The Magic Walking Stick

The fifth John Buchan June continues with a true outlier in Buchan’s vast and varied body of work. In the more than one hundred books published in his lifetime, Buchan wrote history, thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, and short stories—including weird fiction and supernatural horror—but only one children’s novel. That novel is 1932’s The Magic Walking Stick.

Thirteen-year old Bill is home from his boarding school and eager to go hunting. On the eventful day narrated in the first chapter, he sets off from his family’s country home with one of the gamekeepers. A storm is brewing up and they’re in a hurry, but Bill falls behind when he can’t find his walking stick. The gamekeeper and dogs leave without him and Bill, giving up on finding the stick, hurries to catch up.

In a wonderfully atmospheric opening, signs and portents appear suggesting something uncanny is about to happen, but Bill is too rushed to pay proper attention. He is stopped, however, by the sight of a old man sitting under a hornbeam. The old man is curiously dressed and has a strange, high-pitched voice, but offers to sell Bill a new walking stick from the bundle of sticks he carries. He offers a peculiar one—of a reddish wood with a white, crescent-shaped handle at the top. Bill accepts and pays a farthing.

When Bill catches up to the gamekeeper and tells him about the old man, they turn back to look but the man—hornbeam tree and all—is gone.

What Bill discovers that day is that the stick, if set in the ground and twirled while one wishes to be in another location, will transport him there instantly. He learns this by accident during their hunt: to his great delight when he lands in the middle of a flock of ducks and to his gratitude and relief when he is saved from a flash flood.

This begins the most fun and adventurous part of the story, as Bill experiments with the stick and discovers more of what it can do. He visits exotic places in the Pacific and Africa and plays a bold trick on his family’s obnoxious neighbors. He also learns more about the stick itself. By happenstance, his father is reading a medieval chronicle and relates one of those curious side-stories so many medieval scribes included without elaborating on the details we’d love to know now. Two ancient staves named Beauty and Bands had made their way to Charlemagne’s court. They could, if used properly, transport their owners anywhere, but each observed certain limits: one could be used only for serious work, the other for amusement. Misuse them and they would, somehow, disappear—as, indeed, they had later in the Middle Ages.

Bill decides his stick must be one of these but, not knowing which it is, disciplines his use. He doesn’t want to transport himself to the Solomon Islands on a lark only to be abandoned there by the stick. As in so many good stories of magic and fantasy, his exploration of what precisely he can do is a lot of the fun.

I won’t go into all of Bill’s adventures, but by the middle of the book he has learned how to honor the purposes of both sticks and work within their limits, first by saving an uncle who had disappeared why flying over the Sahara and finally, in the novel’s longest and most consequential series of adventures, by helping young Crown Prince Anatole, the heir to the throne of a troubled eastern European kingdom called Gracia, escape his anti-monarchical enemies and claim his throne.

This second half is pure Ruritanian romance and, as noted by Buchan biographer Andrew Lownie, thematically meshes with other Buchan novels of the time, especially the Dickson McCunn books, which entangle the retired Scottish grocer in the dynastic disputes and revolutionary upheavals of Evallonia. But where The House of the Four Winds, especially, falls apart as a novel, The Magic Walking Stick captures the lightness and swashbuckling high spirits of books like the original Ruritanian romance, The Prisoner of Zenda. Gracia’s political situation is not over-elaborated, Bill’s pluck as well as his friendship with Anatole make their escapades fun and engaging, and Buchan throws in enough twists and reversals to keep it suspenseful.

I think it’s safe to call The Magic Walking Stick a minor Buchan work. The two biographies I have, those of Lownie and Ursula Buchan, each mention the book only two or three times, and only Lownie explains anything about its story and reception. In trying to run down a copy for John Buchan June, even the cash-grab print-on-demand versions available on Amazon were few, and I ended up reading it in e-book form through our local library. A Buchan book being hard to find was a new one for me. (I’ll note that the entire thing is available from Project Gutenberg.)

This is too bad, because The Magic Walking Stick has the lightness of touch, the brisk pace, and the winsome young hero common to much classic children’s fantasy. The situations Bill gets himself into are varied and cleverly executed, and the many settings—including tropical places continents away, the moors and forests of Buchan’s beloved Scotland, and the fields and hills of southern England, which are clearly based on the Oxfordshire landscapes around Elsfield, where Buchan lived with his family at the time—are simply but beautifully described. Buchan makes Bill’s leaps from the thorny scrub of Africa back to the cold and damp of England palpable.

I also enjoyed the glimpse this book provides into the world of a well-to-do English boy of the early 1930s. Bill goes hunting and angling with the family keeper, knows his way around the servants’ quarters and back passages and can use them for mischief, and can visit London where, at the age of thirteen, he buys his friend a rifle for £25. A totally lost world. If Buchan’s original readers could thrill to imagining themselves traveling anywhere instantly, a modern reader of any age might just relish imagining having the kind of freedom Bill enjoys.

