Diagnosis of diagnosis

Earlier this week, Alan Jacobs offered up a new taxonomy of (non-fiction) writers: diagnostic, prescriptive, and therapeutic. (This is a riff on a post from a few years ago similarly categorizing thinkers.) Regarding the first category, he writes that

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? . . . Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

After describing the other two, he concludes by returning to this observation:

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you’ve looked through the non-fiction current events books on the tables and endcaps at Barnes & Noble, all of which seem to have been written within echo chambers for the purpose of affirming what is already held as unquestionable fact within those echo chambers. But I also wonder whether the present glut of this kind of “diagnostic” writing, especially when it repeats accepted pieties or tries to turn them into political cudgels, doesn’t have perverse effects.

If you actually read what the people who lionize Darryl Cooper, or who mock Douglas Murray for his rant on Joe Rogan about the necessity of expertise, or who get into flatly wicked things like Holocaust denial say online, you’ll find that they view themselves as fighting back against a false consensus. They reject what they perceive to be a politically imposed misdiagnosis that confers in-group status and prevails through ad nauseum repetition by bad-faith insiders and wish to assert their own diagnosis—one that provides the right enemies to blame. This is, as Jacobs points out, “something we very much want to know.”

That impression of monolithic consensus is reinforced by the kind of thousandfold repetition of old diagnoses that Jacobs mentions, but is almost always false. Any specialist in, say, the history of the Third Reich could immediately point you toward faultlines within the field and legitimate points of debate. Here’s one. That false impression is usually born of ignorance, which is regrettable. But is also preventable. You only have to trust someone to teach you, not strike out on your own with nothing but suspicion to guide you.

To conclude, I feel like I should apologize for adding to the heap of diagnostic writing in the internet landfill, but I’m terrified to be prescriptive and you don’t want to read my therapeutic advice.

Listening is not reading

Last week on Substack the perennial argument over audiobooks flared up again: does listening to an audiobook count as reading, and is having listened to a book the same as having read it?

I mentioned the pedant in me in my recent post about The Last of the Mohicans. He is never far from the surface but must be kept in check with regard to colonial New York bridge architecture and whatnot. But on this topic I’m happy to let him off the chain.

No, listening is not the same as reading, and if you’ve listened to an audiobook you haven’t read the book.

This opinion probably provoked a kneejerk reaction in at least some of y’all. These arguments get passionate quickly. But here’s my pedantic take on the whole thing: they shouldn’t. Such passion is misplaced for two interrelated reasons.

The first is the basic semantic fact that listening and reading are different words describing different things. Saying “I read War and Peace last month” when I listened to it in my car is simply untrue. This seems pedantic but it’s an important distinction; we have different verbs for these things for a reason.

The second reason has to do with the reality of reading and listening in and of themselves. These are not the same activity. You are doing different things and different things are happening to you. You can get scientific and neurological about it—as my wife, who has a degree in literacy, can and does, having recently led a professional development based on Proust and the Squid at her school—but common sense proves this, too. I both assign readings to my students and lecture. If there were no difference I could assign only readings or only lectures.

Again, this is both a semantic distinction and an immovable truth, the most important fact in the debate. Everything else is epiphenomenal. And yet if you point out that reading and listening are not the same thing, fans of audiobooks will infer from that distinction a snobbish judgment of inferiority or outright condemnation. But that inference—not to mention the defensiveness that arises from it—does not follow.

So why does this debate keep coming up? I think two factors are at play:

First, the valorization of reading. This is the “Fight evil, read books” school of reading, in which reading is treated as virtuous in itself. What used to be the specialist skill of clerks and chroniclers is now a badge of honor and mark of moral rectitude. This is pure self-congratulatory sentimentalism and should be dismissed as such. Reading is important—you’ll find no dispute on that point on this blog—but it does not make anyone good and, in a society of democratized mass education, it doesn’t even make you special.

Second—and I think the real culprit behind the rage—is the Dominion of Content. Our culture is in the grip of the erroneous assumption that all stories, media, and information are undifferentiated and interchangeable. Note how often the word consume comes up in these arguments. This is a giveaway. Failing to differentiate between reading a story yourself and having it read to you reduces writers’ work to free-floating, gnostic content that can be delivered any old way so long as it gives you some kind of picture in your head. In this view, writers don’t write books, they “produce” “content” at one end of a supply chain and at the other the “content” is simply “consumed.”

