What readers say about Dark Full of Enemies

Dark Full of Enemies has been out for a month now and the first reader reviews are coming in!

John, reviewing the book on Goodreads, describes the novel as

An Alistair MacLean-style, World War 2 commando mission story. It follows McKay, a clandestine super Marine called on to form a team of expendables and blow up a Nazi dam in Norway. McKay is sleep-deprived, guilty, unsure of himself--yet focused and cold-blooded once the bullets start flying. 

When the novel revs up, it's simple to the point of poetry. Plans go awry; friendships are tested; trust is annihilated and restored; many things explode and get shot up in ways the reader will find satisfying. At its core, Dark Full of Enemies is the story of a man's search for meaning in the back alleys of a world at war.

Steven, a reader reviewing the novel on Amazon, writes that 

The action occurs in a place I had not heard of before and adds another dimension to the story. . . . The story helps make the characters come alive and the events move quickly. I would recommend this to those who like novels based on history but appreciate some action. 

In a starred review at Goodreads (four out of five), Jay writes: 

In McKay, Poss writes a soldier in conflict with his senses of loyalty to country, duty to his mission, concern for his men, and dignity as an individual. The resolution to the conflict is satisfying, even if it has a whiff if blockbuster drama/thriller about it. 

Though Dark Full of Enemies is fiction, the war it takes place in was all too real. I would recommend this book to those interested in World War II and/or historical fiction. Personally, Poss' book has encouraged me to learn more about the Scandinavian campaigns. 

In an unsigned Amazon review, a reader writes: 

What an awesome read that has you from page one immersed into the story. He has the ability to make you part of the plot and to paint with words the environment you are in. The dark, the extreme cold, the danger surround you. I highly recommend Dark Full of Enemies!!!

Reader Jared, also reviewing the book at Amazon, writes: 

Once started, I couldn't put this book down. It takes the harsh realities and impact of war and pulls it glaringly into the light. . . . Doesn't matter if you are a history buff or just an adventure addict, this is the book for you.

Check out the above reviews, and stay turned for more. If you've read Dark Full of Enemies, I'd love for you to share your opinion of the book on Amazon, Goodreads, or elsewhere. If you haven't, check it out and let us know what you think!

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes

This is a good time for Norse myth—or at least it should be. Thor is one of the most popular parts of the central cast of the Avengers series, TV is loaded with Viking or Norse-themed programming, and last year geek darling Neil Gaiman released Norse Mythology, his own retelling of some Norse legends. 

Unfortunately a lot of this pop culture is just Norse-flavored. The Thor, Odin, Loki, and Asgard of the Marvel franchise are entertaining but considerably different from their original versions. TV shows like Vikings have serious historical problems. And even Gaiman's Norse Mythology, an entertaining enough read, limits its focus to the gods—and not just to the gods, but to the subgroup of the Æsir—and his depictions of their personalities owe more to the characterizations of Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston than to the dark and often inscrutable gods of the eddas. 

An excellent short introduction

I was really pleased, then, with a new book I read last week by Carolyne Larrington: The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, from Thames & Hudson. I found the book on the recommendation of Dr. Jackson Crawford of UC Boulder, about whom more below.

I was already familiar with Larrington thanks to her excellent recent translation of the Poetic Edda (a.k.a. the Elder Edda) for Oxford World Classics. She's an accomplished expert in the field and clearly loves the material, which is a good combination when approaching something as diffuse, arcane, and incomplete as Norse myth.

What we know is based almost entirely on the Poetic Edda and another work by Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda, and it is apparent from both that we don't have all the stories the Norse told about their gods and heroes. What we do have is episodic, allusive, and varies wildly in tone, sometimes within the same stories. Larrington retells the myths carefully, noting often what we do and do not know about the fuller mythology, and retelling them mostly on their own terms, without a lot of modern reinterpretation. Where she does offer "explanations" of certain tales, she is appropriately undogmatic.