The Magic Walking Stick was a welcome surprise. As children’s fantasy, it is not of the same rank as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia but, as both Tolkien and Lewis were fans of Buchan, it is difficult to imagine those books existing without books like this one. It is not deep, but it is fun and exciting, and still worth a read for both adults and kids.

The Half-Hearted

This fifth John Buchan June continues with The Half-Hearted, Buchan’s earliest novel with a contemporary setting, a story that ranges from Scotland to the mountains of northern India and concerns politics, espionage, love, and the tragedy of missed opportunities.

The Half-Hearted, appropriately, takes place in two parts. In the first, a young Scottish laird named Lewis Haystoun returns to his homeland after years abroad. He is beloved on his estate and among the locals and famous throughout the British Empire for his recently published travel book about the uncharted mountains of Kashmir. While fishing one day he meets Alice Wishart, the daughter of a successful merchant who has moved to the area. Alice had read Lewis’s book before moving to Scotland and has heard great things of him from his family and friends. Lewis and Alice are both smart, adventurous, and independent, and their attraction to each other is immediate.

And yet they never quite synchronize their attraction. Every time they meet some awkwardness intrudes—a misstep in manners, or Lewis, not wanting to appear too forward, erring on the side of formality, which suggests indifference to Alice, or some other misunderstanding. Their interest in each other survives, but only barely, and each missed opportunity further damages their shared hopes and Alice’s high regard for Lewis.

Further complicating matters, Lewis has a rival, Albert Stocks. Alice meets Stocks when she first arrives in Scotland and he shows immediate interest in her, but Stocks, a Radical politician, is a dull, unimaginative plodder. He is unattractive without being repellant, boring without being rude, and, above all, persistent.

Worse, Stocks defeats Lewis in an election. Lewis had only been convinced to run as a candidate by his more political friends, who appealed to his sense of duty. His obvious unwillingness to run and poor performance while campaigning almost convince Alice of his lack of courage and commitment—what she refers to as half-heartedness.

The story of Alice, Lewis, and Stocks reaches its climax during a picturesque country outing. While climbing a headland above a moorland pool, Alice and Lewis begin to connect at last, but the bank gives way beneath Alice and she falls into the river. Lewis, startled, does not react in time. Stocks does. Plunging instantly into the river, he hauls Alice to safety. Lewis, though thankful for Alice’s rescue, resents Stocks and blames himself intensely for that moment of unpreparedness and hesitation. Perhaps he is a coward, one of the half-hearted.

It’s this event—and that moment—that drive the first half of the novel to its conclusion and lead Lewis into the second.

In Part II, some of the geopolitical problems Lewis’s friends discuss offhandedly in Part I bring Lewis back to Kashmir. Thanks to his previous travels and familiarity with the area, he has been recruited for an intelligence-gathering mission. The authorities have already heard rumors of tribal disturbances and potential frontier uprisings and the Russians on the other side of the impassable, as yet unmapped interior mountains are reportedly massing troops. With the British army spread thin and consisting mostly of sepoy troops in small, vulnerable outposts, the imperial authorities need to know what precisely is going on, and need to know soon.

Forlorn and hopeless, as Lewis and Alice were only able, at last, to speak plainly to each other about their love once it was too late, Lewis hopes to redeem himself here, to show himself driven and courageous and capable of the unhesitating self-sacrifice required of the full-hearted man. Kashmir, where he made his name, will give him ample opportunity. This time he will not miss it.

The Half-Hearted was published in 1900, when Buchan was twenty-five and recently graduated from Oxford. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than his two previous books, the historical adventures John Burnet of Barns and A Lost Lady of Old Years, and is unusually psychologically acute. Buchan’s characters were always believable but seldom presented with such scrutiny of their thoughts. The vicissitudes of Alice and Lewis’s failed courtship, especially the reversals of Alice’s feelings with each new obstacle and misunderstanding, are realistically painful. These two people would be perfect for each other—would be.

The first half of the novel, though well-plotted, moves slowly, while the second half blazes past. Neither of these observations is a criticism—I enjoyed The Half-Hearted at a leisurely pace (which is why there was an uncharacteristic delay between this month’s first review and this one). Buchan’s nature writing is especially beautiful and the comedy of manners playing out in the upper class drawing rooms and moorland picnics of Scotland was enjoyable to imagine. There is even some humor, as when a nouveau riche visitor proves herself a bigger snob than the actual aristocrats. Fans of Richard Hannay will also appreciate the brief appearance of a Lady Clanroyden, whom one must assume is Sandy Arbuthnot’s mother.

That said, Buchan’s abilities as an adventure and thriller writer are apparent in the shift from Part I to Part II. Once Lewis has returned to Kashmir and received his mission, the novel steadily intensifies right up until the moving final pages. The intricacies of frontier espionage, the grueling nature of long-distance travel, the hazards of mountaineering, and the heroism of the desperate last stand all factor in, and all are thrilling.

