Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

A good visit with Bookish Questions

Last week I was honored to talk to Alan Cornett of the excellent Cultural Debris podcast about my latest book, The Snipers. This video interview is part of a new short-form author interview project called “Bookish Questions.” I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this ten-minute chat.

Among the topics of conversation were not only The Snipers but also some of my other work, what I’m reading, what I recommend, what I’m working on and planning ahead for right now, and why it is that I gravitate toward writing historical fiction.

Be sure to check out Cultural Debris on the podcast platform of you choice. If you want good episodes to start with, I’ve enjoyed Alan’s interviews with Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway, medievalist and CS Lewis scholar Jason M Baxter, author and literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, and CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

The Twilight World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blanket of the Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Snipers has arrived!

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

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

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

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

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

One certainly hopes, anyway.

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

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

Coming soon: The Snipers

I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest book, a World War II novella titled The Snipers.

The Snipers takes place during the Battle of Aachen in October of 1944. Four months on from D-day, the Allies are pressing into the western edges of Germany and slowly, laboriously penetrating the Siegfried Line. Aachen, the former chief residence of Charlemagne and one of Germany’s most prestigious and historical cities, is heavily defended, and as the US Army enters the outskirts of the city one unit comes under devastating sniper fire. Their battalion commander, unable to slow the offensive, instead calls up the leader of his reconnaissance squad, Sergeant JL Justus for a special assignment—find and kill the German sniper harrying the men of Charlie Company.

Justus has only two men left in his squad after the continuous slog from Normandy to Germany, and he has just settled down to some much-deserved rest in reserve as other units push into the city. But he has sharpshooting experience from the weeks following D-day and the boys under fire need him. And so he and his buddies Whittaker and Porter load up and enter the city.

Justus, a Georgia boy with an abiding interest in the Civil War and a wry sense of the absurd, has his doubts about the mission. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how is he supposed to find him? Can he do so before many more men are killed? And why is the commander of Charlie Company so certain that there is more than one sniper?

The rest of the story, which takes place across a single day of block-by-block, house-to-house fighting through the rubble of a once-beautiful city, will challenge and shock Justus in more ways than one. I hope it will do the same for the reader.

I’m quite excited about this one. I may related the genesis of the story here sometime soon, but for now I’ll say that once I had it in my head it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d gotten it down in writing. My hope is that it will prove a brisk but involving action story, both thought-provoking and poignant and with a dash of humor, ideal for reading in two or three sittings. At 35,000 words, it’s a little less than half the length of my previous World War II novel, Dark Full of Enemies.

The first paperback proofs of the novel arrived just this afternoon. I’ve included a gallery below that I hope y’all will accept as a preview. Pending tweaks and final corrections—which should be minimal thanks to the efforts of friends and beta readers who have already looked at the manuscript and provided helpful feedback—I hope to have The Snipers out and available on Amazon before the end of the month, just in time for the Independence Day holiday.

Last week I reorganized my website’s Books page to divide full-length novels like Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville from short fiction, and to add The Snipers. You can look at the dedicated page for The Snipers, with paperback and Kindle purchasing links (not yet activated), here.

Thanks for reading! This one came together unusually quickly and I hope y’all will check it out once it’s available. Stay tuned!

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.

The Inheritors

Years ago I wrote here about Chesterton’s definition of bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” Chesterton wrote of contemporaries refusing to see one another’s political or religious perspectives—a distance that is difficult enough to bridge at any time. But what about perspectives separated by millennia? The Inheritors, William Golding’s second novel, attempts to reaching deep into prehistory to imagine a mind far more alien than any political or cultural opponent we resent today.

The Inheritors follows Lok, a Neanderthal man who is one of the junior males in a dwindling family group. The group is led by Mal, the eldest male; the old woman, who the reader gradually infers is Lok’s mother; Fa, Lok’s mate; Liku, their young daughter, to whom Lok is affectionate and devoted; Ha, another young man; Nil, his mate; and the new one, Ha and Nil’s infant boy.

When the novel begins, Lok’s group are returning inland from a winter by the sea. In the first of an series of troubling complications, Lok’s group discovers that the log they have always used to cross a river in their path has gone missing. They find another shorter, thinner log and lay it over the water and all cross safely except Mal, their capable but aging patriarch. He falls off as he crosses and though he is able to crawl out to safety, the chilly river, swollen with snowmelt, breaks his health. By the next evening, as the group shelters under a cliff overhang by a large waterfall upriver, Mal lies dying. And Lok has begun to notice that their group, despite the precautions they take against wolves and big cats, are not alone.

