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 Runagates Club

John Buchan at his desk in 1939

John Buchan June begins its fourth year today! I started this event as a way to reclaim my birth month for something worth celebrating, and it’s grown beyond anything I could have anticipated. This year I’m reading some of Buchan’s more obscure or lesser known novels, another short biography for a taste of his non-fiction, and emphasizing some of his short fiction with three collections of short stories. We begin with one of those today, Buchan’s 1928 anthology The Runagates Club.

The club of the title is The Thursday Club, a London club to which many of Buchan’s recurring characters like Richard Hannay, Archie Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen, John Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha belong. It appears in a few previous books, most prominently The Three Hostages, where Hannay describes its meeting place as “a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street, a pleasant room, panelled in white, with big fires burning at each end.”

That’s the setting. The premise of The Runagates Club is that it is a collection of a dozen stories told by its members in the course of conversation. Like the characters themselves, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, politicians, fighter pilots, scholars, and businessmen, the stories range widely in tone, topic, and form, but they’re never very far from adventure.

The collection begins with Hannay, whose story “The Green Wildebeest” takes place in his pre-Thirty-Nine Steps days as a mining engineer searching for ore deposits in remote stretches of South Africa. While hunting for water during one expedition, Hannay and his companion, a highly-educated, rationalistic younger man, have a chance encounter with shaman, a sacred grove, and an otherworldly animal. The younger man is shaken, and Hannay narrates how his haughty intrusion changed his life for the worse.

After the eeriness of that story, the Duke of Burminster tells a comic two-part story called “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” The story begins with a high-spirited dare between the Duke and Archie Roylance leading to a footrace through the hills of the Scottish Borders and, through mistaken identity and a series of misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous coincidences, ends with the Duke plotting his escape from a mental hospital.

Palliser-Yeates follows with “Dr Lartius,” a story about espionage during the First World War and a mysterious, popular young doctor with mystical powers suspected of being a German spy. That story’s twist ending leads into perhaps the darkest story in the collection, “The Wind in the Portico.” This story concerns a rich eccentric who, having come into possession of a country house with the ruins of a Roman-era temple in the grounds, attempts to rebuild the temple and revive its ancient worship. His efforts get him the wrong kind of attention.

“‘Divus’ Johnston,” the short followup from Lord Lamancha, continues the theme of gods in a humorous vein. A story within a story, it is a tale told to him by a Scottish sea captain who, shipwrecked in Indonesia, was captured and prepared for sacrifice to a local god—who turns out to be an old friend from Glasgow, also shipwrecked.

The story told by Oliver Pugh, “The Loathly Opposite,” concerns codebreaking during the First World War and the obsession one side’s cryptanalysts can develop for their opposite numbers. In this case, a young man working in codebreaking develops an elaborate picture of the mastermind behind German codes, a picture and an obsession that continues after the war with surprising results.

Sir Edward Leithen follows with a story about how a world of adventure can be had without leaving London—shades of Leithen’s debut in The Power-House. “Sing a Song of Sixpence” relates his encounter with a charismatic but embattled South American president named Ramon Pelem and the surprising way he was able to help him both avoid assassination by revolutionaries and keep a social engagement.

“Ship to Tarshish,” one of the most moving and challenging stories, is about a friendly, well-connected, completely useless young man whose wealthy father dies immediately after a crash in the family business’s stocks. Unable to cope with the pressure of righting the ship, he flees to Canada with a small amount of cash and sinks lower and lower through lack of skill and experience. The allusion to Jonah in the title is aptly chosen for a story of manfully confronting unasked for obligation.

The uncanny returns in “Skule Skerry,” in which an ornithologist forces his way onto a remote island—one of the Norlands, later to appear in The Island of Sheep—to observe birds despite the objections of locals, among whom the island has a bad name and a reputation for the supernatural. There he has a terrifying encounter with something he later believes he can explain, though the reader may be left doubting his comforting, too-neat rationalization.

The uncanny of a different kind occurs in “Tenebant Manus,” another story rooted in the First World War, in which the unremarkable brother of an officer killed on the Western Front takes up his mantle for a brief, bright, forceful career in politics.

A final humorous story, “The Last Crusade,” is a satire of fake news avant la lettre. When a bored journalist working the South African frontier drops in on an elderly minister’s sermon, in which the minister inveighs against the Bolsheviks for threatening to execute an Orthodox patriarch, he files an amused, scoffing column which is stripped of context, exaggerated, and presented as news—as is the public response. Every news cycle makes the story bigger and wilder and less connected to the real world. By the end, the media is announcing the launch of an amateur invasion of Russia by a fictitious army of American Fundamentalists motivated by the words of the minister, who is now dead. The whole incident, according to the narrator, veteran journalist Francis Martendale, ended with fortunate real-world results, but that was no thanks to the news media.

The last story, “Fullcircle,” concerns Sir Edward Leithen but is told by historian Martin Peckwether, and begins with a time the two were tramping across the countryside and encountered an impeccably progressive, high-minded young couple in an old estate. Catching back up with them two years later reveals the power of the land to transform people.

