John Burnet of Barns

This first week of John Buchan June concludes with a high-spirited historical adventure set in the hills of the Scottish Borders. This may sound like a familiar Buchan setting until one gets into the specifics. This is his first full-length novel, published in 1898 when he was just twenty-three: John Burnet of Barns.

Taking place mostly in the late 1680s, during a time of widespread unrest and disorder throughout Britain but especially in Scotland, this novel follows the adventures of John Burnet, the scion of an old and respected Border Reiver family from Barns, near Peebles on the River Tweed. Burnet may have rollicking, swashbuckling ancestors but he is a shy, diffident, scholarly sort. Where his aging father crippled himself racing a horse through the hills with other young bloods, John is set for university studies in Glasgow.

But the old yearning for adventure in his blood shows from the very first chapter, in which John, as a boy, skips out on a lesson from his tutor to go fishing in the River Tweed. There he meets the beautiful Marjory Veitch who, like him, comes of old aristocratic stock and, like him, has an imaginative, adventurous streak. They become constant companions and playmates right up until John departs for university.

John is a good student but never fully settles into university life. After a chance encounter in the streets with his arrogant and soldierly cousin Gilbert, who comes riding through town wearing his fashionable best, John decides on the spot to drop out and return home to Barns. To his surprise, Gilbert has beaten him there. To his greater and much less welcome surprise, Gilbert has met Marjory and decided to make her his own.

The encounter in the streets of Glasgow and Gilbert’s intrusion into John’s innocent world back home mark the beginning of an escalating series of confrontations. Gilbert’s attentions to Marjory provoke an epiphany in John—he realizes he loves her and always has, and sets out immediately to propose. She accepts. Soon after, John’s father dies, and he becomes the laird of his family estate much sooner than expected. He delays his marriage to Marjory so he can step fully into his new role.

But he also decides, thinking he has settled the matters of betrothing Marjory and getting his father’s affairs in order, that he should complete his studies—not at Edinburgh, but on the continent at Leyden in Holland. Marjory agrees to wait for him.

In Holland, John meets and clashes with Gilbert again. After John defeats him in a duel, Gilbert departs Holland in a sulk. This seeming victory proves fateful for John. Shortly afterward, John receives word that Gilbert has returned to Tweeddale, has insinuated himself into Marjory’s drunken brother’s company, and is menacing her and the household. Once again he drops his studies and heads home.

But Gilbert has baited him. Upon returning from Holland, he has fabricated documents showing John to be conspiring against King James II. A warrant is out for John’s arrest, and no sooner has he landed in Edinburgh than he flees to the hills to live as an outlaw accompanied only by Nicol, his shrewd and resourceful servant.

The central action of the book follows John through his months of outlawry—falling back from one hiding place to another, encountering numerous colorful characters, passing along secret letters for Marjory, and occasionally surprising and humiliating his pursuers—a condition only ended by distant political revolution. The climax of the novel is a relentless horseback chase across Scotland to Gilbert’s remote estate in the West Country with Gilbert and the captive Marjory always staying just ahead of John and Nicol, who must contend with freezing weather, drunken ferrymen, closed gates, scaled walls, and swordplay among the dangers.

I’ve actually owned a copy of John Burnet of Barns since the first John Buchan June in 2022 but have hesitated to read it. It’s among the earliest of Buchan’s published work and Buchan himself regarded it with some embarrassment, later calling it “immature and boyish” and “a hotch-potch.” In her biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan writes that he thought it “cumbersome and ill put together.” The very first of his novels that I reviewed here, A Lost Lady of Old Years, came out the year after John Burnet of Barns, and though I liked and admired it I noted pacing problems and a passive and slightly dense protagonist. If Buchan himself viewed the even earlier John Burnet of Barns as inferior, how bad must it be?

As it happens, not bad at all. I began it with some trepidation but quickly found myself engrossed. Despite some evident problems that mark John Burnet of Barns as an early and, yes, immature work, it has all of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction and was some of the most purely enjoyable reading I’ve had in a while.

The narration itself is not as tight and economical as is typical of later Buchan. As a narrator, John tends to overexplain, and even interesting incidents sometimes drag on. There are a number of free-floating incidents, like a flash flood on the Tweed that introduces the character of Nicol, that last perhaps too long and contribute too little to the plot. But the biggest weakness of the novel, at least in its first third, is pacing. John narrates his own life, and a real life is episodic, but it takes several chapters for the narrative to gain direction and momentum. The early chapters are unfocused and diffuse. We are a long way from the skillful in medias res openings of similar historical adventures like Midwinter or The Free Fishers.

These are real faults, but they barely detract from an accomplished, carefully constructed, and—most importantly—exciting story.

