The Wendigo

Every Christmas we get the kids new calendars for their rooms. Typically we pick national parks or historic sites, but last year we thought the boys would enjoy a worldwide cryptids calendar—Bigfoot, Nessie, the Kraken, the Chupacabra, and the like. The boys greatly enjoyed it until this summer, when we turned to a new month and a new image: the Wendigo, giant, antlered, and skull-faced, lumbering through a dark forest on warped legs. One of the twins hated it so much we ended up turning to the next month weeks ahead of time (Fairies, for some reason assigned to Germany), meaning they had almost two months of August.

A silly thing, but it piqued my interest in the monster and I sought out the story that introduced this fixture of some Indian folklore to a mass audience, Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo.

Set among the dense forests and mazes of rivers and lakes in northwestern Ontario, The Wendigo is related secondhand, the unnamed narrator retelling a story told him by Dr Cathcart. A Scottish expert in the still-new field of psychology, Dr Cathcart has taken his nephew Simpson to Canada on a hunting trip. With two Canadian guides and an Indian cook the Scots work their way deep into the wilderness hunting moose only to be disappointed. The hunting is bad that year, and after considering their options, Dr Cathcart and Simpson decide to split up for a few days.

Leaving Punk, the Indian cook, at the camp, Dr Cathcart heads off in one direction with one of their guides. Simpson, fresh out of seminary and visiting Canada for the first time, travels with the other, the French Canadian Défago, an “imaginative and melancholy” man who knows the area, its hunting, and its lore well. They cross long lakes by canoe and travel inland through dense forest for days. Simpson is a novice woodsman and relies entirely on Défago, and so when they make camp one night and Défago, who senses and intuits far more than Simpson can perceive, catches a strange, foul scent on the breeze, his reaction terrifies Simpson.

Défago turns sullen and silent, refusing to discuss what the smell means or indicates to him. After the two bed down in their tent for the night, Simpson awakes to find Défago in a panic, trembling and muttering. Something is outside the tent, something enormous, something with an indescribable “singular odour,” something that bellows out a long, loud, terrible sound before calling Défago’s name.

Défago flees the tent. Simpson, barely resisting his panic, follows his tracks until the oppressive darkness and the gigantic, unidentifiable tracks alongside Défago’s send him back to the tent in terror. Unfortunately for him, the night and his trials have just begun.

I don’t want to describe any more of the story, but it involves voices in the sky, deformed feet, a long vigil by the campfire, and a visit from someone who looks like a friend. Only when Simpson, using what little knowledge of camping and trailblazing Défago had imparted to him, returns to the group’s camp after trekking alone for days does Défago’s fate become clear.

Or does it? The Wendigo exploits to the fullest the ambiguity of both Simpson’s experiences and his uncle’s narration. Dr Cathcart, remember, is a psychologist, and the narrator pointedly mentions that he wrote a book on shared hallucinations. But Dr Cathcart, who saw fit to tell this story to our narrator, also left this story out of his book and confesses near the end, when Simpson is pressing him to explain what had happened to him, that smells are less commonly hallucinated than sights and sounds. What to make of that?

“I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself,” Dr Cathcart says, which our narrator follows with “He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations.” As in so many weird stories and gothic tales, the man of science rushes to the limit of his knowledge and is forced to stop.

This ambiguity and the frame tale—another gothic staple—are a key part of the story’s effect, but the real power of the story is in its atmosphere. Blackwood, who spent years in Canada before returning to Britain, evokes the loneliness and potential terror of a night in the remote northern woods exceptionally well. The sensory detail—that “singular odour” on a cold light wind, the sunlight on the vast lakes, the snow, the crashing of something huge through the branches of the trees and the thumping of its feet as it approaches through the night—build into a suffocating sense of danger made all the worse by the fact that, whatever is out there, Simpson never sees it. It’s wonderfully done, one of the creepiest stories I’ve read in a long while.

But this being the age of Themes, I have to refute something I saw on Wikipedia. The article on the wendigo cites a literary scholar’s argument that The Wendigo, through Blackwood’s “subtly-demonizing rhetoric[,] transforms the Wendigo from a native myth into a descriptive template for the Indian savage.” That is, The Wendigo is about the inferiority of Native Americans, and guilty of cultural appropriation to boot. This is stupid for three reasons: first, because the concept of cultural appropriation is ideological brainrot and inimical to all art and culture. Second, because Punk, the only Indian character in the story, is steady, capable, and also the only character with the good sense to leave when it becomes clear the Wendigo is nearby.

But finally and most importantly, the point of the story is to get a spook. It’s scary entertainment rooted in real places and folklore, and is “about” an ill-fated hunting trip. Expertly crafted and beautifully written, with a clear feel for the woods and how unsettling they can be, the story leaves the reader with enough questions to remain unsettled. Blackwood meant to entertain the reader and succeeded. Check your seminar table theory at the door—this story is for enjoyment.

The Wendigo is an enjoyable novella that offers creepy atmosphere, a weighty sense of dread—always a more powerful emotion to me than horror or the gross-out—and an imaginative, surprising story. It’s a worthwhile Halloween read and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. I hope y’all will check it out. Our kids won’t be anytime soon.

A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls

It’s been a busy fall, and despite my best hopes for a revived Chestertober the month is already two-thirds over. I nevertheless hope to put out at least a few posts on some of Chesterton’s non-fiction, including a few of his earliest essays and one of his most famous books. Here’s the down payment.

* * * * *

Recently on Substack a post from someone who has made a career out of lamenting the state of modern literature accused the culture of a “seriousness crisis.” We are not all reading Dostoevsky in our leisure time, you see. It seems sublimely appropriate, then, that the first essay in GK Chesterton’s first published volume of essays is so writerly, so populist in attitude, and—in keeping with Chesterton’s well-earned reputation as a prophet—still so relevant.

When Chesterton wrote “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” he was responding to much the same criticism. The penny dreadful, cheap exciting fiction for the masses, but especially young men and boys, was a wildly popular medium in the late Victorian period and prefigured the rise of pulp fiction. Critics scoffed at the novels’ vulgarity and sentimentality, decried their simplistic artistry and bad writing, and warned that their romanticized, action-packed stories of bandits, swordsmen, knights, cowboys, and other adventurers promoted violence and immorality.

Chesterton defends the penny dreadful with an appropriate tu quoque. “Bad story writing is not a crime,” he argues, pointing out that Hall Caine, a well-regarded novelist whose books trafficked in socially conscious moralizing, “walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.” More damningly, he argues that fears of penny dreadfuls leading to crime—an accusation familiar to us in arguments about video games—are overwrought and misplaced. The heroes of both highly praised modern novels and the classics do the same things, and more:

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s Ivanhoe, Scott’s Rob Roy, Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Byron’s Corsair, Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton’s Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.

A lot of this worry, as belied by the frequent accusation that penny dreadfuls are “vulgar,” is simple class bias. A businessman, lawyer, or aristocrat thrilling to Sir Walter Scott in his drawing room is acceptable but a delivery boy enjoying a cowboy novel during his lunch break is cause for concern.