A few things I appreciated about Larrington's book:

• Short, well-told summaries of the major myths, with good explanations of things first-time readers of Norse mythology would need to know.
• Larrington uses the original spellings of the gods' and heroes' names throughout, including the letters eth and thorn: thus Oðinn instead of Odin and Þorr instead of Thor. This seems like a minor detail, but I think it helps distance the reader from comic books or modern interpretations and open them to the originals.
• Sidebars on interesting side stories or other topics.
• Over 100 illustrations, many from Romantic era books with anachronisms like winged helmets, but the pictures are a welcome help in imagining the stories. Many others are photographs of archaeological finds like the Lewis chessmen, rune stones, or the Oseberg ship or reproductions of original medieval or early modern Icelandic drawings.
• Larrington is refreshingly frank about the unappealing nature of the Norse gods. Where Marvel's Thor is a well-intentioned but arrogant young warrior who learns humility and self-sacrifice and Odin is a wise—and, well, godlike—old man, the real Þorr is an unapologetically violent bruiser who kills people for humiliating him and Oðinn is a malevolent trickster who first favors then traduces mere mortals in order to stock his hall with warriors.
• Larrington includes excellent summaries of several major human heroes, including Volsung, Sigurð the dragon-slayer, and Ragnar Loðbrok. 

All in all, an excellent short book, and a great introduction to the topic. I recommend this heartily as a first stop.

More if you're interested

Check out all of the books I mentioned above, but especially the original sources for our understanding of Norse mythology, the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda.

In addition to Larrington's translation of the Poetic Edda, the aforementioned Jackson Crawford has an excellent new translation available from Hackett Publishing. As a bonus, he includes his adaptation of the Hávamál, "The Sayings of the High One," the Cowboy Hávamál, a western-inflected interpretation inspired by his grandfather. You can listen to Crawford read it here.

Another book Crawford recommends in the video linked above is the longest and most complicated of the Icelandic sagas, Njals saga, or The Saga of Burnt Njall. I read the Robert Cook translation he recommends while I was working on the first draft of No Snakes in Iceland after college. It's a wonderful book, one I've been meaning to reread for years.

Fortunately, Crawford has just completed a six-part summary retelling of Njal's Saga for his YouTube channel. You can watch all six parts below. Check it out!

Part I: Hrút and young Hallgerð
Part II: Gunnar's rise
Part III: Gunnar's fall
Part IV: Njal's sons
Part V: The burning
Part VI: Kári

Darkest Hour & Churchill in film and history

Yesterday I saw Darkest Hour, the latest in a welcome—to me—spate of Winston Churchill films. 

Those who complained of Dunkirk's crucial lack of generals pushing flags around map tables have the movie they wanted in Darkest Hour—this film takes place almost entirely in smoky conference rooms and halls of power. That's not a criticism—there should be room for both kinds of movies. But Darkest Hour is much, much more than a recreation of grand strategy and the decisions of powerful men. It's an excellent dramatization of determination in the face of defeat and the crucial role one man can play.

The film

When Darkest Hour begins in May 1940, Nazi Germany, flush with diplomatic victory in Czechoslovakia (1938) and military conquest in Poland (1939), Denmark, and Norway (April 1940), has invaded France. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, once lauded as the savior of world peace, is now derided and mocked to his face in Parliament. Chamberlain recognizes that he must step down, and that political and military necessity require the formation of a coalition government between rival parties. Chamberlain nominates Lord Halifax as his successor, but it rapidly becomes clear—to the immense exasperation of Chamberlain, Halifax, and King George VI—that the only member of their party that the opposition will accept as head of a coalition is Winston Churchill.

Darkest Hour follows Churchill—65 years old, outspoken political pariah and flipflopper, veteran of many failed imperial and military ventures, the most prominent of which is the Gallipoli campaign—through roughly the first month of his premiership, into but not quite through the crisis at Dunkirk, which plays out, off-screen, through the last third or so of the film. Throughout, Churchill must battle rivals within his own government, especially Chamberlain and Halifax, who want to pursue negotiations with Germany in order to avoid further bloodshed and the total destruction of the British army in France.