Technically, despite faults in pacing and overlong start, the novel is strongly written and intricately plotted. Every plot element is set up for later payoff. Considering the reputation Buchan still has for relying on coincidence in his fiction, there is very little of that in John Burnet of Barns. With such care taken over preparing the elements of the climax, the novel’s cross-country chase succeeds brilliantly.

The novel also features great historical detail in vividly and authentically described 1680s settings. Historical elements like the Covenanters and the Glorious Revolution are well integrated into the plot without overburdening it. Buchan also creates tactile, evocative atmosphere throughout. A cave full of outlaws, a lethal swordfight in a snowy forest, a rough crossing in a small ferry, hiding in the tall grass and heather as the enemy searches, and a shallow rocky fishing stream at sundown—all are beautifully imagined. And despite some incidents lasting too long or leading nowhere, others add such color and texture or are so fun and exciting that they’re worthwhile. A chance encounter with another outlaw, a nameless man with a terrible yearning to swordfight with someone, anyone, a man whom John never sees again, is especially wonderful.

But the novel’s greatest virtue is its stock of lifelike and engaging characters, most especially Nicol, Marjory, and John himself. Nicol is a recognizable type, the faithful lower-class servant (imagine a more dangerous Samwise Gamgee from the Scots Borders) but Buchan imbues him with life as a distinct, memorable individual. During his months in hiding John never seems more vulnerable than when he has sent Nicol on an errand, a clear testament to Nicol’s strength as a character.

Modern readers would unthinkingly critique Marjory as a damsel in distress, but this would be to misread a strong, canny woman with a lot of endurance. She’s sharper than John, which makes their awkward courtship sweet and funny, and in staving off Gilbert—right up until he uses his authority as a cavalry officer to kidnap her—she shows great tenacity. John and Marjory may not be Buchan’s best romantic pair—I’d still give that title to Sir Archie Roylance and Janet Raden in John Macnab—but they are well-matched and fun to read about.

But this is John’s story, and whatever the flaws of his narration he keeps the novel interesting and engaging. A recognizable Buchan archetype, the retiring scholar who is forced into action and daring, it is remarkable to see how clearly Buchan has both imagined and realized him so early in his career. Intelligent and learned but also recklessly impulsive, his earnestness, his senses of duty and honor, his friendship with Nicol, and his love for Marjory make him enormously likeable and carry us along with him as he changes. John Burnet of Barns is a coming-of-age story, and John’s flightiness and indecision gradually give way to the steadfastness and determination of maturity.

The man racing on horseback through sleet and snow in the middle of the night is unimaginable when we first meet him skipping out on school to go fishing, and that unexpectedness, through surprising turns and slow transformation, helps make John Burnet of Barns thrilling—a wonderful opening movement to a great career in storytelling.

The Levanter

Among his many skills, Eric Ambler excelled at two of the basic varieties of thriller: the breakneck and the slow burn. In one, the pace picks up quickly and puts the characters through an unrelenting series of escalating obstacles. In the other, a single obstacle may steadily build in threat and intensity until a final catastrophe. Both rely on a mastery of pacing. Ambler had it, and The Levanter offers a good example of the latter, the slow burn.

A later work in Ambler’s long career, The Levanter takes place over about two months in 1970. Three different characters narrate portions of the story: Lewis Prescott, an American reporter who has stumbled into the events after the fact; Teresa Malandra, the secretary and mistress of an English industrialist; and Michael Howell, the industrialist himself, third-generation heir of Agence Howell, a manufacturing and shipping firm with connections all over the Mediterranean and Middle East.

When the story begins, Howell has successfully navigated several of the perils of decolonization in Syria, working with the emerging socialist government to avoid losing his family’s business to various nationalization schemes. This involves working closely with corrupt government officials, including Syrian military intelligence and a government go-between with connections to Second-World powers: Maoist China, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

Busy enough keeping the family business afloat and its reputation untarnished following a series of failed production schemes imposed by the government, Howell is surprised to discover, thanks to Teresa, large unexplained orders of chemicals buried in the company accounts. With government pressure and hostility building, he decides to investigate the moment he finds out. This means a late night trip with Teresa to one of the plants dedicated to producing consumer batteries.

Howell finds the factory, which is supposed to be closed, open, brightly lit, and with teams of men working on producing fulminate of mercury—explosives. Armed men accost him and Teresa, and when the night watchman arrives he reveals himself as Salah Ghaled, the notorious leader of a hardline Palestinian terrorist organization too extreme even for Arafat and the PLO.