It is easy to point out this kind of hypocrisy but Chesterton does not stop at rubbishing the critics’ arguments. Although frankly admitting their lack of artistry—they embrace hero and villain cliches, stock situations, and adventure tropes—Chesterton asserts that they meet human needs. Two, in fact.

First, the stories in penny dreadfuls, despite centering on bandits and pirates and other dodgy sorts, presented characters adhering to and living according to codes of honor, acting as though life were precious and worth living, and believing in right and wrong. Their thieves were more careful about morality than the protagonists—definitely not heroes—of tasteful realistic fiction:

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. . . . And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all.

For all their airs of seriousness, it is the highbrows who are the moral threat and the lowbrows who are embracing and reinforcing morality, in however backward a fashion. As Chesterton would put it a few years later in Orthodoxy, “The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal.” This moral aspect is what keeps Chesterton’s defense of popular fiction from devolving into the tired “At least they’re reading!” argument. We’ll return to that.

Second, and more deeply rooted in human nature: regardless of the artistry or content of the penny dreadfuls, that they excite and stir the reader at all is worthwhile. “[P]eople must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories,” he writes. “The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.” Decry the cheap novel’s poor writing and simplistic plot and characters all you want, but “it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.”

“A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” is one of my favorite Chesterton essays, not least for the reminder in that last line quoted above—which actually comes from the first paragraph of the essay. (Chesterton, patron saint of topsy-turvydom, was turning everything on its head right from the beginning.) Seriousness is not the only reason to read fiction, or even the strongest one. Chesterton offers an excellent answer to the kind of po-faced critic I began this post with, the kind of person who thinks their tastes are serious and that everyone else is goofing off, but it is also worth considering what has changed since Chesterton’s day.

Of the two crucial points in the essay, the second is best and remains truest. We are storytelling creatures, understanding and remembering our lives as stories. We need stories to make sense of the world, and meeting this need is more vital to the mind and soul than good taste. After all, taste changes with the age. (Who among us doesn’t encounter the name Hall Caine and have to look him up?) Chesterton suggests that the imagination is fundamental, not an artifact, and we must attend to it—especially now, when our imaginations are continuously threatened with dullness by screens, passive entertainment, and machines that aim to take over what little bit of our thinking is left to us.

It’s Chesterton’s first point that requires emendation. Whatever fumes of morality the boys of Chesterton’s examples picked up from the “vulgar” examples of Dick Deadshot or Robin Hood is long gone from popular fiction. The excitement of the bestselling fiction today is not provided through action, danger, and suspense but through pornographic titillation—blunt, artless, explicit, and geared toward self-absorption and self-indulgence if not self-abuse—and in increasingly extreme forms. Vulgarity ain’t what it used to be.

While the culture pays lip service to the imagination and the appetite for stories is alive and being fed, we cannot trust even vulgar literature to excite it in helpful ways anymore. As CS Lewis, a noted Chesterton fan, would write later, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The threat of technologies that compete for control of the imagination—addicting it and then dulling it—means the task of storytelling is as important as ever, with the added pressure that the culture has turned against the morality even cheap fiction used to instill. The burden writers today must shoulder is not to feed the storytelling instinct but to shape it well, and to worry less about seriousness or elite taste and more about setting imaginations aflame.

Notes on Goldfinger

Jill Masterton (Shirley Eaton) Falls foul of Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger (1964)

While last week’s Book Club episode covering Goldfinger did a good job covering Fleming’s life and career and this particular entry in the Bond series, Sandbrook and Tabby did unfortunately cave to the temptation to jeer a bit too often for my taste. It’s not as bad as the discussion I once heard on another podcast, in which a couple of vegetarian Mormon hipsters snickered at and completely misunderstood it for a half-hour, but it did make me want to jot down a few items if only for my own sake.

Goldfinger is not my favorite of the Bond series but it has one of its best villains and served as the basis—with some actual improvements by the screenwriter—of one of the best Connery films. So, a few notes and observations:

• Goldfinger isn’t the best place to dive into Fleming’s novels. I enjoy it, but as I noted on Goodreads my last time through the book, it’s the first novel of the series to feel like one of the Bond movies: a little more outlandish, a little more exotic, a little more extreme in its sentiments. The original reader approaching Goldfinger did so through six previous novels, all of which—per Buchan, whom Dominic rightly credits as an influence—“defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible” but were still more grounded adventures. Fleming intended the books to work as standalones but I think Goldfinger is best served by approaching it in publication order, or at least after first reading Casino Royale and From Russia, with Love to see the baseline from which Fleming was beginning to depart.

• Dominic and Tabby make a lot of the “Bond formula” but as I’ve mentioned many times here and elsewhere, the formula is a convention of the movies. Fleming liked to experiment with form and no two Bond novels are structured exactly the same. Read Goldfinger alongside the book immediately preceding it, Dr No, and the book immediately following it, Thunderball, and you’ll see this clearly. The contrast with some of the great volumes in the series, like Casino Royale, From Russia, with Love, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or the handful of Bond short stories is especially strong.

• A lot of Dominic and Tabby’s scoffing has to do with Bond’s attitudes about… everything. I’ll simply point out two mistakes here: First, it is a great mistake to take the things Bond says when angry or frustrated as his normal perspective. Like most people, Bond says things he either doesn’t mean or regrets later. He lashes out. (The best example has to be the closing line of Casino Royale. That’s not misogyny or whatever, it’s pain.) Second, it is an even greater mistake to assume that Bond’s opinions are always Fleming’s. Fleming intentionally designed Bond to differ from himself in a variety of ways—Fleming preferred scrambled eggs to fancy food and readers often wrote to correct him on details of cuisine (or, most famously, firearms)—though Bond’s fundamental discouragement and sense of purposelessness as the Empire crumbles are certainly his creator’s.

• I also think it’s a mistake to dismiss Bond’s suspicion of Goldfinger as classist because Goldfinger cheats at golf. Petty cheating is a character flaw in several Bond villains (like Hugo Drax in Moonraker) and suggests deeper corruption and a pragmatic, predatory tendency. The members of M’s club in Moonraker or the caddy in Goldfinger may scoff at Goldfinger’s new money tackiness, but Bond sees beyond this.

• Goldfinger is underrated as a villain. Bond resents his cruelty and especially his parasitic character—a big contrast to other Bond villains, who often have genuine skills and accomplishments to their credit. Goldfinger is just a thief and a hoarder, a dragon sitting on his pile under a mountain. See my Goodreads notes linked above for more on this score.

• Re. the stuff in the Bond novels, it’s a bit much to call Fleming’s use of real brand names “product placement.” Fleming was after verisimilitude. Ditto the details of Bond’s travel. I’ve seen it pointed out that under postwar austerity, the British reading public especially was starved for travel and enjoyed even the mundane details of airport lounges and hotel accommodations. It’s another sign of Fleming’s art that he could use Bond sitting silently at an airport to establish—from the first page—mood, tension, and character. This is the not the only time Fleming does this.

