Charles Portis, RIP

For years now, I have hoped for just one more novel from two aging Southern writers. One was Cormac McCarthy, whose most recent novel, The Road, came out in 2006, when I was in college. The other, and the one whose work I more devoutly wished for, was Charles Portis. Portis’s last novel, Gringos, was published in 1991. Escape Velocity, a 2012 miscellany of newspaper articles, travelogues, short fiction, a play, and essay-length appreciations by other writers, collects a handful of more recent stories. It looks like it will be his last book of any kind—Portis died yesterday aged 86.

An Arkansas native, Portis served in the Marine Corps in Korea—a memory obliquely evoked in at least one of his novels and his final short story—before going into journalism. After writing for regional papers in or near Arkansas he was picked up by the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked alongside Tom Wolfe (literally alongside, their desks being next to each other), among others. He covered the Civil Rights movement before being assigned to the paper’s London bureau—a job once held by Karl Marx. (He joked that the Herald Tribune “might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better.”)

The London bureau job was his final gig. He quit journalism and returned to Arkansas to write his first novel. Norwood came out in 1966 and was adapted into a film four years later, by which time he had published his second, best remembered, and arguably greatest novel, True Grit.

These first two novels have everything in them that Portis would tweak and explore in his later books. Naive but well-meaning Southerners or westerners, a picaresque road trip, loquacious cranks, con men more pathetic than threatening, a world blankly indifferent to the characters, and masterfully interwoven humor, especially deadpan snark. There is no joy like Portis’s dialogue.

True Grit also demonstrates Portis’s mastery of narrative voice. While the story takes place in narrator Mattie Ross’s fourteenth year, her acid, knowing narration is the voice of middle aged Mattie, and the wry interplay of this Mattie describing her younger self in more precocious years and livelier times—and settling theological and political scores in terse asides—is half of what makes the book great. It also helps that it’s a great story, and Rooster Cogburn a fictional invention for the ages. Throughout, the tone is what keeps the book going as much as anything, and it’s the Coen brothers’ success, in the more recent of the book’s two film adaptations, in dramatizing the tone of the book that has made theirs the better of the two film versions. Mattie is the American narrator par excellence—I’d choose her over Huck Finn any day.

His last three books came out in six-year intervals from 1979 onward. The Dog of the South is about a cuckolded bore traveling into Mexico in pursuit of his wife, who has run off with a lover. Masters of Atlantis tells the story of a naive midwesterner hoodwinked into founding a secret society to protect the arcana of Atlantis. Gringos tells the story of American expatriates—some good, some bad, most somewhere in between—living out their days in the Yucatan, passing the time leading tours of Mayan ruins, trafficking the occasional illicit antiquity, and dealing with violent millenarian hippies.

All are great.

These books have meant a lot to me since I first discovered them a decade ago, and they are among the few that I have reread with even more enjoyment a second time. I reread True Grit and Masters of Atlantis just last year. I have not only enjoyed them but learned from them, and tried especially to use the lessons in the art of fiction I learned from True Grit when I came to write Griswoldville. Anything I’ve written pales next to his work, but he remains an inspiration. My consolation is that at least I can be near him on the shelf.

Portis was a gift, and my genuine sorrow that he is no longer with us is balanced by my lasting gratitude for his work. RIP.

Dawson (and Lewis) on the benefits of history

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970)

Last week I began reading Christopher Dawson’s 1932 book The Making of Europe, one of the first histories seriously to push back on the Renaissance and Enlightenment image of the early medieval period as “the Dark Ages” and to rehabilitate the period as a crucial—even the crucial—era in the development of Western culture. It’s great so far.

Dawson starts strong. In his introduction he offers several reasons why he has written the specific book he has about the time period he has chosen, and among them are the following:

One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves—away from obvious and accepted facts—and discovers a reality that would otherwise be unknown to us. There is a real value in steeping our minds in an age entirely different to that which we know: a world different, but no less real—indeed more real, for what we call “the modern world” is the world of a generation, while a culture like that of the Byzantine or the Carolingian world has a life of centuries.

“History should be the great corrective to that ‘parochialism in time’ which [is] one of the great faults of our modern society.”

— Christopher Dawson

History should be the great corrective to that “parochialism in time” which Bertrand Russell rightly describes as one of the great faults of our modern society. Unfortunately, history has too often been written in a very different spirit. Modern historians, particularly in England, have frequently tended to use the present as an absolute standard by which to judge the past, and to view all history as an inevitable movement of progress that culminates in the present state of things. There is some justification for this in the case of a writer like Mr. H. G. Wells, whose object it is to provide the modern man with an historical background and a basis for his view of the world; but even at the best this way of writing history is fundamentally unhistorical, since it involves the subordination of the past to the present, and instead of liberating the mind from provincialism by widening the intellectual horizon, it is apt to generate the Pharisaic self-righteousness of the Whig historians or, still worse, the self-satisfaction of the modern Philistine.

“Parochialism in time” is an excellent way to think of the problem. Modern people would scoff at someone who spent their entire lives in one town but think nothing of reading only the very latest books. That kind of parochialism is even more damaging and dangerous than the homebody’s, because it keeps the mind small and warped to fit only the shape of the present.

Dawson’s argument here anticipates—and probably even inspired—similar arguments in CS Lewis’s work, notably in The Abolition of Man and, even more clearly, in CS Lewis’s great essay “On the Reading of Old Books.” (For a little more about Dawson’s influence on Lewis, their mutual respect, and their awkward first meeting, see here.) Lewis wrote the essay in 1944 as an introduction to a new translation of St. Athanasius’s De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (On the Incarnation). Early in the essay he writes that

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. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. 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. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

Dawson, like Lewis, is also alert to the misuse of the past, especially as a polemical weapon in what we would now call culture wars:

There is, of course, the opposite danger of using history as a weapon against the modern age, either on account of a romantic idealisation of the past, or in the interests of religious or national propaganda. Of these the latter is the most serious, since the romanticist at least treats history as an end in itself; and it is in fact to the romantic historians that we owe the first attempts to study mediaeval civilisation for its own sake rather than as a means to something else. The propagandist historian, on the other hand, is inspired by motives of a non-historical order, and tends unconsciously to falsify history in the interest of apologetics.

“One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves.”

— Christopher Dawson

Dawson cites as examples the work of Catholic historians aiming to defend the Church against the attacks of modern atheists using medieval stereotypes as a cudgel, and we might add to this the uses to which history has been put in modern cultural and political debates, which often come in pairs: Marxist histories histories in which everything is exploitation and money and Whiggish histories in which everything is the fight for liberty; the tidy whitewash of Neo-Confederate history and the everything-looks-like-a-nail slavery-centric approach of the 1619 Project; freethinkers’ histories of religion as the font of all evil in the world and their counterparts in which all evil stems from Nietzsche, or Darwin, or Voltaire.

But “this way of writing history,” Dawson notes, “defeats its own ends, since as soon as the reader becomes suspicious of the impartiality of the historian he discounts the truth of everything that he reads.”

Such propagandist histories fail because they do not confer the very first benefit of history Dawson lists—they do not take us out of ourselves, but instead “subordinat[e] the past to the present,” especially our own interests. For all their faults, the Romantics were at least interested in the past for its own sake. Only if, like them, we surrender to the past and try to understand it on its own terms can we reap the benefits Dawson describes, or feel Lewis’s “clean sea breeze” freshening our minds.

Scruton on nothing buttery

From The Soul of the World, in which the late Roger Scruton mounts a sophisticated philosophical attack on reductionist accounts of religion, the experience of the sacred, and the personal encounter with God. Having just described the way in which describing a sequence of pitched sounds is inadequate as an explanation of a chord or harmony in Beethoven, and just before moving on to a detailed argument against the pretensions of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to explain thought, consciousness, and personhood, Scruton writes:

It is helpful at this point to register a protest against what Mary Midgley calls “nothing buttery.” There is a widespread habit of declaring emergent realities to be “nothing but” the things in which we perceive them. The human person is “nothing but” the human animal; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; sexual love is “nothing but” the urge to procreation; altruism is “nothing but” the dominant genetic strategy described by Maynard Smith; the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre. And so on. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things—symphonies, pictures, people—we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step in the search for God.

Compare CS Lewis in The Abolition of Man. In this famous passage, he critiques reductionist attempts to debunk or explain away traditional understandings of reality as cynical attempts to “see through” things to what is “actually” happening. This mindset or hermeneutic of suspicion proves self-defeating in the end:

But you cannot go on “explaining away” forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

Scruton’s book is an extended examination of why that’s the case. It’s worth your time, and I regret that it took his death two weeks ago for me to pull it off the shelf and, finally, read it.

1917, isms, and art

“Loyalties as simple as death.” British infantry shelter in A freshly dug trench near the end of 1917.