Ghaled and his men need Howell alive. His men are making detonators for bombs and trying to get incomplete Soviet rockets into a usable condition. Howell will be useful for them. Ghaled forces him and Teresa to swear their allegiance to his organization and to sign confessions of complicity in the murder of a former member—an internal hit Ghaled publicly blames on the Israelis. He then has Howell order the manufacture of missing parts and arrange shipping aboard a company cargo ship. Thrust deeper into Ghaled’s plot, little by little Howell pieces together what Ghaled is planning.

On Herzl Day, an upcoming Israeli national holiday, Ghaled aims to detonate dozens of remotely armed bombs hidden in Tel Aviv. Hence the detonators. He plans to coordinate the bombing with his rockets, launched from offshore and aimed at the coast, a strip of popular beach lined with hotels, restaurants, and homes. The Agence Howell ship will carry him on to Egypt the same day, where he will hold a press conference claiming responsibility and making the usual Palestinian talking points. Howell is horrified.

He also realizes that, since not only Ghaled but other key members of his organization all got jobs at Agence Howell through government influence, his government contacts are in on the plot. He cannot turn to the authorities. In desperation he uses a business trip to inform Israeli intelligence, but his contact is skeptical and offers little help unless Howell can provide more information than he has. If Ghaled is to be stopped, it may be up to Howell himself.

The other Ambler slow-burn thriller that The Levanter resembles most is Cause for Alarm, in which an English engineer working in Mussolini’s Italy just before the outbreak of World War II slowly uncovers sinister goings-on within the tidy order of his factory. In both novels, Ambler puts a lot of effort into making the industrial and commercial setting feel believable well before introducing espionage and terrorism. There’s a lot of looking through ledgers and blueprints, making sure products are up to spec, and arranging shipping and payments. This would be dull in any other writer’s hands. Ambler, through a careful, steady drip of foreshadowing and underestimated threats, instead uses such workaday details to build suspense.

Where The Levanter bests Cause for Alarm, though, is in its use of setting. Ambler exceled at evoking the real-life cosmopolitan, polyglot worlds of international crossroads, from the Aegean and the Balkans in The Mask of Dimitrios to postwar Malaysia and Indonesia in Passage of Arms. The Levanter, with ties to both the Cold War and the unending multidirectional conflicts of the Middle East, is no exception. Ghaled, one of Ambler’s most vivid and believable villains, is a European-educated Palestinian Islamist who is as resentful toward the PLO, the Baathists, and the Jordanian monarchy as he is hostile toward Israel. His education and Marxist ideology are European and his weapons Russian, Chinese, and East German. The Agence Howell has dealings all over the Eastern Mediterranean and its ships and factories have multiethnic crews and captains. Teresa is Italian and Howell himself, despite his seemingly English name and business sense, is mostly Armenian and Cypriot. He and Ghaled are, in dramatically different senses, both men without a country, the one a businessman and the other a zealot.

In addition to a realistic and authentically complicated setting, The Levanter is also cleverly written. I mentioned above that it is narrated by Howell, Teresa, and Prescott, an American reporter who otherwise plays no role in the events of the story. The muddle of Howell’s predicament, the leverage Ghaled and the Syrian government use against him, and the outcome of the story lead to media controversy, a controversy fully exploited by Palestinian activists. The novel is Howell’s attempt, with Prescott’s encouragement, to set the record straight. His testy, finger-wagging narration proves both fun to read and disturbing—how would I, or any of us, were we forced into a bind like this, ever hope to exonerate ourselves?

The Levanter is not Ambler’s best or most exciting thriller, but it is one of his most involving and, above all, one of the most plausible. The overwhelming feeling it imparts throughout is that if something like this were to happen, this is exactly how it would happen. Its emphasis is not on action and gadgetry, though both play a role, but on cunning, desperation, bloodlust, and the weakness of human nature. Though set in 1970, the world it takes place in and the characters who people it still feel recognizable and all too real.

Notes on the history of spy thrillers

This week, courtesy of Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack, I discovered Alexander Larman’s review of Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd. Larman has become one of my favorite critics and is always insightful, as in the first two paragraphs here, where he offers a very short précis of the history of the spy thriller and the pivotal place of John le Carré in that history:

Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a very great consumption of expensive food and wine, a MacGuffin that everyone wants to lay their hands on, and, last but not least, a love interest whose loyalties remain ambiguous right up until the final page.

Accurate, both specifically and generally. The boredom Larman notes, for example, is present in characters as different as Richard Hannay and James Bond, but for different reasons. The tone of the thriller changed between Buchan and Fleming even if some of the trappings remained, appropriately, unruffled. Larman continues:

Le Carré removed pretty much all of these elements, minus the mass duplicity and, in doing so, made the spy novel more intellectually respectable but (whisper it) just a tiny bit boring. If I was given the chance to read a rip-roaring page-turner in the vein of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its ilk, I should take it without hesitation.

