Shakespeare in Fiction

Last week I got Bernard Cornwell's latest novel, Fools and Mortals, from the library and blitzed through it. It's an immensely enjoyable book and a quick read.

Fools and Mortals

Cornwell made his reputation with historical action adventures like the Sharpe series, following an English soldier in the Napoleonic wars, an the Uhtred series, set in Anglo-Saxon England during and after Alfred the Great's reign. He's also written standalone novels like Agincourt and Redcoat, set in crucial times and featuring lots of thrilling, well-executed action. His heroes are typically amoral badasses who are tough bordering on sociopathic but always do the right thing in a pinch.

Fools and Mortals is vintage Cornwell is some ways and a departure in others. The characters are masculine tough talkers and there's plenty of grit to be found, and there is more than one fistfight and plenty of casual wench-ogling. But, as Cornwell himself has pointed out in interviews, not a single person dies in this novel, and the heroes aren't soldiers, but actors. And the protagonist dresses like a girl.

Fools and Mortals takes place over the course of a few days in 1595. The narrator is Richard Shakespeare, baby brother to the Bard. Richard is ageing out of the female roles he has been playing and longs to have a man's part in one of his brother's plays. His brother is, in fact, working on two, which he believes to be among his best work. In the meantime, the brothers and the rest of their company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, keep up a tedious schedule of rehearsals and performances and try to keep the Puritans from shutting them down.

There are multiple subplots and threads of conflict running through Fools and Mortals (not unlike one of Shakespeare's plays), and Cornwell paces it all masterfully. Rival companies are trying to steal Shakespeare's new material so they can stage it first. The Puritans are looking for ways to shut down the theaters that have been built outside their jurisdiction in the City of London. The government's Catholic hunters are harassing everyone. Richard wants better roles, a permanent position with his tetchy brother's company of players, another chance to meet the fetching servant girl who works for the Lord Chamberlain's wife, and, in the meantime, he's barely paying his rent.

Like A Midsummer Night's Dream, which Shakespeare and his company perform at the end, all these loose plots come together in the staging of a play to celebrate a wedding. A book with lots of subplots ending in a play with lots of subplots ending in a play—it's wonderfully meta in a way modern pop culture can't rival. 

Cornwell being Cornwell, there is no shortage of sneering religious hypocrites (an actual line from the villain: "In the name of the Lord, bend over.") and sniveling cowards as bad guys, but he keeps things pretty restrained. And there is a surprisingly sympathetic and moving portrait of an elderly Jesuit missionary living out the end of his life in the house where Richard rents a room. The book is full of period detail, especially when it comes to the staging of Shakespeare's plays themselves.

And the theatrical aspect proved the most enjoyable and interesting part of the book to me. Cornwell got the idea for Fools and Mortals from summers he's spent acting with the Monomoy Theatre (you can see him as Prospero here), and his experience as an actor shows. The performances in the book are peppered with unexpected but vivid touches clearly drawn from life—for example, the different ways each player handles the stress backstage before a performance begins, the panic and irritation that come when someone forgets their lines, the way the actors feed on the energy of a bored, indifferent, or excited audience. It made me want to find the nearest theater performing Shakespeare and go sit down for a play as soon as possible. 

Fools and Mortals was a great read, a real labor of love for Shakespeare, and a treat for people who love Shakespeare's work. I recommend it. 

And, by the way, the two plays in the novel are A Midsummer Night's Dream, from which Cornwell gets the novel's title ("Lord, what fools these mortals be") and Romeo and Juliet. I won't reveal whether Richard finally gets his man's role onstage.

The Shakespeare Stealer series

By sheer coincidence, as I read Fools and Mortals for myself I also finished reading a young adult series I've been reading to my wife before bed each night. They're The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe, and Shakespeare's Spy, by Gary L. Blackwood.

The series follows Widge, an orphan from the north of England, as he is first enlisted to steal from and then joins Shakespeare's players. The series takes place across about two years, from 1501-3, ending with the accession of James I. Along the way, Widge survives plague, works directly under Shakespeare, and becomes no mean player himself. He also develops a crush on Shakespeare's daughter Judith, who proves to be a high-maintenance tease, and rivalries with other boys in the company. 

Many of the same Elizabethan themes crop up in the series as in Cornwell's more recent book—acting, boys playing female roles, Puritanism and Catholic hunters, the cutthroat rivalries between acting companies, and more—but usually in a more kid-friendly way. The plots are more diffuse and not as tight, but Widge is an amiable narrator and good company to have on the journey. The series incorporates a lot of nice period detail and you get a really good sense of what London was like at the time.

We really enjoyed Blackwood's trilogy and recommend it for your own reading, or if you have kids who enjoy a good historical story and might want to learn a little about Shakespeare, too.

Gringos, by Charles Portis

Charles Portis is one of my favorite authors. He's most famous for True Grit, which is a magnificent novel, but he's also written four other less well-known and appreciated novels. The most recent (published in 1991) is Gringos.

Gringos has a lot in common with Portis's other novels. Like True Grit and The Dog of the South, it's the story of an Arkansas native in exile. Like Norwood, the protagonist finds himself falling in with all kinds of colorful characters and a certain amount of danger he's not really prepared for. Like Masters of Atlantis, the esoteric and occult figure prominently.

The main character is an American living in the Yucatan, where he gives guided tours of the jungle and Mayan ruins and occasionally traffics in a little illicit Mayan antiquities. His life is upended by a couple of changes to his circumstances, including love (kind of ?) and the arrival of a band of dangerous hippies who may have something to do with a recent kidnapping in the United States. 

To describe more of the plot would be both giving away too much and pointless. Because in any Portis novel the real joy is the narrative voice, the dialogue, the ramshackle collection of eccentric characters, and the preposterous set pieces that the plot meanders between. Also enlivening every one of his novels are marvelous little observations and asides like the two below, both from Gringos:

Simcoe read a book. It was all right to do that here. In the States it was acceptable to read newspapers and magazines in public, but not books, unless you wanted to be taken for a student or a bum or a lunatic or all three. Here you could read books in cafes without giving much offense, and even write them.

A passage that should make anyone who has ever read or written along in a restaurant grin.