About a week ago, a friend of mine in the Marine Corps sent me a Slate article about 1917, the best movie of last year and one of the greatest war films ever made. The article is headlined “1917 has one major flaw—it’s irresponsibly nationalistic.” Anyone who has seen 1917 and taken it on its own terms will wonder what on earth the author of the piece is talking about. True to form, the essay has all the high-flying silliness of a typical Slate piece, including a lot implicitlys—a classic indicator of spectral evidence—and condescending oversimplifications and plenty of inane references to Donald Trump. (My favorite: Kaiser Wilhelm II was “a proto-Donald Trump,” which is not only silly but somehow manages to be insulting to both men.)

While I drafted and redrafted this blog post with much longer excerpts, the following paragraph sums up the piece’s argument. Writing that while he enjoyed the craft and technical achievements of 1917, the author

felt very uneasy—not for aesthetic reasons, but for moral ones. “1917,” as its title indicates for the historically well-informed, is a World War I picture. Any film set during that conflict has a responsibility to account for the horrors of nationalism, much as a film that takes place during the Civil War must deal with slavery, and one that occurs during World War II must acknowledge fascism.

To which I say, as politely as I can, no. For two interlocking reasons.

First, because storytellers can tell the stories they want and tell them any way they damn well please. I can’t emphasize this enough. One of the least becoming and most nefarious aspects of contemporary talk about storytelling, whether on film or television or between the covers of books, is the reflexive urge to police who can tell what story and how. The who and what have been particularly hotly contested in the Slough of Despond known as YA fiction. The how is what concerns me here.

In writing that 1917 “must acknowledge the inherent ambiguity of” World War I, the author is ordering Sam Mendes and his co-writers to tell a different story than the one they have chosen to tell. It is a tedious demand that the filmmakers tell a story that he prefers—in this case, an ideologically driven argument about political bogeymen. “Even if we are only being told a microcosmic story about two soldiers trying to survive a dangerous mission,” the author writes, “we should still understand the larger tapestry in which those characters are mere threads.” This is the leftist equivalent of those historians who wanted, needed, had to have scenes of Winston Churchill giving speeches and generals pushing flags around map tables stuck into the finely tuned story of Dunkirk. This kind of bossiness betrays a lack of trust in or appreciation for what the storytellers have used their skill, creativity, and carefully sharpened discernment—their arts—to create. It’s anti-art, and the author’s own admitted admiration for the film, despite the desperate override commands of his ideology, belies that fact.

“It is immoral to tell a story about a war without analyzing the reasons behind that war.” Why? World War II stories “must acknowledge fascism?” What does that even mean? Civil War stories must deal with slavery? No. Some of the greatest entries in Civil War literature barely acknowledge slavery’s existence, much less ruminate on its morality. Here’s one you might have heard of. I myself wrote a Civil War novel in which slavery plays almost no role because that’s not what concerns my characters and not what drives the plot. In short, that’s not what my novel is about.

And that’s my second objection. Introducing the kind of navel-gazing ruminations on isms that tickle people like this Slate writer have no place in the world of 1917 because that’s not what 1917 is about.

As I wrote at length in my review, 1917 is about the experience of combat, the dreariness and terror of the trenches, the toll it takes on the men caught up in the war, and, in a contrast made more striking by the vivid depiction of what life in the trenches was like, the beauty of friendship and home. Nationalism doesn’t come into it—even “implicitly”—because that is not what moves the characters.

Writing almost a hundred years ago in his great book The Everlasting Man, GK Chesterton conveyed the disconnect between ideology, which he calls “practical politics” or “realpolitik,” and reality, and did so with soldiering as his example:

Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas. . . . The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. . . . A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.

This almost exactly describes the approach Mendes and company used for 1917’s depiction of the war. The two protagonists, Schofield and Blake, have intensely immediate concerns—get from here to there safely, avoid being seen or shot at, deliver their message, save lives, get back to their families. They live with the “loyalties as simple as death” and the war is precisely that simple for them. Earlier in the same passage, Chesterton imagines it even more succinctly:

Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, “My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.” Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, “If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments, but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.”

These are manifest absurdities, but are apparently what Slate writers and their ilk want out of a movie like 1917. Tell us how bad the British officer class was. Don’t other the Germans. Don’t “validate the nationalist impulses that led to such terrible bloodshed.” Don’t give us a movie, give us a disquisition. Give us a sermon. Give us a Slate article.

The author of this piece does offer up counterexamples in the form of All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, both fine movies, well produced and well acted. But, tellingly, the most political parts of those movies are also the phoniest parts, the most tinny and artistically clumsy, and the strongest parts are those most like what 1917 accomplished, bringing the viewer into the experience of the soldiers in the trenches.

Why does any of this matter? First, because I object to the totalitarian impulse to make everything political. Second, I hate to see this film, an outstanding evocation of a time and place and the experience of an entire generation of ordinary men, denigrated for such stupid and meretricious reasons. Third, and I think most importantly, the nature of art and storytelling, the basis of my first objection, is at stake. Artists and storytellers must be free to tell the stories they have in the way best suited to those stories. They must be true to their art. The team behind 1917 exercised their considerable gifts to tell a good story and tell it well, just like the filmmakers behind All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory did in their day. They used their gifts to choose their material and to shape it toward their end. What matters after that is whether they succeeded in what they set out to do, not in what pundits think they should have done.

“Poetry is, among other things,” John Ciardi wrote, “the art of knowing what to leave out.” Begin dictating those choices and you kill the work of art.

2019 in Books

Not only was 2019 a good year for movies, my reading this year was unusually good. I dialed my ambitions back a little bit, setting my Goodreads Challenge goal as 55 books and intending to make several of those longer, heavier novels. I ended up reading 80, finishing the last—Ian Fleming’s short story collection For Your Eyes Only—a few hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve. You can look at everything I read here, but below are my favorites from the last year.

Per my usual year-in-review lists, I’m focusing on favorites, meaning those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories. The books fall into three broad categories: fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books, with a top ten for the latter two categories and, because I can’t keep these things to a set number, a few runners up. The books appear in no particular order, but I do save my favorite of the year for each category until the end.

Another thing I’ve been trying to discipline myself to do is reread good books. CS Lewis wrote that “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once,” a line that has always bothered me because I so often fail to live up to it. I feel keenly the desperation to read everything I’m interested in and the list is unending, so revisiting something I’ve already read can sometimes feel like falling behind. But this year I did reread a lot of old favorites, and I’ve included a list of those as well.

I hope y’all enjoy! If y’all are looking for something good to read in the new decade, I hope you can find something in these lists.

Ten fiction favorites:

Presented in no particular order. Rereads are marked with an asterisk.

The Moonshine War, by Elmore Leonard—A fun Depression-era adventure from the moment of Leonard’s career in which he was transitioning from Westerns to crime novels. Like many other Leonard novels, The Moonshine War pits multiple implacable bad guys against a single stalwart who has something they want. In this case, the bad guys are ostensibly on the side of law and order, the stalwart is Son Martin, and what everyone wants is a massive stash of high quality moonshine hidden somewhere on Son’s land. This has everything I enjoy about Leonard’s Westerns, such as a strong, silent hero who stands up against overwhelming odds and survives through quick thinking, backbone, and a stubborn refusal to quit, plus an unusual and well-realized setting and a great ending. As a bonus, it also takes place in a 1930s Appalachia that does not feature any condescending or grotesque Southern stereotypes.

Andersonville, by Mackinlay Kantor—The longest, weightiest book I read this year, Andersonville is a modernist masterpiece of Civil War fiction, harrowing and brutal in its realization of life in the sprawling, badly run Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. It’s not a perfect book, but it has a breadth of imagination and sweep of life in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century that are engrossing from start to finish. I wrote a longer, more detailed review early in the year which you can read here.

Past Master, by RA Lafferty—I read perhaps two sci-fi books per year, and this was one of them. It was the most delightfully weird novel I read this year. Past Master begins with Astrobe, a future society founded and planned as a Utopia, struggling to maintain its utopian standards despite decline and collapse. The planet’s fractious leaders decide to go to the man who coined the very word utopia, Sir Thomas More, and bring him back from the past to advise them. More—witty, urbane, skeptical, with a sly wit (much as in real life)—comes along and, in his travels, shows us the dark side of utopianism. I don’t want to say much more, but Past Master is weird and wonderful, an unjustly overlooked dystopia that has more to say to us now than the more faddish 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale.

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming*—One of the classics of the spy genre and the novel that introduced James Bond, Casino Royale is short, sharply written, and much more internal and psychologically grounded than the Bond series’ reputation would suggest. Fleming enjoyed experimenting with plot and especially structure, and the three acts of the novel—casino, capture, and the tragic denouement—are an early indication of that impulse. But the main draws are the characters—richly drawn and memorable, from Bond himself to Vesper Lynd and Le Chiffre, the immensely threatening villain—and the plot, which races along from beginning to end and takes Bond through attempted assassination, torture, and more. There’s a reason this character has proven immortal. Do yourself a favor and give this first book of the original series a try sometime.