The performances throughout are excellent. Gary Oldman, in heavy prosthetics and a fat suit, is very good as Churchill. His voice never quite loses that familiar Gary Oldman timbre, and he sounds whinier than Churchill when reaching into the upper registers, but he captures a great deal of the spirit and especially the energy of the man—the real man, not the icon. Oldman ably walks the line between caricature and character assassination, about which more below. 

Other standouts include Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in HBO's John Adams) as Lord Halifax, depicted here as perhaps oilier and more conniving than in real life but a powerful opponent to what Halifax perceives as Churchill's recklessness with the lives of British soldiers and civilians. Ronald Pickup is good as a politically disgraced and physically failing Chamberlain. Kristin Scott Thomas is good as Clemmie Churchill and Ben Mendelsohn is good as a standoffish George VI who must warm up to Churchill over the course of the film. Lily James brings the luminous innocence of her characters from Downtown Abbey, Cinderella, and Baby Driver to the small—probably too small—part of Elizabeth Layton, Churchill's new secretary. Crucially, all of these performers work well together, and especially with Oldman, who is willing to share his scenes with other characters rather than grandstand.

The film is beautifully scored by Dario Marianelli, and beautifully shot by Bruno Delbonnel. Especially stunning are scenes set in Parliament or Churchill's underground war cabinet. A radio broadcast lit by the red On Air bulb is particularly striking. The cinematography has a digital sheen that I don't care for, but digital cinematography is in the ascendant; you won't see many more Dunkirks going forward.

Darkest Hour as history

A brief word about the film's historical accuracy, something I've mentioned before that I care a lot about. 

Darkest Hour depicts an intensely busy and chaotic month in one of the most dramatic events of world history. Naturally, the screenwriter and filmmakers have massaged the material to fit within a two-hour runtime. Characterizations are mostly accurate, and the events themselves are largely true to the historical record.

I was underwhelmed by the famous and apparently controversial scene in which Churchill travels one stop on the tube and talks to ordinary Londoners. One reviewer, who apparently didn't pay much attention to the movie, claims that Darkest Hour "dishonors Winston Churchill's memory." The tube scene is charming and sentimental—and extremely restrained compared to the sentiment in historical films by Steven Spielberg—but hardly dishonors the man. Oldman, in an interview linked below, described it as "lyrical," a poetic scene that aims at "emotional truth" rather than literal, events-based drama. I'm fine with that.

Like those of another great World War II film, Valkyrie, the events of Darkest Hour are well known. What the film succeeds at brilliantly is portraying the doubt and fear of living through those events ignorant of the outcome. That's always a worthy achievement.

But the film Darkest Hour reminded me most of was Lincoln, with its dramatic depiction of how ideals and determination must force their way through the realities of political life: compromise, cooperation, wooing, and sometimes abject failure. Like Lincoln, Darkest Hour is held together by a great central performance. And through those perfomances both films show us leaders who can accurately parse what is and is not important, which hills to evacuate and which to die on, and, rather than succumbing to defeat or cynicism or mere jockeying for power, see the big picture and drive toward it.

Dueling Winstons

As I mentioned above, there have been a number of films about or prominently featuring Churchill in the last few years. While waiting for Darkest Hour to start, I was able to tick off seven others:

The Gathering Storm, starring Albert Finney
Into the Storm, starring Brendan Gleeson
Churchill's Secret, starring Michael Gambon
Churchill, starring Brian Cox
The King's Speech, with Timothy Spall as Churchill
The Crown, with John Lithgow as Churchill
Inglourious Basterds, with Rod Taylor making a cameo appearance as Churchill

And there are surely more.

Oldman is a powerhouse in Darkest Hour, but as I've hinted above, I never quite overcame my sense that I was watching a really good performance. The voice, for me, was the giveaway. This is not to detract from Oldman's performance or the film—go see it—but Oldman will ultimately come up second or third in my favorite cinematic Churchills.