Also, for a taste of the "Unsolved Mysteries"-like esoterica that drifts into Gringos:

Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren't nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.

Do check out Portis's books; not just True Grit, which is a masterpiece and well worth your time, but his others as well. They're all great, and precious few.

Conspiracy

Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann in Conspiracy

For this installment of Historical Movie Monday, we look at bureaucracy, memos and meeting minutes, jurisdictional wrangling, fine hors d'oeuvres in comfortable surroundings, and the murder of six million people. The film is Conspiracy, a 2001 TV movie starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, and directed by Frank Pierson.

“Politics is a nasty game. I think soldiering requires the discipline to do the unthinkable and politics requires the skill to get someone else to do the unthinkable for you.” —Reinhard Heydrich in Conspiracy

The history

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men from Nazi Germany's chief security, economic planning, legal, and administrative agencies met at a lakeside villa outside Berlin for a one-hour meeting. The invitations noted that lunch would be included.

SS General Reinhard Heydrich (1904-42)

Adolf Eichmann, a low-ranking but influential SS official, had organized the conference. The meeting's chair was Reinhard Heydrich, deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, head of the Reich Main Security Office (and therefore the Gestapo and the SS intelligence service), and second-in-command to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler himself, the head of the SS and one of Hitler's most trusted subordinates.

Among the attendees were Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, a legal expert and one of the leading architects of the Nuremberg Laws; Drs. Georg Leibbrandt and Alfred Meyer, representatives of the Reich ministry for occupied Eastern European territories; Dr. Josef Bühler, second in command to the Governor-General of occupied Poland, where millions of Reich Jews had been forced into squalid ghettos; Heinrich Müller, head of the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo); and Dr. Roland Freisler of the Reich Ministry of Justice.

One of the original purposes of the meeting had been to settle plans for Nazi policy toward Mischlinge and people in mixed-race marriages. When the meeting finally convened on January 20—after a delay caused by the entry of the United States into the war—Heydrich had several other more sweeping purposes to cover. 

First and foremost, Heydrich asserted his authority and that of the SS, authority bestowed by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Hitler himself, as the decision-makers in the "Jewish question." Heydrich announced mass "evacuations" of 11,000,000 Jews from all areas of Europe—including England and neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, which Heydrich included in his calculations—to the east where, separated by sex, they would be used for manual labor. The difficulty of the work and the poor conditions would diminish the number of Jews involved through "natural wastage." After that, the remainder would be collected, transported using Poland's extensive railway network, and exterminated using poison gas. Heydrich was proposing a "final solution."

What became clear in subsequent discussion—and in two further meetings held later that year—was that Heydrich's proposals were orders, and the meeting was a formality. Gassing had already begun. He was merely informing the various ministries of the Reich government of their subordination to his authority, and they had no actual room to debate it. The Wannsee Conference was an announcement and a call to coordination, not an invitation for feedback.

This was important to Heydrich, who needed the entire apparatus of the Third Reich to carry out his plans. The long-anticipated genocide of the Jews would no longer be carried out by ad hoc teams of gunmen firing point-blank into crowds over open graves, killing a few hundred at a time—or in rare circumstances thousands—but efficiently, scientifically, and on an industrial scale. "What had hitherto been tentative, fragmentary and spasmodic," writes Sir Martin Gilbert, "was to become formal, comprehensive and efficient." For that, he needed the bureaucracy informed and, if not on his side, subservient. He was not disappointed.

“[The Wannsee Conference was] a formal sit-down between mass murderers and senior civil servants.”

— Michael Burleigh

Also important was that all of the men at the conference were now on the record as part of the process. And they were not shocked or upset by the topics of conversation. This was no gathering of ignorant or squeamish functionaries. One of them, Dr. Rudolf Lange, was an SS officer who had helped in the shooting of 24,000 Jews from Riga, in Latvia. Another, Dr. Stuckart, had handed his own one-year old son, who had been born with Down syndrome, over to be killed by the state in the T4 program. While some of the attendees apparently bridled at Heydrich's display of authority, all of them agreed to cooperate.

Eichmann later reported that, after the meeting, an ebullient Heydrich allowed himself to smoke and drink in front of some of the remaining guests—a rarely seen liberty—and relaxed by the fire with music.

The film

Conspiracy premiered on HBO in the spring of 2001. I vividly remember my high school senior trip to New York City, at least in part because of the enormous posters for Conspiracy plastered high above Times Square, with Branagh and Tucci glaring down. 

The film recreates the Wannsee Conference in almost real time. The script is based on the sole surviving copy of the meeting's minutes, discovered after the war, supplemented by things like Eichmann's testimony after his capture by Mossad. Conspiracy is play-like, with lengthy scenes of dialogue, argument, and debate in a limited number of locations, and the film was shot on Super 16 so that the scenes could play out in longer takes. There is no music in the entire film until Heydrich puts on a record at the end; the film is carried along by the rhythms of its characters' speech. The result is a film that is essentially an hour and a half of men sitting around a table, talking.

And it's riveting.

The subject matter is a key part of the reason why, but the performances elevate the film as well. Kenneth Branagh is great as the charming, urbane, cruel Heydrich, a man Hitler described as having an "iron heart." Stanley Tucci, as Eichmann, is demure and retiring, but makes it clear what kind of authority he and his boss have and that he is in total control of the meeting, from the arrangement of the flatware to what goes into the minutes. The actors also deliver their euphemisms and bureaucratese in a banal, businesslike way that only heightens the horror. Even the famously histrionic Roland Freisler, the Nazi judge who harangued Sophie Scholl and the survivors of the Officers' Plot on the way to the gallows, is relaxed and dispassionate. Conspiracy immerses us in a world where it is normal to talk of the destruction of life with boredom, even flippancy, and no small amount of theory and rationalization.

The best example is Colin Firth's scene-stealing performance as Stuckart, who fumes and finally explodes at Heydrich and some Party functionaries over what he views as the lawlessness of the plan. By this point of the film, the viewer is casting about for a good guy, and at first Stuckart, with his talk of law and principle, seems to fit the bill. But it quickly becomes clear in his rant against Heydrich that his objections are strictly legal, strictly about form and protocol, and the only real difference between himself and the rest of the meeting's attendees is one of method. It's powerful and deeply disturbing. (Take the four minutes to watch him in this scene here.) 