This is a paragraph calculated to get my attention, The Thirty-Nine Steps being the old favorite that started the whole John Buchan June thing here on the blog and Rogue Male being one of the best pure thrillers I’ve read in the last several years. As much as I like le Carré—something I’ve been chatting with a couple of y’all about for a while—I have to agree.

The result of le Carré’s transformation of the genre? Larman:

But most contemporary espionage fiction follows in the le Carré vein, alas, rather than the Ian Fleming mold. Carefully worked-out social criticism is plentiful, genuine thrills, and intrigue either meanly rationed or nonexistent.

Larman is pointing to the two main thematic components of the spy thriller: moral or at least intellectual weight, and action. Prior to le Carré, these were typically joined in the spy thriller. As the late great Sir John Keegan noted of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan’s thrillers in particular had, in addition to chases, danger, and wild hair’s-breadth escapes, “moral atmosphere.” As different as all of them are from each other, Buchan, Ambler, Household, and Fleming all had some measure of both. The drama gave the action weight and the action sold the book.

Le Carré bifurcated these, aiming for subtle and intensely introspective, chilly, cerebral drama. An Ambler or Fleming hero sweats when he faces capture and torture; a le Carré character—one hesitates to call them “heroes”—sweats when he has a terrible epiphany while looking through old files.

As Larman notes, le Carré’s astounding skill and success at this means it has become the model ever since, with “serious” spy novels almost always adhering to the introspective dramatic mode. Action continued to flourish in pulps before eventually taking on a highly technical, suspense-oriented character in writers like Frederick Forsyth and—the god of this kind of thriller—Tom Clancy.

So the spy thriller today is apt to be all dingy rented rooms, cynicism, and (usually left-wing) social criticism or all gear, gadgets, technical specs, and three-page chapters that begin with military time. (Occasionally you get writers who do both, with mixed success. Mick Herron, whose Slough House books are great favorites of mine for their wit, pacing, and suspense, recently published a turgid, commentary-heavy parallel novel burdened with smothering introspection. I’ve kept all the Slough House books to reread later but that one went straight to the used book store.)

But it need not be this way. Buchan, Ambler, and Fleming are still good models, and I was glad to learn from Larman that Gabriel’s Moon “is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school,” balancing character drama and a fast pace. I’m looking forward to it. I picked up a copy Wednesday night and start it today. Here’s hoping it’s part of a reunification of the two halves of the spy thriller that, though they can succeed alone, work wonderfully together.

Eight Hours from England

Anthony Quayle (1913-89) in Albania during World War II

If you grew up, as I did, on classic war movies, you might not know the name Anthony Quayle but you’ll probably know his face. Quayle appeared in many of the great war films of the 1950s and 60s, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Guns of Navarone, often playing earnest, well-intentioned officers frustrated by ugly reality. That is certainly the case in the two films I named, and to judge from Quayle’s 1945 war novel Eight Hours from England, which was based on his experiences with the Special Operations Executive in Albania, he didn’t have to strain his imagination to portray those characters.

Eight Hours from England covers a few months in the winter of 1943-44. Major John Overton, a decent man with several years of experience in the war, has returned to England on leave. The homefront bores him, and his unrequited love for Ann, the woman he has hoped for years to marry, convinces him to accept an offer of a new mission on a whim. He bids Ann good bye, struggling to express his yearning for her, and leaves.

His trip east is long and frustrating. He arrives in more than one staging area unannounced and has to wait for orders. When he is finally redirected to Albania, which was not the mission he initially agreed to, he goes along with it, a knight errant ready for any quest.

He arrives in Albania by boat in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and eager to get to work. The officer he is replacing has become standoffish, hiding in a cave and refusing to have anything to do with the Albanian guerrillas he was sent to help. Overton determines to make a better job of it. With a handful of other British commandos, a few American intelligence officers, and an Italian officer who, his country having lost and swapped sides following Mussolini’s ouster, is committed to helping the Allies, Overton sets out to connect with the locals as well as the two groups fighting both the Germans and each other: the Balli and the Partisans.

The Partisans are Communist guerrillas backed by the Soviets, and claim to have both huge numbers and an insatiable need for materiel—weapons, ammunition, clothing, food, medicine, even blankets. They also regularly attack the anti-Communist civilians. The Balli, on the other hand, are the local anti-Communist resistance who have made the grave mistake of partnering with the Germans in order to eradicate the Partisans.