• Related: Dominic and Tabby are quite right to praise Fleming’s writing. I don’t fault them for leaving it out—the episode is about the book, not every detail of Fleming’s life—but Fleming’s time working for Reuters in the 1930s was formative. Both then and in his wartime work he learned to be clear, concise, and to precisely calculate the emphasis he wanted to impart.

• Finally, about Pussy Galore’s backstory: a lot of the women in the Bond series are damaged or wounded, as Bond himself is. Pussy’s background isn’t given space to breathe—though it is worth noting that it’s the hard, flippant Pussy herself who is relating it, which must have something to do with the tone—but it’s not unlike the much more detailed and sympathetically related story of Honey Rider in Dr No.

Again, it’s still mostly a good discussion but these items nagged at me. The best tribute I can pay to Dominic and Tabby is that, even though some Bond discussion on Substack and gotten me eager to reread the novels again, their episode convinced me it’s time. I have Casino Royale on standby. (As I tried to finish writing this last night, one of the kids came down with a croupy cough and we made a late-night visit to the ER for some oral steroids. I took Casino Royale with me. It’s great.) I’m just afraid that once I start I’ll ignore everything else I’m reading. (Too early to tell: I’m mostly just tired today. Stay tuned.)

The Book Club continues to be a good listen. My hope is that, having done a good job on Buchan and a reasonable job on Fleming—though I hope they’ll cover more of both—they might get to Eric Ambler sometime soon.

Death Comes as the End

Last night I finished reading Agatha Christie’s only historical novel, Death Comes as the End, to my wife. This was my second reading of the novel and, although I had picked it as our bedtime read because I remembered enjoying it, I was pleasantly surprised just how much I enjoyed it the second time through. A shortish sick-day review: 

Death Comes as the End takes place on the country estate of Imhotep, a ka-priest who lives near Thebes in Upper Egypt during the 11th Dynasty, over 3,000 years ago. As a ka-priest Imhotep is responsible for the maintenance and regular offerings and rites performed at a nearby tomb, where he also has an office managed by Hori, his trusted scribe. Thanks to the endowment of the tomb and the prestige of his position, Imhotep, now entering old age, enjoys authority and wealth—including estates downriver, in Lower Egypt near the mouth of the Nile. 

Not that his wealth has brought him happiness or stability. His household includes three sons: the slow, dutiful Yahmose, the hard-partying and womanizing Sobek, and Ipy, the teenaged son of Imhotep’s old age. The two older sons have wives—shrewish, domineering Satipy and slow, plain, child-obsessed Kait, who tolerates Sobek’s philandering because of the benefit their marriage guarantees to her children—and Imhotep’s aged mother, Esa, the rarely-heeded brains of the family. Also skulking around the house is Henet, an old servant and companion of Imhotep’s long-dead wife. Henet is a Wormtongue-like flatterer who prides herself on gathering and using information. Her obsequious fawning just barely conceals her resentments.

The last member of the household, and the novel’s main character, is Imhotep’s only daughter, Renisenb. Newly widowed with one child, Renisenb has returned after eight years away with her husband and is still mourning—though, despite the freshness of her grief, she is bothered to find herself already forgetting her husband’s face, and has turned to the old rhythms and routines of her childhood home as a comfort. But it is precisely these that Renisenb will see demolished, and be forced to reckon with why. 

Christie expertly introduces the reader to this family and its foibles—weak, status-conscious father, henpecked eldest son, pompous younger brothers, jostling and jealous daughters-in-law, wry grandmother—before injecting the element that will explode it and start the novel’s mystery: Nofret, the concubine Imhotep brings home from a trip to the richer, more glamorous north.

Nofret is beautiful, manipulative, and spurned in love. The details emerge slowly, but it is clear from the moment she arrives that she views becoming Imhotep’s concubine as settling. She heaps scorn on the family members, probes for weaknesses and disagreement between them, and exploits them for maximum discord. She forces Hori to send letters to Imhotep with false complaints against his sons, and—in a fatal decision—moves to have them disinherited. It is not long before Nofret is dead.

As so often in a Christie story, everyone had good reason to want her dead. Renisenb, without ever consciously thinking of herself as a detective, discusses the situation with Hori and her grandmother Esa, the two people she most trusts and who are least blinded by greed, envy, and foolishness.

Unlike many other Christie stories, the body count climbs. Whoever killed Nofret does not stop with her, killing off other family members and even a servant. Rumor that a vengeful Nofret is cursing the family from her chamber in the tomb run rampant, aggravated by missing jewelry turning up and at least one sighting of a woman in Nofret’s clothing just before someone else drops dead. Hori and Esa assure Renisenb that, based on her standing within the family and her attempts to be kind to Nofret, she cannot be a target. But as more and more die, Renisenb worries both for her family and friends and for herself.

I mentioned that I’ve jotted this review down during a sick day. In a nice coincidence, I first read Death Comes as the End three years ago, when I was sick and quarantined to protect our newborn twins and just in time to make the 2023 year-in-review. I’ve remembered it fondly, recommending it as a good short mystery read last year, and it didn’t disappoint on a reread. In fact, it passed that most difficult of hurdles for a mystery: upon rereading it, I couldn’t remember the solution to the mystery, who the murderer was and why they were doing it. All of the characters still seemed likely suspects, and the atmosphere of dread and suspense were just as palpable and enjoyable.

And Death Comes as the End is not only a satisfying mystery, it is a good historical novel. Christie, whose second husband was an archaeologist, based the novel on his research and her visits to Egypt as well as the extant letters of a similar Egyptian family. It has been a long time since my grad school Egypt course—which mostly focused on the 18th Dynasty anyway—so I can’t vouch for every detail, but Christie authentically evokes the mood and mental atmosphere of ancient Egypt. The story flows with the Egyptian calendar and the rhythms of the Nile and farm work, and the ordinary routines and worries of a well-off but not elite Egyptian priestly family is well imagined. One especially nice note, and a good spot of Christie’s wry dark humor, was Imhotep’s escalating concern about the cost of embalming.

Even in her English country house mysteries Christie was always adept at conveying the workaday concerns of the people who lived there, and without modernizing them or treating them as if nothing has changed in the 3,000 years between Renisenb’s time and ours, she makes these characters’ lives and concerns recognizable. This is a challenge for any historical novelist, and Christie, in her first and only foray outside the twentieth century, did it brilliantly. I was impressed, on that first reading three years ago, both with how well she created Egypt in the fictive dream of her story and with how economically she did so. There are no laborious explanations, no info dumps, no tedious piling on of detail. I’ll be returning to it for lessons in craft.

Death Comes as the End has much more going on in it than I can lay out here. I haven’t even nodded toward Renisenb’s interest in Kameni, an envoy from Lower Egypt who may offer her a better life away from the striving, petty jealousy, and death of her home, or the way their attraction eventually forces Renisenb into a dilemma. The plot is engaging, the characters well imagined and surprising—especially as the deaths begin to reveal more of what each has suppressed in their lives so far—and the historical setting effortlessly realized. This is not Christie’s most famous novel, but it is one of ones I have most enjoyed.