The film as history

Conspiracy is remarkably faithful to the facts of the Wannsee Conference as we understand them. Most of the inaccuracies are minor: Heydrich arrives flying his own plane, though Himmler had ordered him grounded before the conference; Gerhard Klopfer, depicted by Ian McNeice as a crass, obese thug, was a much younger and trimmer man. Most of these things fall under legitimate artistic license—McNeice, through his performance, conveys to the viewer a man confident of his position thanks to the power of the Party—and they don't impair the film.

I recommend Conspiracy as a Holocaust film that is chilling without any onscreen violence, and as an example of the way the Final Solution had to be planned.

I think a lot of people assume the Holocaust just happened. This ignorance—of the Holocaust's origins and mechanics—is what Holocaust deniers take cynical advantage of. What Conspiracy dramatizes is the quiet, bureaucratic working of evil, as men at desks coordinate their powers through paperwork, memos, and lunchtime meetings to kill millions. The Holocaust was industrial, which meant that it was bureaucratic, which meant that it was impossible without the modern state. 

Conspiracy is also valuable for depicting the different kinds of evil men that made up the Nazi regime. The Nazis have become so ingrained as an image of evil that we believe we can spot it immediately: evil comes wearing jackboots or with a shaved head, shouting racial slurs and waving torches. But the ignorant thugs at Charlottesville last year are only one kind of Nazi. Klopfer, as he's depicted here, fits that stereotype. Far more pernicious, and far more damaging, are the suave Heydrichs, the quiet and hardworking Eichmanns, and the eloquent, well-educated, intelligent, and principled Stuckarts. The state system is a tool; the evil is in the men themselves.

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Finally, Conspiracy should caution us, warn us about how much evil people can accommodate. The banter and joking around the conference table in that elegant mansion on the Wannsee remind me of nothing so much as a the blase, flippant attitude toward abortion captured by the undercover videos of meetings with Planned Parenthood functionaries released a few years ago. And again, the fifteen Nazis at this conference were not ignorant men being coarse and flippant—eight of the fifteen had doctorates, and the majority were lawyers. It is comforting to us to imagine evil worked only by monsters of ignorance, but once you have accepted some basic premises, established a system both to support yourself in the work and shield yourself from the consequences, and begun to move forward, there is no limit to what you can get used to.

Or, to defer to Shakespeare:

Hamlet: Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings at grave-making.
Horatio: Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.
Hamlet: 'Tis e'en so. The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

More if you're interested

The historical literature on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is vast, so for the purposes of this post I'm limiting myself to a handful of books that I have read or regularly consult, plus one more film that I plan to write about in a future Historical Movie Monday. There is much, much more out there.

Among general histories of Nazi Germany, the best coverage of the Wannsee Conference that I've seen is in The Third Reich at War, the final volume of Richard J. Evan's trilogy on the Reich. For other surveys that cover the Wannsee Conference, see The Third Reich: A New History, by Michael Burleigh; The Storm of War, by Andrew Roberts; and The Second World War, by Antony Beevor, all of which offer succinct discussions. A more recent book by Burleigh, Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II, only briefly discusses the conference but deals with its consequences in detail.

KL, Nikolaus Wachsmann's comprehensive history of the concentration camp system, has a good passage on the conference, and emphasizes the eventual adaptation of Heydrich's plan to the preexisting camp network. The late Sir Martin Gilbert's book The Holocaust includes a chapter on it, with quotations from the only surviving copy of the minutes and Eichman's later interrogations, and ties the day's topics of discussion to the logistics of their future implementation under Eichmann.

Hitler's Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II, by Donald McKale, under whom I studied the war at Clemson, includes a chapter on the Wannsee Conference and its place in the long-planned genocide of the Jews. McKale also gives good attention to the question of Mischlinge, which consumed a large amount of the conference's time, and situates the meeting in a time when Hitler himself gave repeated, blunt public pronouncements about the Reich's intended destruction of the Jews.

Christopher Browning, one of the great historians of the Holocaust, covers the Wannsee Conference in some detail in his magisterial book The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. His earlier and perhaps more famous book Ordinary Men is worth reading for its graphic description of what genocide meant before the Wannsee Conference industrialized the Holocaust.

Finally, last year saw the release of the film Anthropoid, about the much deserved assassination of Heydrich in Prague just a few months after chairing the Wannsee Conference. I plan to write on this film at the beginning of the summer. I recommend checking it out if you haven't seen it already.

Two years without snakes!

This is a week of anniversaries. Ten years ago Wednesday I completed the rough draft of No Snakes in Iceland, my first published novel. Two years ago today, No Snakes in Iceland appeared for sale on Amazon. 

I'm still inexpressibly grateful for all those who helped me along the way, particularly those like my wife, Sarah, who encouraged me to get the book into a finalized form, to make it available, and to do so quickly. I'm also thankful for my readers, especially those who took the time to critique the book when it wasn't finished and those who have so generously reviewed it online since it came out. I appreciate you all; you've all been party to this blessing.

So, two years snake-free in Iceland! Have you read the book yet? If so, what did you think? If not, why not get a copy today?

Why Liberalism Failed

This week my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Radio Network posted his interview with Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at Notre Dame and author of Why Liberalism Failed, a bracing new book from Yale UP. I was excited to listen since I read Why Liberalism Failed just a few weeks ago. It's a great interview—take the time to listen to it.

First things first—by liberalism Deneen does not mean the progressive politics of the Democratic Party. Instead, he is critiquing the centuries-long project of liberalism as an Enlightenment philosophical project. Liberalism, in this definition, is an all-encompassing philosophy based on the pursuit of pure liberty—defined, for the first time in history, as the mere freedom from restraint—as the greatest good and the autonomous individual as the agent of that pursuit. Individuals pursuing the maximum liberty possible should be a recognizable political ideal whether your end goal is gay marriage and abortion on demand or free market capitalism and totally legalized drugs. By this definition, Democrats, Republicans, progressives, conservatives, libertarians—their fights are all infights, because they're all liberals, and Deneen positions his critique to cover them all.