Acting as a go-between, hiking back and forth across the mountains trying both to liaise with the locals—who care more about finding pretexts to demand British cash than anything else—and to convince the Balli and the Partisans to cooperate, Overton finds his earnestness fading. The Albanians, whom he regarded as colorful potential allies when he landed, come to look more and more thuggish and untrustworthy. His work grinds him down physically and mentally, especially after he receives word by radio of a major British operation in the Balkans that needs all the local help he can organize. And, lurking in the background, busy but hidden from view, are the Germans.

The impossibly rugged terrain, the remoteness from home and people making the decisions, the backwater hit-and-run fighting, the betrayals by local “allies,” the seeming fruitlessness of one’s efforts, and the bloody small-minded rivalries among the locals, whose backward customs and moneygrubbing pettiness and simple thievery Overton gradually grows fed up with—I have to wonder how much Eight Hours from England would resonate with veterans of Afghanistan.

This is an unusual war novel in that it is not action-oriented. Quayle’s story is a drama of logistics, organization, and diplomacy. The Germans appear only occasionally and at great distance, visible as lines of trucks on the other side of a valley or as gray dots setting up heavy weapons far below, but their threat is omnipresent. False alarms send Overton and his group scrambling to fallback positions and hideouts more than once. And the difficulty of communication—with headquarters, with each other—as well as bringing in supplies is clear. To charge their radio batteries they need petrol; to get petrol they must bring it in by boat; to request it on the next boat, they need the radio; and when it arrives they have to keep the Albanians from stealing it. Eight Hours from England is a novel of what goes on behind the scenes of special operations, and of just how unbearably frustrating and exhausting war can be even when—perhaps especially when—there is no fighting.

Quayle conveys all of this beautifully, with vivid descriptions of the people and landscapes. (The actual landscapes, by the way. The locations Quayle names are all real. Here’s the base where he entered and left Albania. Some of his equipment is still there.) Quayle captures the impossibility of Overton’s situation and makes the reader feel it, as well as making it clear that, whatever the outcome of the war of the Allies against the Axis, Albania will not enjoy a simple happy ending.

I read Eight Hours from England in the recent paperback edition published by the Imperial War Museum as part of its Wartime Classics series. There are sixteen books in the series and I already have several more lined up for this year. Eight Hours from England was a good place to start. Strongly and imaginatively written, it brings the reader into a complicated, often overlooked side of World War II and dramatizes it brilliantly.

The Novel, Who Needs It? and The Decline of the Novel

Speaking of the good old days and present decline, this summer I read two books about novels. Or rather, The Novel, in the abstract. The first was The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein and the second The Decline of the Novel, by Joseph Bottum. Though starting from a similar point and assuming both the embattlement and the necessity of The Novel, they are quite different books.

Epstein’s book, which is more of a loosely structured long-form essay on a series of interrelated topics, defends the traditional novel as an essential medium for the exercise of the imagination and the cultivation of moral character. It is quite good, though with its discursive structure and a few other limitations, about which more below, I felt it never cohered into a single compelling argument. So while I may agree with some of the points in The Novel, Who Needs It? more, it was Bottum’s Decline of the Novel that I found more thought-provoking and insightful.

Bottum builds on a thesis from his earlier book An Anxious Age, which looked at the cultural and psychological effects of the collapse of the shared mainline Protestant culture of the US, but narrows his view here to fiction. The novel, Bottum argues, is a fundamentally Protestant form given its interiority, individualism, and concern with personal transformation. Long fictional narratives served to playact the sanctification of souls in individual imaginations. They were a form through which “we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.”

As such, the novel became the preeminent artistic medium for meaning and self-understanding in the modern world and enjoyed a three hundred-year reign, from the early picaresques and moralistic epistolary novels of Defoe and Richardson to the 800-page potboilers of the 1970s.

But no more. With the decline of a shared culture has come a decline of the narrative form that once fed and shaped its imaginations. Novelists today do not occupy the taste-maker or thought-leader status a John Updike or Norman Mailer once did, nor do the educated need to have read any recent novels to be in the know—what Bottum calls “the Cocktail Party Test.”

In the best chapters of the book, Bottum traces this decline through the careers of four novelists: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Tom Wolfe. Faced with a “thin” or disenchanted world, all four sought to infuse meaning into life through fiction, albeit in different ways. Scott sought meaning in stories of the past, inadvertently inventing—to all practical purposes—historical fiction. Dickens, a generation on, strove to make fiction meaningful as a vehicle for pursuing the truth, for uncovering and exposing evil. But both these ends proved inadequate, giving rise to the modernism exemplified, in Bottum’s argument, by Mann, who made the novel its own point—novels for novels’ sake. It may not provide meaning, but it’s all we’ve got—let’s fuss over the artistry. By the time of Tom Wolfe, who attempted the unblinking truth-telling of Dickens in the realistic modern mode of Zola, narrated with journalistic attention to detail and rendered in frenzied prose, neither he nor his characters had the old “vision of the good life” that could give his shambling novels power and his readers no longer believed in the novel enough to take him seriously. Indeed, Wolfe became an object of scorn among the literati, especially when he dared to tip the sacred cow of the sexual revolution in I am Charlotte Simmons.