Albert Finney's performance in The Gathering Storm is a longstanding classic, a handsome and well-acted TV movie that gives you a very good sense of Churchill out of power. This is Churchill during his "wilderness years," politically ostracized and barely making ends meet through his writing. Finney is excellent. The best sound-alike I've come across is certainly Timothy Spall in The King's Speech, where he has a small and not particularly accurate role in the abdication crisis. Into the Storm boasts one of my favorite actors, Brendan Gleeson, as Churchill, but Gleeson is too burly for Churchill and the film is a rather cheap-looking TV production. Michael Gambon, the second Dumbledore, was miscast in Churchill's Secret, which also missteps by devoting a lot of its time to a fictional nurse's personal struggles. I haven't seen last year's other Winston movie, Churchill, but I love Brian Cox and he apparently gave a solid performance in a film that was—speaking of character assassination earlier— otherwise garbage.

To the surprise of no one more than myself, perhaps the best Churchill performance I've seen recently—vying with Finney's classic and the bold new Oldman—is John Lithgow in The Crown. 

Lithgow is too thin and tall—by eight inches—for Churchill, and he's American to boot. So what a wonderful surprise to see a nuanced, carefully balanced and real portrayal of Churchill. To me, Lithgow's unlikely Churchill perfectly blends the traits that make it easy to caricature the man in one direction or the other: the crankiness and amiability, the cold blooded determination and maudlin sentimentality, the confidence and bouts of depression, the devotion to honor and tradition and the political calculation, the high-flown grandiosity and candid self-deprecation. Churchill was both a frustrating man and one who inspired intense devotion. I haven't seen both sides of him portrayed quite as well.

More if you're interested

A few books and other resources that I've enjoyed and benefited from on the topic of Winston Churchill in World War II:

Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings is a comprehensive look at Churchill's wartime leadership, including much, much more than the month covered by Darkest Hour, including Churchill's ill-fated courtship of American help (carefully and subtly portrayed in Darkest Hour), his obsession with commando operations and opening a front in the Mediterranean, and his eventual marginalization by Roosevelt in favor of Stalin and his fall from power. It's a triumphant and tragic story brilliantly told. I highly recommend it.

The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill & Hitler, by John Lukacs, is a short, brisk history that frames May and June of 1940 as a battle between two titanic personalities at the height of their powers. Both Churchill and Hitler struggled with recalcitrant subordinates and military setbacks, and both traveled extensively back and forth between command centers and points of crisis as the invasion of France unfolded. Lukacs, with pointed insight, does an excellent job of laying out the parallels but also, more importantly, explaining the deep differences between the two men and their sides and foreshadowing the different courses Churchill's and Hitler's wars would take. As I watched Darkest Hour, I was reminded again and again of The Duel, and when I watched the end credits I realized why—Lukacs served as the film's historical advisor. 

Lukacs has also written Five Days in London: May 1940 and Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning, Churchill's First Speech as Prime Minister, two short books on even narrower slivers of Churchill's early leadership: a few days during the collapse of the Allies in France and a single speech to parliament. 

Winston Churchill: A Life, by the late Sir John Keegan, is a short biography from the Penguin Lives series. Keegan manages to compress Churchill's massive life into a brisk 200 pages, with good attention given to his wartime years. I recommend this biography to anyone setting out to study Churchill for the first time.

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Great Speeches is a wonderful Penguin Classics collection of Churchill's oratory from across his long career, including the three immortal speeches dramatized in Darkest Hour.

Finally, Dan Snow of the History Hit podcast has two excellent interviews on Darkest Hour available: one with Anthony McCarten, the film's screenwriter, and another with Gary Oldman himself, who is remarkably humble and candid about his approach to portraying Churchill. Each interview is around twenty minutes long, and well worth the time to listen.