I've been thinking about Why Liberalism Failed a lot since I finished it, and I still haven't completely digested it. I agree in principle with Deneen's arguments; I arrived at a rejection of Lockean liberalism a long time ago, and his bipartisan criticisms appeal to my a-pox-on-all-your-houses attitude, but I do think he overstretches his catalog of what problems are and are not caused by liberalism a bit. But that's a quibble.

Deneen is at his best when describing liberalism as an anti-culture, a system that breaks down and dissolves all competing identities and, in a seeming paradox, requires the absorption of free individuals into the state. Again, regardless of your particular political goals, pursuing maximum liberty as the means to those ends results in the strengthening of the state. With nothing but atomized, free-floating individuals, culture—real culture of shared traditions, virtues, ideals, and stories—is impossible, because no one will limit their freedom by fettering themselves to it. And so you are left with nothing but isolation, consumerism, and vacuous pop culture. (In a disturbing bit of coincidence, the book I read immediately after this was Ready Player One, which provides the best possible accidental illustration of the world Deneen describes.) Deneen also has a strong chapter on the damage done to education by liberalism, an issue of particular concern to me.

I'll stop there. As I said, I'm still working through some of Deneen's ideas. Do listen to Nathan's interview with Deneen, or this one from John J. Miller at the Bookmonger, and check out the book for yourself. It's short and straightforward, and even if you ultimately disagree with Deneen, his challenge to our prevailing worldview is long overdue.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

“And I to him: ‘I am one who, when Love 
inspires me, takes note and, as he dictates
deep within me, so I set it forth.’”

— Dante, Purgatorio XXIV, 52-4

As a brief St. Valentine's Day greeting, I want to encourage y'all to pick up Dante this year. But why Dante—grim, vengeful medieval poet, the "great master of the disgusting" according to one 19th century poet—and why on the most romantic day of the year?

Poet of love

Beatrice leads Dante into the heights of heaven, an engraving by Gustave Doré 

While he's most famous now for Inferno, that book represents only the first third of his masterpiece, the Commedia, or Divine Comedy. So if you've ever been assigned the Inferno by itself or simply read it on your own (in which case, well done!), you've only read a third of his vision of love. 

Yes, love. Dante's Comedy has as its theme all kinds of love. His love of his hometown, Florence, from which he was exiled in 1302, is a poignant strain throughout, and the wicked so memorably punished in hell, we are reminded often, sinned because they loved the wrong thing or loved a good thing in the wrong way. Paolo and Francesca, adulterers punished together in the circle of the lustful, shift the blame for their sin to a bawdy love poem. And the mover and focus of much of Dante's journey is his famous beloved, Beatrice.

That's just a sampling. Love, as a theme, as a plot point, as a subject of conversation and debate, is present throughout. But all of these loves are subordinate to and—if rightly ordered—derive their ultimate meaning from "the love that moves the sun and other stars," the love of God. 

It's God's love for a fallen man that dispatches Beatrice—on behalf of St. Lucy, on behalf of the Virgin Mary, on behalf of God— to Dante as he wanders lost in sin at the beginning of Inferno. It's love that created Hell—a thought that makes moderns squirm—and love that sends sinners there and keeps them there. And it's love that changes and saves Dante, and grants him, in the last passage of the book, a vision of God himself. 

Dante's Comedy is the story of salvation, which means that it's the story of love.

So enjoy your chocolate (Lord knows I already have), enjoy time with your beloved, and celebrate love and the relationships that give us human creatures meaning, but consider as well the source of all love. And give Dante a shot. I think you'll be glad you did.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

My recommendations

My favorite translation for pleasure reading is that by Anthony Esolen, available from Modern Library, but I've read and enjoyed many other good ones, including Mark Musa's heavily annotated one for Penguin Classics and Allen Mandelbaum's excellent but underappreciated translation for Bantam Classics. These are all readable, affordable, and easy to find. Enjoy!

A Man for All Seasons

Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII and Paul Scofield as St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons

St. Thomas More's birthday was last week, and this provided me with an excuse to inaugurate a new, semi-regular feature for this blog: Historical Movie Monday. This week, I write about a favorite of mine, a film I happened to be rewatching as More's birthday rolled around: A Man for All Seasons.

“I am commanded by the King to be brief, and since I am the King's obedient subject, brief I will be. I die his Majesty's good servant, but God's first.”

The history

A Man for All Seasons is the story of Sir Thomas More, a London lawyer, writer, philosopher, and renaissance humanist scholar. After the Archbishop of Canterbury helped him get into Oxford, More became a lawyer and statesman, worked for Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord High Chancellor, and communicated with some of the greatest humanist scholars of his time, including Erasmus, compiler of the Textus Receptus, the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament. Erasmus even stayed with More and his family when he visited London. They entertained themselves by translating Lucian together.

More was well-educated, intelligent, a man of wide experience, a prolific writer, and dedicated to his family and, above all, to his faith. He personally oversaw the education of his children. This included, atypically for the time, his three daughters, the eldest of whom, Margaret, became famous for her intelligence and command of Greek and Latin. He was also a good-humored wit. According to Erasmus, "from earliest childhood [he had] such a passion for jokes, that one might almost suppose he had been born for them." His sense of humor comes out most clearly in Utopia, published in 1516—in which he describes an outlandish society meant to satirize the Europe of his day—and, perhaps, in his death.

Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger

More traveled often with Cardinal Wolsey on diplomatic missions to the continent. He eventually became a secretary to King Henry VIII himself, and in 1529, with Wolsey dying and out of Henry's favor, he became the first layman to serve as Lord High Chancellor, a position he held for two and a half years before resigning.

More was a slightly older contemporary of Martin Luther, and the schism within the Catholic Church that resulted from Luther's 95 Theses defined the later part of his career. He wrote on numerous theological and philosophical topics and conducted literary debates with Luther and William Tyndale. As Lord High Chancellor, he was charged with prosecuting heretics in Henry's kingdom. While the Protestant propagandist John Foxe's accusations that More tortured prisoners not only in the Tower of London and but in his own home are false, More did preside over numerous heresy trials, six of which resulted in the condemned being burned at the stake. 