Successive failed attempts to find meaning, maintenance of empty forms without belief, and finally disbelief and disavowal—this is a deconversion story, a loss of faith. A “failure of nerve,” as Bottum puts it, but ours, not that of the novel. “The novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”

There’s a lot to this argument, and Bottum argues it well. Certainly much of it jibes with my own observations, such as the way novels now tend to mean more to rabid subcultures than to any broadly shared culture—with one or two important exceptions. But I remain unconvinced by the overall thesis. Something is missing, or simply off. His narrative of disenchantment and decline is persuasive, but not because of the evidence brought forward through Scott, Dickens, Mann, and Wolfe. Since reading it a few weeks ago I’ve continued to puzzle over this.

Other reviewers have pointed to The Decline of the Novel’s narrow Anglophone focus, imprecision in how Bottum uses the word Protestant, or over-selective case studies as problems. This criticism has some merit. Here are two reviewers, Darren Dyck at Christianity Today and science fiction author Adam Roberts, who both sympathize with Bottum’s book while raising important questions about his thesis. Both reviews are worth your time for these lines of criticism.

“Ultimately,” Dyck writes in his review, “it all depends on how you define novel.” Whatever other points I could raise, I suspect this is the real problem. The Novel, capitalized, in the abstract, is probably too protean and slippery a form to describe in enough detail to prove a thesis like this.

This becomes especially clear in the book’s final chapter, about popular fiction, in which Bottum points out the way children’s fiction has taken the place of grownup novels as tools of imaginative instruction. Novels do, then, still form part of a broadly shared culture as theatres of moral drama and objects of debate and controversy—it’s just the novels of JK Rowling, not National Book Award or Booker Prize shortlisters, that matter now.

That last chapter works as an important caveat to the narrative that makes up the bulk of the book. It is also one of the several things that make The Decline of the Novel better than The Novel, Who Needs It? For Epstein, popular and genre fiction, which get barely a mention, mostly serve to prepare readers for the exquisite, lip-pursing pleasures of Henry James and Proust. Per Dyck, Epstein’s definition of novel doesn’t seem to include much beneath these delights. Blunter reviewers than I have accused Epstein of snobbery. Though Bottum doesn’t fully explore the implications of his observations in his final chapter, that he meditated on genre fiction at all makes his argument more serious and more open to emendation.

The survival of something of the novel’s function, as Bottum sees it, in however limited and compromised a form in children’s and popular fiction inevitably brought Chesterton to mind. In his early essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” Chesterton stuck up for the crude, sensationalistic popular fiction of his own time for precisely this reason:

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense . . . but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

Which means that however much The Novel has declined, as long as good stories set young imaginations on fire and keep them lit, there is reason for hope. The task is to preserve and, when possible, keep writing good stories.

Despite the limitations imposed on it by its author’s standards, The Novel, Who Needs It? offers serious, impassioned support to good fiction, and despite my minor misgivings about its overall argument, The Decline of the Novel is worthwhile as a thought-provoking, incisive look at fiction and the role it plays—or perhaps played—in our culture. I hope, alongside both Epstein and Bottum, for the novel’s return.

Concepts and ideas in the novel

From critic and essayist Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? an apologia for the novel as a form:

“Create a concept and reality leaves the room.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

Concepts have their value, but they tend to explain more than they can justify. From Karl Marx’s class-struggle to Max Weber’s linking the rise of capitalism to the rise of Protestantism to Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex, conceptual thinking tends invariably to be both overly ambitious and sketchy, leaving out crucial aspects of human experience, and thereby necessarily highly simplifying. “Create a concept,” Ortega wrote, “and reality leaves the room.”

What Epstein calls “concepts” could also be called “theories” or, more precisely, “ideologies,” though the line between all of these is blurry. Epstein continues this paragraph with an observation on the similarly limiting effects of specialization:

Scientists, historians, politicians, economists, and poets all perceived the world, as Michael Oakeshott noted, through what he termed their separate “mode of experience,” but for him each of these modes was partial, incomplete, only part of the story. Oakeshott also felt that the whole story was not to be encompassed through any discrete mode of learning, even through philosophy, with its pretensions to be architectonic.