These twelve stories originated as magazine pieces, mostly published in the mid- and late-1920s, and the frame structure of The Runagates Club was Buchan’s inspired excuse to collect and unite them. Quite apart from the fun of imagining Buchan’s regulars hanging out and chatting over a good meal together, one of the joys of this collection is the imaginative variety of the stories. Buchan was at the height of his powers as an author of fiction in the 1920s, writing novels like Huntingtower, Midwinter, The Dancing Floor, and my two favorites, John Macnab and Witch Wood, in the years leading up to this book. With horror, humor, satire, suspense, straightforward human drama—and with many stories mixing two or three of these—The Runagates Club shows off Buchan’s range to great effect.

Throughout the stories, Buchan revisits many themes and subjects familiar from his novels. The foolish things of the world confounding the wise, a biblical truth invoked explicitly at the end of “The Last Crusade,” comes through in several stories of reversal and unlooked-for grace. The virtues of integrity, physical courage, and duty, old-fashioned and neglected even then, feature in many of the stories and most prominently in “Ship to Tarshish,” in which a moral weakling, cossetted by an undemanding life of privilege, must choose hardship not only to do right by others but to be able to live with himself.

The First World War also looms large. The clubland characters narrating these stories made up the officer class of the British Army and suffered disproportionate losses in terrible combat. Buchan himself lost his best friend and brother and knew many others who never lived to see 1918. The weight of that loss comes through in stories like “The Loathly Opposite” and especially “Tendebant Manus,” but it’s there even in lighter wartime tales like “Dr Lartius.”

Buchan even seems to have a little fun with himself. I’ve noted before his reputation for wild coincidences playing a part in his fiction, a tendency noted in his own lifetime. The humorous stories in The Runagates Club like “‘Divus’ Johnston” embrace this to the point of comedy and “The Frying Pan and the Fire” is built entirely out of a cascading series of coincidences and bad luck, like the steady escalation of a Marx Brothers sketch.

But the most powerful recurring theme throughout, one revisited over and over again in Buchan’s novels, is the fragility of civilization, which Buchan justifiably saw as a thin, translucent veneer laid over bottomless barbarism. Sometimes this takes on a this-worldly political aspect, as in Leithen’s assistance of Ramon Pelem against leftist revolutionaries who, we learn in the painful coda of the story, eventually do take Pelem down.

More often, in at least three stories, civilization lulls modern man into hubris, a complacent confidence in his all-encompassing materialistic worldview that leads him to trifle with forces older and more powerful than he can reckon with. Thus the fate of Hannay’s assistant in “The Green Wildebeest” and the ornithologist in “Skule Skerry,” in which the scientific arrogantly ignore local custom and tradition and suffer for it. But this theme comes through most chillingly in the case of the amateur neopagan in “The Wind in the Portico,” who seeks an encounter with something he has romantic notions of but does not and cannot understand. His fate, quite pointedly, is the fate of mortals who trespass against the gods in Greek myth. Ancient paganism was not a hobby.

Buchan’s good solid prose and skills with structure, pacing, and description strengthen all of the stories in The Runagates Club, but these last three, with their gothic atmosphere, vividly imagined landscapes—the remote hills of South Africa, a ramshackle English country house converted into a temple, a misty uninhabited island in the North Atlantic—as well as their thematic depth, were my favorites. With such a variety to choose from, I imagine any reader could pick up the book and come away with an entirely different set of favorites. I hope some of y’all will. If you do, I’d love to hear which you liked best.

John Buchan June is off to a great start with these stories. I look forward to writing about the first full-length novel of the month, and the first full-length novel of Buchan’s career, next time.

Cicero vs Sumner

One of my “runners up” or honorable mentions in last week’s spring reading list was Josiah Osgood’s Lawless Republic, which describes Cicero’s legal career with special emphasis on the early cases that made his name. I finished the book conflicted.

On one hand, it offers a succinct, vividly drawn picture of the legal system and courts in the late Roman Republic, including some insightful explanations of procedure and the way lawyers could try to game Rome’s intricate system of holy days to influence cases. I learned a lot in these passages, even with regard to familiar stories like Cicero’s prosecution of Verres. On the other hand, as I briefly noted last week, the book is not content to tell Cicero’s story, but has to reach—strain—to impart some kind of usable lesson for us in the present.

Here’s an odd interlude in the conclusion: writing of Cicero’s “achievements as a public speaker” and his belief that the legal system “offer[s] a better chance for accountable government and justice than does violence,” Osgood notes how “Cicero’s speeches have remained valuable examples of how to convince others.” He offers this example:

[I]n 1856 the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, delivered on the floor of the United States Senate a five-hour speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner attacked senatorial colleagues for trying to extend slavery into into the territory of Kansas. Of Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina, Sumner said, “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery.” Famously, two days afterward, Sumner was brutally caned at his desk in the Senate by Senator Butler’s nephew, Representative Preston Brooks.