It’s striking how much of Buchan’s later work is prefigured in The Half-Hearted. With a brave, noble character who willingly takes a loss for the sake of a woman and enters into realistically dangerous espionage work, I was reminded of Buchan’s underappreciated interwar novel A Prince of the Captivity. Its emphasis on the role of the lone, capable, honorable man racing against time is familiar from any number of other novels, from Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Midwinter and even Buchan’s more literary work like Witch Wood. Most resonantly, its plot of a man seeking redemption from his failings on a selfless task in a far-off rugged land bring to mind Buchan’s final and most moving novel, Sir Edward Leithen’s swansong, Sick Heart River.

The Half-Hearted is not as good as any of those later books but still has unique qualities that recommend it, not least its doomed romance. It is impossible to read about Alice and Lewis without feeling the agony of their near miss. While not rising to the level of Buchan’s best work, The Half-Hearted is an enjoyable read and an interesting early meditation on themes Buchan would elaborate and improve upon for the next forty years.

Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

Heir to the Empire

Well, here was a pleasant surprise. Though I’ve been aware of the legion of Star Wars novels that have been available since I was in elementary school, I’ve never read any, suspecting that their quality would lie somewhere between a Wookieepedia article and the usual movie tie-in novel. But over the years Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy has gotten consistent enough praise for me to notice, and the strong recommendations of several of y’all whose taste I trust finally convinced me to check out the first volume, Heir to the Empire.

This novel picks up a few years after the original film trilogy ended. Han Solo and Princess Leia have married and are expecting twins. Leia, slowly undergoing her own Jedi training under Luke, learns that the twins will be especially strong with the Force. Luke begins the story troubled by the division with the Rebellion—now billing itself as the New Republic—especially internal factions attempting to assert themselves against the Rebellion’s more established leaders. Like many rebellions, success may prove to be the worst thing that could happen to it.

This vulnerability of the New Republic, struggling for both legitimacy and unified purpose as the Empire crumbles, arises as the Empire calls up a new leader to deal with the threat to its hegemony. Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue-skinned, red-eyed being who has spent years campaigning in imperial backwaters, replaces Darth Vader. Thrawn views his predecessor as an unhinged mystic who catastrophically failed the Empire. He approaches defeating the New Republic with a combination of icy rationality and art. A connoisseur of painting and sculpture from worlds all over the Galaxy, Thrawn believes that understanding an opponent’s cultural background is as important in defeating them as pure logistics.

Not that the logistics don’t matter. The destruction of the second Death Star has created a manpower shortage across the Empire. Thrawn’s recruits are young and inexperienced, their training rushed and their discipline and protocol incomplete at best. Further, there is a shipping shortage across the Galaxy.

It’s this logistical problem that slowly becomes the center of the plot and draws the different characters together, as the New Republic dispatches Han to negotiate hiring smugglers as ad hoc transport—including some familiar characters from Han’s past—and Thrawn lays plans of his own for commandeering the vessels the Empire needs.

The one important plot element I haven’t mentioned here is the wild card: Mara Jade, a woman employed by one of the crime lords Han approaches about working for the New Republic. Mara is cagey about her past even with her boss, has an impressive breadth of technical skills she picked up who knows where, is familiar with the Force and lightsabers, and yearns to kill Luke Skywalker. But the less revealed about her, her background, and her quest to confront and kill Luke the better.

There’s much more going on in the story than even the above may suggest—including a trip to the Wookiee home world, a rogue leftover Jedi with a taste for mind control, and a race of brutal assassins Thrawn puts on the scent of Leia and her twins—and the richness with which Zahn evokes the world of the original trilogy is one of its pleasures. Heir to the Empire gives us a situation that believably continues that seen at the end of Return of the Jedi and introduces new complexity and depth to both the Rebellion and the Empire. But best of all, it provides an excellent villain. Thrawn is coolheaded, canny, skilled in both long-term strategy and tactical improvisation, and his insistence that culture matters combines menacingly with a typical Imperial willingness to use force. He proves a genuine threat to both the New Republic and to the familiar characters we care about.

But Zahn also manages to do what Disney failed at twenty years on: using the originals and their world to drive off in new directions that aren’t mere pastiche. Everything in Heir to the Empire feels truer to the original films and—perhaps even more importantly—plausible and true to real life than anything in the Disney trilogy. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s no wonder fans of books like this are ticked off with Disney.

But if Heir to the Empire stands out in comparison with something like The Last Jedi, that’s because it was already good in its own right. The quality of the writing itself is middling, improving over the course of the novel, but the plotting, characterization, and thoroughness of the world imagined by Zahn is outstanding. Heir to the Empire is solid genre fiction, which I’ve argued before no one should turn up their nose at, and enjoyable from beginning to end. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

The writing rule everyone misses

A recently popular genre of Substack note—judging by what the algorithm sends my way, anyway—is complaining by writers about “rules” for writing. These frequently take the form of fulminations against old advice to avoid adverbs. To paraphrase one note, which if I remember correctly was originally much ruder, “Every adverb I write is a little screw you to Stephen King.” More broadly, some will argue that the there are no rules for good writing and even to formulate rules is a kind of tyranny or imposition or—for a special subset of writers who self-consciously posture as independent outsiders—the mark of the dreaded “MFA writing.”