Pronto, by Elmore Leonard—One of Leonard’s crime novels, and the book that introduced Raylan Givens, hero of the TV series “Justified” (which I haven’t seen), to the world. Pronto deftly follows multiple overlapping plots involving the Mafia, a bookie on the run, and US Marshal Givens, and hops back and forth between Miami and Italy. It’s one of Leonard’s most enjoyable crime novels, long on character and tension and the thrill of the chase, and I look forward to reading the other Raylan Givens stories he wrote: Riding the Rap, Raylan, and one of the short stories in When the Women Come out to Dance (aka Fire in the Hole).

Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis*—An underappreciated novel by an underappreciated novelist. Masters of Atlantis follows bland Midwesterner Lamar Jimmerson over several decades, from the tail end of World War I through the 1960s and 70s, as he is hoodwinked into founding a secret society—based on the supposed last surviving text from Atlantis—which briefly flourishes before collapsing into a few small cells of esoterica-obsessed mystics, eccentrics, and con men. It’s a hoot. I first read this seven or eight years ago and liked it even better this second time around.

Cain at Gettysburg, by Ralph Peters—I wrote a little about this novel in my summer reading list, but it’s an excellent piece of Civil War fiction, gritty, hard-eyed, and shockingly violent, but with a humane sympathy toward its diverse cast of characters—squads of German immigrants from Wisconsin and mountaineers from North Carolina, generals and officers from both sides and all levels of command, and at least one legitimate war hero—that makes it a powerful read.

The Weight of This World, by David Joy—A grim story of poverty, addiction, friendship, and betrayal, this novel takes place in rural Appalachia near where I grew up but among the people of a completely different world. Set during the lowest days following the 2008 financial crisis, best friends Aiden and Thad, a wounded veteran, get by on the copper they steal from abandoned summer homes and sell to scrapyards. They use most of their cash on booze and meth, and Aiden, the responsible one of the pair, worries about how long this life can last. He wants out, a new start in Asheville or points east. Thad vows he’ll never leave the mountains again. Then, during a drug deal gone wrong, the pair come into enough wealth in cash and drugs to make their mutually exclusive dreams come true, and the tension between them and the lowlifes jealous to get a piece of the action threaten to destroy them both. A cross between Ron Rash’s settings and well-drawn relationships and the darkness and brutality of Cormac McCarthy—especially No Country for Old Men—The Weight of This World is a crushing tragedy beautifully told, with hints of the power of redemption.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy*—I first read The Road as a college senior, shortly after it was published. I loved McCarthy, and while I enjoyed The Road I didn’t class it among my favorites of his work at the time. Now, almost thirteen years on and as the father of three children, I’ve reread it to a totally different effect—it destroyed me. The Road is all of fatherhood in a book. The difficulty of raising a child and passing on as much as you can of what you know, the nagging anxiety for the future and the uncertainty of how much time you have, the gut-deep sense of the dangers of the world and the instinct to protect and teach, the panic when the danger becomes real, the frustration, the exhaustion, the fear, and, despite everything, the joys too deep for words—all are given powerful expression in the story of this father and son and their harrowing journey through a post-apocalyptic South. I was rapt from the first page and wept at the end. The Road is a deeply moving and meaningful book, and a monument to all fathers seeking to “carry the fire” and pass it on to their children.

Honorable mentions:

Dune, by Frank Herbert—A monumental work of imagination with a vividly realized setting and a palpably vast history. I enjoyed Dune much more than I thought I would, given that I had tried and failed twice to get into it in college. To my surprise, I found the sandworms thrilling, but I did feel the plot dragged in one or two places and resolved rather too quickly. Going to give at least one of the sequels a shot this year.

Big Trouble, by Dave Barry—A comedic crime romp across Miami with more than a little of an Elmore Leonard vibe (Barry apparently knew Leonard and thanks him in the acknowledgements) and the distinct comic voice and running gags of classic Barry humor. There’s ultimately not much to it but it was a ton of fun. You can read my longer review here.

Liberator, by Dominic Hall—This is a bit of a cheat, as I read Liberator in manuscript. It’s a forthcoming Christian action thriller by my old friend Dominic Hall and follows a young man through his first few days as the member of an elite special ops group operating out of San Diego. It was a blast to read and I look forward to its release. Y’all should definitely check it out when it becomes available later this year.

Favorite of the year:

A Bloody Habit, by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson—If you had told me last January that my favorite novel of the year would be about vampires, you’d have to forgive me for scoffing. And yet here we are. I heard an interview with Eleanor Bourg Nicholson on John J. Miller’s Great Books podcast in which she both sang the praises of and critiqued Dracula. When Miller asked her a few questions about her own vampire novel, a novel I found I had heard of—A Bloody Habit—I was sold.

A Bloody Habit takes place across about a year in the last days of Queen Victoria. It’s the memoir of John Kemp, a middling London lawyer who, through a case involving a strangely behaving aristocrat and his foreign wife, who has disappeared, falls in with Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, an unassuming Dominican friar—and vampire slayer. (The “habit” of the title is a pun on the serial predation of the vampire and the bloodstained clothing of the monks who hunt them.) Kemp, who shares all the materialist progressive assumptions of a cultivated Englishman of his day, is dismissive of the quiet but persistent little friar at first but, as weird incident upon weird incident piles up around him and he sees the aftermath of more than one brutal murder, he seeks the man out for help and counsel.

There are grisly murders, seemingly supernatural events that Kemp struggles to explain, and the gradual revelation of even greater dangers than Kemp is at first aware of.

The characters are all fun and finely drawn, from Kemp and the friar (think Father Brown crossed with Dr. Van Helsing) to the more traditional detective of Scotland Yard, the various women who pass in and out of Kemp’s life, and scads of suspiciously cadaverous and threatening men. The tone is one of genuinely creepy horror—the first appearance of a vampire in the novel actually nauseated and spooked me—but also of goodnatured fun. When a team of vampire hunters consisting of a lawyer, doctor, detective, a few cops, and a throng of Dominican monks troops out into the streets of London near the end I was laughing for pure enjoyment. And speaking of London, the setting is nicely researched and presented. Fans of anything late Victorian—Sherlock Holmes, H. Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, even steampunk—will enjoy Kemp’s world.

But what really sets A Bloody Habit apart—there are, after all, a lot of vampire novels out there—is the seriousness with which Nicholson treats the evil Kemp and Father Thomas Edmund confront, and the rigor with which she, through the friar, presents the truth that will set the victims free. Kemp proves an extraordinary vessel for this story, and his transformation over the course of the novel is well done and quite moving. He finds his condescending attitudes—toward the priest, toward Catholics, toward foreigners and rural peasants who still believe in both God and vampires—challenged, and he wrestles with the implications of this trip beyond himself and his assumptions. Nicholson weaves some powerful theological themes through the book but dramatizes rather than preaches them. It’s incredibly effective and well done, a model any Christian concerned to convey some measure of the truth through his writing would do well to emulate.

If you’re looking for a fun, atmospheric, genuinely creepy and inventive adventure novel with its heart and mind aligned to the truth, A Bloody Habit is for you. I highly recommend it.

Ten non-fiction favorites:

Symbol or Substance? by Peter Kreeft—I owe an enormous spiritual and intellectual debt to Peter Kreeft, as I discovered his book Socrates Meets Jesus in college and was heartened by his vision of the friendship of faith and reason. Symbol or Substance?, like that earlier book and many of his others, is written as a dialogue, with CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Billy Graham debating the nature of the Eucharist. Are the bread and wine just symbols, as the low church Graham maintains? Or something more, per Lewis? Or do they become the literal flesh and blood of Christ, as Tolkien believes? Winsome, fun, and fair to all sides, this is an excellent and persuasive book.

God is Not Nice: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For, by Ulrich Lehner—A brisk, readable rebuff to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the polite, affirming, undemanding (and therefore unnecessary) God of most modern Americans, including Christians, and a call to greater commitment to a God worth believing in and following. An excellent short read.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, by Flannery O’Connor—A collection of O’Connor’s writings on a variety of often overlapping topics—writing and art, story and character, the South and Christianity. It’s excellent, full of wisdom and not a little of O’Connor’s mordant, self-deprecating sense of humor. One of the best books on fiction writing out there, from one of the great masters of the mid-twentieth century short story.

Normandy ‘44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, by James Holland—An outstanding new history of the Normandy campaign, from its planning stages through the beach landings to the breakout from the hedgerows at the end of the summer of 1944. Wide-ranging and well-researched, with good attention to all levels—and both sides, Allied and German—of this grueling campaign, from Eisenhower down to the infantrymen and tankers on the ground.

Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism—A new edition of Kirk’s book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism, a short, briskly written handbook to the fundamental priorities or dispositions of conservative thought. You won’t find policy proposals or sloganeering here, but rather a guide to the nesting layers of relationships and “permanent things” that conservatives should seek to protect and preserve. I hope this book gets a wide readership; conservatism today can only benefit from its vision. I wrote a full length review which you can read here.