Pale Faulkner

Last week I finished reading Pale Fire, my first and long overdue Nabokov. It’s the best possible version of what John Gardner described as a skilled writer “jazzing around,” a novel constructed of the implications within the text—which, superficially, is a long commentary on a long poem—and the inferences of the reader. A story told entirely between the lines, so to speak.

There’s a lot going on in Pale Fire and I look forward to a future second reading, but one of the most poignant aspects of the book is the way the painful personal reflection in the poem—which concerns the poet John Shade’s family life, including the apparent suicide of his only daughter—is ignored by the poem’s editor and commentator, Charles Kinbote (or, perhaps, “Charles Kinbote”). Kinbote, in notes that inevitably drift into tangents, spins or misinterprets every possible line and word of Shade’s poem as allusions to the imaginary kingdom of Zembla and its exiled king, about which he tells verbose, self-indulgent stories that the reader gradually infers are about himself—another layer of the story.

As TV Tropes puts it: “While Pale Fire is about a lot of things, one of the biggest is literary commentators who can't help but use other people's work as mirrors onto their own neurotic obsessions.” Or, even better, Man Carrying Thing (in a genuinely brilliant video): “It’s a hilarious maneuver watching this commentator wrangle a sincere poem about art and grief into something about his favorite subject.”

Nabokov parodies this brilliantly, and so this was all fresh on my mind when, having finished Pale Fire Friday, I picked up a book that I last read probably twenty years ago: The Sound and the Fury.

I didn’t bother with the introduction to this edition, a nice new paperback that I got for my birthday, but after a few days I flipped through it and was struck by the academic ability to Kinbote basically anything— “maneuver[ing]” a book into a discussion of one’s “favorite subject” or “their own neurotic obsessions.” We’re all aware of the way kooks like Kinbote do this, but he’s just more obvious about it because he is a kook. The tendency is present in all academics, and tolerated when the “favorite subject” is some kind of fashionable ism.

Faulkner’s novel, apparently, is mostly about racism, the legacy of slavery and white supremacy, and the Lost Cause (that bugbear, which I’m less and less sure actually means anything), or at least so thoroughly infused with the above that it becomes functionally about them. This TED Ed video, since the latter apparently wasn’t enough, adds Absalom, Absalom!’s supposed concern about “the region’s intolerable* history of genocide” to the mix.

But is this really what The Sound and the Fury is “about”? I’ve written several times in recent years about the prevalence of theme over story. As annoying and distracting as that tendency is for genre fiction (not a distinction I pay much mind to, but bear with me), the way it dominates discussion of literary fiction is intolerable.

The Sound and the Fury is first and foremost a family drama. The alcoholic father and bedridden mother; the promiscuous daughter; the brothers—one jealous, another hardworking and embittered,** yet another mentally handicapped—the help, themselves by turns loyal, impatient, entitled, detached, but never deceived; the loss of patrimony and the entire bunch’s financial straits; the sense of decay and decrepitude and judgment hanging over everyone—this is what The Sound and the Fury is about. The characters themselves impotently fume or resign themselves and more than one talks of afflictions, of curses on the family. Quentin moons around Boston feeling the weight of his own sin, not the legacy of slavery. And it is hard to read the long opening section, told from Benjy’s perspective, and see how different people treat him when no one is looking, and think that Faulkner was animated or even cared about these big social themes. If you must have something more abstract and high-falutin’ than these, decline, disappointment, and guilt are still better options than those buzzword themes because they’re closer to the characters.

Not that the themes cited above and so beloved of critics and tastemakers—who want to shepherd us into the correct interpretation of Faulkner’s story just as surely as Benjy’s caretakers want to keep him off of the golf course—don’t matter at all. They are trappings, necessary component parts of the setting and its history. A story like The Sound and the Fury that did not have Jason Compson lashing out at the family’s black help in frustration would be unrealistic and lack an important means of revealing character, and the burden of defeat in the Civil War is an appropriate part of the atmosphere of Faulkner’s world. But these trappings are not the point, and making them the point is to turn Kinbote on Faulkner.

The difference is that, in Pale Fire, Kinbote is a lonely weirdo. Today the Kinbotes hold conferences.

* Thank goodness for that “intolerable,” otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to think!

** There is a strong sense of the elder brother in “The Prodigal Son” about Jason Compson—despite being the Compsons’ second son—that I haven’t really seen explored. Something for the future, perhaps.

Theo of Golden

An elderly Portuguese man arrives in a picturesque Georgia college town. He is cultured, courteous, friendly but meditative, and clearly independently wealthy. Taken with the pencil portraits hanging in a coffee shop along the downtown thoroughfare, he buys them up in batches, finds the subjects one by one—janitors, accountants, musicians, a homeless woman—and gifts them to them, soliciting their life stories and changing a few lives along the way. And he has secrets, several of them.

The old man is Theo, the town, closely based on Columbus, is Golden, and his “bestowals” of the portraits to the people of the city are the story of Theo of Golden, the runaway word-of-mouth bestseller of the last year.

Theo of Golden the novel has, like some other famous books, become entangled with its publication history. Its author, Allen Levi, a musician and former judge from Georgia, self-published the book several years ago. Its reputation grew slowly thanks to the praise from readers who loved it and exponentially increasing word-of-mouth sales. I first heard of it last year at GJ Ford, our favorite local bookstore in St Simons Island, where the owner urged my wife to read it—and this was before it had been picked up by a traditional publisher. By the last time I checked a few weeks ago, it had sold millions of copies. Millions. This is one of the great self-publishing success stories, and I’m genuinely glad for Levi.

And I’m also glad to say it’s enjoyable. Theo is a well-drawn character and the story’s hook, the “bestowals” of local artist Asher Glissen’s portraits, is intriguing. Levi evokes the thriving New South town, with its shaded riverwalk, tree-lined main street, and seasonal rhythms built around tourism and college semesters with precision and affection. The story, with its emphasis on art, loss, family, faith, and redemption, aims to uplift and inspire.

That surely accounts for the book’s success. In a field crowded with trauma and grievance and general self-absorption, a book about living for others and bringing beauty into darkness has met a need the traditional publishers didn’t even know was there.

As soon as I finished reading it to my wife last week I set the book aside and, even through the drowsiness our bedtime reading is supposed to ease us into, we mulled over what we thought of it for probably twenty minutes. I’m thrilled for Levi’s success, did not mind reading it, and recognize why people love it, but it’s good, not great. Theo of Golden—enjoyable, uplifting, gentle to a fault—is fine. What my wife and I were trying to figure out is exactly why that is.

Whatever criticisms I have come from liking the book and seeing how it could have been better, not hating it. But even before finishing the book I saw a few savage negative reviews, perhaps the beginning of the kind of backlash all such successes provoke. I want to start with those, because I found the most negative reviews the most wrongheaded and oblivious to what keeps Theo of Golden from greatness.