After cataloguing a few Ciceronian rhetorical features of Sumner’s speech, features that could just as easily be found in the oratory of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or Jefferson Davis, Osgood concludes:

Cicero’s speeches should still be studied today for their limitations but also their rhetorical power. We shall be able to better understand the achievement of later orators such as Charles Sumner by doing so, even as Sumner's caning reminds us of the problems a republic faces when it denies equality to all.

Fair enough, but that very last point is a strange thing to take away from either the history of the Roman Republic or the Sumner-Brooks incident. The Romans would have been confused by our idea of equality and the demands we make based upon it. Their legal system wasn’t meant to create or enforce equality—and it is highly questionable whether any state should or even can—but to balance the interests and prerogatives of competing orders in order to maintain Order. The Romans had many flaws but they had no illusions about what a breakdown of order meant.

In the Sumner incident, however, a self-righteous, hypocritical blowhard publicly insulted a severely ill man who wasn’t present to answer him, and said man came from a culture in which personal honor would be defended by force if necessary. Sumner viewed that culture with contempt, to his detriment. Brooks’s caning—after, in accordance with protocol, challenging Sumner and demanding an apology—had immediate and lasting propaganda value. That turned a personal dispute into a political allegory that persists to this day. Here it is popping up in a book about Cicero.

The tacked-on quality of comments like these make me wonder if they were something demanded by the publisher. Regardless, I’d still recommend Lawless Republic for its early chapters, its insight into the functioning of Roman courts, and the important fact that Osgood does not annihilate the sources through gainsaying or deconstruction in order to allow himself to explain what “really” happened, like some prominent anti-Cicero classicists I could name but won’t.

As it happens, with John Buchan June just around the corner I’m reading Buchan’s short 1932 biography of Julius Caesar. Buchan, no mean classicist himself and an elegant writer, is more charitable toward Caesar than I’m inclined to be, but his narrative is compelling and his portrait of Cicero is quite good. A sample:

Cicero was for the moment the most popular man in Rome, for even the mob had been scared by the orgy of blood and ruin involved in Catiline’s success. He deserved the plaudits which he won, for he had made no mistakes; his secret service was perfect; he gave Catiline the necessary rope to hang himself; he had the nerve not to act prematurely, and when the moment came he struck hard.

It’s shaping up to be a Roman summer. I have Osgood’s previous book on Cato the Younger on standby. Stay tuned.

Spring reading 2025

It’s been a hard semester, but through it all I’ve had some astonishingly good reading. With over thirty books read I feel like my reading has finally bounced back from the birth of the twins almost two years ago. I had a hard time narrowing this list down, but below you’ll find a handful of favorite novels, history and general non-fiction, and kids’ books, as well as a few honorable mentions in the two main categories and the books I revisited this semester.

For the purposes of this post, my “spring” ended Monday the 19th, the first day of summer classes here at my school. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

A Month in the Country, by JL Carr—A veteran of the Western Front, physically and spiritually broken, is commissioned to restore a defaced medieval mural in a small church in the English countryside. A short, seemingly simple, but rich, beautifully written, and moving story. One I plan to reread soon, as even while reading it I was aware that I wasn’t picking up all it had to offer.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle is an undistinguished scholar of 19th-century British literature and an expert on the obscure Romantic poet William Ashbless. When an eccentric businessman contacts Doyle with the opportunity to lead a group of millionaire tourists to 1810 London to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Doyle is skeptical but accepts. To his astonishment, the businessman’s time travel works—but Doyle is stranded in London when the party returns. Reduced to begging, he encounters Jacky, a girl disguising herself as a man in order to avenge her murdered brother; Horrabin, a terrifying street-performing clown who leads an army of beggars from an underground hideout; Dr Romany, a magician with ties to the gods of ancient Egypt; and Dog-Face Joe, a werewolf with the ability to swap bodies as the one he occupies becomes more and more obviously a monster. As Doyle simply tries to survive and find a way back to the present—with the help, he hopes, of Ashbless, whom he knows from his research will be in London soon—all of these characters try to use him, and even the businessman who got Doyle into this mess turns out to have hidden designs for Doyle, for Dog-Face Joe, and for the capabilities he has developed. This is the best kind of time-travel story, with minimal explanation of how the technology actually works and a great emphasis on a realistically rendered past for the characters to get lost in. The horror elements are, as a friend put it, a “fever dream,” a totally involving and mysterious adventure, and the intricately constructed plot resolves with one of Powers’s most satisfying conclusions. One of the most purely absorbing and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.

Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd—A short but complex and well plotted spy novel concerning a journalist, having gotten a rare interview with the president of a revolutionary government in the decolonizing Africa of the early 1960s, being slowly pulled into the world of espionage and deception. Shades of Buchan and Ambler with a more powerful sense of uncertainty and paranoia than is usual in either. Full review on the blog here.