In conclusion

Go see Darkest Hour. It's a very good film and an excellent look at one month of history. Pair it with Dunkirk to get a sense of those events from the top down and the bottom up. And check out some of those other Churchill films. If you already have and have a favorite film version, let me know which it is with a comment. But above all, dig into the history and learn from it. It's something Churchill himself, no mean historian, would heartily endorse.

Writing Rules

John J. Miller, who teaches journalism at Hillsdale College and hosts the excellent Bookmonger and Great Books podcasts, offers five pieces of writing advice inspired by great advice from other writers.

Be sure to follow Miller's links to Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing and the great Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language," which is always worth a read. Orwell's final piece of advice is crucial.

The Second World Wars

Just before Thanksgiving I had the honor to talk with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian whose work I've long admired, about his most recent book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won. An analytical rather than chronological history, Dr. Hanson's book looks at World War II from multiple perspectives—like industry, leadership, infantry, armor, and naval power—to examine why the Allies won, the Axis lost, and why the war was the bloodiest in human history.

This interview is part of the Christian Humanist Profiles series. Profiles is a member of the Christian Humanist Radio Network. Listen in to my interview with Dr. Hanson below, and check out the network as a whole.

John Ronald's Dragons

Saturday morning I took my kids to the library. My daughter insisted on finding a picture book "bout dragons," so I went to the catalog computer, and once I had narrowed the search to that particular branch of the library and its kids' collection, I found this gem: John Ronald's Dragons: The Story of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Caroline McAlister with illustrations by Eliza Wheeler. 

John Ronald's Dragons is a children's picture book biography of the first half of Tolkien's life, and it's wonderful. The story follows young John Ronald from his youth in the Midlands to school, his move after his mother's death when he was twelve, his meeting and courtship of Edith, his experience in World War I, and finally his professorship at Oxford where, one day while grading exams, he came across a blank sheet of paper and scribbled "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." The theme throughout is Tolkien's love of dragons, and the illustrations bring out the inspirations for his dragons in his everyday landscape.

The story is well told and a good jumping off point for your kids. I'm a bit of a nerd about Tolkien and his life, and so I would have liked more detail on, for instance, his remarkable courtship of Edith (when his guardian worried that she would interfere with his studies and forbade him to see her until he was twenty-one, Tolkien obeyed; he sent her a proposal the day of his twenty-first birthday), but this is a succinct and warm retelling that kids will enjoy. My daughter certainly does. We've read it five or six times in two days.

The illustrations are beautiful—far and away the best feature, and the best I've seen in a picture book in quite a while. The pictures include many real places, especially Oxford locations like the Hertford Bridge and the Eagle and Child, with a cameo by C.S. Lewis. Illustrator's notes at the end of the book point out some nice details tucked away in some of the pictures: a fountain pen that Edith gave John Ronald for his birthday, a copy of Beowulf hidden in his study, distinctly hobbit-like neighbors from Tolkien's childhood in the background of a landscape scene. 

Perhaps my favorite—or at least the most evocative, to me—shows Tolkien huddled in a trench, hard at work on Quenya, as tanks breathe fire in a treeless no-man's-land above.

The climax of the book is a trip through two-page landscapes from The Hobbit, in which John Ronald follows Bilbo and a troupe of dwarves through the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and across the Long Lake to find "his dragon," a lavishly illustrated Smaug hulking above a mountain of gold. Sharp eyes will note a golden cup and the Arkenstone among the pile of treasure.

As a geek bonus, the end matter includes a list of dragons from Tolkien's work, including Glaurung, Smaug, and the underappreciated Chrysophylax, and quotations from several of his essays and lectures on dragons. Good stuff.

John Ronald's Dragons is a beautiful picture book and I highly recommend it. It's a double treat in that I can read my daughter a book about one of my favorite authors and both of us enjoy it.

Visit the publisher's page for some full-page samples of the gorgeous illustrations.

Another Dark Full of Enemies sighting

A few paperback copies of Dark Full of Enemies have been sighted at Re/Max of Rabun in my hometown of Clayton, Georgia. They're available at the front desk for just $10, three dollars off the list price of $12.99. Stop by and pick one up while they're still available!