Combine content culture with a culture that makes proud little warriors out of people who happen to know how to read and you get a popular incentive to consume books without distinguishing how one has consumed them.

Conversely, put reading in its right place as an important but value-neutral skill (so that readers won’t lord it over audiobook listeners) and stop treating art as mere content to be consumed (so that audiobook listeners distinguish what they’re doing from reading) and the difference between reading and listening ceases to be pointlessly inflammatory.

Which is what I’d hope for. There’s nothing wrong with audiobooks. There’s no reason to be defensive about listening to a book and no reason to bridle at what should be a boring factual distinction. I prefer and always will prefer reading—and from a physical book, not a screen—but I have trained myself to follow and enjoy audiobooks, too. I listen to books that are hard to find and to books I’ve read before but want to enjoy in a new way. I have relatives who listen to books to pass the time on morning walks or while working a long nighttime shift in a patrol car. These are all legitimate and enjoyable—but they’re not reading.

To end on a positive note, everyone litigating this on Substack over the last several days made exactly one point I agree with wholeheartedly: listening to a book is better than just about any other activity you could be filling your time with at present. That’s why I’m always thrilled to recommend audiobooks to those relatives and friends I mentioned, why I’m glad Audible exists, and why I’m mad that AI is trying to conquer audiobooks, too.

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.

A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

I’m excited to have a review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three historical horror novels—A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice—published online at Catholic World Report this weekend. These books concern Fr Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a Dominican vampire hunter, and the various scrapes he gets into with vampires, werewolves, and, most recently, leprechauns—and worse. A sample from my review:

Those who enjoy Gothic atmosphere—gaslit streets, full moons, windswept moorlands, big dark houses, old families with terrible secrets—will find something to love in all three novels. Nicholson creates and maintains palpably tense and moody settings, and the mysteries at the heart of each story unfold with maximum dread and suspense. That the stories take place in painstakingly realized historical periods provides yet another pleasure.

But the stories prove especially powerful because of the well-drawn, lifelike, and likable characters with which Nicholson has peopled them. Father Thomas Edmund, the only character to recur in all three books, is the best example, but each has a strong cast, all of whom have their own goals and worldviews, all of which clash and compete. This is compelling in all three novels, not only because pitting rival philosophies against each other works so well in horror fiction but because Nicholson has the rare gift of being able to make goodness attractive.

I’ve mentioned Eleanor’s novels here on the blog several times before, including here and here, and A Bloody Habit was my favorite fictional read of the year in 2019. They’re a lot of fun and counterbalance their unromanticized depiction of sin and evil with an appealing and theologically sound vision of the good. Give my review a read and check these fine novels books out!

Literary vs genre fiction, craft vs content

Item: This week at The Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas bids “Good riddance to literary fiction,” arguing that “it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.” Readers want stories, not beautiful but aimless style.

Item: This week 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back announced their next read, Colleen Hoover’s BookTok bestseller Ugly Love. In discussing their choice, Mike and Conor brought up this passage from a Texas Monthly article on Hoover’s success and recent writer’s block:

Hoover is often approached by readers who tell her that her books are the first they’ve finished in years, but her success has puzzled some fellow authors. “A lot of writers will read my books, and they’re like, ‘Why is this so popular?’ ” she says. “I don’t want to use big words. I don’t want to use flowery language. I hate description. Hate it. I’m a very ADD reader. I have ADD in my real life. And if I have to read more than two paragraphs without dialogue, I will skip it.”

That Spectator column celebrating the near-irrelevance of literary novels is odd and frustrating, not only because the magnificent work of popular art that awakened Thomas to the pointlessness of literary fiction was, ludicrously, The Da Vinci Code, but because the image he sets up of literary fiction is a straw man. Gorgeously written, navel-gazing novels on Important Themes in which nothing actually happens? This describes a recognizable prententious award-bait type but is not characteristic of all literary fiction. Certainly not the kind that has lasted.

But I agree entirely with Thomas at one point: stories are what matter. This is why, to me, the division of fiction into literary and genre fiction has always felt uncomfortable if not downright false. Good fiction is good fiction, as far as I’m concerned, and so my interest has steadily drifted toward care and craftsmanship and a compelling story wherever you may find it.

So I’d rather read a good literary novel than The Da Vinci Code, not because the latter is low-brow or too popular, but because it’s abominably written. And by the same token, I’d rather read a good crime or sci-fi novel than self-absorbed high-brow bilge—anything by the Bloomsbury group, for example, the prototype of what Thomas is condemning in his Spectator piece. What traditionally separates Evelyn Waugh from John Wyndham or Graham Greene from Ian Fleming is reputation, which is fickle and easy to manipulate. What these all have in common is that they’re excellent writers, which is all that should matter.