First, Theo of Golden is not terribly written. I was prepared for that, self-publishing being what it is, but Levi’s straightforward, mostly unadorned style is perfectly clear and readable and better than plenty of traditionally published books I’ve read. There are none of the usual tells for amateur fiction: no bad strings of adverbs, clunky overreliance on participle phrases, embarrassing dialogue tags, or spatially incomprehensible descriptions of settings. Even the rare passages that strain themselves reaching toward lyricism fail not out of tastelessness but in overreach. He’s not Evelyn Waugh, but no one was asking him to be.

Then there’s hyperbole. Theo of Golden is not—cannot be—the worst book anyone has read in twenty years. (This writer also thinks there’s only one black character in Theo of Golden. I’m not sure why that would be a mark against it in the first place, but while Levi isn’t explicit about most of the characters’ races there are at least five black characters, including two of the core group that grows up around Theo. Pay attention, even to books you hate.)

Then there are matters of taste. I’ve seen reviews calling it predictable, its final revelations about Theo and his mission obvious. I didn’t find it so, though my wife guessed Theo’s identity about a quarter of the way through. Others objected to the novel’s Christian themes, but that is not an artistic critique and changing or omitting those themes would have gutted the book.

I hate to see a book criticized for bad reasons—or even praised for the wrong reasons—so I decided to review Theo of Golden out of a desire to defend it. But I also wanted to sort out exactly what I think doesn’t work in the book. Potential spoilers ahead.

The fairest criticisms I’ve seen are that Theo of Golden’s characters are too thin and the whole book is too sentimental. These two problems are linked, but one is more serious than the other.

I want to point out that not all of the characters are thin or flat. A number of the major characters who become Theo’s friends are well-realized, the best—or at least my favorite—being Tony, the bitter old Vietnam vet who owns the downtown bookstore. A wry skeptic, his talks with Theo deepen realistically from banter to heart-to-heart vulnerability, and he follows a subtle but believable arc prompted by their friendship. A late chapter in which Theo and Tony share a bottle of port may be the best in the book.

Other characters are less rounded, but that’s normal. Novels concentrate on a central set of major characters with side characters of diminishing importance and complexity. In all his cast, Levi only gives us one bad character: Pearce, Asher Glissen’s younger brother and the father of a young professional who receives one of Theo’s first gifts. Pearce is a caricature of a selfish businessman—loud, rude, constantly glued to his phone. He stands out among Levi’s cast because the others, if not complex, are believable and recognizable types.

No, Theo of Golden’s most serious fault is its sentimentalism. I don’t mind the sentimental myself, Lord knows, but sentimentalism weakens this novel in two interrelated ways.

First, by trying too hard to tug at the reader’s heartstrings. Another of Theo’s early bestowals goes to Kendrick. See if you can feel the point at which his situation starts to feel manipulative: Kendrick is a janitor at the local university and a young single father, his wife having been killed in a car accident that also injured their daughter, a faultless angel who is only ever sweet and who may be permanently disabled if she cannot get a necessary surgery soon. In case that’s not enough, we learn later that the car accident was caused by an illegal immigrant, and Kendrick, who must testify at the man’s sentencing, asks Theo for advice. It turns out the immigrant was only in Georgia illegally because his daughter in the US was in the hospital with cancer. Kendrick sees himself in the man and asks the judge for leniency.

Or consider Ellen, the middle aged homeless woman Theo befriends. She has a non-specific mental problem, sleeps under a bridge, and obsesses over her bicycle, which she refuses to let out of her sight, even in church. She is also a bookworm and—almost unconsciously—peppers her conversation with quotations and literary namedrops. Theo learns that, decades before, she had given birth in South Carolina and had her baby taken away by the state. You can probably guess what the end of her arc is.

Both of these situations present a lot of dramatic potential, only some of which is followed through on. In Kendrick’s case, the sentimentalism extends not only to himself but to the illegal immigrant who killed his wife. Of course Kendrick will forgive him. This is supposed to be a moment of grace, but Levi makes the man so sympathetic and pitiful that it becomes easy for Kendrick to forgive him. Imagine if, instead of an illegal immigrant with a cancer-stricken daughter, a local white trash boy high on meth had caused the accident. If grace means anything, it means forgiving the undeserving, but that’s not the situation Theo of Golden invites us into.

Similarly, Ellen is only ever a lovable eccentric. Her bicycle and her quotations and her sudden lurches in conversational topic are the severest symptoms of her illness. Levi gives her none of the off-putting, difficult, even dangerous qualities of real homeless and mentally ill people; she is simply there to be funny and affecting and to jerk tears with her backstory.

On a number of occasions I called this “overegging the pudding” or “laying it on too thick,” and this is nowhere more obvious than in the novel’s Calvary moment. (Again, spoiler warning.) Theo, awake with insomnia after a triumphant concert by the young cellist he has taken under his wing, hears Ellen being attacked outside by drunk college students. They steal her kooky hat and try to throw her bicycle in the fountain where Theo has carried out his bestowals. The cellist comes to the rescue, but the college boys beat him, smash his cello, and break his hand. Theo, distraught, trying to get their attention from the balcony of his apartment, falls to his death.

It is both moving and simply too much. Just as Kendrick’s situation would be more compelling if it were harder for him to forgive—a scenario we’d all be more likely to encounter—Ellen’s victimization would be more moving if she had proven harder to love, if Theo and everyone else had had to struggle more to bring her into their lives, and if Simone the cellist weren’t so carefully, icily calculated a victim, too.

That’s my biggest problem with Theo of Golden. I’ve dwelt on these subtle but fundamental flaws, but it is a good read and worthy of its success. I do not begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it the way I would a book by Dan Brown or the latest scummy romantasy, and I’ll certainly read the next book Levi writes. This is a smooth and easy read, vividly imagined, peopled with mostly believable and recognizable characters, emotionally involving, and, as Nadya Williams argues here, beautifully dramatizes the way mere mortals can help each other grow in saintliness simply by loving God and each other. But, as I wrote above, it’s gentle to a fault, and if it were to challenge a bit more than it endears, it would make its point much more powerfully.

Summer reading 2026

The last few weeks have been maddeningly hot and busy, so the descriptions in the fully assembled reading list below may be a bit more laconic than usual, but I had a very good summer of reading and am excited to share the best of it. I hope y’all will find something good here to read this fall or winter.

For the purposes of this post, “summer” begins with my summer in-service in early May and ends today, Labor Day. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Inklings Detective Agency, by John R Kelly—The Inklings, an informal club of Christian literary scholars at Oxford including, most famously, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Owen Barfield but with many other, less appreciated members like Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Adam Fox, and Warren “Warnie” Lewis, are approached by a famous benefactor, a man long thought dead who asks them to solve a series of murders. A fun gothic mystery studded with literary stars like Dorothy Sayers and, in a cameo, GK Chesterton, the story is satisfying and the way Kelly evokes the world and personalities of the Inklings is wonderful. Full review on the blog here.