The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures, by Roger Scruton—I won’t even try to summarize this one, but it’s a strong critique of materialism, reductionist philosophies grounded in the overzealous application of empirical methods, and a work of anthropology, the philosophy of man, of people. Scruton masterfully works his way through his arguments about being, self, will, art, beauty, and the transcendent. It’s a challenging but not impossible read—challenging because of the ideas, not the vocabulary—and I’m still not sure I’ve fully digested it. (N.b.: This would pair well with his later book On Human Nature, which I actually read before this one.)

Letters to an American Lady, by CS Lewis—A collection of letters written by Lewis to an American correspondent named Mary over the course of the thirteen years between 1950 and Lewis’s death in 1963. Wide-ranging, witty, and thoughtful, with Lewis’s thoughts on a huge number of topics big and small. Well worth reading.

CS Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, by James Como—Speaking of Lewis, here he is again, in this excellent short book from Oxford UP. Como crams a solid biography and full accounting of Lewis’s work into just over 100 pages, an astonishing feat worthy of the subject himself. If I were to recommend any one book about Lewis to someone wanting to get to know him and his work, but who is daunted by the longer biographies available, this would certainly be it.

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, by Karen Swallow Prior—A winsome and insightful guide to learning and practicing the virtues through our reading. Prior examines a wide variety of novels and short stories—including some of my favorites, like Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor, as well as authors I’ve never read before, like George Saunders—for examples of virtue in action and encourages us to lead better lives with these stories as models. A good guide to the roles of beauty, goodness, and storytelling in shaping our lives.

Favorite of the year:

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner*—I first read Gardner’s books The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist for my senior novel writing class in college. I’ve reread one of them every time I’ve completed a rough draft since. This fall, upon completion of the manuscript for what I’m calling The Wanderer, I reread The Art of Fiction.

The Art of Fiction has exerted a profound influence on my work, especially in how Gardner conceptualizes the way a good story works. Gardner makes paramount what he calls the “vivid continuous fictive dream,” the state a reader enters into as they read the story. Nothing should interfere with or disrupt that dream, and anything that does, anything that wakes the sleeper, has to go.

This is a good way to express how fiction does what it does and also leaves a lot of room for flexibility, careful experiment with style and form, and what Gardner calls “jazzing around,” the seemingly improvisatory but expertly disciplined grace notes of a writer in full command of his talents. Gardner rightly avoids being prescriptive, offering good guidelines but emphasizing throughout that what is permissible in fiction is whatever a good writer can make work, the way to make it work being to develop and sustain the fictive dream. There’s a lot of room.

Finally, Gardner presents the best account I’ve seen so far of the process of conceiving of and writing a novel—or any fictional work—and includes a lot of helpful advice on matters stylistic and mechanical as well as a host of useful exercises to keep the writer’s mind limber.

I’ve benefited a lot from Gardner’s book, and this trip back through it—my third or fourth—was no exception. If you’re looking for a good book on the fiction writing process, I always recommend this one. It’s encouraging, inspiring, and challenging, and I always finish it determined to be a better writer than I am.

Runners up:

Stories in the End: Short Letters from a Long Life, by Tom Poole and Jay Eldred—A wonderful and unusual epistolary memoir by a man who saw an enormous amount in his long life. From the killing of John Dillinger to the attack on Pearl Harbor to surviving a night in the English Channel after a U-boat attack to turtling along the North Carolina coast, Tom Poole led an extraordinary life and this book wonderfully captures his understated wisdom. You can read my full review here.

Æthelred the Unready: The Failed King, by Richard Abels—Another good, short book from a series, Richard Abels’s volume on the reign of Æthelred is an excellent short biography and introduction to the period of late Anglo-Saxon England. It also offers a good reassessment of an easily caricatured and much maligned figure. You can read my longer Goodreads review here.

Ætheflæd: England’s Forgotten Founder, by Tom Holland—An even shorter book on an Anglo-Saxon ruler, Tom Holland’s Ladybird Expert book on Ætheflæd began through his research into her nephew Æthelstan for the Penguin Monarchs series. The daughter of Alfred the Great and de facto ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia after her husband’s death, Æthelflæd was a powerful and influential woman and ably defended her people against the Vikings at a time when many kingdoms succumbed to their repeated attacks. This little book is beautifully written and illustrated and offers a fascinating look at a truly great woman, well worth remembering.

Knight of the Holy Ghost: A Short History of GK Chesterton, by Dale Ahlquist—A solid short book on the life and works of Chesterton, one part biography, one part literary history, and one part apologetic, making the case for Chesterton’s influence and defending Chesterton’s memory against some common present day critiques.

Homer: A Very Short Introduction, by Barbara Graziosi—Another solid entry in Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series, this concise little book covers what we (think we) know about Homer and his life, and gives a concise but thorough exploration of the plots, characters, and themes of his two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Disappointments:

The Reckoning, by John Grisham—An intriguing premise very, very badly executed. I’ve already written about this one in my summer reading recap.

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson—Some genuinely spooky moments and a vividly realized setting, but the characters and dialogue were too clever by half and annoyed me. A lot. The book’s greatest strength is its atmosphere, but unfortunately that isn’t enough.

Last of the Breed, by Louis L’Amour—I love escape stories and anything about desolate arctic landscapes, but for all the adventure, cunning, and survivalist exploits in this book, I found it pretty dull. I think some of its subplots could have been removed with no damage to the central story and a more fully realized antagonist would have helped. Nevertheless, I’ve had this novel recommended to me by many trusted friends over many years, so I may give it another go in the future.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer—Part of the problem with this novel is simply historical: the Sherlock-Holmes-cocaine-addiction trope has been done to death now, though it probably felt pretty fresh when Meyer published this story. The plot is bifurcated—in the first half, Watson tries to cure Holmes of his addiction with Sigmund Freud’s help. In the second, Meyer cooks up a quick and simple mystery for the now-clean Holmes to solve. It’s fun but falls far short of the best Holmes adventures, and there’s also a lot of very silly Freudian hoodoo, which Meyer apparently intended us to take seriously.

Rereads:

The books I read for the second or third—or, in the case of Dante, fifteenth? twentieth?—time this year, in no particular order. For those that I have briefly reviewed on Goodreads I have provided a hyperlink to the review. These were all well worth the reread.

• True Grit and Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis—See above. I gave the top ten slot to Masters of Atlantis because with True Grit in the race it’s just not fair. Both are great.

• The Art of Fiction and Grendel, by John Gardner

• Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus

• The Poetic Edda, trans. Jackson Crawford

• Inferno, by Dante, trans. Anthony Esolen—Read for a group discussion during Lent. Any excuse to read Dante is a good one.

• Iliad, by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles—Read for The Core Curriculum Podcast, the first series of which covered the entire Iliad in eleven episodes. I appeared in four (episodes 3, 8, 9, and 11). It was great.

• Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, and Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming

• The Shining, by Stephen King—Read for the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s annual Halloween crossover event, in which Jay Eldred and I discussed the novel with The Book of Nature Podcast’s Charles Hackney. You can listen to the episode here.

• A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Read to Sarah before bed every evening. We usually read a chapter of something to relax before turning out the lights. For the first of these, we read just about the entire second half in one go.

• All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, trans. AW Wheen

• The Man Who Was Thursday, by GK Chesterton

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy—See above. One of my favorite reads of the year, and one of the most striking rereading experiences I can remember.

Favorite kids’ books:

By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischman—A fun Gold Rush adventure about a wealthy Boston boy and his butler and their voyage to California. Emphasizes courage, toughness, resourcefulness, and good cheer through hardship. We really enjoyed this. You can read my Goodreads review here.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle, by Beverly Cleary—I somehow passed through childhood without ever reading Beverly Cleary. On my wife’s recommendation I read this to our daughter as a bedtime story and we both enjoyed it a lot.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater—One of my childhood favorites, I was excited to share this with my daughter as a bedtime story. She especially enjoyed the idea of penguins living in the freezer and, eventually, a frozen lake in the basement. (Now, as an adult, I mostly worried about the mess and the Popper family’s food budget.)

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, by CS Lewis—I didn’t read the Narnia books until I was in college, but my father-in-law read them to my wife when she was very small so we introduced them to my daughter this year. She loved them, though the flashback structure of Prince Caspian proved a little confusing for her. We’re carrying on into the new year—we just started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader last night!

Looking ahead

I’ve set my Goodreads goal for 2020 and have a stack on my desk and nightstand ready for me to plow through. I’m excited for the new year and all the reading—and living—in store for us. I hope y’all had a great New Year and have a lot of good reading ahead of you, too. Thanks for reading!

CS Lewis on translating expertise

From Lewis’s 1945 address “Christian Apologetics,” collected in God in the Dock:

“I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. ”

This passage has haunted me for years.

Lewis was addressing a conference of Anglican priests and youth leaders on the challenges facing them in presenting and defending Christianity. This passage follows immediately after a list of terms which mean one thing to theologians and something almost totally different to even educated laymen. The jargon has been barbarized, and so miscommunication is a grave danger.