Snatches of strange voices and glimpses of figures and fires through the trees alarm Lok, who tries both to investigate the strangers and to warn the rest of his group about the “new people.” But Mal’s sickness, death, and burial, the delay in their journey, and their constant need for food distract and disperse them. When the scale of the threat the new people pose finally becomes clear, it is too late. The new people kill several of Lok’s band and kidnap Liku and the new one.

Lok and Fa are able to escape and observe the new people from high in a tree for one long, terrible night. The new people not only use fire—like Lok and his band, who relied upon the old woman to carry live coals from stage to stage on their journey upriver—but make it. They build roaring bonfires around which they gather, eat, and argue. They make artificial caves to shelter in at night. They can cross the river at will in hollow logs. They wear skins and furs and jewelry. They make honey-smelling liquids that provoke wild and violent behavior. The men and women intrigue with and against each other. And they carry bent branches with which, when they catch sight of Lok, they attempt to “give” him sharp flint-headed twigs.

The middle and end of The Inheritors follows Lok’s epiphany that, with Mal dead, he is the new Mal, a startling and terrifying realization of responsibility in the face of danger. The Inheritors is, then, a coming-of-age story of a kind. With Fa, Lok, the newly minted leader of their threatened group, determines to save Liku and the new one from the strangers. It is not a spoiler to say that their rescue attempt does not end well.

The final chapter shifts perspective from Lok to one of the new people—a group of modern man, Homo sapiens, in flight after their leader stole another man’s woman—and ends the novel with a note of tragedy and a deep sense of foreboding. After all, for the modern men who encountered Lok and his band by the river, this only the beginning of the story.

The Inheritors does several things I really love in a novel. First, it drops the reader into a completely foreign time, place, and mindset and trusts the reader to keep up and figure it out. Golding narrates this world in a stripped-down, direct, and forceful style with a deliberately limited vocabulary. He involves the reader in Lok’s perspective immediately—it is totally absorbing. Golding makes this alien world comprehensible and carefully prepares the way for the reader to understand while never spoonfeeding information. It’s expertly crafted.

This is because, second, Golding commits totally to telling this story from the point of view of Lok, who has an alien mind. The Neanderthals, in Golding’s telling, are intuitive rather than rational, relying on mental “pictures” that they can communicate to each other through minimalistic callbacks and shared memory. Their world is a flux of habit, play, affection, fear, and hunger. This attempt to bring the reader into the Neanderthal mind could have gone horribly wrong—but Golding executes it brilliantly.

That’s because, third, Golding uses the immense dramatic irony of this perspective to provoke suspense, horror, and above all a deep sympathy. I’ve written before about how the irony of a past person’s limited knowledge and understanding is a tricky, distancing authorial tool, one more often used to scorn or belittle characters than to understand them, but Golding evokes nothing but pathos for Lok and his people. He treats them and their situation seriously, and their fates as genuine tragedies. Lok may not have a word for the love he feels for Liku, but Golding makes us feel it as Lok feels it. And the dread—a far more powerful emotion to me than mere horror—that Golding generates is nearly unbearable. Fa, who sees more and understands quicker than Lok, is perhaps the most compelling character in this regard. The conclusion of their night watching the new people from the tree, in which Fa turns Lok’s face away from the fire in the clearing while she watches the new people with wide, unblinking, tear-shining eyes, is the stuff of nightmares.

I have to point out that the Neanderthals as described by Golding don’t match what we know of Neanderthal life today. Unlike Lok and his group, Neanderthals made and used tools, hunted and waged war, built dwellings, ate meat, and wore clothes. (My own, personal, non-expert suspicion based on Neanderthal archaeology is that Neanderthals were really just a funny-looking subgroup of modern man.) I actually wondered a few times if Lok’s people were not some yet earlier form of man and the new people Neanderthals, but these modern scientific terms are not used and it doesn’t ultimately matter. The Inheritors may not be a textbook description of Ice Age early man, but as an invitation to imagine ourselves and our nature from a radical and unflattering alternate perspective it is unmatched.

I began Griswoldville with three epigraphs, one of which was this favorite line from an essay by Richard Weaver: “It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who are left behind.” The Inheritors is perhaps the ultimate such imaginative alliance, one that not only shocks and moves but should cause us to consider the cost and meaning of progress.