I can’t speak for every writer who has ever laid out a list of rules for their own writing, but these Substack warriors could save themselves a lot of time and lower their blood pressure by noticing one all-important caveat or disclaimer in every good list of rules I’ve ever seen: break the rules if breaking them will produce better writing.

In the early days of the blog I collected three sets of writing rules from three favorite writers: CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard. They have areas of broad overlap, especially a concern with precision and clarity, but here’s perhaps the most important:

• Orwell: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

• Leonard: “If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules.”

Orwell’s rule comes at the end of his list; Leonard’s before he even lays his out. They’re emphasizing that these are their rules for how they write, a set of strictures that they have found effective, but space must remain for artistic judgment. This rubbishes another species of Substack complaint about rules, one often leveled at Orwell specific: that of hypocrisy.

Most of the complaints I’ve seen about rules for writing stem from a misapplication of or unwarranted rigidity in a using particular set of rules. This is a legitimate problem. The rule against adverbs exists not because adverbs are inherently bad, but because they become a crutch for weak writers. Most of the items prohibited by lists of rules have this temptation about them: overuse of adverbs can cause verbs, where the action happens, to atrophy; overspecific dialogue tags can, in addition to reading clumsily, bear more of a burden of information than the dialogue itself; passive voice can become an unthinking habit until the involuted relation of subject and verb in repeated passive sentences kills the pace of writing. Noticing and controlling these effects is necessary for strong prose; never, ever using an adverb or passive voice is something a high school English teacher might enforce (indeed, I know specific examples), but is an overreaction.

Again—the authors who lay out these rules usually say exactly that. These rules aren’t hard and fast. These rules aren’t universal. Sometimes you must break them. After all, they’re my rules.

One would think that would settle it, but some of these complaints also seem born of willful misunderstanding or mere resentment. This isn’t limited to Substack writers: I was surprised several years ago to see Ursula Le Guin taking an obvious potshot at Leonard in her book on writing. She took much the same tack, talking about his rules as if they are obviously phony and accusing him of hypocrisy. She was wrong, and the complainers are wrong.

Most crucially, rejecting or refusing even to consider rules and constraints will warp a writer’s artistic judgment. Any attempt to be bold or daring must begin at a baseline, because without that one cannot make judgments about what does and doesn’t work, and a writer who never works within constraints will never grow. Writing without rules is no more feasible than living without them.

* * * * *

Addendum: Even Strunk and White, who are the object of a Two Minutes Hate that comes in almost predictable cycles, were trying to train the sensibilities of beginners, not lay down eternal laws of good writing. One can write well while ignoring their advice, but not until it’s become a conscious decision, not a habit one slips into.

Preliminary notes on worldbuilding

Over the weekend I started reading my first Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn. This isn’t my usual fare but it came highly recommended enough by enough trusted friends that I finally picked up a copy last year. I’m enjoying it.

What I’ve found especially enjoyable is the convincing post-Return of the Jedi situation Zahn imagines: the Empire struggling to recoup its losses, especially in manpower, and calling in reserves from the outer edges of its reach, and the Rebellion threatened by diverging priorities, in-fighting, overconfidence, and poor choices leading to bad PR. Grand Admiral Thrawn is not unlike “Hitler’s Fireman,” Field Marshal Walter Model, being rushed from one doomed campaign to another on the strength of his tactical acumen, and this outcome for the Rebellion will be familiar to anyone who saw Lawrence of Arabia or who has studied the American Revolution in real depth. (It is, in fact, the better outcome, since the members of most resistance movements end up like the protagonists of Rogue One, the most realistic Star Wars movie.)

That is, Heir to the Empire has good worldbuilding.

I hate the term worldbuilding.

It was cute as a term for what novelists, especially those dealing in fantastical or unfamiliar worlds, have to do to make their stories believable the first 10,000 times I heard it. But the more I heard it the less I liked it, or at least the way it was used—especially when it was used as a single criterion for praise of condemnation of a novel.

At any rate, Heir to the Empire got me thinking about this topic again, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and misgivings about it down in writing. Consider the following informal preliminary notes toward a full account of worldbuilding.

As I conceive of it, “good” worldbuilding works along or toward the following aspects of a story:

• Plausibility

• Complication

• Depth

• Thoroughness

In addition to their obvious purposes—any story should be plausible, right? and “deep” is always preferable to “shallow”—the first three should all suggest the fourth.

This brings me back, as so often, to John Gardner’s “fictive dream.” I’ve written about this in much more detail before, but the short version is that fiction works like a dream in absorbing the dreamer’s attention with a situation and story that are unquestionably real as long as the dream endures. It should be “vivid and continuous,” with the reader’s senses convinced by carefully selected concrete details and nothing to distract and “awaken” them.