It is against this background that the final crisis of More's career played out. When Henry, who had earned the title Defender of the Faith from the pope for his sparring with Luther over the sacraments, became convinced that his wife Catherine could not bear him a son, he had a sudden change of mind about the sacrament of marriage. Henry had worked with Cardinal Wolsey to get an annulment from the pope on the grounds that Catherine had previously been married to Henry's elder brother Arthur. The marriage was therefore incestuous according to canon law, and had only been permitted with a special dispensation from a previous pope. Henry hoped that this, with Wolsey's intercession, would allow him to weasel out of his 24-year marriage and allow him to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. 

Every attempt by Henry to gain an annulment failed. More, Wolsey's replacement as Lord High Chancellor, refused to cooperate, as the Church's teaching and laws were clear on the matter. Nevertheless, beginning in 1532, Henry pushed forward a series of parliamentary acts that separated the English church from the Catholic Church, made Henry the head of the Church of England, declared his children by his new wife his legitimate heirs (cruelly cutting off his one surviving child by Catherine, Mary), required a loyalty oath on all of these matters, and set a penalty of death for anyone who refused. Early on in this series of acts, More resigned.

“Thomas More, who seemed sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting.”

— GK Chesterton, A Short History of England

More had too high a profile to ignore, even though he refused both to take the oath and to denounce it. Enemies, including Henry's enforcer, Thomas Cromwell, and Richard Rich, an ambitious young courtier, conspired against him, accusing him of a variety of crimes but the charges didn't stick. Henry's ministers eventually forced the issue, interrogating More several times, ordering him repeatedly to swear the oath of loyalty, and imprisoning him in the Tower of London. At his brief trial on July 1, 1535, perjured evidence was used to convict him of treason, and the court sentenced him to death.

More was beheaded five days later. According to witnesses, he joked on his way up the scaffold.

The film

A Man for All Seasons is a film adaptation of a critically acclaimed play by Robert Bolt, who had previously scripted Lawrence of Arabia and would later write The Mission. Bolt adapted the play for film himself, and the film was directed by Fred Zinnemann, director of critical favorites High Noon and From Here to Eternity.

Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More on trial

Zinnemann's High Noon offers interesting points of comparison. Like that film, A Man for All Seasons pits a principled authority figure against a seemingly unstoppable opponent. The hopelessness of his situation causes even those nearest him to waver and withdraw their support, and he faces the ultimate threat alone. Unlike Marshal Will Kane, Sir Thomas More gives up his authority as part of his resistance, fights back with words and reason, and—at least to the purely pragmatic eye—loses. A Man for All Seasons dramatizes a resistance to tyranny that does not rely on meeting force with force.

The sets, locations, costumes, and cinematography are beautiful. Scenes of the natural beauty of the Thames—always associated in the film with More against the crenelations and gargoyles paired with Henry and his yes-men—are particularly striking. The film came out in 1966, during an awkward transition from the stagy interior set design of the 1950s to the harder realism of the 1970s. It's perfectly poised between the two; the locations in the film feel real, even the sets, and at least a few scenes were shot in period-authentic locations. The trial scene was supposedly shot in Westminster Hall, where More was actually tried, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Robert Shaw, in a supporting role, is a young, energetic Henry VIII whose tyrannical inclinations are barely contained at the beginning of the film. "He is no caricature," Alison Weir writes, "but an attractive, intelligent man whose every whim has hitherto been gratified." Susannah York plays a charmingly erudite and devoted Margaret More, the only one of More's children depicted. You feel and believe the affection between More and his daughter, which raises the stakes in the final act. An obese Orson Welles is very good in a handful of scenes as Wolsey, ill and world-weary. Leo McKern is a bluff and formidably cutthroat Cromwell, and a very young John Hurt plays Richard Rich as an object lesson in virtue ethics. Rich begins the film an ambitious young man, begging More for preferment, and proves willing to debase himself further and further in his quest for position and recognition. 

The standout performance is, of course, Paul Scofield as More. Scofield originated the role on stage, and he fully inhabits the part on film. It's a finely tuned, subtle performance, built out of minute gestures, flickers of emotion in his eyes, and the carefully controlled intonation of every syllable of his speech. It helps that he's working from a magnificent script, with wonderful dialogue and speeches, but without Scofield More could come across as a tedious scold or an out of touch fanatic. There are, indeed, elements of both in other depictions of More.

There's not a careless moment in the film—technically, artistically, or in the performances—and Scofield is its centerpiece.

The film as history

A Man for All Seasons covers approximately six years of More's life, from just before his appointment as Henry's Lord High Chancellor to the moment of his death. For a two-hour film with a limited cast of characters, A Man for All Seasons does remarkable justice to the complexity of the political and religious situation of the time and remains extraordinarily faithful to the facts. Luther lurks in the background—Will Roper, Margaret's suitor and eventual husband, is shown with a boyish enthusiasm for Lutheran doctrine—and this seemingly arcane theological issue finally erupts in the person of the king. 

“It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales, Richard?”

— Sir Thomas More

The film's characterizations of More and others are very good. One must allow for artistic license, but nothing in A Man for All Seasons cuts against the record. More really was keen-witted, eloquent, and with a savage wit; Henry really was full of bustle and machismo at this stage of his life; Cromwell really was Henry's cynical hatchet man; Rich really was a slave to his own ambition. Again, More is the best character in the piece, and he has all the best lines—especially his one-liners, like his celebrated zinger to the perjured Rich—but the film's depictions all ring true.

The trial and sentencing hew very close to the record. Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of More, reprints the entire transcript. You can read it in about ten minutes. Most of the changes Bolt makes to the trial are in the interests of streamlining, saving screentime, and simply updating the 16th century English for modern audiences. Even More's last words, spoken moments before his beheading, are taken essentially verbatim from the historical record. Only the jokes—as he ascended the rickety scaffold, the ailing More asked someone to help him up and promised to shift for himself on the trip back down—are omitted.

One man faces the power of the state.

One could nitpick, something More, a lawyer, would probably enjoy. There's no solid evidence that Henry VIII died of syphilis (see below). And it is not entirely true that More was silent. He refused to take the oath, but during these years he produced a constant stream of writing that, while never naming Henry or Anne Boleyn or directly addressing the controversy, clearly critiqued it. But the play does depict a larger truth about conscience and state power. As Paul Turner writes in his introduction to Utopia:

in Tudor England there was no freedom of speech; there was not even freedom of thought. More himself was executed not for anything that he had said or done, but for private opinions which he had resolutely kept to himself. It was not enough to abstain from comment on Henry VIII's astonishing metamorphosis into Supreme Head of the Church: More's very silence was a political crime.