The real dividing line in modern fiction runs between stories and content, between craft and indiscriminate consumption, between good stories told well, with the mastery of all available creative tools, and mere utilitarian delivery systems for specific kinds of (increasingly pornographic) audience-demanded stimulation. As Mike, baffled, spoofed Hoover’s explanation of her approach, “You know, this whole writing thing—I’m not a fan of the prose, or…”

If the words don’t matter, you’re not writing.

My guess is that rumors of the death of literary fiction, like Mark Twain’s, will turn out to be greatly exaggerated. What will die will be pretension—MFA-in-crowd stories of the kind mocked by Thomas in his column. What will survive—what must survive—are good stories told with care in any genre. Only that will outlast fads and keep imaginations rather than appetites alive.

The masculine urge to zap space bugs

This week on my commute I’ve been taking a break from podcasts to revisit a novel I last read in college, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It’s been about twenty years.

I faintly remember being disappointed by it, but not much else. I still wish it had more action, but with the benefit of twenty years of growing up, studying, reading, and learning from life, I can see that the problem with my first read was me. Under the sci-fi adventure premise and WWII-memoir-in-space style, Starship Troopers is an uncommonly rich and complicated book.

This passage from relatively late in the story struck me especially sharply. The protagonist, Johnny Rico, joined the Mobile Infantry straight out of high school, during peacetime. While training, war broke out with the “bugs,” the most notorious early incident of which was a bug attack on Buenos Aires that “smeared” the entire city—including Johnny’s parents. Or so he thinks. As he departs his original ship for OCS, he bumps into his father, now an NCO despite being in his mid-40s.

Johnny’s father had strongly disapproved of joining up, so not only his survival but his about-face on military service surprises Johnny. He assumes his father joined to avenge his mother. Not so. Johnny’s enlistment awakened something long dormant in his father:

“Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do… even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock—you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain—and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal… but a man.”

There’s a lot going on here. Running through it is a strong strand of Ernst Jünger—who like Heinlein proved controversial for being clear, unsparing, and uncategorizable within the permissible simplistic divisions—and the word “man” means Johnny’s father is not only making a statement about himself, masculinity, and courage, though that is the obvious surface-level meaning, but about what people are and ought to be.

What I immediately thought of was a short but poignant line from Dr Johnson, who has been much on my mind lately. In his Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell quotes him as saying, on the topic of war:

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”

— Samuel Johnson

An apt description of Johnny’s father, who is a fairly minor but memorable character, and a lot of the rest of us. I had my own abortive brush with the service after grad school, the kind of thing that was clearly not meant to be (a little too old, a little too slow) and worked out well in the end. I wouldn’t change a thing. But thinking back on it still causes me a pang of “what if” every so often. Fortunately we have imagination and stories, and the examples of the men who did soldier, who did go to sea.

Starship Troopers might be a “controversial classic,” as the most recent paperback calls it, but that it resonates so strongly with itself, with other great literature, and with a powerful impulse inside most men, an impulse either fulfilled for felt forever as accusation, is a clear mark of its worth.

For a recap of some of the controversy, a good examination of some of the nuance in the book, and a very good critique of the film adaptation, which was an deliberate act of vandalism, see this piece from American Reformer. For a similar premise with different themes and a strikingly different tone but similarly powerful social critique and more action, read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, a novel I’ve read or listened to a number of times.

The Magic of Silence

As I’ve previously noted, since reading Rembrandt is in the Wind late last year I’ve been making an effort to learn about some of my favorite artists more deliberately. Having grown up with an artist grandmother, surrounded by her art and that of the artists who inspired her, and learning from an early age to love and appreciate it, I discovered through that book how much I’ve taken for granted through simple complacency.

This book by Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, came my way at exactly the right time. Recently translated from German, this is a study of the great German Romantic landscape artist.

A native of the Baltic port city of Greifswald, Friedrich was the son of a candlemaker and only slowly achieved success as a painter. He unsuccessfully sought the patronage of Goethe, who apparently found him annoying, but eventually sold paintings to the Prussian and Russian royal families. Quiet, deeply religious, and a staid creature of habit, he spent most of his life in Dresden, from which he traveled back and forth to his hometown on the Baltic coast and such islands as Rügen, and married late. By the time he died in 1840 he left behind a widow and three children as well as hundreds of sketches and canvases.