If Clayton is too far a drive, you can always find it and my other books at Amazon. Enjoy!

The Loved One

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading Evelyn Waugh this year, and have already gotten through two of his shorter novels. I'm a latecomer but love his work. Last night, I finished The Loved One. 

The Loved One, published in 1948, is the story of Dennis Barlow, a young English war veteran living in Los Angeles. After publishing one volume of poetry to great acclaim in Britain, he was recruited by Hollywood to help write a biopic of Shelley. That project having fallen through, he became a script doctor. When the novel begins, he has been totally out of work for months and has settled for a job he is surprised to find he enjoys—working at a mortuary for pets.

When a friend in the English expatriate community loses his writing contract after twenty-five years with the studio, he kills himself, and Dennis is the only one available to make funeral arrangements. He goes to the largest and most famous cemetery around, Whispering Glades, where "loved ones"—not corpses—are prepared for eternity in "slumber rooms" and "the waiting" have a wide variety of non-sectarian ministers and sanctuaries to choose from for preparation, commemoration, and burial. 

At Whispering Glades, Dennis meets and falls for Aimée Thanatogenos, a young cosmetician who specializes in freshening the appearance of "loved ones" with makeup and haircuts. She works under the rock-star embalmer Mr. Joyboy, charismatic and beloved of everyone at Whispering Glades, who has been making his intentions toward her clear by passing his freshly embalmed "loved ones" on to her work station wearing enormous grins. 

Think Barton Fink crossed with Bernie.

After Aimée criticizes the Happier Hunting Ground, the pet mortuary where Dennis works, he determines to woo her strictly through his poetry, never mentioning his job. Unfortunately, he has writer's block, and cribs from everyone from Keats to Poe in order to win her over. Aimée finds herself torn between the flashy and winsome Mr. Joyboy and the apparently unemployed but sweet British poet.

I can't summarize much more without giving things away, and the novel is less than 150 pages long, so I'll stop there. The situations that develop from these circumstances are hilarious, and finally intersect in first funny, then shocking ways.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), master of savage satire.

Waugh's sense of humor is notoriously dark and cruel, and this novel has some of the blackest comedy I've ever read. It's also one of the funniest novels I've ever read. I laughed out loud throughout, even through some of its darkest and most shocking turns.

Beyond the dark humor, Waugh's sense of irony gives the whole book a cutting satirical edge. Most obvious are Waugh's digs at American manners. "They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen," one elderly Englishman remarks near the beginning. "Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard." 

More biting are Waugh's critiques of American beliefs and sentiments, particularly around the subject of death. Whispering Glades is a very obvious spoof of a real place—Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Waugh visited on an abortive trip to MGM to discuss filming rights for another book, and left more fascinated with the cemetery than anything else in the film capital of the world. The sentimentality, the tasteless displays, the rootless striving for legitimacy, the commodification of a sacred rite, the litany of unthinking euphemisms—many of which, like memorial park and loved one, we no longer even notice as euphemisms—all show a world in retreat from the realities of life and death. A world like Hollywood.

Waugh brings these themes out poignantly in several late incidents in the plot, but I don't want to give anything away. The Loved One is a rich and hilarious novel, and I highly recommend it.

On History in Fiction (and Vice Versa)

Last month, Peggy Noonan had a column in the Wall Street Journal about what is at stake in inaccuracy—or, perhaps, misrepresentation—in historical films. Noonan wrote in response to season two of The Crown and Steven Spielberg's latest film The Post. If her summaries are accurate she raises some legitimate but relatively minor concerns, but she rather hyperbolically calls these inaccuracies "lies" and writes that, through depicting JFK as a smoker and Nixon as a malevolent criminal power withholding the Pentagon Papers to protect himself, "we are losing history."

Today, Christopher J. Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, responded with a column on the virtues of even inaccurate historical films. 

I both teach history and write historical fiction, so I care deeply about the uneasy marriage of history and fiction in that genre label. I also think Scalia has the better argument.