Watcher in the Shadows, by Geoffrey Household—An obscure zoologist living in rural England finds himself the target of an obsessive but careful murderer. Both have secrets. A gripping and surprising thriller, one of my favorites yet from Household. Full review here.

The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin—A fictionalized portrait of the great German film director GW Pabst who, after coming up in the early days of silent film and pioneering modern film editing, made acclaimed Weimar-era movies. When the novel begins, Pabst is working in Hollywood, misunderstood and frustrated. He ends up back in Germany just in time for the Second World War to begin, trapping him geographically. He also finds himself trapped artistically, convinced, through a combination of coaxing, flattery, and intimidation, to produce films under the Nazi aegis. Pabst, an anti-Nazi, tells himself is he not making propaganda for the regime, but his artistic singlemindedness rather than his ideology gradually compromises him. A brisk but rich novel with an incredibly dramatic climax—Pabst desperately shooting and cutting a movie in Prague as the Soviets take the city—and a complicated picture of a complicated situation. Likely my favorite novel this summer and one I had hoped to write a full review of here but, alas, I could not make time.

Bad Actors, by Mick Herron—Another solid entry in the Slough House series, with some nicely interwoven plots and good teamwork from a surprising pair of characters. The original protagonist, River Cartwright, is offstage for the entirety of this one but apparently returns in the most recent installment, which came out in paperback last month. Looking forward to it.

At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon—Portraits and incidents in the life of an aging smalltown priest. Not the kind of book I’d have ever picked up on my own, but when we finished our previous bedtime reading my wife asked me to read this: and it was wonderful. Fun, funny, peopled with charming and recognizable characters and set in a sharply observed Southern mountain town, it was also not infrequently moving. And in keeping with its main character’s vocation, the occasional meditations on Scripture and the faith were always surprisingly well-timed for me.

I, Ripper, by Stephen Hunter—A meticulously researched picture of late Victorian London and the events of the Whitechapel Murders, fused with an ably plotted and surprising thriller. Grim but engrossing. Full review on the blog here.

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway—A powerful novel, full of irony and pathos and regret, and a classic of modern literature. I hated A Farewell to Arms when I read it in high school but, over time, decided that I might have missed something. I finally revisited it this summer and found that, yes, the problem was me—namely seventeen-year old me. A reflection on revisiting the book after a quarter-century here.

Special mentions

Galahad and the Grail, by Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts—A birthday gift from my wife, who correctly intuited that it was right up my alley. This is the first (but chronologically third) volume in Merlin’s Isle, a four-book cycle of ballads based on King Arthur by Malcolm Guite. The story, which fuses and expands upon several medieval versions of the Grail quest, is epic-length but told in ballad stanzas that can be read silently or aloud to great effect, and the illustrations are magnificent. Guite follows more of the later Arthur traditions in reducing the role of Sir Perceval, in whose story the Grail first appeared, but the end result is still great. Beautiful through and through. Looking forward to the second book (chronologically the first), The Coming of Arthur, which is due out this fall and my wife preordered as part of my birthday.

The Odyssey, by Homer, a graphic novel adaptation by Gareth Hinds—Marvelous artwork and a respectful approach to Homer’s story distinguish Hinds’s adaptation from many other retellings. Even as a comic book, Homer’s power shows clearly.

Vita Nuova, by Dante, trans. Joseph Luzzi—A solid, readable new translation of Dante’s first book, beautifully designed and printed by Liveright. For whatever reason, despite loving the Comedy and reading and rereading it many times, I’ve always struggled with La Vita Nuova. I had no problem this time.

Favorite non-fiction

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan, designed by Quentin Fiore—Brisk, enjoyable, insightful, and prescient. McLuhan, extrapolating from his understanding of the mode of communication mattering more than what is communicated and from the history of such modes leading up to his time (1967), more or less predicts the re-barbarization of culture, the collapse of linear thinking and communication under the influence of interconnected information like the internet, and even self-publishing accessible to everyone. An important work that, given its loop-the-loop structure and sometimes jarring mid-century collage style (which, to be honest, hasn’t dated well), demands a reread soon.

American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, by HW Brands—A solid new biography making extensive use of primary source quotations. Perhaps too much—there were a few times I wished Brands would simply summarize and comment upon events. But getting the words of the participants themselves is always valuable, and Brands’s approach to his subjects is largely descriptive, allowing the reader to see the people of Washington’s world as they saw and talked about themselves—a charitable and all too rare approach. The one thing that has most consistently challenged my Tory attitude toward the Revolution is Washington’s personal character, which Brands allows to shine. I find I admire Washington most before his presidency, when he allowed the baleful influence of Hamilton to warp the entire forward trajectory of the country. Brands’s brief conclusion, in which he sums Washington up as a man of a lost age who, through his peculiar strength of character and old-world virtues, ushered in a new world, is surprising but certainly right. Washington, for better or worse, helped create a country that would eventually prove unable to create men like him.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, by Jim Corbett*—My favorite non-fiction of the summer. Corbett, a big game hunter and conservationist who lived most of his life in British India, retells the stories of man-eating tigers and leopards and what it took to stop them. Moving, dramatic, and exciting. Full review on the blog here.

Chaucer, by Peter Ackroyd*—One of a series of short biographies by Ackroyd (another is his Poe: A Life Cut Short, which is excellent), Chaucer offers a good portrait of the poet’s life and work. Ackroyd pays particular attention to Chaucer’s connections to London (including the detail, which I somehow didn’t know, that Wat Tyler’s rebels entered London through the gate above which Chaucer and his family were living in 1381) and the strengths and influence of his work. I listened to this on a long drive and would very much like to revisit it in print soon.

Thomas More: A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Marshall—A readable succinct overview of More’s life and work—as lawyer, philosopher, writer, and politician. Marshall is especially helpful on Utopia, a book whose meaning and seriousness I’ve never been able to settle on, and the more controversial episodes of More’s career. And as much as I love A Man for All Seasons, Marshall also quite rightly pushes back on Robert Bolt’s admirable but foreshortened version of More, aiming to present more of the man rather than the seasons. With Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, which I read back at the beginning of the year, that’s two excellent little books on principled but doomed lawyers this year.

Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sort of prequel to Goldsworthy’s Philip and Alexander, this book begins in the Mycenaean Era, tracing the development Athens and Sparta both as poleis with distinct cultures and institutions and as rivals in prestige and military power. Goldsworthy notes that most of what we know about Sparta comes from outsiders and is correspondingly careful in his analysis and judgments but without chucking all of the evidence as fiction the way some postmodern classicists do. The chapters on Athenian politics, the Persian Wars, and especially the two stages of the Peloponnesian War—which Goldsworthy, contra Thucydides, presents as the result of a two-way contest in status and prestige, all Greeks being keen to be seen as excellent—are clear, vivid, and appropriately dramatic. I especially appreciated Goldsworthy’s emphasis on contingency and the role of culture—nothing in this book was inevitable, and what finally drove Athens and Sparta into a destructive cycle of warring was not actually how different they were from each other but what they had in common.