Friedrich was then, for over sixty years, almost totally forgotten.

Illies approaches Friedrich’s life and work thematically, through the four classical elements: fire, earth, water, and air. This proves a stimulating and surprising approach. “Fire,” quite movingly, opens with the loss of hundreds of German Romantic paintings in a gallery fire in Munich, and Illies provides numerous other examples of Friedrich works lost to fire, whether an accidental housefire at his family’s tallow rendering shop back home in Greifswald or in the RAF bombing of Dresden. “Water” examines this Baltic coast native’s use of the sea, especially at dusk—or is it morning?—and “Earth” the power of his landscapes, which pieced together landmarks from real places to create imaginary forests, ruins, and mountain ranges more real than their antecedents.

Certain themes recur: loss, faith, nature, the melancholy of Friedrich’s work, which features so many stark landscapes, cemeteries, and ruins, and his place in the nascent German nationalism of the time, for which he later, unwittingly, became the posterboy. The personal stories are especially moving, such as a childhood incident related in “Water”; one winter as a child, Friedrich fell through the ice on a frozen river. His brother jumped in to save him and, despite hauling Friedrich to safety, was himself drowned beneath the ice.

What can this have done to Friedrich the boy? How did it affect Friedrich the man? Illies speculates cautiously, but makes it always clear that there is much about the reticent, closed off Friedrich that we cannot know. But knowing about this incident affects us—read Illies’s account of Friedrich’s near-drowning and his brother’s death and then look at The Sea of Ice or a pensive later seascape like Stages of Life.

What also proves moving is the story, told piecemeal throughout the book, of how Friedrich’s work was rediscovered, which we can credit to the enthusiasm and hard work of a handful of art historians and collectors. Thanks to their efforts, within the first twenty years of the 20th century a forgotten artist had become a sought-after icon. The many stories of lost Friedrichs surfacing here and there—a gallery, a country house, the retirement home bedroom of an elderly noblewoman—many of them initially misidentified or simply anonymous, are an important part of the book’s appeal. Even recent history enriches the story, as in a years-long case involving stolen Friedrich canvases hidden in a stack of tires and a mafia lawyer’s legally dubious negotiations to return them.

While The Magic of Silence says much about Friedrich’s life, work, rediscovery, and legacy, it does not focus as much on composition or interpretation. Only a few major works like Friedrich’s early altarpiece Cross in the Mountains, which became surprisingly controversial on its exhibition, or The Monk by the Sea, which has been interpreted variously as a nihilistic image of a hopeless, godless world or the first great abstract painting, or the magnificent, justly famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog receive in-depth attention. Illies’s subject is Friedrich’s life and mind and the afterlife of his work, not the mechanics of how he executed them.

My only real complaints are that the thematic organization broke up Friedrich’s life story so totally and that only four of his paintings were included in the book. The former problem is not insurmountable, and reading the book quickly created a powerful cumulative effect that suggests the shape of Friedrich’s life without sticking to it chronologically.

The latter is a bigger problem. Illies names and describes many of Friedrich’s works—whether as he completed them or as they were rediscovered in the early 1900s—but most of them are not available to look at in the book itself. I ended up mentally noting a lot of titles and browsing Wikipedia’s impressive (if still incomplete) collection of articles on them later, as well as ordering this more thoroughly illustrated book. This does not detract from the value of Illies’s study, but it is a curious oversight in a book about art.

Those two quibbles aside, this was a strong place to start in my project to give more proper attention to art. The Magic of Silence is a deeply researched, engrossing, insightful, and beautiful read. I especially appreciated occasional insights into Friedrich’s theological view of his art as well as the picture of the artist’s personality that emerges over the course of the book. I’m glad to recommend it to anyone interested in Romanticism, German culture and history, or art generally.

Gabriel’s Moon

Gabriel Dax has two problems. The first is that, after a childhood incident in which his nightlight apparently burned down the family home, killing his mother, he cannot sleep. He drinks and medicates but these stopgap solutions bring their own problems. The second problem is that MI6 is after him. They want him to do a job. And then another.

Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd, begins in 1960, as English travel writer Dax gets a scoop. He’s researching his next book and has stopped in the newly independent Congo, where he is approached by an old college friend with the offer of an exclusive interview with Patrice Lumumba, the controversial president. Gabriel accepts, has a pleasant chat with Lumumba, who insinuates that somebody—he names three men unknown to Dax—is out to kill him. Gabriel packs up his tape recorder and his notes, flies home, and thinks little of it.