Bomber, by Len Deighton—The story of a single day and a single fictitious air raid by the RAF on Germany in the middle of World War II. Deighton moves between the bomber crews, ground personnel, German radar operators and night fighter crews, and the civilians and military authorities of the small German town that the bombers, through technical malfunction and bad luck, accidentally target. Brilliantly executed, gripping from beginning to end, with powerful and moving irony throughout. With The Anubis Gates, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—The Jim of the title is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in history at a small English university. Jim is not very enthusiastic about his job but needs to pass the review chaired by his department head, the vague, inscrutable Professor Welch, in order to have his probationary position made permanent. In his increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Welch he gets drunk and embarrasses himself at a party hosted by the Welches, antagonizes Bertrand, Welch’s bohemian artist son, and must contend with a manipulative sometime girlfriend, irrationally hostile flatmates, an earnest student who knows more than he does, and his own growing attraction to Bertrand’s girlfriend, the angelically beautiful Christine. Hilarious and cringe-inducing, Lucky Jim’s vision of hapless academia is often all too recognizable, and Jim himself vies with Ignatius J Reilly as the worst-case-scenario version of myself. Another one I intend to revisit soon.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A short, snappy crime thriller about low-level Boston thugs selling guns and an aging con trying to play the cops and other crooks off each other to his own advantage. Any plot summary will make the novel sound more familiar and predictable than it is. Higgins’s dialogue is excellent and his storytelling reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard. A great surprise, and I’m going to seek out more of Higgins’s work.

Runners up:

• Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John Le Carré—Two short, brisk, sharply observed detective stories that also happened to introduce George Smiley, one of literature’s greatest spy characters, to the world. Read before revisiting The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time since grad school.

• Baron Bagge, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—A moving, dreamlike novella about an Austrian cavalryman’s brushes with love and death during World War I. Full review for Substack forthcoming.

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—An involving fictional account of one of World War II’s many frustrating side-shows by a man in a thick of it. Full review on the blog here.

Special mention

Back in January I read Uppsala Books’ newly republished edition of Waltharius, a medieval Latin epic translated by Brian Murdoch. The story is set in the mid-5th century and concerns Walther of Aquitaine, Attila the Hun (briefly), and other semi-historical figures familiar from centuries of subsequent legend and poetry. I greatly enjoyed it, and wrote about it in some detail here.

Favorite non-fiction

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, by Russ Ramsey—The followup to my favorite non-fiction read last year, Rembrandt is in the Wind, this volume is not quite as good as that book but was still a thoroughly involving, moving, and thought-provoking look at art and faith with the added dimensions of pain and suffering as a theme. I hope to revisit both of Ramsey’s books sometime soon.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—A massive account of the life of James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare has not only read every source, he has spoken to every possible living connection to Fleming and incorporates all of it into the story. At first the level of detail is overwhelming but once Fleming reaches adulthood and steps into his crucial role in British intelligence during World War II the book settles into a confident stride and breezes through hundreds of pages. The result is an exhaustively detailed picture of Fleming, his world, and his work. Bond doesn’t come along until at least two-thirds of the way through, a good reminder of how much life Fleming was drawing from by the time he created this character. It is also powerfully sad. One gets a sense of Fleming as both a first-rate bounder and a damaged little boy who lost a sterling father and lived his life under the thumb of a ghoulish, manipulative mother—and then married a woman just like her, who mocked his books with her highbrow friends during all-night salons while Fleming tried to catch up on sleep. Far from “failing upwards” because he was posh, as I’ve seen some online critics of Fleming assert, Shakespeare shows that Fleming had both natural talent and a powerful work ethic alongside serious personal flaws. Charm and connections may have gotten him far but can’t account for his success—as reporter, intelligence officer, and finally novelist. This is probably far more Fleming than casual readers will want to spend time with, but a very good biography and a worthwhile read.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers—A comprehensive, readable, and fair biography of Poe that pays good attention to his life, character, work, and reputation. A few years ago I read short biographies of Poe by Peter Ackroyd and Paul Collins as well as thematic studies of his life and work—Poe and science, Poe and the American city. I’d recommend Meyers’s longer biography to anyone wanting a more thorough treatment. His examination of the confusing and controversial parts of Poe’s life is especially judicious, and his account of the posthumous smearing of Poe’s reputation and the long process of rehabilitation since is very good.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—Why do so many kids from affluent families have vaguely-defined anxiety? Why do so many in sheltered suburbs suffer from trauma? Why are so many taking psychoactive meds? Why are so many seeing therapists? And, most importantly, why is none of it helping? Shrier’s basic thesis is that modern American parents, operating from fundamentally flawed premises about harm, have panicked and committed whole generations to regimes of psychiatric “help” that actually leave them emotionally stunted and make them more anxious, passive, morbidly self-absorbed, and less resilient. Shrier couples this with a critique of the child psych industry and the dangerous theories its practitioners often field-test through their patients. A tough but necessary read. Should pair well with The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which my wife read about the time I was reading this and which I mean to read sometime soon.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A wide-ranging thematic account of the life and art of the great German Romantic painter as well as a poignant, often bitterly ironic look at his work’s afterlife—forgotten, rediscovered, repurposed, occasionally stolen, and much of it destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson—An interesting look at the political events, social trends, and intellectual currents in a single year that contributed to our present WEIRDER world. I found some chapters weak and the overall point muddled, but the majority of the book is excellent.

• Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood—A good overview of Cicero’s legal career that also attempts to chart the breakdown of law and order in the late Republic. The former is better than the latter, which is when the author strains for relevance or lessons in this story.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garret M Graff—An enjoyable if necessarily incomplete survey of the evolution of the UFO phenomenon since World War II. Full review on the blog here.

Rereads

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Kids’ books

• Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Gareth Hinds from William Shakespeare

• The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander

• Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

• Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim

• James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

Looking ahead

I’m still reading a few books I had started before my cutoff date and I have several more promising reads lined up, including more John Le Carré and Len Deighton and several books for John Buchan June. Stay tuned next month for those. In the meantime, I hope as always that this list leads you to something good to read, and that y’all have a pleasant and restful summer. Lord knows we need it.

Thanks for reading!

The Return

Ralph Fiennes strings Odysseus’s bow in The Return

Last night I finally had a chance to watch The Return, last year’s film adaptation of the climactic second half of the Odyssey. After anticipating it eagerly for some months, and more so as a steady drip of information about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey epic for IMAX has begun, I was underwhelmed.

First, the good. Ralph Fiennes is an excellent choice to play Odysseus and got into gnarly physical shape for the part. He looks every bit the weathered and toughened old warrior-king, and when he first opens his eyes on the beach at Ithaca they shine with sharply focused intelligence.

And, to be honest, that’s about it. There are a few nice touches I want to come back to, but the best I can say of The Return is that Fiennes performs excellently at the center of a movie that doesn’t measure up to what he’s doing.

I had two big problems with the film. The first is that, from production design and costuming to tone, the film is relentlessly dull and bleak. In the first two areas this bleakness betrays a depressing unoriginality and inauthenticity: inauthentic because this is not what Homer’s or Odysseus’s world looked like, unoriginal because The Return offers the same coarse, dingy, brown-on-brown vision of past peoples as primitives that was already old when Monty Python and the Holy Grail spoofed it.

The Return reminded me of Franco Zefirelli’s Hamlet in that it makes token nods toward a popular misconception of what a period is like—rough wool clothing in impractical designs, rickety dwellings made of sticks, cavernous stone palaces—while using flagrantly anachronistic elements—medieval castles in both cases—to create atmosphere. This could be forgiveable. Indeed, I love Zeferelli’s Hamlet. There will probably never be a movie that gives us a realistic look at the Bronze Age world Homer describes, but at least try to come up with something other than a stereotype.

The bleakness of the film’s tone is the bigger problem. Homer is serious when he needs to be, and presents the stakes—for Odysseus, for Penelope, for Telemachus, even for the suitors—seriously, but is never dour. The Return is simply dour. The film has no comic relief, no joy, no gratitude, no fond reminiscence or hope for the future. There is not even an Athena to pity or help or intercede for Odysseus. The Return is not just demythologized, it’s dehumanized.

This tonal problem is rooted in the film’s approach to the source material. The screenwriters have used the Odyssey to dramatize and explore modern pathologies. This is most evident in the case of Odysseus’s two most important allies upon his return, Eumaeus the swineherd and Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. In the film, both of them hate Odysseus for leaving for Troy and tell him so. They help him grudgingly. When he finally reveals himself and kills the suitors, Penelope reacts in horror and intervenes to spare Antinous, one of the ringleaders, whom Telemachus kills anyway. Penelope turns on them both, berating Odysseus for turning their hall into “a slaughterhouse” and leading Telemachus into a life of violence.

At this point, by replacing Homer’s characters with modern people, the story becomes absurd. What did you think was going to happen when Odysseus came back, lady? When Telemachus hesitated to give Odysseus his bow in the first place, why did you tell him to do so? Why did you bother to delay the suitors at all?

Then, in their long-anticipated reunion, Odysseus tells Penelope that he took so long to come home because he was ashamed of what he had become during the war. At this point all clicks into place: he’s been traumatized you see. Everyone in The Return is dealing with trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma, just like a bunch of suburbanites moping their way through life. In place of Homer’s lost world of custom, loyalty, duty, ritual, and protocol, a world in which there is still room for love between father and son and tenderness between a well-matched husband and wife, The Return gives us angst and resentment.

It’s strange to me that the film finally squandered what goodwill I still had toward it during the climax, the well-staged slaying of the suitors. But I suppose it was there that the film shows its hand and I realized how far from Homer this story has wandered.