The Pale Blue Eye

Speaking of breaking the basic rules of fair play in a whodunit, my first fiction read of 2023 was the historical mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I first heard of this novel late last year when the teaser for the Netflix film adaptation arrived. A lifelong Poe devotee, I was immediately intrigued. I dithered over whether to read the novel as I have had some of my own Poe-related fiction simmering for a few years, but as I don’t have Netflix and the basic premise wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to go for it.

I read it in just a few days right after the New Year. I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering it ever since.

The film has been out a while now so the broad outlines of the story should be familiar. Retired New York City constable Gus Landor is called one fine autumn day to meet with the commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The commandant, Sylvanus Thayer, tells Landor that one of the Academy’s cadets has been found hanged. Thayer has already ruled out suicide, as after the victim was discovered his body was cut down and his heart cut out. The corpse they removed to the infirmary. The heart has yet to be found. Thayer asks Landor to investigate, both to find the killer and to protect the Academy, which is still new, untested, and the object of suspicion among some citizens of the young republic.

Landor, a consumptive who lives continuously aware of his impending death, agrees to his request with some strict conditions and begins. He questions witnesses, examines the body, searches the barracks, and goes over the grounds of the Academy and the place near the Hudson where the body was found. In the course of his searches he meets a first-year cadet from Virginia, one Edgar A Poe, who offers Landor one sharp bit of advice and disappears. His curiosity piqued, Landor later seeks Poe out at a local tavern and the two strike up an odd partnership built around solving the crime—part crime-fighting duo, part mentor-protégé, part estranged father and orphaned son.

Their partnership is deepened and tested when more cadets are murdered and, even more disturbingly, evidence mounts of some kind of satanic worship extending right into the ranks of the Academy itself.

I don’t want to give much more away, as the unfolding of the investigation, the accumulation of clues, and the working relationship between Landor and Poe is one of The Pale Blue Eye’s great joys. It is also, as it turns out, one of its great frustrations.

Before I get into the one major spoiler, let me praise the two best features of the novel. First, the narrative voice: wry, sardonic, blunt and straightforward but with a finely honed poetic edge, Landor tells his story in such a way that a reader is guaranteed to be hooked. Even when the story’s pacing flagged—as it does in a few places near the middle—I was drawn along by Landor’s narration, which never lost my interest.

The other strength of The Pale Blue Eye is its portrait of young Poe. His semester and a half at West Point is often passed over as a biographical curiosity, but Bayard gives Poe’s time there a central place in his life story and brings this young man, burdened with a hard background and self-sabotaging flaws but buoyed by a tremendous trust in his own gifts, to vibrant life. (Bayard’s interpretation owes too much to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, who psychologized and pathologized and autobiographized Poe’s work to death, but that angle is probably only discernible to the enthusiast.) I’ve seen some readers complain that the novel is dull whenever Poe is “offscreen”; I disagree, but it does take on an irresistible energy whenever he appears.

That said, I’ve been reflecting on The Pale Blue Eye ever since I finished it not only because I enjoyed it so much, but because its conclusion, its climactic revelation, was such a cheat: it turns out that the first murdered cadet was killed by Landor himself.

In my post about Glass Onion’s failure to play fair with its audience, I mentioned Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective fiction. Knox’s rules had been on my mind because of that movie and I sought out the specific rules again because of this novel. In the case of The Pale Blue Eye, rules seven and eight are broken: “The detective himself must not commit the crime” and “The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.”

Given the structure and narration of The Pale Blue Eye, violating the one necessitates violating the other. Landor, having already murdered the first victim when the novel begins, withholds key information—namely, that the cadet had been one of several who had gangraped Landor’s daughter, an act that drove her to suicide. Instead, Landor misleads, telling everyone he meets and us, the readers, directly, that his daughter has left him. This is left as vague as possible: perhaps she ran off with a man, perhaps she died… somehow. Landor’s own tuberculosis offers the reader a red herring by association. His tragic backstory, when it is alluded to, is only a tragic backstory, presented with no apparent connection to the events at the Academy because Landor never gives any specifics regrading what happened to his daughter.

