. Because at best you’re going to be one of a crowd following along, and, more likely, by the time you finally get on the bandwagon the wheels will have fallen off and it’s overturned in a field somewhere.

MDC: Yeah.

Powers: And I think these days—and I speak from the advantage of complete ignorance—

MDC: Me too.

Powers: Ha! I think there are a number of bases to touch, boxes to check, especially in current science fiction and fantasy, which I think would be detrimental for a writer to pay much attention to. I think we’re going through a sort of tunnel. I think it may not be related but I think it’s alarming that Roald Dahl, RL [Stine] who did those sort of spooky stories for kids, and Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie are having their works retroactively revised to be acceptable to 2003 [sic] standards.

It’s definitely related. Powers’s choice of the tunnel as a metaphor for our cultural moment is fitting, tunnels being narrow, dangerous, and impossible to escape in any way but getting through it.

Just don’t live unto the tunnel, or take on its shape. Do your own thing. Be your own man, write your own stories, and don’t chase the latest trend—especially if that trend is writing to appease the legion of scolds who want to dictate how you must write your story and what you must include. Bowing to this kind of political orthodoxy is the worst way to fit in and be trendy. After all, recent events have demonstrated that you can toe the line—touch every base and check every box, in Powers’s terms—and still fall afoul of the mob. A lesson anyone familiar with Bolshevism should know.

Powers and his interviewer do, however, offer a hopeful vision of the future:

MDC: You got this kind of weird landscape where everybody is—you’re right, you’re writing through this tunnel. I think we’ll come out of the other side of it, though. There is pushback.

Powers: Oh, yeah.

MDC: And it’s not just the old school who are old enough to have enjoyed these things before the world started turning woke or whatever it is. I think there is a movement, there is pushback on it. We don’t want art to be that way. We don’t want it.

Powers: Yeah, yeah. And certainly, you think, ‘Well, it’s old now, the original text of Fleming and Agatha Christie.’ But then, when I was reading Heinlein, Sturgeon, Leiber, Murray Leinster, Henry Kuttner, those were all before my time. Those weren’t new writers. I was, you know, digging around used book stores and, yeah—I don’t think the readership is going to confine itself to the new editions. I think readers are hungry enough to dig widely.

The used book store may well prove to be the ashes from which literature will resurrect itself. But first we have to pass through the tunnel.

Good stuff, and there’s more I could have included. There’s a lengthy section in which Powers talks about his friendship with Philip K Dick that was especially good. Check out the entire interview at the link above or in the embedded YouTube player.

Special thanks to those of y’all who’ve recommended Declare to me at some point, especially David and Chet. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve already picked up Powers’s supernatural pirate epic On Stranger Tides, which looks amazing, and I’d be glad to hear from other Powers fans which of his other books would be good to look into after that. I’ve already heard good things about Last Call. In the meantime, I’m trying to make time between work and the commute and feeding babies all night to finish Declare. Looking forward to all the big revelations along the way.

Where now the rider?

I mentioned in my summer reading recap that I’m currently reading Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which my daughter thoughtfully picked out for me from her classroom’s library. Here’s a passage from about a third of the way into the book, the first time Joey, the horse, and his second owner, a British cavalry officer, see combat in the fall of 1914:

The gentle squeak of leather, the jingling harness, and the noise of hastily barked orders were drowned now by the pounding of hooves and the shout of the troopers as we galloped down on the enemy in the valley below us. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the glint of Captain Nicholls’s heavy sword. I felt his spurs in my side and I heard his battle cry. I saw the gray soldiers ahead of us raise their rifles and heard the death rattle of a machine gun, and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

A simply narrated but powerful moment, and presented believably from the point of view of an animal. Having seen Spielberg’s film adaptation several times, I had a good idea what the outcome of this attack would be, and yet when I read “quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore,” I choked up. I was moved.

Part of it is the fate of the kind, noble, courageous Captain Nicholls, and part of it is the finely wrought dramatic irony of Joey not realizing at first what has happened. (Another novel to do the same thing extremely well is Richard Adams’s Traveller.) But another factor is surely the image that the passage creates—the riderless horse.

The movie, in one of its most beautifully shot and stirring scenes, makes dramatic and stirring use of this image, but for my money the subtlety and simplicity of the original in Morpurgo’s novel cuts deeper.