Then, as Dax tries to get his interview into publishable form for a magazine, the magazine kills the project. Old news, his editor tells him. Lumumba has been overthrown and imprisoned. Dax should move on.

Not long after, Dax is approached by Faith Green. He recognizes her as a woman who had been reading one of his books on the flight back from Congo, and is flattered. Only gradually does he realize that she’s an intelligence agent. She’s trying to root out a “termite,” a Soviet agent in the service, and has something small for him to do. She has approached him because his older brother, a functionary in the Foreign Office, has used him as a private courier before, and this job will not be much different—fly to Spain, meet an aging modernist painter, purchase a sketch, return it to England.

Simple enough, but one job leads to another and Dax finds himself thrust deeper and deeper into espionage work. He makes new contacts—a veteran diplomat, the editor of a radical leftwing journal, an American who makes dark threats—suspects his house is being searched while he travels, and learns from Faith that Lumumba has been assassinated. This she lets slip long before the press makes it public. Who are these people? How do they know what they know? What are they using him for? And why does everyone want the tapes of his interview with Lumumba?

And on top of all this lie Dax’s personal struggles: his slumming relationship with a Cockney waitress, his psychoanalysis sessions, his personal investigation into the fire that claimed his mother, and his slowly dawning attraction to Faith, his handler.

This might sound like a whole lot of novel, all brooding interiority and intricate, cynical conniving, but the book comes in at just over 260 pages. As I mentioned several weeks ago, the review that brought this book to my attention compared it favorably to the best of John Buchan. That is certainly true in terms of pacing and structure. Gabriel’s Moon develops its many interwoven strands of story—Congo, MI6, Dax’s past, Dax’s personal life, Dax’s anxieties—with great subtlety and an effortlessly brisk pace. The story engages the reader from the opening pages and never lets up. It’s rich and complex but neither sluggish nor over-engineered. It’s masterfully done.

But the classic thriller author that Gabriel’s Moon reminded me of even more than Buchan was Eric Ambler. Both were masters of plotting and pacing, but where Buchan’s heroes were often principled adventurers who, if not seeking it out, embraced danger when a threat arose, Ambler’s were ordinary men of no great distinction who stumbled into danger. Already unwilling participants in whatever nefarious activities they uncover, they are often manipulated by more canny parties and bridle at being used, making foolish mistakes as a result. Gabriel Dax fits the Ambler mold perfectly.

The result, a Cold War novel with Buchanesque pacing and suspense and Ambleresque characters, evokes a feeling of paranoia better than any other spy thriller I’ve read. Alongside Dax, the reader feels Faith’s hooks sinking in deeper, dragging him further and faster into the world of espionage than he expected. Who is a friend? Who an enemy? Dax comes to suspect everything.

The only previous William Boyd novel I’ve read is Solo, a James Bond novel taking place in the late 1960s, after The Man With the Golden Gun. I don’t remember caring for it but I’m going to take another look at it soon, and I plan to check out Boyd’s other spy novels. In an interview about Gabriel’s Moon Boyd said that he intends to write two more Gabriel Dax books, rounding this story out into a trilogy. I look forward to those, and in the meantime can recommend Gabriel’s Moon highly to anyone who likes both a fast-paced globetrotting spy yarn and good character drama.

The illusion of insight

A quick follow up from last week’s post about the overemphasis on “themes” as part of English education.

People may rebel against their middle- and high-school English classes out of frustration with things like themes and symbols, but the same oversimplifying impulses are alive and well in pop culture. Where the wannabe intellectual discussing his favorite books online might still talk about themes, the more populist, mystical type will gravitate toward “archetypes” and, the thing that has introduced legions of precocious readers to this kind of talk, the Hero’s Journey.

I don’t know enough about Jung qua Jung to judge the validity of his ideas as an approach to psychology, but I abhor the Jungian “archetypal” approach to literature, and for the same reasons I abhor overemphasizing themes.

An example, and one of the things that alerted me to and turned me against archetypal readings:

Years ago I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, a book on “the masculine archetypes” recommended in a blog series at The Art of Manliness. The authors, Jungian analysts, use the four titular archetypes to develop a taxonomy of the male personality and to examine the ways deficiencies and excesses—to put it in Aristotelian terms—warp it. Where the “mature masculine” balances all four, too little or too much of any of the archetypes result in various forms of bad character. The king, if insufficiently strong, becomes a weak puppet; if too strong, a tyrant. The warrior must use the wisdom of the magician to balance his propensity for violence, lest he become either a cruel sadist or a passive masochist. And so on.