How much more should these these events trouble us in a democratic age? Instead of the conflict of one's conscience with the will of a monarch, one now, in order to obey God or the dictates of conscience, must go against the majority. We've given up trying to please a king for trying to please everyone. It's a question More would have us consider, and seriously.

The film concludes with the narrator describing the fates of the major players: 

Thomas More's head was stuck on Traitors' Gate for a month, then his daughter, Margaret, removed it and kept it till her death. Cromwell was beheaded for high treason five years after More. The archbishop was burned at the stake. The Duke of Norfolk should have been executed for high treason, but the king died of syphilis the night before. Richard Rich became chancellor of England and died in his bed.

That final sentence, which tells the audience that the film's scummy young striver lived a life of position and success, is the film's stinger, and masterfully brings one of the story's latent themes to the fore. Unlike High Noon's Will Kane, who does defeat his enemies in physical combat and does restore his reputation and standing and his relationship with his love interest—and then rejects everything but his love in disgust—More models a success of conscience. He is physically and materially defeated, stripped of rank and property, separated from his wife and children, and finally killed. And yet he succeeds, because faith, conscience, and truth are more important than the kind of success so eagerly grasped after by Henry, Cromwell, or Rich. And longer lasting.

A Man for All Seasons is a story we always need, perhaps especially now.

More if you're interested

My DVD of A Man for All Seasons includes this 18-minute Life of Saint Thomas More documentary. This short features a number of prominent historians and biographers, including John Guy and Alison Weir (see below). It's worth the time to watch for a capsule summary of the real More with reference to the film.

Peter Ackroyd's biography The Life of Thomas More is highly recommended as both well-researched and readable. It's also still widely available and easy to find. Tudors, the second volume in his ongoing multi-volume history of England, also covers the controversies surrounding Henry's divorce, remarriage, and Act of Surpremacy succinctly but with good detail in a readable narrative.

Historian John Guy has a number of books you might consult. First is Thomas More, which attempts to separate the man from the legend. Guy's entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame, is a very short, readable biography of More's king, with good attention given to Henry's divorce, his split with the Church, and his eradication of dissenters, including More. Guy has also written The Tudors, part of Oxford UP's Very Short Introductions series.

Alison Weir, who has done a great deal to popularize the Tudors with her voluminous biographies, covers More well in Henry VIII: The King and His Court. Recent paperback editions include a short essay in which she compares various film depictions of Henry and his life.

Charlton Heston played More in a TV adaptation of A Man for All Seasons, which I haven't seen. Neither have I seen his portrayal by Jeremy Northam in The Tudors, which I gather is sympathetic but inaccurate. I have seen the BBC's Wolf Hall, based on the novel by Hilary Mantel, in which More is played by Anton Lesser opposite Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Mantel is violently anti-Catholic and Wolf Hall is an admitted attempt to tear down More's reputation. I haven't read the novel, but I understand the miniseries to have toned down her attack, even if it includes Foxe's false accusations of torture. More comes across as an educated doofus, a man stupidly committed to principle instead of expedience (Cromwell, throughout, is held up as his pragmatic opposite). I still recommend Wolf Hall because it's excellent storytelling and filmmaking, but understand that its depiction of More is overtly hostile.

And of course there are the works of More himself. Utopia is readily available in a variety of editions and translations. I'm currently reading Paul Turner's translation for Penguin Classics. Vintage Spiritual Classics offers a modest Selected Writings anthology. Other works are readily available elsewhere, including free digitized texts online at places like Project Gutenberg. Check out More's Dialogue Comfort Against Tribulation, written while More awaited his death in the Tower.

A Handful of Dust

My trip through the works of Evelyn Waugh continues with A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh's most autobiographical and hard-edged works. Sharp readers may intuit spoilers in the review below. It shouldn't really harm the reading experience, but be forewarned.

The man who loved Hetton

A Handful of Dust tells the story of Tony and Brenda last, an aristocratic couple living a quiet and apparently contented life with their son John Andrew in Tony's ancestral family home, Hetton. Hetton is an unfashionable Victorian gothic mansion that Brenda cordially dislikes. Tony adores it. It's not just his home, it's his family's home, the seat of the family legacy, and the symbol of his responsibilities as a family man and aristocrat. 

Tony and Brenda cross paths with John Beaver, a shallow cipher of a man who bums his way from one party and country house to another, living off of wealthy friends. He's everyone's second choice for filling seating arrangements. This is simply unthinking parasitism—he's too full of nothing to be malicious. When Beaver shows up at Hetton mostly uninvited, Tony, a quiet man who dislikes intruders and prefers his routines, fobs him off on Brenda, who is a more skilled entertainer. 

Beaver makes an impression on Brenda, not for any strengths or attractive qualities, but for his very emptiness and pliability. She begins an affair with him, absconding to London more and more often under the guise of studying economics. Brenda, perhaps owing to a guilty conscience, even tries to lure Tony into his own affair with a succession of vacuous and self-absorbed acquaintances. Tony, oblivious, and loyal to Brenda to the end, ignores them all.

The crisis comes when, with Brenda skipping out on an actual opportunity to entertain guests at Hetton, Tony and Brenda's son John Andrew has a terrible accident. When a friend tracks down Brenda and tells her that something has happened to "John," she misunderstands at first and, when she realizes it's her son John and not her lover John, she blurts out, "Thank God." Then she breaks down weeping.

After this Brenda seeks a divorce, and Tony is stunned not only at the tragedy that has befallen the family, but at his wife's betrayal. He nevertheless—because he has "contract[ed] the habit of loving and trusting Brenda"—agrees to grant her grounds for a divorce, which leads to a series of comically inept attempts to stage an infidelity involving hired detectives and a good-time girl with an annoying daughter.

Finally, Tony, fed up, drops the divorce suit, refuses to cooperate with Brenda's efforts to secure alimony, and joins up with an explorer setting out to find a lost city in the Amazon. The ending—with Tony hopelessly trapped in the jungle, Brenda remarried to one of Tony's only friends, and Hetton in the hands of distant cousins—is a shock.