I’ve long had an allergy to the kind of arcane scholarly jargon—academese—that characterizes a lot of humanities scholarship nowadays. Such writing and specialist vocabulary has its uses as does all technical language, but more often than not it obscures meaning and functions as a code for initiates, the privileged few who have been admitted to the higher mysteries of the “studies” disciplines. This doesn’t educate students or ordinary people, which is its gravest failing. But an additional, hidden danger is that, in the enclosed hothouse of academic journals and conferences and ever finer splitting of hairs, communicating so often and so exclusively in jargony “educated” language will obscure not only your subject but the failures of your own mind. Compare Orwell.

“[Y]ou must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular,” Lewis writes. “This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought.” I find I have learned as much by teaching, by striving to make my subject understood to my students, distilling complicated historical argument into understandable classroom language, as I ever learned through my own study. On my own, in my yet smaller bubble of interest and study, I might miss something, misunderstand something. Communicating it to them has caught me out more than once, to my benefit.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay here. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics is an excellent, wide-ranging collection of Lewis’s writings and well worth owning. You can find it on Amazon here.

2019 in Movies

Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out

Back in the spring I looked ahead to the scheduled summer releases and realized that, with one or two exceptions, I wasn’t looking forward to anything. If, like me, you’re almost totally burned out on Marvel, the summer of 2019 was a bust, and I was beginning to think that 2019 would be another lean year for movies the way last year was. But, lo and behold, after some solid stuff in the spring and a dry spell during the summer—which I used to write the rough draft of my next novel anyway—fall and early winter turned out to be delightful. It ended up being hard to choose what to include here. It was a good year for movies—at least for me.

Two notes before I launch into my favorites of the year:

• First, this is a list of favorites. I might give some opinions on superlatives below—best acting, best made, etc.—but I’m mostly assessing these movies as favorites, as the movies I either most enjoyed or got the most out of, not necessarily making claims about which are the best of the year.

• Second, I’ve actually written about several of these movies before on this blog, so for any film for which I’ve already written a review, I’ve kept my recap here short and included a link to the full review elsewhere.

So here, in roughly ascending order, are my seven favorite movies of the last year:

Richard Jewell

Paul Walter Hauser as Richard Jewell

I remember the to-do surrounding the 1996 Atlanta Olympics quite vividly. The logo and obligatory weird mascot were everywhere, the torch passed through my hometown on its way to Atlanta, and my family watched the opening ceremonies and as many of the events as we could. I also remember the bombing.

Richard Jewell narrowly focuses on the title character and what happened to him as he worked security over the first few days of the Olympics. Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a former security guard and sheriff’s deputy, hopes to get back into law enforcement if he can do well enough with his gig doing security at a concert venue in Olympic Park. Clint Eastwood, directing from a script by Billy Ray, carefully reconstructs the events of these first few days, and the scenes surrounding the bombing are tense and shocking. Jewell’s role in saving lives is made clear and the media adulation that unexpectedly envelops him for a few days is made bittersweet by what we know is coming. Especially poignant is the pride Jewell’s mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) takes in her boy.

The bulk of the film follows the FBI’s bumbling investigation into Jewell following a tip from a former employer, the leak to the media via AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), and the vicious trial-by-media that ruined Jewell’s life for months as newspapers and TV networks dogpiled him. Jewell fights back by calling on lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) and the two form a testy friendship as Jewell tries to understand what’s happening to him and Bryant tries to keep Jewell, a believer in law and order who “was raised to respect authority,” from being so obliging to the FBI, who are using his attempts to be forthcoming to railroad him.

The film is full of good performances. Sam Rockwell, good in everything he’s ever been in, is a standout as Bryant. Kathy Bates is excellent as Bobi Jewell, an authentic and sympathetic portrayal of an ordinary Southern woman unprepared to live under the scrutiny of both the media and the federal government, unable to comprehend the callousness of both and the injustice being done to her son. But the best performance in the film is Hauser as Jewell. Hauser is 100% authentic. His accent, the cadence of his speech, his understated sense of humor, his posture as he stands or sits—all are dead-on, as is his attitude toward the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, best described as a worshipful camaraderie that takes a severe hit by the end of the film. I know people just like this. It’s outstanding, and while Hauser’s isn’t the flashiest performance of the year—for that, see below—it’s certainly among the best precisely because it’s so real.

Richard Jewell, we realize toward the end of the movie, bewilders the powerful because he’s a man without an angle. He did what he did because it was his job and he wanted to help people. The tragedy is that the powerful in our world—the feds, the media—can’t understand this kind of goodness. For that reason alone, Richard Jewell is an important movie to watch and a fitting tribute to a decent man.

The Highwaymen

Kevin Costner as a weary Frank hamer in The Highwaymen

The Highwaymen inverts the usual retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story by focusing on the lawmen who tracked down and killed them rather than the bandits themselves. More a police procedural than an action movie, the film follows aging Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault as they are specially deputized to deal with Bonnie and Clyde’s unique style of interstate violence. The two lawmen, relics of the not-quite-vanished age of the frontier, doggedly track the crooks up and down the highways of Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Louisiana, always traveling in the wake of their thefts and murders. Their frustration and the toll of life on the road mounts, and when we reach the final confrontation on a lonesome road in the piney woods of Louisiana (shot in the actual location, dressed by the set designers to its 1930s appearance), the expertly heightened tension is almost unbearable.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (who directed the underappreciated masterpiece The Alamo) and starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, both excellent as the taciturn Hamer and the damaged and worn out Gault, this is a handsomely mounted, well acted, atmospheric drama that rightly depicts Bonnie and Clyde as destructive thugs without glorifying the means used to take them down. Indeed, the film is comfortable allowing some ambiguity—at least among the characters—about the nature of law enforcement, crime, and personal responsibility, and ends not on a note of triumph but of resignation. It’s almost worth watching just for its wordless final scenes, an eloquent condemnation not of criminality but of celebrity worship. It’s great.

My friend Coyle Neal of The City of Man Podcast and I recorded an episode about The Highwaymen after it came out in the spring. It was a fun discussion. You can read a few notes about that, and listen to the episode, here.

Knives Out

Daniel Craig and Ana de armas investigate foul play in Knives Out

A carefully plotted murder mystery with a colorful cast of characters and a good dose of humor, Knives Out is the most fun I had at the movies this year.

After elderly mystery-thriller writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found with his throat cut the morning after his birthday party, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives to consult with the police to find the murderer. Murder? A straightforward interpretation of the death scene would indicate suicide. But Blanc is convinced otherwise after interviewing the many members of Thrombey’s self-serving and duplicitous family and enlists Thrombey’s personal nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), to help him untangle what happened that night.

Knives Out owes a lot to the mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, with a stately house full of despicable characters, one of whom must have done it, dedicated but unimaginative traditional cops, and a private detective with keen insight and… eccentricities. The setting, a real house in rural Massachusetts, is interesting and the characters are all wonderfully played. Plummer is good in flashback scenes and Ana de Armas brings a freshness and innocent goodness to Marta that serves as a striking contrast to the various members of the Thrombey family. Daniel Craig is especially good as Blanc, affecting a Southern accent that one suspects Blanc might be overplaying as a bit of investigative sleight of hand. Among the family, Michael Shannon as Harlan’s publisher son and Toni Collette as a dippy “influencer” type and natural health nut are standouts, as is Chris Evans, arriving late as the purported black sheep of a family where the whole flock is already pretty black. Everyone is just slightly over the top, which is part of what makes the movie fun instead of being a slog through a bunch of miserable suspects (compare another mystery in which Christopher Plummer plays a weary patriarch and Daniel Craig the detective, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

I don’t want to give anything away because the film is well constructed to supply surprises. I went in cold, not knowing much about the movie and not really interested given director Rian Johnson’s reputation following The Last Jedi. But my wife and I heard enough good things about it via word of mouth that we gave it a shot for date night and had a blast.

Midway

The USS Enterprise under fire in Midway

Midway emerged as an unintentional star of my blog in the second half of the year, as my notes and worries about the first trailer got a lot of traffic and my eventual review was one of the most popular posts this month.

Because of the trailer I went to see Midway reluctantly but was almost totally won over. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it does what it sets out to do and—what was important to me—respects the real men who fought at Midway. It provides a solid overview of the events between Pearl Harbor and Midway—roughly the first six months of American involvement in World War II—and capably and vividly dramatizes the stakes, both militarily and personally, for the men involved, as well as what it took to rise to the occasion and fight back. It has some overacting, weak dialogue, and dodgy special effects, but the things I hope to see in a historical film are all there. It’s worth your time.

You can read my full review of Midway, written to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day a few weeks ago, here.

Joker

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker

Now that the pearl-clutching fainting couch furor over Joker has proven to be overblown, I hope people can untwist their knickers and revisit and reassess it. This movie deeply impressed me, and after I saw it I spent the next several days mulling it over. Joker is not an enjoyable or fun superhero romp—this is no popcorn movie. But Joaquin Phoenix gives the best performance of the year in the title role and the film built around him is a carefully and sharply constructed character study.