Gardner’s conception of fiction as a dream is key to my own understanding of writing, but if it is missing or fails to account for anything it is the strangest and most uncanny aspect of dreaming. In a real dream, we simply know a lot of things beyond the specific events and details of the dream itself. A dream comes prepackaged with unexplained context. This is often the most difficult part of a dream to explain to whatever patient person you’re telling about it: “I was in the lobby at work, but it wasn’t really the lobby, it was an airport terminal, and I was there to…”

Worldbuilding’s best and most proper function, I think, is to fulfil this role, to provide context for what is assumed by the characters within the story. Because really vivid characters will seem to have existed before your story begins, in a world that was carrying on without waiting for you, the writer, or the reader to show up.

I have two basic problems with worldbuilding as it is popularly talked about. The first arises with the verbs I keep using: seem just now, and suggest above.

There is no law governing how much worldbuilding an author should or must do for a given story. It’s going to depend on the story. A novel about ordinary people with nine-to-five jobs set last year will not need a lot of deliberate, calculated explanation. A story set in, say, the marches between the native Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons in AD 550, or in a fantasy world, or in a galaxy far far away, will require much more. In writing a novel like these, some authors will lay it on with a trowel, and some readers will complain if they don’t.

But worldbuilding works best by suggesting thoroughness. The full world imagined by the writer should come through organically, without a lot of direct explanation, and “build” through allusive power that also characterizes and advances the plot. This requires skill and art. The infodump—which is not the same thing as exposition—does not. The writer must resist to urge to put every detail on the page. They must know what to leave out.

Pro and con examples: Tolkien is the paradigmatic example of allusive, suggestive worldbuilding done well. People who complain about the long songs or mentions of “irrelevant” legends of historical characters miss this dimension of his storytelling and read an impoverished version of his work. Robert Jordan, on the other, hand, actually does most of the things people accuse Tolkien of doing: going off on tangents, bringing the story to a halt for extraneous info, overexplaining, overdescribing, overstuffing.

My second problem with worldbuilding is that, as much as it is discussed as some special characteristic of fantasy, science fiction, or some other genre, it is something all writers of all fiction should be doing. Indeed, if they’re doing a good job of writing fiction at all, they’re already doing it. It is inseparable from imagination and good craftsmanship and is, ultimately, a meaningless subcategory of creativity. See again Gardner’s fictive dream.

Again, these are notes on the subject, not an exhaustive treatment. I may revisit the topic again soon, especially if having gotten this into writing I’m able to refine my thoughts.

Len Deighton, RIP

I was sorry to learn yesterday that novelist Len Deighton had died Sunday, aged 97. Deighton has an important place in the history of the spy novel and the thriller and a well-earned reputation for style, precision, and craftsmanship in his fiction. His excellence in these areas sets him apart from many of his successors in both genres.

I can’t remember when or where I first heard Deighton’s name. I seem to always have been aware of it. As my interest in the thriller genre deepened, his name came up more and more often as an innovator, an influence, and one of the masters. Shortly after Sarah and I married—when I had the first draft of Dark Full of Enemies on ice—I found a used copy of his name-making first novel, The IPCRESS File, and dove into it.

Here’s where my story may depart from other fans’: I didn’t care much for it. I found it disjointed and hard to follow. But it stuck with me—I still can’t say why. When I finished it I was dissatisfied but wanted to read more, and suspected that not getting The IPCRESS File was due to some failure on my part. I had to be missing something.

Fast forward some years and, after almost picking it up at the used book store many time, I splurged on Grove Atlantic’s new paperback of Berlin Game, the first in his Game Set Match trilogy centered on British spy Bernie Samson. I loved it from the first page, and followed it quickly with Mexico Set and London Match. I was irrevocably a Deighton fan. Bomber was one of my three favorite fiction reads last year. And I was delighted to learn, as I started collecting the new reissues, that Deighton was still alive in his late nineties.

He hadn’t published much more than afterwords to his previous work or this short, gossipy memoir of Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory in thirty years, since the final Bernie Samson novel, Charity. As one of his obituaries put it, he simply “appeared to switch off his word processor and, without fanfare, retire.” As was his right. But, just like with Charles Portis, I wonder what further joys we might have had of him.

You can get further details of Deighton’s life from the articles and memorials I’ve gathered below. What I most appreciate about Deighton is his work, of course, which is detailed without being overstuffed, technical without getting bogged down in irrelevant minutiae or wrecking the pacing, intricately plotted without turning his characters into automatons, character-driven without navel-gazing. Few thriller writers since have struck such a precise balance.

And his tone: I’ve seen his voice or characters or storytelling called “cynical” in a number of places, often in an attempt to belittle the thriller writers who came before him, but I don’t see it. Bomber may reflect bitterly the waste and confusion of modern war but it is intensely earnest. Deighton’s work is characterized not so much by cynicism as a studied wryness, an awareness of the tragedy and futility of the world that is often appropriate to the situations in his books, and just as often a life-saving skill. Not that his stories are grim or nihilistic. His ironic sense of humor pervades his books, adding an edge where needed and taking the edge off when things get grim. Deighton was an artist and brought a sharp sense of proportion to his craft.