The point is that, until Landor explains precisely what happened in the final pages of the book, the reader could never have guessed at these relationships or events. Even when, about halfway through, I first darkly suspected that Landor was involved in the first murder I told myself it couldn’t be—there was nothing to base that suspicion on. Once Landor confesses to Poe and the reader, it recasts not only the meaning of every event in the book like a good twist should, but the very premise of the story itself. It just doesn’t work. The reader rejects it. The revelation is meant to be a tragic surprise but feels like a betrayal, a betrayal compounded in the last few pages by absurdity as Landor, somehow, narrates throwing himself over the same cliffs where his daughter killed herself.

As I mentioned last time, rules are made to be broken, and I didn’t look up Knox’s rules to hold The Pale Blue Eye accountable for some minor breach of protocol. I despise that use of rules for fiction. (Here’s the worst offender, an utterly arbitrary and stupid measure that many readers take as gospel.) But rules like Knox’s exist for a reason. Think of them less as an imposition of external standards on how to tell a story and more an empirical record of what doesn’t work.

A master, fully cognizant of the rules and of the risks he runs in purposefully breaking one, might get away with it. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie in this connection before. But more often you will get a novel like this one.

The Pale Blue Eye is a case study in taking such risks and failing. It is brilliantly and often poetically written, full of well-realized characters, spooky gothic atmosphere, evocative and realistic Jacksonian-era period details, and a striking portrait of a real person at a formative moment in his life. But its final twist undermines the entire novel up to that point, making the reader doubt whether it was worth the investigation at all.

The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time, the final novel by Josephine Tey (1896-1952), concerns Scotland Yard detective inspector Alan Grant. Having fallen into an open manhole while pursuing a suspect, Grant lies recovering from his injuries in a hospital bed, morosely memorizing the cracks in the ceiling above him, nursing jocular grievances against his two nurses, and longing for something good to read rather than the drivel that friends have provided him.

For lack of anything better to do, he goes through a stack of portraits of historical figures. Grant prides himself on his ability to judge character by “physiognomy,” a gut instinct based on a lifetime of looking at faces, but he is brought up short by the portrait of a man in late medieval clothing, with a sensitive face full of suffering.

A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it, less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.

The man in the portrait turns about to be King Richard III.

This gives Grant pause. All he knows of Richard III is Shakespeare’s murderous, usurping hunchback, the murderer of the Princes in the Tower, a tyrant risen up against by his own outraged people and justly struck down at Bosworth Field. How could Grant have erred this badly in his instincts and judgment?

The question nags at him. He asks everyone who comes to visit—friends, nurses, the occasional doctor—what they know about Richard III. He gets the same responses: Hunchback, wasn’t he? Stole the throne? And, over and over, Didn’t he kill his nephews, those poor boys in the Tower?

The cold-blooded murder of the Princes is the sticking point for Grant. He seeks evidence for the story in the written record. The one history book available to him in the hospital is an old elementary school textbook kept by one of his nurses, a well-intentioned but half-educated bore. The book contains nothing about Richard beyond what everyone seems to know already. Grant’s sense that something is off deepens. He becomes suspicious. How does everyone know the same rote story about this man? How is everyone so sure of it?

Grant has friends browse London bookshops for biographies and big fat historical surveys and orders specialist titles. He traces Shakespeare’s version of Richard III back to a posthumous book by St Thomas More and digs back further still. More was a child when Richard fell at Bosworth Field; where did he get his information? Marta, the actress friend who first suggested going through historical portraits to pass the time, puts him in touch with Brent Carradine, an unemployed student who does the shoe-leather work in Grant’s investigation—visiting archives, digging through contemporary records, comparing secondary sources with what can be known from the primary sources.

Still supine in his hospital bed, Grant assesses each new item of evidence critically, as a detective, establishing a timeline of events, looking for motive, trying to look beyond hearsay. What was Richard’s relationship with his elder brother, the father of the Princes, like? When were the Princes last seen alive? Where? By whom? What did people say at the time? And if Richard wasn’t responsible for the disappearance of the Princes, who was?

I’m not giving too much away to say that Grant concludes that Richard III was not guilty of the crime. Tey, through Grant, makes a compelling case for his innocence. Who Grant determines is the actual culprit, and why and when he had the Princes killed, is a bit more tenuous, but I’ll leave that to you to decide.