Joker offers another origin story for Batman’s archenemy, a man who has no certain or canonical past, a point exploited by Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Here, the Joker begins as Arthur Fleck, a man with severe mental problems who has been turned out by the system due to budget cuts, an issue that will recur before the film is over. He works a humiliating job as a clown for hire to take care of his mother, an invalid with—we will learn later, if we don’t infer it before then—even worse mental problems than Arthur’s. Weak, ineffectual, and above all pathetic, Arthur deplores the ugliness of Gotham City and its people but recognizes himself as an utter nullity. Then a chance encounter on the subway gives him a taste of the influence and power to be had from using violence to inspire terror, and we watch this put upon, seemingly gentle man turn toward and embrace the ugliness. The film begins with Arthur crying over the world; it ends with him laughing as that world burns.

There’s a lot to admire in Joker, but it does have its weaknesses. Some of its themes are pretty obvious if not clumsy, especially where mental health and the class conflict within Gotham is concerned, the series of humiliations Arthur endures sometimes feels as though it’s on autopilot, and I never quite believed Robert De Niro as the Carson-like late show host who is first Arthur’s idol and then his nemesis. The film also develops a subplot surrounding Arthur’s mysterious parentage—his mother tells him that he is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, which would make him and Bruce half-brothers—that, while building to an important payoff, drags because the truth never feels in doubt.

But the film’s technical aspects, especially its cinematography and set design, are spectacular in their grime and bleakness, and this careful attention to the reality in which Joker takes place—an early ‘80s Gotham City modeled on the collapsing late ‘70s New York City—makes the violence feel that much more shocking and disturbing. Only a handful of people die in Joker, and none of them is thrilling or exciting and all feel like unalterable, irrevocable acts. (Compare the violence in any of the Avengers movies.) Furthermore, there a lot of nice touches in the details, such as Arthur’s poorly conceived clown makeup (I learn from reading about John Wayne Gacy that professional clowns frown upon—sorry—sharp corners for their painted smiles; the sharp angles make them look sinister). Hildur Guðnadóttir’s droning string score also adds to both the grind of living in Gotham and the dread and tension that build up through the second half of the film.

But the standout, what makes Joker so excellent, is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. Arthur’s transformation from a man who can barely muster enough strength to pull a coherent sentence together to someone embracing meaningless violence is only believable because of him. “I don’t believe in anything,” Arthur says at the end of the film, not as a declaration but as an explanation. He smiles as he says it, and through Phoenix we see how he reached this point. In any other hands this would have gone wrong. He’s the reason to see this movie, and the reason it works.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Leonardo diCaprio as rick dalton and brad pitt as cliff booth In once upon a time in hollywood

Here’s a strange circumstance: me enjoying and commending a Quentin Tarantino movie. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with his movies since I first saw Reservoir Dogs in college, and while I liked Inglourious Basterds with some reservations and grudgingly admired the craftsmanship and humor of Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to my surprise, totally won me over.

I won’t get into the plot, but the film follows fading Hollywood star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman-turned-gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) across a few days in the spring and late summer of 1969. Dalton, desperate not to become a has-been, is struggling to remember his lines as the baddie in the pilot of a TV Western and Cliff, out and about on a variety of errands, has a series of run-ins with a creepy hippie girl and her “family” of cronies. The hippies turn out to be the Manson Family and Dalton, we see, is the next door neighbor of Roman Polanski and his luminous wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whom we see in occasional cutaways as she drives around Hollywood, sits in on a screening of one of her own movies, and parties with friends.

There are plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, and while I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fits within the latter category, it’s also a uniquely setting-driven story. I haven’t seen a time and place this lovingly recreated since Zodiac—which, interestingly, begins at exactly the same cultural moment, just farther north in California. Tarantino’s Hollywood is beautiful, vibrant, but it’s also deeply historical—everywhere beneath the glossy present of 1969 are relics of what was and the slowly cohering image of what will be. Rick and Cliff are poised precisely at this point of balance, burdened not with the past—those were unapologetically the glory days, now patinaed and given over to hippie squatters—but with an uncertain future.

This is probably the best made movie of the year—gorgeously shot on film by Robert Richardson, with beautiful and intricately detailed sets and costumes that vividly evoke the era without wallowing in a cartoon version of it. The performances are all outstanding, even down to the bit players, for whom Tarantino shows affection, and this is the first Tarantino script where I didn’t feel like it was grossly overindulgent. The film is long, it lingers, lets us stew in the Hollywood of 1969, but it’s all exactly right. It doesn’t whip us along from one plot point to the next but is the first film in a while that just allows us to live in a scene. By the time the film ended I felt like I knew this place and these people.

Without spoiling anything, I did want to nod to the film’s ending, which rewrites history in a way Tarantino has done a couple times now. But where I felt the ending of Inglourious Basterds, for example, trivialized some of the events involved, the ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood really made me think and reflect. I finished the film mourning real loss and grateful for the mysterious gift of life. I don’t think I can say anything more without giving it all away, but to finish a Tarantino film with this kind of uplift, catharsis, and affirmation of the good and the beautiful was a revelation.

Tarantino claims he’s done after his tenth movie. Let’s hope it’s another as good as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

1917

George MacKay ventures into no-man’s-land in 1917

I’m grateful I got to see 1917, as it only enters wide release in January. The film, set during World War I and directed by Sam Mendes, follows two ordinary English infantrymen on a mission through no-man’s-land and the abandoned German front lines to deliver an important message. This seemingly simple story is told in one fluid, non-stop shot that takes the viewer with the men into some of the most dreadful and dangerous conditions soldiers have ever had to endure. This technique keeps us that their level, down in the muck, reminds us that these men had to walk almost everywhere they went, and creates a heavy sense of dread as the men encounter new dangers—they can’t escape and the camera won’t look away. We’re in this together.

1917 is my favorite film of the year. It’s well acted and technically excellent and involves the viewer like few other war films I’ve seen. Its depiction of life on the Western Front is dreadfully real and offers a two-hour journey into this terrible lost world that should shock and move. It’s brilliantly done. See if it you can.

There’s a lot more to say about this film, but I’ve already written quite a lot about it. You can read my full review of 1917 here.

Honorable mentions

• Tolkien—An okay-ish but enjoyable dramatization of some of JRR Tolkien’s formative years that takes some serious liberties with the truth in order to force this real, unique man into a Hollywood mold. You can read my full review of Tolkien here.

• Downton Abbey—Essentially a jumbo-sized episode of the show with slightly slicker cinematography and a larger budget for extras, Downton Abbey was an enjoyable trip back to this world and these characters. You can read my full review of Downton Abbey here.

• Toy Story 4—A fun, poignant followup to the first three that takes the characters in some interesting new directions.

• Ad Astra—A thought-provoking and beautifully shot film with a small but very good cast—the standout being Tommy Lee Jones as Brad Pitt’s deranged or fanatical astronaut father—that just dragged for significant stretches.

• Shazam!—One of the most flat-out enjoyable movies I saw this year, a straightforwardly comedic superhero movie with a fun premise and a winsome lead performance by Zachary Levi.

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker—I didn’t intend to write anything to contribute to the current Star Wars poo typhoon, but I did want to mention that I’d seen this. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as I’d heard, and I mostly enjoyed it until it began collapsing under the weight of its own nostalgia in the last third or so. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac are excellent, the main reason any of these films have held together, and I wish they’d been better served by the scripts thrown together by the committees at Disney over the last several years.

Special mentions

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka In Tuntematon Sotilas

I wanted to make special mention of one film and two outstanding documentaries I saw this year. I mention the film separately because it technically came out two years ago but only became available in the US in March. That film is Tuntematon sotilas or Unknown Soldier, a Finnish film about a company of soldiers fighting Soviet Russia in the Continuation War. Adapted from the novel by Väinö Linna, Unknown Soldier is excellent, one of the best war films in recent memory. You can read my full review of Unknown Soldier, which I posted to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Winter War, here.

The first documentary I want to mention is They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Peter Jackson. This documentary, which offers a window into the experience of British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I, was assembled from hundreds of hours of footage and oral history interviews in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Much has been made of Jackson’s “restoration” of the footage—he and his team slowed and stabilized the jerky silent footage, digitally removed a lot of grain, damage, or other artifacts, and colorized it—but it’s not a restoration per se. This footage hasn’t been restored to its original condition. Far from it. But it has been manipulated in such a way as to remove some barriers to a modern viewer’s understanding of what they are seeing, and that's a good thing.

The best aspects of the film, however, are probably auditory. First, Jackson’s foley artists provided ambient sound effects and professional lipreaders provided dialogue for footage that has, for a hundred years, recorded only the silent mouthing of long dead men. This alone makes the footage come to life in a way that startled me when I saw it. Second, every bit of narration in the film comes from a montage of real World War I veterans talking about their experiences, with no modern narrator or talking heads getting in the way. It’s excellent, and profoundly moving. You can read my full review of They Shall Not Grow Old here.