The savages at home

Those in the know place A Handful of Dust at a crucial joint in Waugh's body of work, a transition from straightforwardly farcical satires of university and boarding school life, imperialism, or the "bright young things" of fashionable London, to the more reflective and sharper Catholic novels of his maturity.

Waugh's first wife—also named Evelyn—divorced him after having an affair, and Waugh, as oblivious as Tony, was devastated. He obviously drew on these experiences in constructing the story, which was an expansion on a previous short story, "The Man Who Loved Dickens," about an eccentric illiterate who lived deep in the Amazon basin and loved nothing more than to have Dickens read to him for two hours daily by a hapless prisoner. "After the short story was written and published," Waugh wrote later, "the idea kept working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them."

A Handful of Dust is a more difficult read than the other books I've read so far. Not because of its style or technique—it's as effortlessly elegant as any of the others—but because its protagonist, the "civilized man" Tony, faces a conga line of tragedies and betrayals at the hands of merciless savages and his virtue goes unrewarded. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film: 

there are passages where we cannot quite believe how monstrously the characters are behaving. We Americans like to see evil in terms of guns and crime and terrorists and drug smuggling—big, broad immoral activities. We rarely [tell stories] about how one person can be personally cruel to another, through their deep understanding of what might hurt the other person the most.

It's a hard read, but a powerful indictment of shallow society and the destructive selfishness of modern people. I recommend it highly.

More if you're interested

Charles Sturridge directed a film adaptation of A Handful of Dust, which was released in 1988. It stars James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas (Clemmie Churchill in Darkest Hour) as Tony and Brenda, with Rupert Graves (Lestrade to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes) as John Beaver, and Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, Stephen Fry, and Alec Guinness in supporting roles. I found a copy at our local library and plan to watch it this weekend.

Here's novelist Joseph Kanon discussing the book with the Wall Street Journal Book Club.

John Mahoney, RIP

John Mahoney died three days ago at the age of 77. Everyone remembers him—justifiably—as "Frasier's dad," a part he performed wonderfully opposite Kelsey Grammer for eleven seasons. I want to pay tribute to two other performances Mahoney gave before Frasier took off, the two performances I always associate with Mahoney, and to a aspect of his life I've only learned about since his death.

Eight Men Out

Mahoney as Kid Gleason in Eight Men Out

One of my favorite movies—and, in my opinion, the best baseball movie out there—is Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 World Series scandal that ended the careers of eight players for the Chicago White Sox. Mahoney plays Kid Gleason, a veteran ballplayer and now the manager of the Sox. Mahoney doesn't have a lot of scenes in the film, which gives much more attention to the players involved in the bribery scandal—Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn), Buck Weaver (John Cusack), Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), and Shoeless Joe Jackson (DB Sweeney). But in his handful of scenes, Mahoney evokes enormous pathos. Gleason is a father to his players. He's proud of them and trusts them, not just to win ballgames but to play to the standard he has seen them set.

As the World Series unfolds, we see Gleason confronted with evidence he doesn't want to believe. He goes to his players, tries to get them to open up to them, and when they won't, we see, in a wonderfully subtle performance, his heartbreak. During the court case that follows, we see Gleason try to salvage his boys' reputations by standing up for them in the face of all the evidence against them. It's hopeless, and we know it even if he doesn't. It's tragic, and Mahoney plays it excellently. His pride, his disbelief, and finally his disappointment—who hasn't felt their heart pricked upon hearing "I'm disappointed in you" from their father?—command your sympathy and sadness.

Watch Mahoney in his handful of insert shots in the Game 3 montage, at the emotions he takes the viewer through in just a few seconds of screentime. 

Barton Fink

Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink's memorable introduction

The second film—and my favorite Coen brothers movie—that has made me respect Mahoney is his comic turn in Barton Fink. As in Eight Men Out, Mahoney does a lot with a relatively small supporting part. Barton Fink is the story of a socialist playwright who makes the move from New York to Hollywood just before World War II. There, with an enormous opportunity to spread his message and make some good money, he develops writer's block. While Barton is still trying to adjust to the Hollywood lifestyle, he encounters Mahoney's character, WP Mayhew, for the first time—a dapper Southern gentlemen puking his guts out in a restaurant bathroom. His first line to Barton, while washing his hands: "Sorry 'bout the odor."

Mayhew is an alcoholic writer whose critically acclaimed modernist novels have, like Barton's plays, attracted the attention of Hollywood, where he's been slumming ever since leaving the South. (Mayhew is, incidentally, loosely based on William Faulkner, and Mahoney in his bowtie and mustache is a dead ringer for the man.) With just a handful of scenes, Mahoney creates a character whose magnificence lies well behind him, and contributes mightily to Barton's disillusionment with Hollywood in general and writing in particular. After the initial shock of meeting Mayhew wears off (almost immediately, given the circumstances), Barton has almost nothing good to say of his one-time idol: "He's a big fat phony!" and, after Mayhew's put-upon secretary and lover weeps over a drunken Mayhew and says how sorry she feels for him, "He's a son of a bitch!" And, thanks to Mahoney's performance in what could have been a straightforwardly slapstick role, you can see why both characters feel the way they do.

Mahoney the man

Since his death a few days ago, I've learned a little about Mahoney the man. I try to avoid reading about the personal lives of actors since they're usually sordid and disappointing, but I was happy to learn a bit more about Mahoney. The respect and humility he brought to his craft were remarkable, and I think, in hindsight, that it shows in the finished product. He viewed acting as his vocation and approached it as an outgrowth of his faith: 

I’ve always prayed to the Holy Ghost for wisdom and for understanding and knowledge. I think he answered my prayers when I stopped in the church that day. My life was totally different from that day on. I saw myself as I was, and I saw into the future and saw what I wanted to be. And I sort of rededicated myself to God and begged him to make me a better person. It wasn’t fear of hell or anything like that. I just somehow knew that to be like…what I was, wasn’t the reason I was created. I had to be better.

And the prayer he would pray before each performance he gave:

Most glorious blessed spirit, I thank you for all the gifts and talents that you’ve given me. Please help me to use all these gifts and talents to their fullest. And please accept this performance as a prayer of praise and thanks to you.