And yet a few glimpses of Homer shine through. When Odysseus poses as a beggar and is beaten and mistreated by the suitors, I felt an outrage true to the poem. When Eurycleia, Odysseus’s elderly nurse, recognizes him from a scar on his leg and is overpowered by excitement that he has returned, I felt that excitement, too. And, most poignantly of all, Odysseus’s encounter with his dying hunting dog Argos, abandoned outside the palace and the first creature on Ithaca to recognize his master, makes it into the movie. This simple, wordless scene moved me to tears.

If I’m being harsh it’s because I’m disappointed. I’m grateful to see an attempt to treat this story seriously, but grieved that the original wasn’t apparently good enough for the filmmakers. That the most emotionally powerful moments in the film were those lifted from the Odyssey with the least alteration or meddling makes The Return a useful warning against trying to improve on the classics.

I suspect it’s already too late for Nolan to learn the lesson. We’ll see next summer. In the meantime, I plan to reread Homer.

The King of Kings

We were too late for Easter, but last weekend my three older kids and I finally saw The King of Kings, a new animated movie about the life of Christ from Angel Studios.

I admit I was skeptical of the project when I first learned about it. The King of Kings is based on The Life of Our Lord, a posthumously published retelling of selected stories from the Gospels by Charles Dickens, of all people, and Dickens appears in and narrates the movie. I also have to admit that I’m a bit wary of Angel Studios, not only because I’m reflexively and mulishly suspicious of popularity but because much of their work, based what I’ve read about their prestige projects like Cabrini and Bonhoeffer and what I’ve seen of “The Chosen,” strikes me as slick but hollow. I’d be glad to be wrong. I’m certainly glad I took the kids to see The King of Kings.

The movie begins, startlingly, with Ebenezer Scrooge in the cemetery, insisting to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that he has repented and changed. When noisy children interrupt him, we discover that we’re watching Dickens give a live one-man performance of A Christmas Carol in London sometime in the mid-1840s. The noisy children are Charles Jr, Mary, and the youngest (at the time), Walter. The King Arthur-obsessed Walter proves particularly troublesome, disrupting Dickens’s reading until his father shouts at him and confiscates his toy sword.

At home, Dickens and his wife Catherine put the older children to bed and Dickens takes Walter into the family library to talk things over. He gives Walter’s sword back and begins to tell him about the true story of the king who inspired Arthur. What follows is a quick, thematically-oriented tour of the life of Christ from his birth in Bethlehem, through some of his ministry, and finally his death and resurrection.

Any movie revisiting such familiar stories must have an unusual angle to make them fresh again. Many of the rote, stagey Biblical epics era of the 1950s and 60s are forgotten today because they never improved upon what The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur did. The King of Kings, to my surprise, brilliantly used Dickens to narrow the focus of the film and tease important but easily overlooked themes out of it.

By starting off with a Victorian boy’s love of King Arthur, The King of Kings takes Christ’s rule as its central theme, and every part of the story portrayed onscreen supports and expands on this. Christ’s birth was the birth of a king, resisted by a rival king. Each miracle shown in the film demonstrates his authority over some part of creation—his kingdom. Beginning with his healing of a blind man and following with the feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, casting out Legion from the demoniac of Gadara, healing the paralytic on the Sabbath, raising Lazarus from the dead and, finally, rising from the dead himself, they also show an unmistakable escalation in his claims to rule.

A parallel theme is the irony of Christ’s lordship. Walter, like those anticipating the Messiah’s rule two millennia ago, expects something else in a king. Born in a stable, followed by a council of fishermen, scorned, humiliated, and killed—at every step, Christ’s life upends those expectations. You have heard it said, but I tell you…

Even the film’s odd starting point—the end of Dickens’s Christmas Carol—proves aptly chosen. The King of Kings begins with repentance among snowy tombs and ends with Jesus leaving a tomb having conquered death and made redemption possible. The writing, by director Seong-ha Jang, is simple but brilliantly effective.

Something else that pleased me: The King of Kings was made with children in mind and is kid-appropriate, but it does not sand all of the rough edges off the Gospel accounts. Christ clearly suffers on the cross and endures relentless mockery from the crowd. The film also includes things I’ve seen in very few kids’ books and no other animated version of the story. Not only are the demoniac and Legion here, so are the pigs into which Christ casts the demons. And following the feeding of the five thousand, when some of the crowd talk about making him king on the spot, the film includes Christ’s sobering note that many of the people following him are doing so for material reasons, not because they recognize in him the Son of God. This is not merely a feel-good Sunday School story, but a challenge.

Technically, the film is fine, better than a lot of similar independent animated features. Limitations in the animation show occasionally, but the characters and environments are nicely designed—some of the disciples have a nice Rankin-Bass claymation look to them—and the directing inventively supports the story. A series of flashbacks to the earlier miracles during the crucifixion works especially well, with Walter imagining himself as Peter sinking into the Sea of Galilee and Jesus saving him only to sink himself. The King of Kings may not be on the same level as Pixar or Disney, but the director and animators did a wonderful job making sure the visuals were part of the story and not merely the necessary visual means of telling it.