The second documentary is Apollo 11, which came out to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. Like They Shall Not Grow Old, Apollo 11 avoids narrators and talking head interviewees. Instead, it very carefully sticks to contemporary film and television footage to tell the story of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins’s flight to the moon. The story is told in its editing, with the men who participated allowed to lead us through the story themselves, and the rich variety of footage used—launch preparations on Cape Canaveral, the team in mission control, the thousands of people packing the beach to watch the launch, the astronauts inside the command module and on the surface of the moon—gives us a sweeping look at the event that was the moon landing.

Especially noteworthy is Apollo 11’s use of some previously unreleased archival footage shot on 65mm film, giving sections of the documentary an astonishingly sharp clarity. It looks like it was shot yesterday, and when Armstrong or Aldin look into the camera you feel who these men were as men in a way that the scratchy footage used and reused for years on TV never could. It’s excellent, the best documentary on the Apollo program I’ve ever seen.

2019 films I missed but hope to catch in the new year:

• Avengers: Endgame—Yes, I’m burned out, and I have zero interest in Captain Marvel, but I do want to see the (sort of) end of this story. I’ll see it as soon as I can muster the energy to tap this on the screen at Redbox.

• The Irishman—Martin Scorsese’s much talked about return to the crime genre. I’m especially intrigued by the nonlinear structure and the extensive—and widely praised—use of digital de-aging technology to span the decades.

• Ford v Ferrari—The first trailer sold me. I don’t know much about cars or auto racing, especially the high-performance European variety, but this looks immensely entertaining and I do love a good car chase.

• Midsommar and The Lighthouse—Horror films that are long on mood and atmosphere. I’m especially interested in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s followup to The Witch, one of the most engrossing and eerie historical films I’ve seen in years.

• The Peanut Butter Falcon—A widely praised and sweet looking coming-of-age story about a Down syndrome boy escaping his prison-like care facility and learning independence and manhood from an unlikely mentor.

• Unplanned—Based on the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson and her turn from abortion to the pro-life movement. My friends at the Front Porch Show interviewed one of the stars.

• A Hidden Life—Terrence Malick’s biographical film about Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis. It looks amazing. Here Kyle Smith compares it to A Man For All Seasons. Alan Jacobs writes of its portrayal of the mysteries of faith and courage here.

Looking ahead

2020 has some promising titles. I look forward to Greyhound, Tom Hanks’s adaptation of my favorite novel of last year; the latest Bond film, No Time to Die; Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which seems to involve crime and reversing the flow of time, because it’s a Christopher Nolan movie; Kenneth Branagh’s second Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which was teased at the end of his Murder on the Orient Express; and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the weighty Dune, which I read for the first time this year. There’s probably plenty more, but these are the handful I’m most interested in right now.

I hope y’all enjoyed this year’s movies as much as I did, and, more importantly, I hope that y’all had a good year and that the coming year is full of promise and blessing. Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!

Shooting at the Stars

Illustration from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

One of my favorite kids’ Christmas books, one I have delighted to share with my kids since I discovered it a couple of years ago, is Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix. This book does not retell the nativity narratives of the Gospels and there is not a manger scene to be found, but the truth of that story pervades this one.

Shooting at the Stars is based on the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The First World War was only in its fifth month by December of that year but had already shocked Europe with its destruction and death toll. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a war that modern technology was supposed to have ended with a quick and humiliating defeat for one’s enemies. Despite these high hopes on all sides, the overwhelming firepower of modern warfare stopped armies—with horrific losses—and forced them down, into the earth. Trench warfare had already arrived and was a settled reality, especially on the Western Front. Then, over a few days at Christmas, impromptu, unofficial ceasefires brought men from both sides into no-man’s-land to chat, exchange gifts, and celebrate the birth of Christ with real peace on earth—peace made only more real and striking by the context.

Hendrix frames his retelling as a letter home from Charlie, a teenage English soldier. Over the first several pages, Charlie describes the miseries of life in the trenches and Hendrix’s clearly well researched illustrations give the boy soldier’s descriptions weight. We see the rain, mud, the standing water that could flood soldiers out of the holes in the trench wall where they could sleep, and the Western Front’s notorious rats. Freezing temperatures come as a relief because the cold makes the ground solid again.

from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

Then comes the miracle, “a tale so wonderful that you will hardly believe my account!” On Christmas Eve the English hear the Germans singing “Silent Night”—wonderfully rendered as blackletter calligraphy the color of candlelight, hovering over no-man’s-land—and Christmas trees appear all along the German front lines. That leads to a joke shouted over from the German side, a can of jam (mentioned prominently in They Shall Not Grow Old) heaved over from the English side, and two officers from the two warring nations stepping out of their trenches and walking toward one another to meet in the middle. Hendrix, through his careful pacing and his luminous illustrations, makes these officers’ simple handshake a powerfully emotional moment.

The first thing the soldiers do with their truce is to help bury each side’s dead, the numerous unburied corpses being a somber but important fact about the Western Front that Hendrix rightly includes but keeps kid-friendly. From there the soldiers meet, play soccer with a cracker box, take photos together, and exchange souvenirs, humble tokens like buttons and belt buckles—and one wonders at the accidental appropriateness of the German motto struck onto their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, “God with us.”

But the war intrudes again and the truce cannot last. One officer coming up from the rear berates the men in the front lines: “He said we had acted like traitors to Britain—but how could a day of peace be treason?” Hendrix thus subtly but powerfully contrasts the peace that Christ came to bring with the ideologies that possess modern people—in this case, nationalism and militarism, but it could just as easily be any other ism to which we find ourselves committed today.

A friend of mine who read my short Goodreads review a few years ago told me that, as he read Shooting at the Stars with his son, when those first two officers shook hands and Charlie writes that “For one glorious Christmas morning, war had taken a holiday,” his son stopped him and said, “That's wrong. It's more like the holiday took the war away. Right, Dad?” Amen to that.

Well researched, with a good introduction and afterword and a glossary that will be helpful to younger readers, but, more importantly, beautifully written and illustrated, Shooting at the Stars shows what the hope of the incarnation means in a world as broken and destructive as ours. If Christmas can redeem even a few days in the trenches of the Western Front, how much more can the hope born that night in Bethlehem accomplish before he is through? Shooting at the Stars is a must read, a worthwhile addition to your family’s cycle of Christmas stories, and one that makes that truth and that hope all the more real.

Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten, and pax in terra.

Reflections on two years of blogging

John turturro explores the lIfe of the mind In Barton Fink

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the launch of my author website, which I still think of as new. When I was first setting the website up through Squarespace I almost deleted its blog function but decided to keep it. I’m glad I did. It’s far and away the most visited part of the site and—the reason I kept it at all—it’s become a great outlet for quotations, reflections, reviews, and other small writing projects. It’s helped me stay limber as a writer, kept the gears greased and the engine warm. 

I’ve also learned a lot from it, especially as I’ve tried to use the website to promote my books and tried to figure out the whole independent author thing. Here are a handful of lessons learned from the first two years of writing this blog: 

You can’t always predict what readers will respond to

Some of the posts I’ve put a lot of effort into have gone over like lead balloons. I work on one, sweat over it, post and share it and—crickets. It’s hard not to find that disheartening. I’ve learned to respond to this in two different but sometimes overlapping ways: 

First, drop what’s not working. I ran across this piece of advice in a book on social media for authors. Don’t spend effort on work that gets no result. This is the reason—or at least a reason—I dropped my Historical Movie Monday series. I didn’t have the time or the energy for the paltry response they got and decided to use my limited energies elsewhere.

Second, just keep doing your thing. I mostly write this blog for me—more public but less open than a diary, but serving much the same function. Alan Jacobs has called his blog a “commonplace book,” and I’ve certainly used this one as such. So even when something I’ve worked on and polished to a shine fails, the point has been the doing of it. I’ve gotten practice, I’ve grown at least a little bit. That alone makes it worthwhile. 

What readers do respond to will surprise you

Of the top fifteen most popularly visited posts on this blog, I might have predicted two or three of them. Those are ones I really spent time on and tried to make worthwhile to whomever might read them. Some others are notes or reflections I rattled off and posted and didn’t look back at. The rest are somewhere in between. The point is that there’s no telling what will find a readership and what won’t.

But if the results are as unpredictable as my first point suggests, you need to do your best on everything you put out there. You don’t want the post that finally finds a big audience—because of Google or a share in a newsletter or on Facebook or whatever—to be the post where you were neglecting the craft of writing. Not everything has to be as profound as Shakespeare, as rich as Dante, as insightful as Jane Austen, as polished as Evelyn Waugh, or even as funny as Dave Barry, but everything should be best of its kind that you can make it.

Sometimes it just takes time

I mentioned how I stopped putting together Historical Movie Monday posts because they didn’t get a response commensurate with the effort I had put into them. Well, guess what have proven the most popular posts on this blog in the last two years? 

Since first posting them almost two years ago, my critiques of Kingdom of Heaven, Hacksaw Ridge, The Winter War, and The Alamo have, via Google and other search engines, become the most popular things on this website, and it’s not even close. It just took some time.