After all, the joy of The Daughter of Time is not the conclusion but the detective work—that is, Grant’s historical research into virtually every assumption behind the popular story of Richard III and every detail of what actually happened. The obsessive quality of the work, of sensing that you’re on the right track, that you’re this close to finding something forgotten or hidden, of getting to know a small set of sources so well that you can mentally play them by feel like the strings on a harp, is vividly conveyed in Grant’s hospital bed investigation. Ideas and theories nag at him until he does something to find out the truth. He can’t sleep. He talks of nothing else. He is so consumed with his investigation that the a continuous, driving source of the novel’s suspense is Grant’s helpless, fevered waiting for the arrival of new sources. And when, after following a trail of evidence, he discovers something, makes a connection between two seemingly disparate facts…

I have read no other book that captures so well not just the work but the thrill of really studying the past.

All of which makes The Daughter of Time not just a remarkably exciting mystery—again, about an injured cop who can’t get out of bed—but a model for how historical research works. Like Grant, you may start with a story that interests or entertains you. Like Grant, you should certainly want to know the truth behind it. And, like Grant, this desire will lead you further back into the past, through generations of secondary sources—many of them endlessly quoting each other and repeating versions of the same stories—to the primary sources, the raw material. Hopefully, to the truth.

However—

This novel is also a case study in the dangers inherent in trying, definitively, to solve thorny historical questions. Grant demands too much of his primary sources, wanting greater consistency and clearer explanatory power than any primary sources can hope to provide. His critical eye and skepticism toward potentially biased sources turns into outright contempt for those that contradict his thesis and toward past historians who have weighed the same evidence and reached different conclusions. And, in the end, he has far more certainty in his theories than is warranted. What Grant is in danger of becoming—like many an historian before him, both professional and amateur—is a crank.

Lightly paced, deftly plotted, well-written, witty, and continuously engaging from beginning to end, The Daughter of Time is a delight. I don’t want to undersell this aspect of the story; it is one of the best, most enjoyable novels I’ve read this year. That it is also a brilliantly designed introduction to how to study the past more deeply and truthfully and, seemingly by accident, a study of the tensions inherent in investigating and correcting historical myths is a wonderful bonus.

There are locked-room mysteries and closed-circle-of-suspect or “country house” mysteries. Here is a mystery that takes place in a single bed and across four and a half centuries, where the country house is all of England, past and present, and the locked room the historical record. I highly recommend it. This is no ordinary mystery and, fortunately for us, and for Richard III, Grant is no ordinary detective.

A Lost Lady of Old Years

June seems to be the month for themed celebrations, so some weeks ago during my leisure reading I conceived of my own. This is the inaugural post of what I’m calling John Buchan June, a month dedicated to the enjoyment and appreciation of classic adventure fiction. I’ll be reading as many of Buchan’s novels and posting about as many of them as I can. We’ll see how well I can emulate Buchan’s characters in embracing and enduring difficulty.

Today, I begin with the novel that inspired this celebration: A Lost Lady of Old Years.

This, one of Buchan’s earliest novels, takes place in Scotland during “the ‘45,” the last and greatest Jacobite uprising, and tells the story of young Francis Birkenshaw. Francis was born into an austere Highland family that had disowned his mother following an inappropriate marriage. Francis could provide the textbook example of the “callow youth.” A striver unwilling to hold down a desk job that might, with hard work, lead to prominence and respectability; a familiar of seedy neighborhoods, dive bars, and low company; and not a little entitled despite his station, he has something of the prodigal son about him. Having been reared by a mother supported by the quiet largesse of the current head of the family, Francis has assumed that she controls a hidden fortune and demands his share of it.

Having unwittingly deprived his mother of her whole month’s support, he takes ship for France, where he aims to join one of the many Scots mercenary units serving the King of France and so gain some experience of the world. As he departs Scotland, he determines to live utterly unto himself, as a pure pragmatist, devoid of moral scruple. This seems to him the proper mercenary spirit, and so far he is off to a good start.

As it happens, Francis never makes it out of Scotland. He picks fights, makes one friend, and abandons ship within a few days, and the remainder of the novel follows him in his wanderings through the Scottish countryside, seeking his fortune.

Everywhere he goes he is asked about his loyalties—does he support the Hanoverian King of England or Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite pretender? Francis doesn’t much care—he’s in it for himself—but finds himself drawn steadily into the Jacobite orbit, especially once he has made the acquaintance of two crucial characters: the aging and infirm but charismatic Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, who confides and trusts in him; and, even more important to a young man, the beautiful Margaret Murray, the wife of one of the rebellion’s leaders. Francis becomes infatuated with her and, for her, willingly undertakes a dangerous mission to deliver secret messages to the Jacobite forces in the field where they face off against the army of the King of England.