Beyond the books, I appreciated his self-effacing manner in the handful of interviews he gave and his unmysterious nuts-and-bolts approach to his work. He had no pretensions, just dedication and skill. In this he was like another favorite writer: Elmore Leonard. Listening to both was a pleasure, and I’ve learned a lot from both. We all could. We shall not see their like again.

The Guardian had an unusually but justifiably long obituary that is well worth your time to read. Here’s a shorter BBC obit that is also worthwhile, and a sweet personal reminiscence by food journalist Tim Hayward on his surprising chance to interview Deighton. You can listen to the interview here or, if you can’t get that link to work (I couldn’t), on Apple Podcasts here. Finally, here are two older interviews that I’ve enjoyed and revisited several times—one with Melvyn Bragg for the BBC in 1977 and a studio interview for Thames TV in 1983. I blogged about a few comments from the former, about the writer’s duty to entertain, almost exactly a year ago.

Len Deighton, artist, entertainer, and exacting literary craftsman, RIP.

State of Siege

In reviewing Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev last year, I noted that Ambler’s postwar novels, while focusing on polyglot, cosmopolitan, but out-of-the-way worlds unsettled by global events like his early classics, are marked by a broader scope and more mature perspective. Deltchev, his first postwar thriller, takes place in an unnamed Eastern European state faced with imminent Stalinist takeover. His next, The Schirmer Inheritance, follows an American lawyer tasked with settling an old lady’s estate on a journey through postwar West Germany, its scarcely buried past, and the lingering dangers of guerrilla warfare in Greece. Passage of Arms sprawls across British-controlled Malaya, newly independent and unsettled Indonesia, arms trafficking, Communist insurgency, Chinese organized crime, and American tourists.

These are tense and well-plotted but slower, statelier, with seemingly more at stake than the fates of their characters. State of Siege, published in 1956 between The Schirmer Inheritance and Passage of Arms, comes as a bit of a surprise then.

When the novel begins, British engineer Steve Fraser has finished a three-year assignment to build a dam on the island of Sunda, a former Dutch colony that has gained its independence from both the Dutch and Sukarno’s Indonesia. The dam is part of an international development scheme for southeast Asia. Fraser believes in the work but is happy to be leaving. Rampant local corruption and a succession of inept, unqualified native liaisons with the Sundanese government have left him disillusioned if not embittered. Only one local, Major Suparto, has proven tough, intelligent, competent, and genuinely involved with the project—suspiciously so.

Fraser flies to the capital, Selampang, and has only to wait a few days for the regularly scheduled cargo plane out. An Australian friend sets him up with female company, a half-Dutch, half-Sundanese girl named Rosalie van Linden, and his apartment on the town square by the radio station. Fraser is set for a pleasant few days before flying home but for one discordant note: while walking with Rosalie in the garden of a club, he overhears a voice he recognizes—Major Suparto.

The major has arrived by jeep from the dam, a strenuous daylong drive on seasonal roads through territory controlled by leftwing nationalist rebels under General Sanusi, who hopes to root out corruption and turn Sunda into an Islamic republic. That Suparto has arrived on the same day as Fraser, who flew, suggests that he is a part of the rebel movement, and his overheard conversation with “the general” seems to prove it.

Fraser puts it out of his mind. Whatever Suparto, the rebels, and local mobsters are up to, he’s leaving. He continues his preparations to return home, has a second date with Rosalie, and takes her back to his friend’s apartment.

That night, revolution breaks out.

The army having left Selampang on maneuvers, Sanusi’s rebels seize the opportunity to take over the capital and declare a regime change. His troops occupy the city and take over the radio station. Fraser and Rosalie, in their friend’s apartment nextdoor, find their building turned into the headquarters of Sanusi himself.

There they sit, trapped at the center of the revolution, watching and waiting through aerial and naval bombardment, street fighting, the revelation of competing loyalties and betrayal among the revolutionaries, and the growing pressure in Sanusi’s inner circle to eliminate any potential threat to the revolution, including Fraser and Rosalie: one a foreigner, the other a child of the former colonial oppressors.

I began by saying that State of Siege proved a bit of a surprise among Ambler’s postwar thrillers. Like the others I mentioned it has a sweeping, utterly realistic and plausible scope. Sunda is a fictitious island—one of several Ruritanias Ambler dreamed up for his stories, and likely the most vividly realized of them—but it feels of a piece with that part of the world at that time. Ambler never bludgeons the reader with explanation but allows the corruption and mismanagement of the national government, the idealism and brutality of the Islamic rebels, the broader political situation, the ethnic hodgepodge of Selampang, with its foreign engineers, Chinese business class and gangsters, and benighted native population, and even the geography of the conflict to emerge effortlessly, through Fraser simply telling his story.

That gives State of Siege a real-world believability and convinces the reader of the danger Fraser and Rosalie face, but Ambler combines this quality with the best of his pre-war thriller pacing. His typically skillful use of foreshadowing helps sets the story in motion from the first page and, once underway, the action and suspense build steadily right up to the end.