Tame Your Thoughts: Three Tools to Transform Your Mind and Renew Your Life, by Max Lucado*—A simple book about worry, intrusive thoughts, and other problems. Lucado’s emphasis on rebutting untruth with truth and recognizing how the worrier gets caught up in false narratives of his own creation is especially helpful. The second half’s thematic chapters offer more more focused guidance on specific problems.

Nemesis: Medieval England’s Greatest Enemy, by Catherine Hanley—A biography of Philip II Augustus, King of France for forty-three years, as seen through his decades of conflict with four Plantagenet kings of England—Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, John, and Henry III. The focus is primarily political and strategic, though Hanley does a good job of bringing personality and culture into her pictures of all the major players. An extremely helpful book; though I have been long familiar with most of this story I had always learned and studied it from the Plantagenet perspective, and Hanley’s portrait of Philip as both a cunning and politically adept manipulator—a well-established image—and a king willing to master the hard work of siegecraft and take the field with the army was a revelation.

John Buchan June

With this fifth John Buchan June, I’ve finally exhausted the supply of Buchan novels and dipped a little further into his body of biography. A solid set of more obscure works. John Buchan June will return next year, but in what form I’m not yet sure. In the meantime, all reviews are linked below:

• Augustus (1937)

• The Half-Hearted (1900)

• The Magic Walking Stick (1932)

• A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906)

• The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

• The Long Traverse (1941)

• Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895)

It’s hard to name overall favorites with such an eclectic batch. The Half-Hearted represents some good early Buchan adventuring and Buchan’s two children’s novels, The Magic Walking Stick and the unfinished, posthumously published The Long Traverse, were both imaginative and fun. Probably the best book—considered as a book—was Augustus, an excellent and insightful biography that’s still worthwhile almost ninety years later, but I think I enjoyed The Magic Walking Stick most. Check out the reviews above!

Favorite kids’ books

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame—I read this aloud to the kids before bed over several weeks. I may have read excerpts in high school Lit but, if so, I didn’t remember a thing. The hype is real. The Wind in the Willows is a pure delight: beautifully written, strange and surprising, and funny throughout. I hesitated to class this under “kids’ books” but if there’s a children’s literature canon this would certainly be an important part of it, and rightly so. Brief reflection on how Grahame uses his fun, well-realized characters to introduce what in a lesser book might be called a plot contrivance here.

The Cow in the Dark at Night, by Jess Hannigan—An oblivious cow decides to stay awake all night to see what all the fuss is about and meets some interesting “night people” on her adventure. I can’t give anything else away—go into this book as cold as you can. It’s a hoot. A fun read-aloud for both adults and kids; I read this first to my wife after I picked it up at the library, then to our two older boys, and finally to our daughter, and all of them laughed out loud more than once.

Rereads

• La Vita Nuova, by Dante, trans. Joseph Luzzi

• A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

• Vincent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky, by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary GrandPré—Brief personal reflection on what this book has meant to me after a terrible bout of insomnia earlier this year here.

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan—Reread for the first time since the first John Buchan June for an interview on The Wade Show with Wade, available here.

• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury—Short reflection on the book’s most accurate and realistic “prediction” here.

Looking ahead

Having reread a couple books from high school—one I hated, one I loved—to see how they’ve held up, I’m doing the same with The Guns of Navarone, the basis of one of my favorite movies but a novel I found disappointing twenty-five years ago. After deliberately trying to read some of the good history I’ve had on standby near the end of the summer I plan to read more this fall, and hope to take a crack at a second Chestertober after a year without. And of course I will read fiction. I plan to leaven the last couple years’ steady diet of spy novels and classic thrillers with some bookish novels—literature about literature.

I have big plans. I hope y’all will be here for it. In the meantime, thanks as always for reading!

Fahrenheit 451’s most accurate prediction

Having just read a book I hated in high school and found it, as an adult, a masterpiece, I decided to revisit a book I loved in high school but certainly haven’t read in more than twenty years: Fahrenheit 451. To be brief, it holds up.

Not to be brief, it is a commonplace of literary conversation to pit rival dystopias against each other. The two most frequent combatants are Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Questions of literary quality aside, people debate which of the two better predicted the present. Leaving aside as well that “the present” is a moving target and neither author really intended to predict anything, Orwell is usually praised for imagining the modern surveillance state and its dog-eat-dog culture of denunciation and ideological purity and Huxley for his vision of a technocratic, efficiency-obsessed state that placates the masses with entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and hedonism and—in starkest contrast to Orwell—for depicting the oppression of his dystopia as self-imposed, even embraced.

I happen to agree that Huxley’s insight into the willingness of the masses to be oppressed as long as they can enjoy themselves marks Brave New World as more likely than Nineteen Eighty-Four, if not a better novel. But I think even Huxley misses a piece of the dystopian picture that Bradbury nails in Fahrenheit 451.

First, note that Fahrenheit 451, per Bradbury himself, is “not about censorship” but “the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens.”

Bradbury’s book aligns with Orwell’s in the mobilization of the masses as part of a program of surveillance—the scene in which a news program orders everyone in a neighborhood to look outside at the same time in an attempt to catch Montag and the people robotically obey is chilling, one of the most memorable in the novel—and with Huxley’s in the self-imposed nature of that surveillance. Rather than monitor everyone, all the time, the unseen, unnamed authorities who dispatch the firemen rely on informers. Why would people go along with that, especially as enthusiastically as the informants in the novel do?

Because they don’t want to be bothered, upset, or offended. Bradbury makes this point several times. Literature goes away because it’s too challenging, people are too likely to read things that upset them, and when they drift instead to easy, bland, mass-produced visual entertainment the government doesn’t even have to ban books, the people simply stop reading them—all except a few weirdos whom it is easy to crush as dangers to placid minds of the compliant.

But the most accurate, realistic detail of the entire Fahrenheit 451 scenario is not the surveillance or the ease with which the public can be offended or even how easily they can be manipulated, but just how embarrassingly tawdry the people’s entertainment is. Huxley imagines a world in which people have given up freedom—even the freedom to make their own families—for drugs and orgies. Bradbury correctly intuits that people will sell their freedom much more cheaply. The people of Fahrenheit 451 want interactive daytime TV, nonstop music piped directly into their ears, constant affirmation, and the biggest, brightest, most immersive screens possible. Then they sit there, existing.

If you want an eerily accurate prediction from one of these books, the zoned-out, enervated, and completely empty minds of Mildred and her friends—who even, based on the question “Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night?” enjoy short-form video content!—should meet all requirements.

Montag’s wife Mildred is pathetic not because she is unfree and infuriating not because she rats Montag out, but because she has bargained away her soul for a mess of pottage. Less than that, actually—pottage would at least be nourishing.