Reading this passage brought to mind another riderless horse, this one from Michael Shaara’s great Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Just before Pickett’s Charge, the climactic Confederate assault on the last day of the battle, General Lewis Armistead cautions a fellow brigade commander named Richard Garnett against participating in the attack. Garnett is ill and can’t march in with the infantry; he’ll have to ride, and that means he’ll be a huge target. Garnett will not be dissuaded—an officer’s job is to lead.

The attack commences and Pickett’s division, including Armistead and Garnett’s brigades, moves out and comes under heavy artillery and finally rifle and canister fire. As Armistead, coming up with his men behind Garnett’s brigade, nears the Union line, we read:

Armistead thought: we won’t make it. He lifted the sword screaming, and moved on, closer, closer, but it was all coming apart; the whole world was dying. Armistead felt a blow in the thigh, stopped, looked down at blood on his right leg. But no pain. He could walk. He moved on. There was a horse coming down the ridge: great black horse with blood all over the chest, blood streaming through bubbly holes, blood on the saddle, dying eyes, smoke-gray at the muzzle: Garnett’s horse.

A gut punch of a conclusion to an already apocalyptic paragraph. Armistead briefly looks over the field to see if Garnett is still alive, unhorsed and on foot somewhere, but the reader knows immediately. The riderless horse tells the whole story.

The same horse reappears once later, after the attack has failed, as General Longstreet, the overall commander of the assault, responds to the destruction of his men:

There was nothing to send now, no further help to give, and even if Lee on the other side would send support now it would be too late. Longstreet hugged his chest. He got down off the fence. A black horse rode up out of the smoke: familiar spot on a smoky forehead, blood bubbling from a foaming chest: Garnett’s mount.

If the first passage is an apocalypse, with the horse a sign in the midst of catastrophe, here the horse is the final, mournful sign of defeat, a single, hollow death knell.

As with War Horse, the film adaptation Gettysburg uses this image to good effect. I think the purely visual language of film may even improve it. First, the film expands the point of view of Shaara’s novel by actually showing the viewer what happens to Garnett. He charges the Union line, trying to lead by example, and rides directly into the sights of a Union cannoneer who fires at him point-blank.* Garnett disappears instantly. We get a stunned reaction shot from General Lee, who watches from afar through his field glasses, and then this shot:

Soon after we cut to Armistead’s brigade following behind, and Armistead sees the horse and knows. No words are necessary.

And later, after Armistead has briefly breached the Union line, been shot down and captured, and the attack has collapsed, the horse reappears a final time—not for Longstreet as in the novel, but for General Pickett, who had insisted that Garnett be allowed to ride at the head of his brigade, a poignant double reminder.

The film does this wordlessly, in one of its most powerful shots.** First, as the walking wounded straggle back to the Confederate line the horse passes among them at a trot:

The camera follows, both panning and tracking with it from right to left—away from the fighting and the failed objective—to end on a poignant medium shot of Pickett, pushing in as he lowers his field glasses. The usually vivacious and fiery Pickett has been stunned into silence:

The riderless horse goes back much further than War Horse and The Killer Angels, of course. Consider the plaintive questions of The Wanderer. When the poem’s speaker turns from describing his lonely fate to ask where everything that once mattered and made life a comfort to him has gone—genap under nihthelm, darkened under night-helm—the very first pair in the list is:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

“Where is the horse? Where the young man?” Or, in a more famous but slightly less literal rendering by Tolkien, “Where now the horse and the rider?” These are paired in a way that doesn’t scan with most of the rest of the poem, suggesting their inseparability even in the loss of both.

And if we go back to the foundation of Western Literature, the last word of the Iliad, in a sentence that closes out Hector’s funeral and ends the action of the poem with thousands dead and the Trojan War still unwon, is the slaughtered Hector’s epithet: ἱπποδάμοιο, breaker of horses.

Is there any more poetic and immediately mournful image than the war horse with an empty saddle? Geared for war but aimless, it instantly suggests a whole tragedy. The riderless horse is a brave man, lost forever. The saddle is the gap he has left in the world.

* I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else mention this, but it’s pretty clear from the action around the gun that the filmmakers mean this to be Alonzo Cushing’s battery. Just watch what’s going on with the gunner and the dead officer right before Garnett charges.

** It’s not appreciated enough just how well shot Gettysburg is.

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!