The novel, Epstein argues, has an important role in culture because of its ability to create comprehensive imaginative visions of human experience informed by the author’s understanding of human nature, something the arts and sciences tend to approach from only one angle.

Later, Epstein contrasts the ideological novel, the novel of “concepts,” with “the novel of ideas”:

“[W]hile all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas.”

— Joseph Epstein

Of the various forms the novel has taken-the family chronicle, the picaresque, the satire, the novel of ideas—the last, the novel of ideas, may seem a contradiction. I say a contradiction because, first, while all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas. . . . When ideas are at the forefront in fiction, when ideas dictate fact, characters seem diminished, plot suffers, and reality leaves not only the room but the novel.

That is, ideas and theory have to be expressed in “facts,” as characters, places, events, deeds, and choices. Epstein quotes the critic Northrop Frye: “An interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.”

Which is not to say that ideas have no place in fiction, just that they must take concrete form if they are to work as fiction. Epstein praises Dostoevsky and other 19th century Russian novelists as the masters of this form of philosophical storytelling. Certainly there have been many poor attempts to write novels of ideas, and the more the ideas veer into “concepts” or a systematized ideology—whether of the Dalton Trumbo or Ayn Rand varieties, though we are of course afflicted with a lot of strongly ideological fiction today—the more the storytelling suffers.

Food for thought. I’m enjoying The Novel, Who Needs It? and if I’m able I’ll have a full review when I’m done.

2023 in books

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

Favorite fiction of the year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite non-fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of the year:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kids’ books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rereads

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

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

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

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

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

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

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

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

One of my own

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

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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 in 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.

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!

On the appeal of Southern grotesquery to outsiders

The film adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing came out this weekend. I’ve been curious about the book since I heard it described as Southern gothic, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. My wife did, though, and mostly enjoyed it, so she was curious about the film and yet more curious when its wave of negative reviews washed in ahead of opening day. The opening line of Kyle Smith’s (paywalled) review in the Wall Street Journal especially piqued her interest, and so she shared it with me:

“Ten years ago, the Southern-Gothic film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” swept up four Academy Award nominations by pandering to the affinity of Northern intellectuals toward Romantic portrayals of poor folks living in a kind of fascinating harmony with cruel nature.”

Smith’s not so implicit critique here, about the favoritism awarded “Southern” stories that flatter the ineradicable preconceived notions of Yankee audiences, naturally brought to mind this favorite passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:

“Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Both of these lines deal with Southern stereotypes, with Smith connecting them to a kind of noble savage trope and O’Connor noting especially astutely their persistence and flexibility. Her own work is a case in point, often taken literally as a representation of the bigotry and violence of the South when O’Connor was making broader, explicitly theological points in as bold a fashion as she could. In her own words, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Deliverance. The movie is a searing piece of survival drama but James Dickey’s novel, a brilliant, intense, exhausting masterpiece, goes even deeper—into the psychological, the spiritual, the fundamental good and evil secreted in the ignorant deeps of even civilized man. There’s a lot going on there. But its grotesquery, its “large and startling figures,” has been received superficially as meme-worthy objects of prurience or titillation by an audience too satisfied with its assumptions about hillbillies to hear its message. Look at what those people are like, a lot of otherwise smart people have said in response. Paddle faster! I hear banjos.

I suppose in the end you can only write with St John’s injunction in mind: “He that hath an ear, let him hear.” Write for the ones who have ears to hear.

I can’t read much more of Smith’s review, but from the subtitle’s use of the word “charmless” and the headline “Unfevered Swamps” I think I can guess its overall tenor. I have no idea if it’s fair to the film or not. You can read O’Connor’s essay in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, which is a must-read for fiction writers and anyone interested in writing or the South. It is perhaps her most quotable work of non-fiction, and includes this other magnificent zinger:

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

God help us if we ever lose that.

Midwinter

This penultimate entry in John Buchan June concerns the second of Buchan’s novels to be set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, a novel that in many ways mirrors aspects of 1899’s A Lost Lady of Old Years but with lessons learned from more than two decades of fiction writing since, including several immense successes. The novel is 1923’s Midwinter.

Midwinter tells the story of Alastair Maclean, a Scots mercenary who has previously fought for the French and been wounded at Fontenoy. Having recovered, he has returned to Britain to work for Bonnie Prince Charlie as the Jacobites prepare an invasion of England aimed at gaining the throne for the prince’s father. When Midwinter begins, it is late fall and Maclean is traveling through England as a spy and courier, delivering messages and assessing the preparedness of the prince’s English supporters.