All well and good. What has always been most interesting and appealing to me about Jungian archetypes is their usefulness in taxonomy—in sorting and categorizing. (There’s the Aristotelian in me again.) But the authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, in their effort to support their thesis, plunder history and world mythology for examples and badly misuse the ones that aren’t flatly wrong or made up.

Thus, in discussing the “generative,” fertility-related traits of the lover archetype, they give us Abraham and… Zeus. The father of two nations and the ravisher of mortal women and, in at least some traditions, little boys. Sure, both fathered children, but focusing on that similarity and ignoring the differences between these two “generative” archetypes is morally incoherent.

Which brings me to Jungian archetypes in literature and to the Hero’s Journey specifically. (Somewhere inside me I have a 5,000-word essay called “Against the Hero’s Journey,” but until I find the time and patience to write that, a post like this one will have to suffice.) There are plenty of problems with the Hero’s Journey—not least its artificiality, oversimplification or misinterpretation of other myths, and its rarity in the wild—but my primary objection to it is the temptation to treat an observation about structure as some kind of insight into content. Time and time again, I’ve seen stories dissected as examples of the Hero’s Journey and its characters labeled with various archetypes as if this says anything at all about them beyond pointing out the shape of their plots.

I can provide a very direct example. A few years ago I was surprised to see a new review on Goodreads for my first novel, No Snakes in Iceland. The review was fairly positive but what stunned me about it was seeing the author label No Snakes in Iceland an example of the Hero’s Journey. Is that actually true? I wondered. I had a good, long think about it and had to conclude that, yes, it mostly fits the shape proposed by Campbell.

But does that actually say anything about the story? No.

Borrowing from John Gardner and others, I’ve emphasized over and over and over particularity—the preeminence of concrete specifics—as a creative principle. It seems to me to be a good interpretive principle as well. So, to look at just one element of the Hero’s Journey with that in mind, the hero himself, what is this comparison ignoring that matters to the story?

The hero of No Snakes in Iceland is Edgar, a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon nobleman and close associate of King Æthelred, who has served the king for years as gofer and chronicler. Edgar is educated, intelligent, dutiful, and brave, if self-effacing and preferring to work behind the scenes. He is also bitter in the extreme at the loss of his only child to an accident and the loss of his wife in a Viking raid a few years before. He is in Iceland by the order of an archbishop as an act of penance and longs for home. Edgar’s story then—if you’re looking for a theme or character arc—is one of repentance.

Compare him to the specifics of a few other purportedly Campbellian heroes:

• Luke Skywalker—a young single man in an out-of-the-way place with no prospects and apparently undistinguished background. He is brave but petulant and ignorant of the world and mostly wants to get away from the family farm and make something of himself.

• Harry Potter—a child of exalted background who has been orphaned, deprived of his inheritance, and kept in total ignorance of who he is. Longsuffering and not ambitious, he is rescued from his predicament rather than escaping from it and placed in a situation where his natural goodwill can develop.

• Bilbo Baggins—a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor who enjoys a quiet, undistinguished rural life in his ancestral home. Unambitious to a fault and utterly unaccustomed to danger and hardship.

• Neo—a twenty-something cubicle drone by day and computer hacker by night, who lives in total isolation and with no apparent drive and no prospects of improvement. He is ignorant and apathetic and important mostly by dint of being “chosen.”

• Hamlet/Simba—an actual prince who is deprived of his inheritance by his uncle and actively and knowingly avoids his calling until confronted by his father’s spirit.

Are there points of similarity? Yes! But focusing on these obscures more than it reveals. The dissimilarities matter immensely, not only in terms of the specifics of each story but for message, moral import, and, yes, theme. Does it actually mean something that these heroes’ stories play out in a similar structure? No, I don’t think so. Does it mean something that Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are young and undistinguished while Bilbo and Edgar are older, successful, and well-connected? Yes. So why don’t we focus on that instead? Similarities might draw your attention but you’ll get more understanding from looking at dissimilarity.

As I hope I’ve suggested above, there’s a place for archetype talk in the discussion and study of good stories, but more often than not, without a counterbalancing focus on the particulars of a given story, it offers only the illusion of insight.

Stories or themes?