I don’t want to give much more away, except for two facts: First, Francis’s adventures ultimately take him through the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, the mopping up operations following the Pretender’s defeat, and the capture and executions of some of the people whom he has followed and grown to admire; and second, all along, and completely unbeknownst to him, he has been used. By whom, and to what purpose, I’ll leave to you to find out.

Buchan wrote A Lost Lady of Old Years in his early twenties, while still a student at Brasenose College, Oxford. It was published in 1899, one of his first published works—and it shows. Despite its well-realized Scottish settings, its excellent level of historical detail, its wry and witty writing, and its vivid fictional portraits of real people—the most striking of which is the ill-fated Lord Lovat—A Lost Lady of Old Years is clearly the early work of a gifted but inexperienced writer. Those familiar with Buchan’s later books, especially the short, sharp, rapidly moving The Thirty-Nine Steps, will be surprised at how often the pacing flags in this novel.

Further, Francis Birkenshaw himself is largely passive throughout, wandering through events far larger than himself and far beyond his ken. Such characters can make for good novels. The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which Richard Hannay spends much of the story on the run from a seemingly omnipotent enemy, is an instructive counterexample. Where Hannay is an older, wiser, and more experienced man accustomed to danger and alert to deception, giving him some control despite the odds against him, Francis is naïve, flighty, and easily hoodwinked. This is a realistic picture of a pugnacious young man, but he often feels like a side character in his own story. Note my use of the phrases “unwittingly” and “unbeknownst to him” above.

However, what makes Francis interesting is his explicitly stated quest to live beyond the rules, as a purely amoral pragmatist, and his constant failure to live up to that dark ideal. Whether Francis is a Jacobite or not is not the only test he faces everywhere he goes; he also often wanders into situations that test his resolve to live amorally, as when his shipboard friend steals the only food in an old peasant woman’s house and Francis, despite himself, is outraged.

So A Lost Lady of Old Years, in addition to a striking portrait of a real historical moment and a study of loyalty, honor, and betrayal, also reflects the importance of moral formation, of properly oriented affections and piety. One can also sense something of Buchan’s Calvinism in the story in the way that Francis sets his own goals but is consistently drawn to something else, something higher, that changes Francis for the better despite his bad intentions. In the end, Francis’s signal failure in the novel, to live entirely unto himself and his own good, paradoxically proves his only success—bitterly earned, but worthwhile.

A Lost Lady of Old Years is an enjoyable read, with many of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction—eager young men from straitened circumstances, beautifully rendered exotic settings, picaresque and episodic journeys into greater and greater danger, the inevitable Scottish connection—while showing some of the limitations of the beginner. It’s a lesser-known work of the Buchan bibliography, but one with its own strengths and charms and well worth seeking out.

Señor Zorro en la radio

I have a soft spot for swashbucklers—stories of nobility, derring-do, skill with a blade, and unflappable wit in the face of danger—and that’s almost certainly because of Zorro. We had a Disney singalong tape with the “Zorro” theme song when I was a kid, and one of my earliest memories is telling my mom that, when I grew up, I wanted to legally change my name to Zorro. Happily, she dissuaded me—not that I needed convincing once I was actually grown up.

So I shed the enthusiasm for the name but my love of swashbucklers has only deepened with time, especially once I got around to reading a bunch of the classics a few years ago—among them The Scarlet Pimpernel, Captain Blood, and my two favorites, The Prisoner of Zenda and The Mark of Zorro. The last of these introduced the world to my favorite swashbuckling hero and has been adapted for film, however loosely, several times. It’s also the basis of the excellent audio drama I want to review today.

When romance and rapiers ruled in Old California

The story takes place in “Old California,” specifically the pueblo of Reina de los Angeles—a considerably sleepier LA than we’re accustomed to imagine—and begins in medias res, as the drunken layabout Sergeant Gonzalez demands more wine of the local tavern keeper and boasts of what he plans to do when he finally catches up to the notorious bandit El Zorro. El Zorro shortly presents himself, the first of many unexpected, ninja-like appearances, and humiliates Gonzalez by slashing a Z into the brute’s cheek before disappearing, unharmed, into the night. The scene is set.