Not a bad approach to our daily work, whatever it may be. Nor is this humble prayer a bad way to approach our fellow man:

Dear God, please help me to treat everybody—including myself—with love, respect, and dignity.

Actor John Mahoney, RIP.

Fad-proofing yourself

"I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old." —CS Lewis

This morning I rediscovered an old column called "Reading Old Books," by the late political commentator Joseph Sobran. In it, Sobran describes the best reason to read old books by long-dead authors; not because they will teach us any particular lesson—far from it—but because our contact with them and their distant mentorship will help us resist the currents of our own age. 

These are perhaps my favorite paragraphs of the piece: 

There are no particular classics, not even Shakespeare, that you “must” read. But you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind—a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof.

As Sobran cites CS Lewis as one of these voices, these internal councils of his own later in the piece, I have to assume he had Lewis's great essay "On Reading Old Books" in mind when he chose his theme and title. Lewis's essay was a preface to a new edition of St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation, itself an old book, one of the oldest in the Christian literary tradition. Compare Lewis's more detailed observations about fad-proofing:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

This is one reason people used to quote Shakespeare, Milton, or the Bible so much. They had read them often enough that the authors' perspectives became internalized, as familiar as household words, independent perspectives that could be consulted at will. The fact that the phrase "household words" has become a cliche is a measure of at least Shakespeare's influence. It's part of what separates living within a tradition from political tribalism or mere pop culture.

Lewis is certainly one of the "internal councils" I have absorbed and that continue to speak to me, a council I've kept alive by reading and rereading his books. Add to him his friend Tolkien, GK Chesterton, Dante, the Beowulf poet, Homer, and Aristotle and you've got a handful more. 

What internal councils have you cultivated in order to fad-proof yourself against "the thought-factory we call public opinion"? 

Teen Dantexting

Friend of this blog Jay has posted a fun parody of those guides to teen texting abbreviations. Parents, use his guide to find out if your teen has been texting about Dante.

A few samples:

NSFW: Ninth sphere for win
SMH: Saw Malebolge, horrible
YMMV: You must meet Virgil

A few of my own suggestions of what to look out for as you monitor your kids' High Medieval literature texting habits:

TTFN: Take that, Farinata
BC: Berate Ciacco
OMFG: On my flying Geryon or Only Malacoda farts—gross!
BBL: Burning Brunetto Latini
SMFH: Simony makes feet hot
ROTFL: Remember only things following Lethe
ICYMI: In Cocytus you meet icicles

No Man's Land

Soldiers of the Wiltshire Regiment attack across no-man's-land at the Somme, August 1916.

It's the last day of January. How many New Year's resolutions lie in smoldering ruins? I've managed to give new life to two of mine—losing weight and reading seventy books—through a simple change of routine. I'm spending half an hour on the stationary bike every day, half an hour to exercise, clear my mind, and read. I've already managed to blister through three novels this way: Evelyn Waugh's hilarious Scoop, Ready Player One (about which more at another time, perhaps), and the subject of today's post, No Man's Land, by Simon Tolkien.

I haven't actually finished No Man's Land yet, but I already want to recommend it. It was a breath of fresh air, after the empty ephemera of Ready Player One, to read a novel that, while imperfect, wants to grapple with real life, with things that matter. 

No Man's Land is the story of Adam Raine, a London boy whose father, a socialist labor activist, moves himself and Adam to a coal mining town in the north of England. There, Adam's father, a changed man after the tragedy that drove them from London, struggles as a union negotiator to balance the demands of his fellow workers with the realities of mining life and the claims of the mine's owner, Sir John Scarsdale. Adam struggles to fit in; he's a bright, bookish boy and his father works hard to keep him in school and out of the mine. Demagogues and agitators threaten Adam's father's position and the safety of everyone in the mine, and local boys show a natural hostility to Adam. Another tragedy brings the two halves of this story together, and sets Adam's life on a new and unexpected course.

When Adam is taken in by Sir John with the promise of seeing that he completes his schooling and has a chance at an Oxford scholarship, Adam becomes close with Seaton, Sir John's elder son, a principled, good-humored army officer, but falls foul of Brice, Seaton's younger brother, a boy Adam's own age. Brice is conceited, self-absorbed, and entitled. He also aims to marry Miriam, the beautiful daughter of the local parson and the object of Adam's admiration since the day he met her. 

The novel begins in 1900, when Adam is a small boy, and, as the title suggests, the First World War is the ever-present, looming threat to all of this—to Adam's romance with Miriam, to the mine and its workers and their families, to Sir John and his heirs, to Britain, and to the lives of all the characters. When war comes, most of them end up in the trenches. Adam, Seaton, and their peers from Scarsdale end up at the Somme.

I have less than 200 pages to go, and the story has just brought us to July 1, 1916, the awful first day of the British assault on the Somme, a day that saw over 19,000 British soldiers killed, most within the first few hours, and another 38,000 wounded. The author depicts the battle in all its horror, without flinching or holding back. Not all of the characters made it out of that first day--and the Battle of the Somme lasted until mid-November. 

With its class struggle, romantic rivalries, and large cast of workers, housewives, butlers, country parsons, lords, and ladies, No Man's Land teeters on the brink of melodrama. Comparisons to Downton Abbey suggest themselves, but the novel reminds me more of Dickens than contemporary TV. The characters are sympathetically portrayed and well-drawn, and their conflicts with each other feel real. This is especially refreshing in a Games of Thrones era in which everything is resolved with murder, rape, or some combination of the two. 

Most interestingly, and something the publishers have taken full advantage of in promoting the book—the novel is dedicated to JRR Tolkien, the author's grandfather. Simon Tolkien drew on his grandfather's experiences at the Somme as an inspiration, and certain elements of the narrative, such as Adam's chaste, dutiful pursuit of Miriam, reflect real moments from Tolkien's life. The novel is mostly fiction, the plot and characters mostly fictitious, but its connection to a remarkable real life man lends the novel a richness that elevates the book.

I may have more thoughts when I've finished the book. As I've said, it's imperfect, but it's very, very good, a refreshingly old-fashioned novel that realistically and sympathetically depicts a crucial historical moment through the lives of ordinary people.