Eric Ambler (1909-98)

I’ve wondered for some time whether stories are studied and taught the right way. I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve read a lot of critiques of the modern literary establishment and English education, especially at the college level, and I’ve come back again and again to an approach that has bothered me for years: the emphasis on “themes” in fiction.

A few years ago, in reflecting on my first reading of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I quoted a PBS documentary’s summary of the story: “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

“Well,” I wrote, “that is kind of what happens.” Kind of. But not really. Not if you’ve read the story Poe actually wrote, all the complexity and horror of which is here reduced to a talking point.

I had a similar experience this week as I looked for articles on the great spy novelist Eric Ambler. One that I turned up, an introductory guide to Ambler’s life and work, should prove genuinely helpful to the newcomer, but when it recommends six “key” novels it includes the following “themes” for five of them:

• Epitaph for a Spy: “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world.”

• Cause for Alarm: “The dangers of apolitical individuals in a politically charged world.”

• The Mask of Dimitrios: “The intersection of crime and politics, and the corrupting power of ambition.”

• Journey into Fear: “The thin line between courage and fear, and the impact of war on individuals.”

• The Intercom Conspiracy: “The futility of espionage in an increasingly chaotic world.”

Well… that is kind of what those are about. Kind of.

You’ll have noticed a few things about these themes. First, they are formulaic. Three of the five fall into a “the _____ of _____ in a _____ world” pattern, like a Mad Lib. These are all rich, complex, intricately constructed novels that place their characters in crises that admit of no easy answers. Boiling these stories—or any stories—down to something as simplistic and digestible as these themes should arouse our suspicions. Already particularity and nuance are being sanded off and forgotten as we prepare to slot each story into a pre-prepared box.

Second, these themes are vague. As it happens, I’ve read three of these five novels and started one of the others yesterday, and just about any of these “themes” could be applied to any of the novels.

Granted, all of this comes from one internet guide to a single author’s work, but based on my own experience and reading they are broadly representative of the way theme is extracted from story in textbook after textbook, class after class, essay after essay. The complex, diffuse, and imaginative is reduced to the simple, comprehensible, and ready-made. The narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” disturbs us, but we know what to do with “fear” or “guilt” or even “insanity.” Treasure Island is a rollicking adventure, but that’s not enough to make it an important book, so it becomes primarily a depiction of the danger of greed. This is also simpler, easier to understand, and—not insignificantly—to test.

More perniciously yet, at the college level the hunt for themes tends to mean subjecting stories to ideological scrutiny in order—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—to extract political messaging from them via liposuction without anesthesia. Thus assertions like this, which I once saw online: “The Last of the Mohicans is about the taboo on sex between whites and Native Americans.” Most of the time this comes from an overtly left-wing “tenured radical” perspective, but there is a right-wing version of it, too. Just this week a random stranger on Substack, commenting on something I had shared, wrote that Blood Meridian “depicts the southwest as irredeemably corrupt” and is therefore “a wokester wankfest.”

Again—is that really what The Last of the Mohicans or Blood Meridian are “about”? These books aren’t adventures set in particular times and places and happening to specific characters? Is all that matters the barely hidden pathologies or the political messaging?

It seems to me that the dangers of overemphasizing theme in the study of literature are:

• Gnosticism, by which I mean the suggestion that the “real” meaning of the story is hidden behind the words and events of the story, which leads students to either ignore the particulars or be frustrated with literature in toto.

• Didacticism, especially through the implication that good stories must have some broad meaning that should impart a lesson, describe life, or otherwise be useful to the student. If they cannot detect such, it must not be a good story.

• Political hijacking, which is easily the most high-profile, outrageous, and abominable form of this but is therefore also the easiest to identify and resist.

• The aesthetic smoothie, in which students are taught to look for big themes so thoroughly that all literature eventually loses its particularity and runs together into a bland abstraction puree. Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian are apposite here; one could say that both are “about” something like “the violence of whites and Native Americans on the frontier,” but are these books really as similar as this suggests?

This is by no means exhaustive, just the things that occur immediately to me and that I have found most frustrating.

But the final result of all of these is boredom. This is a boring, dull way to study fiction, especially when you’re introducing the young to great stories, and risks leading them away from simply enjoying reading. Great storytellers and their stories are powerful because they are specific. “Themes” are not.

Note that we don’t recommend books to each other this way. To return to one of my original examples, Epitaph for a Spy, would you rather read a book about “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world,” something that could as easily be said of Kafka, Max Barry, or a one-star Google review of the local DMV, or a book about “A teacher on vacation who is mistaken for a spy by the police and forced to help catch the real spy”?