The voicework is also good, with Kenneth Branagh’s narration as Dickens being the backbone of the film, Oscar Isaac as a subtle, understated Jesus, and many smaller parts filled by big names for a scene or two—Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, and Forest Whitaker as Peter, for example. But the chief strength of the movie is its story and the manner in which the filmmakers, a South Korean animation team led by Seong-ho Jang, have chosen to tell it.

The King of Kings is not an exhaustive cartoon version of the life of Christ, but through the thoughtful selection of stories that resonate with each other, it offers a surprisingly and wonderfully deep meditation on how Christ transformed what kingship means while clearly demonstrating who the true king is.

Warfare

A few years ago I quoted Stephen Hunter’s review of Windtalkers, a bad movie for which Hunter offered good insight. In comparing the arch, balletic, frenetic action of that movie to real footage of men in combat, Hunter wrote of how the latter always “amazed” him: “The soldiers appear so informal and undramatic. They never seem to be in any heroic poses; their minds, if you can infer from their body postures, are concerned with very small things, like ‘Let’s get over there’ or ‘Let’s get down’ or ‘Gosh, I wish I wasn’t here.’ They are beyond rhetoric or exhortation.”

I have thought of that passage many times over the years, but it came to mind especially clearly and strongly when watching Warfare over the weekend. A new movie co-directed by Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL turned film military advisor Ray Mendoza, Warfare is the nearest a movie has ever come to fitting Hunter’s description of real-life combat footage.

Part of that is surely down to Mendoza himself. The movie, which is apparently the result of conversations with Garland during the making of Civil War, is based on his experiences during the Battle of Ramadi in the fall of 2006. Mendoza appears as a character, a young SEAL radio operator, though he is by no means the central protagonist. Warfare is an ensemble picture, and the team—radioman Ray, observation post commander Erik, sniper/corpsman Elliott, petty officer Sam, Marine fire support officer Mac, callow new guy Tommy—shares the spotlight.

Briefly, because I really don’t want to give anything away, Warfare recreates a single incident from Mendoza’s time in Ramadi almost in real time. Having commandeered a house shared by two Iraqi families, whom the SEALs confine to a downstairs bedroom, Mendoza’s team observes a busy street in a hostile neighborhood. An opening title tells us they’re operating in support of a Marine unit elsewhere in the city, and though combat can be heard elsewhere and it occasionally diverts the SEALs’ air support, we never see it.

While watching as a growing group of MAMs (military-age males) gathers in a busy market down the street, the SEALs are hit by a grenade and rifle fire and have a furious shootout with enemies they can’t see. Following a second deadly surprise attack, the SEALs are trapped in the house trying to stabilize their wounded while the insurgents from down the road launch their assault. They need air support, their fellow SEALs from other observation posts nearby, and medical evacuation by road—before they’re overrun, and before their friends die of shock or blood loss.

Another quotation that came to mind, this time from Clausewitz: “Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Utterly unromanticized, detail-oriented, and agonizing in execution, Warfare makes you feel that in your bones.

In addition to eschewing a main character, Warfare scraps most of the other conventions not only of war movies but of movies in general. Other than a brief, comedic prologue, the film follows the classical unities, taking place entirely in and around a single house over the course of an hour and a half of a single day of the battle. No one talks about the girl they left behind or what they plan to do when they get back home and no one finds an excuse to explain to a buddy—for the benefit of the eavesdropping audience—what military jargon means or why they’re doing what they’re doing. The characters receive no more characterization than what we can observe of them, and we must infer the reasons for their actions from their results (or the lack thereof).

With so little Hollywood convention to rely upon, Warfare’s brilliance rests on two things: the performances, which are great across the board—I really forgot I was watching actors for a long time—and its technical excellence, especially its cinematography and sound design. There is no musical score; all sound is diegetic, sourced within the world of the story, and though we have all seen soldiers in war movies briefly lose their hearing after an explosion, in Warfare it takes a long time to come back. An uncomfortably long time. And when it does, you might prefer not hearing.

Warfare is exclusively about the experience, the “What was it like?” of the Iraq War, and refreshingly takes no political stance whatsoever. It concerns these men in this house, and what they have to do to fight and survive. If they are “beyond rhetoric and exhortation,” they are also beyond policy and partisan talking points. (This has, predictably, upset some people.) Like their experience of war, Warfare is blunt, direct, stripped down, and teaches no obvious lesson. To do so would be to cheapen and uncomplicate what these men lived through. Warfare brought Ernst Jünger’s entomologist eye to mind: like Storm of Steel, it seems to say War is a thing that is. Here is the specimen I observed.

Warfare is a one-of-a-kind movie, a small gem that deserves a wide viewership and all the praise it’s gotten. It is, in short, exactly what it says in the title, with no embellishments or flourishes. Per Hunter, it is “informal and undramatic,” and though the men fight bravely they do not do so in “heroic poses.” They do what their training and duty and their affection for their friends—never stated or explained but obvious through their actions—require them to do, and several times they do things so dangerous that the word hero, which seems irrelevant in the moment, only occurs to us afterward.