Fraser and Rosalie are also standouts among Ambler’s protagonists. His novels typically feature unadventurous, nose-to-the-grindstone types—often engineers, as Ambler had formal education in engineering—who find themselves embroiled in international intrigues not of their own making, and Steve Fraser seems at first to fit the standard Ambler type. But he proves unusually resourceful and plucky and, perhaps uniquely for Ambler’s put-upon main characters, keeps his cool in danger. A mid-story sequence in which Fraser is forced to work for the rebels in order to protect himself and Rosalie is arduous, tense, and makes his engineering an exciting and integral part of the plot.

And Rosalie may be Ambler’s best leading lady, not only working as a foil and romantic interest to Fraser but contributing, through her personal story growing up among the Dutch plantations in the back country, a strong sense of dread over the outcome of the revolution. Fraser is a tough, fundamentally honest man who wants to think well of people. Rosalie has no illusions whatsoever about what will happen to her if Sanusi’s side wins. Her perspective not only heightens the tension but adds to the realistic murk of Sunda. One’s sympathies may be pulled in one direction or the other—a tension maintained by the complicated and surprising rebel characters—but one cannot sensibly call either side in the revolution the “good guys.”

Finally, one of the unusual joys of State of Siege is watching Fraser and Rosalie’s casual, transactional relationship deepen through the danger they share. Ambler was not known for his romantic plots, but this works wonderfully, not least—without giving too much away—by adding a bittersweet note to the novel’s ending.

Short, briskly paced, but rich and surprising and centered on two of Ambler’s most sympathetic characters, State of Siege may well be my favorite of postwar Ambler. I hope to read it again soon.

A Rough Shoot

Geoffrey Household knew how to open a thriller. His most famous book, Rogue Male, published in 1939 and which I read just over three years ago, begins with its unnamed protagonist in the hands of an unnamed central European dictatorship’s unnamed secret police, who have tortured him nearly to death and are about to dispose of him using a convenient cliff. Believe it or not, the situation escalates from there.

A Rough Shoot, published in 1951, continues this tradition. Roger Taine, a former British Army infantry colonel and now a salesman and family man, is walking the patch of Dorset farmland to which he’s purchased the hunting rights when he spots two men in the bushes. The sun is going down and he can’t see clearly what they’re doing, but they seem to be rigging up traps and he assumes them to be poachers. When one of them, backing through the hedge on hands and knees, presents his backside as a target, Taine decides to give the poachers a painful scare. He levels his shotgun and gives the man a load of birdshot.

The man collapses and his companion flees. Taine realizes that something has gone wrong. He approaches the man he shot where he lies unmoving on the ground and rolls him over. The men had been putting down big triangular stakes for some kind of device and, when Taine shot him, the man had fallen chest-first onto one of them.

None of this is a spoiler—it all happens in the first three pages. The rest of the novel is Taine’s attempt to deal with the consequences and discover who the two men were and what they were doing.

A Rough Shoot, like Rogue Male, has the Buchanesque qualities of vividly realized landscapes and the continuous chase. Taine’s predicament evolves as newer and greater dangers present themselves, keeping the ongoing action fresh and exciting. From Taine’s attempt to conceal the body and his realization that more and more suspicious men are poking around his shoot, asking questions of the tenant farmer and landowner and wanting to find out more about him, to his meeting with an former Polish commando whose story of exile, unofficial espionage, and a rising neo-fascism coordinating itself across Western Europe, A Rough Shoot escalates continuously in tension and stakes. What begins as a personal crisis for Taine—he is guilty, by his estimation, of manslaughter at least—turns into a tiny local battle in the ruins and upset of the postwar.

I can’t say much more without revealing too many specifics, but Taine’s business, wife, and children are inevitably drawn into a plot begun by Taine’s one impetuous, high-spirited act, and the first half’s smothering tension of concealment, silence, and stalking—the suspense of hunting—gives way in the final third to the chase: the prey flushed, the hunters pursuing.

I reflected a couple years ago on what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to visit the bookstalls and see a steady stream of novels like this—unpretentious gems of pure craft and enjoyment—flowing from publishers. Reading A Rough Shoot, a slender novel with no chapter divisions, just steadily building story, I could imagine myself traveling by train and needing a good page turner. A Rough Shoot would have fit the bill back then and, thanks to the strength of its simple but tense and Household’s exquisite craft, it still does. It’s inventive and exhilarating and was one of the joys of our recent time snowed in. This is only the second Household thriller I’ve read, but there will be more.

Mars in Aries

Last year I discovered the work of Alexander Lernet-Holenia, an Austrian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and soldier. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War and as an Austrian reservist in the Wehrmacht, Austria having been consumed by the Third Reich in the Anschluß, in the Second. His work—at least what I’ve read so far, and I’m always looking for more—is atmospheric and uncanny, with his protagonists descending or arriving unexpectedly in worlds in which the invisible is made manifest and layered over the day-to-day.