None of this is to say one shouldn’t look for, study, or teach themes in stories. Sensing and understanding a story’s theme is an important part of interpreting it, but themes should arise from the specific, concrete, particular details of the story, and placing as much emphasis on theme as we tend to do inverts that, elevating broad, big picture abstractions above the particulars that make a story what it is. Until we can treat stories as stories first again—and until we can just enjoy them—I think we should downplay theme.

Ironies and reversals

I came down with something over the weekend that has contrived to keep me home mostly immobile today. I have, however, been able to read a little bit, and to reflect on several striking ironies in two of the books I’m reading right now.

First, a pair of reversals. From Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, in a chapter discussing Fleming’s career hopping—diplomacy, reporting, stock trading—during the early 1930s, a seemingly aimless trajectory that looked especially unimpressive next to his older brother Peter, who was already a daring and accomplished travel writer:

As at Eton, Peter’s literary success thrust Ian back into the shade; only now, Peter’s shadow stretched in pretty well every direction.

For the next twenty years, Ian had to steel himself to be called the brother of writer Peter Fleming, as a decade before Evelyn Waugh had been the brother of Alec Waugh, after Alec’s controversial, best-selling novel The Loom of Youth (1917), written when he was still a schoolboy, had sent shudders of horror down many respectable British spines.

Like Ian, Evelyn had grown up in the slipstream of a successful elder brother. Then in the 1950s both Alec and Peter were to experience a dramatic reversal.

By the time of lan’s death in August 1964, it would be Evelyn Waugh and not Alec who had grounds to be considered England’s most eminent living writer—and Ian Fleming and not Peter, England's most popular.

Interestingly, Peter Fleming and Alec Waugh were both the older brother, and both outlived their (eventually) more famous sibling.

Second, cruel ironies. I’m also reading The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, a thematic, somewhat impressionistic study of Friedrich organized according to the four classical elements—fire, water, earth, air. Author Florian Illies includes numerous ironic incidents from the artist’s afterlife. Among them is this anecdote regarding Two Men Contemplating the Moon, which was narrowly saved from destruction and looting at the end of World War II:

Those Two Men Contemplating the Moon leave Dresden only very rarely. Once, early in the twenty-first century, they flew to New York because the Metropolitan Museum proposed to hang them, for the first time in almost two centuries, beside another Two Men Contemplating the Moon that Friedrich had painted about the same time, but for his doctor, who had been so enamoured of the original version that he accepted a copy of it as payment for his services. But, when the two paintings were finally reunited for the first time, no one could see them. Just on the day the ‘Moonwatchers’ exhibition was to open—11 September 2001—a handful of Islamist terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center. The age of Romanticism was over just when it was about to be reopened. On the evening of 11 September, no one in downtown Manhattan was able to contemplate the moon: dust and ash clouded the sky, and fear obscured the view heavenward.

The ironies are especially terrible and saddening in the first part of the book, “Fire,” and this is the worst of all:

In Leipzig in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a legendary collector of art and music, an unprepossessing building society clerk called Manfred Gorke. He scrimped and saved to purchase art treasures, which he horded in his Leipzig home. . . . Gorke was originally from Hirschberg, Silesia, a mountain town Friedrich had particularly loved; hence he felt a special connection with [Friedrich]. . . . And while dire financial straits forced Gorke to part from his paintings by Carus and Runge in the early years of the war, he would never give up his Caspar David Friedrichs.

As the fighting came closer, and the air raids grew more frequent, Manfred Gorke decided to bring his Friedrichs, yet unknown to art history, to the University of Leipzig to be photographed and safely stored. On the afternoon of 3 December 1943, he personally handed them over to the university. But just the next day, in the early morning hours of 4 December 1943, 400 British aircraft bombed Leipzig, passing over the city centre in three waves between 3.50 and 4.25. They dropped countless explosive and incendiary bombs, enough to set the whole city centre ablaze. The university quarter was levelled; the Department of Art History was burned to the ground; Manfred Gorke’s Caspar David Friedrichs were reduced to ash just twelve hours after being stored away.

And, after listing some of what was lost in the blaze, Illies notes a final awful irony: “Gorke’s flat, where the Friedrichs had hung until the afternoon of 3 December 1943, survived the war unscathed.”

Sometimes it’s remarkable that anything old has survived at all.

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.