This semi-comic opening also establishes Don Diego de la Vega, the handsome young scion of one of California’s aristocratic caballero families. Don Diego is well-educated and fantastically wealthy, belonging to one of the only caballero families that seems to be thriving under the corrupt rule of California’s governor, but he’s timid, unmotivated, horrified by the violence often required of men of his station, and—relatedly—uninterested in any of the duties or recreational pursuits of his class, whether marriage, bull-fighting, or farming. He’s a dandy. No one takes him seriously.

While Gonzalez and his villainous, resentful superior, Captain Ramón, step up their hunt for Zorro, Don Diego’s father Don Alejandro puts fatherly pressure on Diego to find a wife. Don Alejandro recommends the family of Don Carlos Pulido, who has a beautiful and eligible only daughter. Don Diego duly pays the Pulidos a visit, impressing the whole family with his looks and wealth—seemingly his only good features. Doña Catalina immediately presses her daughter to marry Don Diego just to save their family, which has been caught on the wrong side of political disputes, from disaster. But their daughter, the spirited and virtuous Señorita Lolita Pulido, is repulsed by Don Diego’s foppishness and resists her parents’ insistence on the match.

Unfortunately, as Don Diego feebly pursues courtship with her she also becomes the object of Captain Ramón’s interest—but not his affections, as he is strictly an ambitious and cruel striver.

Meanwhile, Señor Zorro continues his Robin Hood attacks on corrupt officials, especially those who are cruel to the poor—the laboring peons and native indios—or clergymen like Fray Felipe, a hardworking and pious Franciscan with close ties to the Pulidos and Vegas. Captain Ramón takes extreme measures to root out Zorro, who enjoys widespread support among the downtrodden, including arresting and publicly whipping Fray Felipe on false charges. Zorro’s sudden appearance and rescue of the monk—not to mention the vengeance Zorro wreaks as a result—is one of the story’s most thrilling scenes.

There’s much more. Don Diego’s continues his tonedeaf and awkward courtship of Señorita Lolita, while she falls for a man who is Diego’s opposite in every way, the dashing and courageous Señor Zorro. The young, up and coming caballeros of Reina de los Angeles—minus Don Diego, to the derisive amusement of the other young men and the embarrassment of his father—form an honor-bound league to track down and defeat Zorro and save California from his depredations. And Captain Ramón, with increasing desperation and disregard for protocol or morality, attempts to win—or simply acquire—Señorita Lolita.

Part comedy of manners, part adventure story, part superhero thriller, part historical melodrama, party mystery (though you won’t have to try hard at all to guess Zorro’s secret identity)—the swashbuckling and charismatic central character ties all of these elements together, and by the end of The Mark of Zorro all of these threads come together in a fun and exciting climax. It’s pulp, but it’s fun, clever pulp, with a few nice surprises along the way and just the right combination of daring, danger, and death.

The audio drama

The Mark of Zorro originally appeared—as The Curse of Capistrano—in serial installments in All Story Weekly in the late summer of 1919. Over the 102 years since, the plot has been treated as disposable by its numerous adapters, but this 2010 full-cast audio dramatization by Yuri Rasovsky follows the original very faithfully. The plot is condensed and streamlined but most of the major incidents remain in three nicely constructed one-hour episodes. Señorita Lolita has been given a light feminist update, asking for a sword in the final confrontation rather than standing by for Zorro to finish the job, but these touches are purely cosmetic and don’t actually alter the story or its themes.

The music and sound effects, crucial in an audio drama like this, are also top quality, comparable to any of the well-produced stuff I grew up listening to. This dramatization, I am unsurprised to learn, earned a Grammy nomination.

The cast are excellent, with the two standouts being Val Kilmer, who successfully pulls off both the confident and strong Zorro and his weakling alter ego Don Diego with a great deal of wit, panache, and—for Señorita Lolita—charm; and Meshach Taylor as Sergeant Gonzalez, a real miles gloriosus whose swagger, braggadocio, and oblivious selfishness make him both a figure of fun and a genuine threat, especially under the leadership of Captain Ramón. Gonzalez, as my description suggests, is a literary type that goes back to the Romans, but Taylor’s performance removes him from the world of cliché and makes him a believable and entertaining character.

Keith Szarabajka as Captain Ramón and Ruth Livier as Señorita Lolita are also good, with Szarabajka’s Ramón being cold and threatening but not over-the-top. Elizabeth Peña, as Doña Catlina, Lolita’s marriage-obsessed mother, seems to be performing her part sarcastically sometimes but this does not detract from the overall production. Armin Shimerman, as the landlord of the tavern where Gonzalez runs up a huge tab, is also great fun, put-upon but ironic, and his framing narration also sets the imaginative stage quite excellently.