Baron Bagge, the novella I reviewed for Miller’s Book Review last summer, does this with an Austrian cavalryman in the First World War. Count Luna, about an Austrian businessman convinced that a former rival who died in the concentration camps is haunting him, does this in the aftermath of the Second World War. Mars in Aries not only takes place during the Second World War, it was written and published—and banned—while it was yet ongoing.

Mars in Aries tells the story of Lieutenant Wallmoden who, we learn on the first page, is not the novel’s hero, simply its main character. The story takes place over a month or so in the late summer of 1939 as Wallmoden, an Austrian reservist, volunteers to join his unit rather than wait to be called up for mobilization by the Germans. He whiles away this peacetime service talking to his brother officers, conducting training exercises, and—occasionally—experiencing visions.

In an especially vivid one that occurs during training, Wallmoden is leading troops across a field near a village when he finds himself surrounded by ghosts. An army doctor assures him he is in good health, but it unsettles Wallmoden to have experienced this after conversations with another officer, a man of a mystical bent and with an interest in spiritualism, about whether or not one can tell if another person is an apparition.

Being of a well-off background and an officer, Wallmoden also makes social calls. It is during one of these that he meets Baroness Pistohlkors. She claims to have been born in the United States and briefly married there before being dumped—all the result of a misunderstanding—and remarrying a consumptive nobleman who moved her back to Europe and promptly died. Still young and breathtakingly beautiful, she is a titled and wealthy widow. An old man who is, strangely, often in her company, insinuates to Wallmoden that despite the two marriages the Baroness is still a virgin.

Wallmoden finds the old man offputting, the Baroness’s foreign friends strange, and her behavior stranger still—why, for instance, does she sometimes speak to only one other person at parties? or disappear before the parties end? and why do the handful of people who know her warn him of her bad reputation?—but he is smitten.

In just a few weeks, heedless of whatever she has earned a reputation for, he develops a passion for her, but the Baroness plays hard to get. Only after Wallmoden’s dogged pursuit does she, one day, agree to meet him for a tryst. They set a date and time for their rendezvous and Wallmoden returns to his camp.

That night the army deploys.

Wallmoden’s unit drives from Vienna to the Slovakian border with Poland preparatory to the German invasion. Wallmoden is unaware of the geopolitical maneuvers by the higher powers, never named, who control world politics, and is preoccupied with letting Baroness Pistohlkors know why he missed their meeting and with scheduling a belated one. He also continues to have visions or waking dreams, like a crawfish migration across the road leading over the Polish border or a ghostly encounter with two bathing girls from some past time, an encounter invisible to everyone else and that leaves no sign behind except a pair of wet footprints.

I don’t want to reveal anything further. I’ve already worked to conceal a lot about the plot. Wallmoden eagerly awaits word from the Baroness, the invasion comes and his unit strikes into Poland, he gets some surprising bad news, and has a yet more surprising encounter after being wounded. The story ends with a stunning reversal, with Wallmoden content but—both literally and metaphorically—nowhere near where he wanted to be.

Mars in Aries may well be my favorite of Lernet-Holenia’s books so far. It has the atmosphere of Baron Bagge and the absorbing ambiguity of Count Luna, as well as a satisfying streak of mystery. It works as both a romance and a war novel. The first half, in which we follow Wallmoden on his desperate bid for Baroness Pistohlkors’s heart, should prove especially poignant to anyone who ever felt unrequited love, and the second half, covering the invasion of Poland, utterly swamps the first. Lernet-Holenia, basing the book on his own experiences in the Wehrmacht, makes the invasion viscerally real—hot, dusty, exhausting, a parade of destruction and casual violence. The harsh reality of these scenes—to which I’ll return momentarily—make the reversal at the end that much more surprising.

The title, an astrological sign, does not reflect any actual celestial alignments during the invasion but apparently does suggest passion and aggressive desire. This is thematically appropriate, but the novel’s original title, The Blue Hour (Die blaue Stunde), a slang term used within the story for brief romantic trysts, works well on several levels, too.

As an additional layer of interest, Mars in Aries was published in 1941 and immediately banned by the Nazis. Actually banned, as in: sale was legally prohibited and the print run put in storage and destroyed. Reading it now, its apparent inoffensiveness—a love story with some mystical elements—may obscure what the Propaganda Ministry objected to. While the novel portrays German victory in Poland, it shows soldiering as unromantic, unheroic, and laborious; some of Wallmoden’s fellow officers openly talk about annihilating civilian settlements; the Poles, though rarely seen by Wallmoden, accordingly have an tone of underdog heroism; and some of the strange social gatherings in the first half of the novel suggest criminal activity—as a few other characters point out to Wallmoden—including Resistance work.

Fortunately, Lernet-Holenia had kept his publisher’s proofs and used them to republish the book after the war. I’m glad he did, and that the combined might of real censorship and Allied bombing couldn’t erase Mars in Aries.

This is an unusual novel, with a unique combination of romance, the uncanny or even gothic, and realistic warfare, and its climax is a suspenseful and moving surprise. Mars in Aries is beautifully written, exceptionally well-crafted, and, at about 200 pages, compact and powerful. I look forward to rereading it soon.