More if you’re interested

While I’ve read a lot about the two battles of Fallujah in 2004, most of what I know about Ramadi comes from the excellent memoir Joker One, by Donovan Campbell, who commanded a Marine infantry platoon in the city at the same time Fallujah was dominating the news. This was two years before Warfare takes place, but would be a worthwhile read whether your see the Warfare or not. Here’s my Amazon review from fifteen years ago.

Addendum, May 1: Since posting this review earlier this week I’ve come across two more good items. First, here’s Kyle Smith’s review for the Wall Street Journal, which says much of what I was trying to praise, only better. Second, here’s a long interview hosted by Jocko Willink with the two real guys wounded in the fight depicted in Warfare. It’s powerful.

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!

Black Bag

Transparent barriers—Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

My spring break last week didn’t go as expected, but fortunately I got a break from my break Friday evening when I met a friend for Black Bag, a new spy thriller written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Black Bag concerns George Woodhouse, a British intelligence officer who specializes in interrogation and polygraph testing. He is happily and faithfully married to Kathryn, a fellow intelligence operative. When the film opens, he’s meeting a fellow agent who gives him a list of five names within the intelligence service who could be the party responsible for the leak of a secret program called Severus. All five are known to George.

One, Freddie, is an old friend, a chummy but loutish and borderline alcoholic lad. Freddie’s much younger girlfriend Clarissa works in signals intelligence and likes to play the innocent and aggrieved ingenue but is much more canny and manipulative than she lets on. Colonel Stokes is an upright, physically fit, perfectly composed agent in a relationship with Zoe, a service psychologist who regularly evaluates all of them. The fifth and last suspect, to George’s dismay, is Kathryn, his wife.

George invites the other four to a dinner party where he mildly drugs them and sets them up in a game designed to provoke uncomfortable conversations through which the four will reveal themselves. Tempers flair. George forms hunches. He also discovers a discarded movie ticket in his wife’s bathroom trash. The same night, the agent who provided him the list dies, poisoned in his own home.

By his late comrade’s reckoning, George had only a week to uncover the traitor and stop the leak of Severus, an act that could kill thousands. Now, with a few days already elapsed in feeling out the others and with new suspicions surrounding Kathryn’s sudden trip to Zürich, George, a meticulous, precise man, must act fast, improvising and bringing pressure to bear on the other agents, playing them against each other, bending the rules, and exploiting gaps in service procedure in an attempt to draw the traitor out without revealing what he’s up to. In doing so, and especially in trying to discover if Kathryn specifically is guilty, he makes a potentially catastrophic mistake.

I’m being vague on purpose. What Severus is, why it can’t be released, and what will happen if it does—these are secrets Black Bag only slowly reveals. The story’s steady escalation as George unwinds more and more of what is going on within the service is one of its joys.

Another is Black Bag’s emphasis on character, which is also where it shows its unusual place among recent spy stories. With the exceptions of George and Kathryn, the spies of Black Bag lead loose, dissipated, unfulfilling lives: drinking too much, taking drugs, putting up with too much from their significant others, cheating behind their backs. These are not just personal flaws—what used to be called sins—but security risks. George’s conspicuously faithful monogamy, which baffles his fellow agents, turns out to be the only reliable thing in their chaotic world.

This, along with some of the real-world implications of the Severus plot, gives Black Bag a moral dimension that, it not unique in latter-day Hollywood, is as unusual as George and Kathryn’s marriage.

George’s name, his chilly interiority, his hunt for a traitor, and even his eyeglasses might call John le Carré’s greatest character to mind, but Black Bag’s interest in personal relationships and the ways they are compromised by weakness feels much more like Len Deighton. In Deighton’s novels, tradecraft and technology play an important role but the personalities and beliefs of the characters are prior to and motivate the spy activity. Knowing a person’s true character proves as important as drones, satellites, code words, dead drops, and secret documents—a refreshing change from the tech- and action-heavy spy films that have proliferated in the twenty-odd years since The Bourne Identity.

Another nice change: Black Bag is lean and well-plotted, coming in at just over an hour and a half with not a wasted moment in it. The performances are excellent across the board, especially Michael Fassbender as George. Fassbender has been my choice for the next Bond ever since seeing him don a tuxedo for another tight, well-paced Soderbergh spy thriller, Haywire. He may never get to play Bond but his performance here is a classic. Tom Burke as the boorish Freddie, Marisa Abela as Clarissa, and Naomie Harris as Zoe, a lapsed Catholic who still acts on her beliefs, are further standouts, as is Pierce Brosnan in a small role as an intimidating and inscrutable intelligence chief.

With a smart, intense, and often funny script, good pacing and plotting, and excellent acting, Black Bag was a welcome surprise. If you enjoy spy drama as much as spy action and are looking for a thoughtful, suspenseful film that doesn’t overstay its welcome, this is well worth your time. And as the big-budget studio movies and superhero series show steadily diminishing returns, I hope to see more like Black Bag.

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.