The Mark of Zorro was great fun to listen to both for myself, the lifelong Zorro fan, and my wife and kids. Both the six- and four-year olds enjoyed it a great deal even if they didn’t follow every contortion of the plot, and thrilled to the chases and swordfights.

What makes The Mark of Zorro great

While The Mark of Zorro is enormously entertaining, what makes the story great and worth revisiting is its serious treatment of honor and virtue. These move the plot, motivate the characters, and make their actions comprehensible.

Don Diego adopts his alter ego out of his sense of obligation to the less fortunate, the despised and abused, and the audio drama explicitly invokes the idea of noblesse oblige—an idea running all the way through but never named in the novel. (An understanding of noblesse oblige is also what’s missing in all those idiotic internet discussions of Batman as a “fascist.”) Zorro is a check on the abuses of his peers and a boon to his inferiors, and holds himself to the same exacting standards as any opponent, refusing to engage in an unfair fight, to “punch down” against an inferior with disproportionate force, or to exaggerate his deeds—or allow others to lie about him. Even his use of deception and disguise is a form of filial piety, as he does not want his vigilantism in the face of a corrupt government to endanger his innocent father. Zorro observes limits, because there are greater things than himself at stake.

And this concern with honor and virtue runs through all of the characters—all of the good ones, that is. Señorita Lolita values courage, good looks, education, and wealth, but rejects all of them when they appear in a coward. She rightly expects more, and her hierarchy of virtues, her priorities, are correct and as exacting as Don Diego’s. Don Carlos and Doña Catilina, while played for laughs at first as they attempt, with embarrassing desperation, to get her daughter to marry Don Diego, reveal hidden depths when Zorro, a man they believe to be a villain, appears in their home. Don Carlos in particular repeatedly proves himself to be tougher than he lets on. Don Alejandro, Don Diego’s father, drives his son toward marriage not out of naked interest in wealth or inheritance but out of sense of obligation and stewardship, a trait that is also highly developed in his son, as it turns out.

And even the dashing, high-living young caballeros of California’s aristocratic elite have been so formed and educated that, when they finally confront Zorro and attempt to subdue him, he wins them over not through some kind of cost-benefit analysis or politicking or rhetorical argument about rights and corruption, but by appealing to their understanding of the duty they owe thanks to their status and the honor of serving justice.

(This last was one of my favorite surprises when I first read The Mark of Zorro. As I wrote on Goodreads after that first reading, “Pay attention, Hollywood! You can use character to resolve plot, and not just bigger fight scenes!”)

The only purely pragmatic characters are the villains, especially Captain Ramón, whose virtues in a number of areas—especially courage and skill with a blade—are ruined by his resentment, his ambition, and his self-serving pragmatism. This is never clearer than when he tries to force his courtship (much too fine a word for his intentions) on Señorita Lolita. His dishonorable but effective brutality makes his comeuppance—as well as those of the venal governor of California and the boastful Sergeant Gonzalez, who nevertheless gets the last word—at the hands of the moral and law-abiding all the more satisfying. The finale of the story is almost a dramatization of Burke’s dictum that “When bad men combine, the good must associate.”

In our cynical age, a story like The Mark of Zorro comes across as black-and-white, simplistic, without the lauded “moral ambiguity” so sought after in prestige TV. But look beneath, past that platitudinous criticism, and you’ll witness a balletic dance of virtue, reputation, honor, and honesty that demonstrates, in its fun and pulpy way, just how simplistic the opposite really is.

Conclusion

This is ostensibly a review of the excellent full-cast audio drama by Hollywood Theater of the Ear, and I hope you’ll check that out and enjoy it. With holiday travel approaching as I write this, it may be an excellent way to pass three hours on the road with your family. My wife, kids, and I certainly enjoyed it over our Thanksgiving travels. But I hope you’ll seek out The Mark of Zorro in book or movie form as well. I have the Penguin Classics edition, but it is widely available from other publishers, including for free online at Project Gutenberg, and if you check out a film version, the 1940 adaptation starring Tyrone Power is loose but broadly faithful to the book and a lot of fun, with the excellent Basil Rathbone offering a serious swordfighting challenge to Señor Zorro.