Scalia draws from Sir Walter Scott, author of immensely popular 19th-century romances—what we would today call "historical novels"—to make his point. Briefly, Scott responded to accusations that he had, in novels like Ivanhoe, "adulterat[ed] the pure sources of historical knowledge" or, in Noonan's terms, lied about the past. The danger represented by his inaccuracies or adulterations is described in terms strikingly similar Noonan's: Scott was "causing history to be neglected—readers being contented with such frothy and superficial knowledge, as they acquire from your works, to the effect of inducing them to neglect the severer and more accurate sources of information."

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Scott's critics had a point—if they were looking for pure accuracy in his novels. Ivanhoe is replete with medieval stereotypes and anachronistic howlers. But pure accuracy was not his concern; telling a good story was.

Here, Scott's defense gets interesting, and he makes a point I have felt intuitively but never seen put into words before. The benefit of even a book like Ivanhoe is that, if the story excites and entertains—delights, in one half of Horace's formulation—and does these things well enough, the reader who has been touched by the story will seek out the truth behind it: 

I have turned the attention of the public on various points, which have received elucidation from writers of more learning and research, in consequence of my novels having attached some interest to them.

Or, in Scalia's words: "Historical fiction actually promotes interest in purer history."

I might amend this to "good historical fiction," since there must be excellence in execution for any art to be effective, but Scalia's summary is, in my experience and observation through hundreds of novels and films, exactly right. Accurate, if you will. 

How many readers have—on their own—dug deeper into Anglo-Saxon England or the Napoleonic Wars because of Bernard Cornwell? Or ancient Rome because of Colleen McCullough? Or Greece because of Stephen Pressfield, High Medieval Europe because of Umberto Eco, the Tudors because of Hilary Mantel, or Texas, Hawaii, Poland, and large tracts of the rest of the world because of James Michener?

All of these writers' books have problems—some of them serious, and worth serious consideration—but they have all successfully interested the public in the past, and that's something. Fiction may be the first history that many untrained readers come to, but it is often not the last.

Read both Noonan's and Scalia's pieces; they're both worth your while. I have much more I could write, especially on the reaction of some historians to a fine film like Dunkirk, but those thoughts can wait for another day.

A final thought on the value of fiction from G.K. Chesterton, a passage I return to again and again, which I'll close with sans commentary: 

No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official forms or political pronouncements. . . . It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington's cat or like a witch's cat? Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That is the sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other totems the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel. 

—from The Everlasting Man

Dark Full of Enemies sighting

Blogger Jay Eldred, an old friend and fellow history teacher and Germanophile, has profiled Dark Full of Enemies for "Teaser Tuesday" at his blog Running in My Head. Check it out. 

Read like it's a vice

Advice to keep reading fresh and enjoyable, from a master:

"The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored—treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance." 
—CS Lewis

And one that came on an Amazon bookmark I got in high school, nearly twenty years ago, and have never forgotten:

"When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left I buy food and clothes." 
—Erasmus

Of course, Erasmus didn't have two kids, but this is an infinitely adaptable sentiment.

Helena on the course of modern politics

St. Helena with the True Cross, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

I'm currently reading Helena, Evelyn Waugh's novel of emperor Constantine's saintly mother, and the author's personal favorite among his many books. The story is a beautiful meditation on motherhood and religious faith, but Waugh has a number of jabs to throw at the modern world.

Here, in conversation with her power-mad son, Helena reflects on the dangers of power:

“Sometimes," Helena continued, "I have a terrible dream of the future. Not now, but presently, people may forget their loyalty to their kings and emperors and take power for themselves. Instead of letting one victim bear this frightful curse they will take it all on themselves, each one of them. Think of the misery of a whole world possessed of Power without Grace.”

Power Without Grace would be an excellent title for a study of post-Enlightenment political thought.

I've just discovered Waugh in the past year, when I read Sword of Honor. I'm digging fervently into his work, and Helena is wonderful so far. Check it out.