In the midst of his travels, Maclean has a strange run-in with a gamekeeper and a boy poacher. Through Maclean’s intervention in the beating the gamekeeper is administering, the boy escapes and introduces Maclean to a band of seeming outlaws. Dwellers in swamps, woods, and byways, relicts of what they call “Old England,” they call themselves the Spoonbills, and their leader is an ungainly but charismatic old man named Midwinter. Midwinter tells Maclean about “Old England” and the Spoonbills’ secret network of allies and how to summon their aid. Having sheltered and fed him, Midwinter and his men help Maclean on his way.

Maclean’s next stop brings him into contact with both Whig and Jacobite nobles, as well as another ungainly figure, an awkward middle-aged tutor who searching for a runaway student, Claudia, a teenaged girl who has eloped with one of Maclean’s aristocratic contacts. The tutor is a loud, twitchy, ill-dressed, but loquacious and wise man named Samuel Johnson.

From here, Maclean travels northward. But his work becomes more dangerous—he senses he is being followed, he escapes traps and capture by men with an uncanny knowledge of his movements, and he learns that there are traitors among the prince’s men in England. In the terms of a modern spy novel, he uncovers a mole. Two, in fact.

Meeting Johnson’s student Claudia, now married to one of the prince’s English supporters, complicates matters further. A convinced Jacobite, she befriends Maclean and wholeheartedly offers her support. Maclean is smitten. Unfortunately for him, as he discovers with harrowing and near fatal consequences, one of the moles is most likely someone in her circle.

Time is short. The invasion is coming, the King of England’s army is moving north to meet it, and Maclean knows not only the identity of the mole but also what the mole has done to sabotage the invasion. Maclean also feels a sense of personal betrayal and the need to satisfy his and others’ honor by confronting and killing the traitor.

Go to the prince and let the traitors escape? Or catch and punish the traitors and risk the success of the revolt? As the armies close in on Derby in early December, Maclean—with Midwinter and the Spoonbills as hard-to-find help and Johnson in tow as friend, mentor, and little-heeded counselor—must choose.

I don’t want to reveal much more of the plot. Midwinter is a sprawling high adventure across beautiful and dangerous landscapes, with all the familiar aspects of the spy thriller thrown in and made fresh by the novel’s well-realized historical setting. Like A Lost Lady of Old Years, the Jacobite Uprising adventure Buchan wrote during college, Midwinter wears its research lightly and is strongly written. Unlike A Lost Lady of Old Years, this novel is excellently paced, with Maclean’s mission and backstory carefully doled out bit by bit as he continues on his dangerous work, and—as I hint in the paragraph above—Maclean himself is an active, engaged, canny character whose decisions matter.

Midwinter is also peopled with well-realized characters, not least two real historical figures. I chose Midwinter for this project when I learned that one of the real people in this novel is General James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia and a personal hero of mine. At the time Midwinter takes place, Oglethorpe had only recently returned from fighting the Spanish in Georgia and he appears in the novel as a noble English officer mustering troops to repel the coming Jacobite invasion. He only appears in a handful of scenes, but those scenes are crucial, vibrantly written, and capture a great deal of the energy, rectitude, and guts of the man. Pitting the fictional Maclean against him heightens the tension, especially as the two men, though divided by politics and the war, come to like and admire one another.

But the standout in the novel is Samuel Johnson. This Johnson is not yet Dr Johnson, being a tutor in his mid-30s with great knowledge but humble prospects. He cannot even afford to live with his wife, he tells Maclean near the end, and is treated as a figure of fun by some of the other characters in the early going. (And Johnson does offer genuine comic relief; his attempt to start a fistfight near the beginning is hilarious.) But Johnson’s intelligence, wit, insight, staunch belief in virtue, and insistence on doing right make him stand out even among his more polished aristocratic betters. He proves both a frustration and a boon to his friend Maclean. Witness this exchange as Johnson presses Maclean toward self-knowledge about his mixed motives:

Alastair had a sudden flame of wrath. “Do you accuse me of lying?” he asked angrily.

Johnson's face did not change. “Sir, all men are liars,” he said. “I strive to make you speak truth to your own soul.”

Johnson is not merely a real person stuck into a fictional story, but the heart and conscience of the novel.

All of this makes Midwinter both the best kind of adventure and the best kind of thoughtful novel. Only as I have worked on this review have I begun to understand the novel’s parallel secret networks—the political network of Jacobites and the traditionalist network of Spoonbills—and its deep themes of divided loyalties and undivided truth. It is, as so much of Buchan’s fiction is, seemingly effortless, but rewarding not only to read but to reflect upon.

Midwinter is neither Buchan’s best nor most famous novel, but it is a rich and well-paced historical adventure with good characters and two striking historical portraits, and for those reasons it is well worth reading. For myself, I plan to return to this one soon.