Toad ex machina

For the last couple months I’ve been slowly reading The Wind in the Willows to the kids before bedtime. Last night we finished the penultimate chapter, in which Toad, having escaped from prison and reached Rat’s riverbank hole after a madcap cross-country chase in disguise, learns that Toad Hall has been taken over by the stoats and weasels who live in the woods. They’re living off the fat of Toad’s patrimony and wrecking his house, and, what is more, have guards posted and regular patrols around the perimeter of the property.

Rat and Badger rule out a direct attack. The stoats on guard duty will warn the weasels, who will be ready and waiting—provided Toad and company ever get past the guards. Despite Rat’s passion for weaponry of all kinds, they’re outnumbered and outgunned by opponents who have no scruples. How will they ever get in and reclaim Toad Hall?

Then we read this exchange and revelation:

“Then it’s all over,” sobbed the Toad, crying into the sofa cushions. “I shall go and enlist for a soldier, and never see my dear Toad Hall any more!”

“Come, cheer up, Toady!” said the Badger. “There are more ways of getting back a place than taking it by storm. I haven’t said my last word yet. Now I’m going to tell you a great secret.”

Toad sat up slowly and dried his eyes. Secrets had an immense attraction for him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.

“There—is—an—underground—passage,” said the Badger, impressively, “that leads from the river-bank, quite near here, right up into the middle of Toad Hall.”

“O, nonsense! Badger,” said Toad, rather airily. “You’ve been listening to some of the yarns they spin in the public-houses about here. I know every inch of Toad Hall, inside and out. Nothing of the sort, I do assure you!”

“My young friend,” said the Badger, with great severity, “your father, who was a worthy animal—a lot worthier than some others I know—was a particular friend of mine, and told me a great deal he wouldn’t have dreamt of telling you. He discovered that passage—he didn’t make it, of course; that was done hundreds of years before he ever came to live there—and he repaired it and cleaned it out, because he thought it might come in useful some day, in case of trouble or danger; and he showed it to me. ‘Don’t let my son know about it,’ he said. ‘He’s a good boy, but very light and volatile in character, and simply cannot hold his tongue. If he’s ever in a real fix, and it would be of use to him, you may tell him about the secret passage; but not before.’”

Now for an odd comparison:

One of the great weaknesses of Ready Player One is that every time narrator Wade Watts meets some hitherto unprecedented challenge, something that should pose a problem and complicate his quest, he waves dismissively to the reader and lets us know he actually mastered whatever skill is required to complete it—playing an obscure arcade game, watching every episode of some trash 80s sitcom multiple times, memorizing every line of Monty Python and the Holy Grail—ages ago. No biggie. Very convenient.

Wade has a stash of knowledge and skills he only mentions once it becomes relevant. Ordinarily something like this should be set up or at least mentioned beforehand, as in a fair-play mystery. (Contrast this with the best Harry Potter novel, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Rowling performs dazzling sleight-of-plot with all but a few key elements plainly visible from the beginning.) What Ready Player One does is not exactly deus ex machina, but it feels both contrived and lazy and it’s all too common in bad fiction.

Badger’s revelation in Wind in the Willows, on the other hand, which similarly introduces a solution to a thorny problem just as it seems impossible, works. It works because the way the information is revealed is rooted in the characters. We know Toad all too well by this chapter—of course if there were a secret passage no one would tell him. And we know Badger both through his actions and his reputation among the other animals—of course if there were a secret passage he would be the best person to trust with the secret. It feels natural and therefore credible not because the secret passage was set up beforehand, but because of what we have seen of the characters all the way through.

The other animals looked hard at Toad to see how he would take it. Toad was inclined to be sulky at first; but he brightened up immediately, like the good fellow he was.

“Well, well,” he said; “perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am—my friends get round me—we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories—and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be. Never mind. Go on, Badger. How’s this passage of yours going to help us?”

That Kenneth Grahame is able to get some laughs—again, rooted in character—out of this plot point is just the icing on the cake.

A weird, unique, brilliant, funny, and fun little novel, and so much better written and plotted than a lot of fiction today. (This climactic section is also quite consciously modeled on the Odyssey, something even my kids picked up on. Perhaps material for a future post.) I’m glad I’m finally reading it and hope to finish it tonight.

“Disproving” Lord of the Flies

I’m not sure how many people would say William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is one of their “favorite” novels, but its persistence on school reading lists and its resulting popular familiarity has given it a lot of influence. It has also attracted criticism, especially from those who, in our sentimental age, find it too “depressing” or “pessimistic.” The deeper critics will sometimes invoke a Rousseauian image of man as “basically good” and condemn Golding for his refusal to acknowledge this. I don’t have much to say in response to this; whether you believe in original sin or not, if you can’t see the potential in yourself to succumb to Lord of the Flies-like pressures, Golding’s book is the medicine you need.

A popular recent line of critique I’ve seen—especially on social media—is that a real-life incident from shortly after the book’s publication “disproves” or shows it to be unrealistic. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys ran away from their boarding school in a stolen boat and, after being stranded on a desert island, lived fifteen months. They cooperated in finding food and shelter, established orderly routines, and, when finally discovered by a passing Australian fisherman, were in good health and high spirits.

I first recall seeing this argument around the time this Guardian piece came out in May 2020 (rough timing for someone flogging a “hopeful” history of mankind), but it comes up in cycles on Substack. It is usually presented as decisive, a gotcha for Golding and all the doomers who like his novel or at least found it compelling food for thought.

This is a weak argument and a poor comparison. The situation of the Tongan castaways is only superficially similar to Golding’s scenario—basically the only parallels are the school-age boys on an uninhabited Pacific island. The scale and circumstances are fundamentally different.

Consider: in the real-life incident, six teenage boys from similar backgrounds who were already friends planned and voluntarily ran away from their school. They brought preexisting community and shared goals to the island with them. Both collaboration and negotiation occurred at the level of intimate friendship.

In Lord of the Flies, dozens of boys, only some of whom actually know each other, are thrown together by happenstance when their plane is brought down in an apparent nuclear war. Their ages vary much more, they come from different backgrounds—the class and regional difference evinced by Piggy’s pronunciation of asthma is a significant repeated joke—and the only bonds they share are either created deliberately after the crash, as in the friendship of Ralph and Piggy or the entire community itself, or small preexisting cliques, like Jack and his crew of choirboys. Loyalty to these groups has to be subordinated to the whole, competing interests debated and judged, and peace maintained between strangers and enemies.

Golding is quite clearly concerned with the artificiality of society, which, to rise above the level of a mere organic group of friends, must combine and coordinate multiple such groups. The island setting is both a spoof of Victorian Robinsonades, novels in which decent chaps effortlessly remake civilization on remote islands, and a jab at the Enlightenment “state of nature” idea that undergirded them—and modern optimistic critics of the novel.

There may be legitimate lines of criticism to explore regarding Lord of the Flies—although not regarding its craft or magnificent science-fiction atmosphere—or the philosophical assumptions and worldview Golding expresses in it, but this isn’t one. The real-life Tongan boys’ adventure, as fascinating and dramatic as it is, bears more similarity to Huckleberry Finn than Lord of the Flies.