That’s a good reminder of the value of patience and endurance. We live in a world of instantaneous results; if we can’t see the benefit immediately, it has no value to us, and nowhere is this more true than online. But patience is the key. No good thing is gotten without effort, and effort requires the patience and tenacity to outlast those who give up. This is a lesson any writer needs to learn—especially if you’re self-publishing—and the reminder has been good for me. 

Humility

So if your best efforts don’t get the readership you want, you can’t predict what will, and you just have to give it time while you put your back into it and slave away, the result should be humility—humility before the tradition and craft you practice first and foremost, but also a humility before the people who may (or may not) read your stuff and the forces that (fairly or not) bring your stuff to those readers.

Railing against failure is a failure of humility. It’s entitlement, perhaps the besetting sin of our world. (Cf the comments on instant gratification above.) And when you reject this kind of humility, refuse to adopt it as part of the necessary discipline of writing, the result isn’t just pride, it’s resentment.

Gratitude 

I don’t think we live in an age of wrath or fear so much as an age of resentment. What we desperately lack is gratitude, which is the best antidote for resentment. It’s something I’ve been working on personally for a long time, and I hope it informs my writing—both here and in my novels. Because if grateful people are also the most generous—as seems to be the case—a grateful writer is going to be most generous to his readers.

So for all the surprises, both good and bad, successes and disappointments, I’m thankful that I have this website and this blog and that I have readers. Y’all mean a lot to me.

It’s been a great two years. I look forward, gratefully, to many more.

Butterfield on faith in humanity

The internet is loaded with clickbait offering to “restore your faith in humanity.” Usually what these stories mean is “Here are some photos that will give you a temporary feeling of blind positivity.” While the clickbait is silly enough, otherwise serious people actually talk this way. But the unasked question—the first that occurs to me—is Why would anyone have faith in humanity in the first place?

Herbert Butterfield (1900-79) is one of the great minds in the historiography of the last hundred years. His most famous book, The Whig Interpretation of History, was an enormously influential critique of theories of constant historical improvement, a book that is still relevant. The following comes from his book Christianity and History, originally a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge in the fall of 1948, on the radio in the spring of 1949, and published in book form later that year.

This passage concludes chapter two, “Human Nature in History,” in which Butterfield examines how an historian’s basic assumptions about human nature fundamentally alter how they perceive, study, and present the past. Unless an historian begins with “individual personalities, possessing self-consciousness, intellect and freedom,” it will become “difficult to write historical narrative at all.” He therefore sets out to examine and defend the centrality of the study of individual human persons to the historical discipline and to push back against mechanistic or reductionist conceptions of history, explicitly naming Marxism a number of times though his critique, lo these seventy years later, is very broadly applicable.

Butterfield concludes by anticipating a criticism that his conception stems from religious belief (he was a devout Methodist), asserting first that the anthropological idea he has sketched is open to anyone, religious or not (in medieval terms, the view he has outlined is not dependent on revealed truth but can be arrived at through unaided reason, meaning anyone can—and should—grasp its truth.) Second, and more importantly, he contends with the idea that stripping out religious belief immediately moves a scholar into the broad, sunlit uplands of pure objectivity. Finally, he puts his finger on one particularly dearly held but unquestioned anthropological assumption perhaps even more common in our own day than his, an assumption that lies behind many of the catastrophes of the modern era—as well as a lot of insufferable feel-good pap, from Oprah to memes to the clickbait I started this post with.

It is necessary for me to emphasize the fact that what I have been outlining in this lecture is not merely a Christian idea—it is not dependent on the truth of any super-natural religion. We are concerned not with theology but rather with anthropology, with our ordinary doctrine concerning man. . . . [I]t is a mistake for writers of history and other teachers to imagine that if they are not Christian they are refraining from committing themselves, or working without any doctrine at all, discussing history without any presuppositions. Amongst historians, as in other fields, the blindest of all the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess any. It must be emphasized that we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not support. And now, as in Old Testament days, there are false prophets who flourish by flattering and bribing human nature, telling it to be comfortable about itself in general, and playing up to its self-righteousness in times of crisis. When it suits us we may set out to advertise the sins of one nation or another, but we bring in the moral issue here and there as it serves our purposes. While we are crying out against the crimes of an enemy we may be putting the soft pedal on the similar terrible large-scale atrocities that are being committed by an ally. Our own doctrine of human nature leads us into inconsistencies.

“ It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.”

— Herbert Butterfield

During the war it was put to a British ambassador that after the destruction of Germany Russia would become a similar menace to Europe if she found herself in a position to behave over a large area with impunity. The answer given on behalf of this country was that such apprehensions were unjustified, Russia would not disappoint us, for we believed that her intentions were friendly and good. Such an attitude to morality—such a neglect of a whole tradition of maxims in regard to this question—was not Christian in any sense of the word but belongs to a heresy as black as the old Manichaean heresy. It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There might be great virtue in disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake of a good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom in that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.

Again, Butterfield is writing during the Berlin Airlift, as the Russians—Britain and the US’s erstwhile ally—sought to starve the western half of the city into submission. One need not dig too deeply to find the self-delusion and self-righteousness Butterfield describes in the Allied conduct of the war a few years earlier; read FDR’s hopelessly optimistic correspondence with Stalin sometime. We could multiply examples.

A decade before Butterfield’s book, about a week after the beginning of the Blitz, CS Lewis wrote in one of his finest essays that chivalry “offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.” Lewis’s thoughts on chivalry are excellent and I want to write on them at length some other time; what brought his essay to mind in this context was his conclusion, which strikes a note similar to Butterfield’s, but with an even darker note of British understatement: “There was, to be sure, a rumour in the last century that wolves would gradually become extinct by some natural process; but that seems to have been an exaggeration.”

1917

Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) cross no-man’s-land in 1917

One of the books I read in my grad school World War I class was called Eye-Deep in Hell. The book was a break from our reading about strategy and troop movements and the cultural and political substructure of the war and took us instead into the experience of combat. It answers, in enormous and thoroughly documented detail, the question I’ve mentioned on this blog many, many times before in regard to war and the past—What was it like? The horrors of the Western Front as described in that book piled up line by line, paragraph by paragraph, first shocking, then paining or nauseating, and finally numbing the reader.

1917 is the best realization of that experience that I’ve ever seen on film.

The short version

The film begins with two young English lance corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), at rest behind the lines. Their rest proves short-lived. When Blake’s sergeant tells him to pick a man and follow him, Blake chooses his pal Schofield. Rather than being assigned light duty or sent on some other errand, Blake and Schofield meet their commanding officer, General Erinmore (Colin Firth). The general personally briefs them for a special mission—a British battalion on the other side of a German salient is scheduled to make an attack across no-man’s-land at dawn the following morning, an attempt to exploit a German withdrawal and force them to continue retreating. Aerial reconnaissance has revealed that the Germans have fallen back to an impregnable new line of defense, meaning that unless the British attack is called off the men going over the top will be annihilated. But the Germans have cut all telegraph and telephone lines to the doomed unit and so the message must be delivered on foot—as soon as possible.

Why send Blake? His elder brother is a lieutenant in the battalion. Fail to deliver the message calling off the attack and he and 1,600 others will be killed. They have about eight hours.

With this simple setup and these high stakes—both military and personal—Blake and Schofield set off. They move up through the labyrinthine lines of trenches and, when they reach the front line, strike out into what used to be no-man’s-land. From there they must work their way through the abandoned German trenches (which are depressingly better designed and built than their own), the emptied countryside beyond, a bombed out village, and finally into the freshly dug trenches of the battalion as it prepares to attack. Much goes wrong.

I don’t want to say much more about it because I want everyone who can to go see it, and to see with the uncertainty that the characters live with moment by moment.

In which I gush over technical matters

1917 is technically brilliant—the most well-made movie I’ve seen all year, a masterpiece of what cinema is capable of. The director, Sam Mendes, and the cinematographer, the great Roger Deakins, have used all their visual and dramatic skills to craft a magnificent, overwhelmingly powerful movie. It’s breathtaking, one of the very few films which I’d describe with the overused word “immersive.” The film is awash in the kind of detail you find in books like Eye-Deep in Hell—the sucking mud, the stagnant water in the craters, the banks of sandbags and miles of telephone wire, the omnipresent rats boldly feeding on corpses. The men wear bulky, filthy uniforms and stagger under heavy packs, often needing to help each other up, and when they lose their breath and pant we understand why.

The film’s depiction of no-man’s-land is particularly harrowing. It’s a barren waste pocked by shell-holes and strewn with dense tangles of barbed wire, dotted all over with the rotting corpses of both men and animals. Blake and Schofield slip and stumble through the muck and up and down the artillery-scarred terrain. 1917 doesn’t just show you what it was like, it makes you feel what it was like. It’s all there but the smell.

In addition to the exceptional production design, Deakins’s camerawork helps create this sense of immersion. It’s well known by now that the film is a single continuous shot lasting its almost two-hour running time. There is, in fact, one cut—blackness as a character is knocked unconscious—and the film is not really a single shot but multiple long takes stitched together digitally. But thanks to meticulous planning and seamless editing, for most of the film the impression is of a continuous, unbroken shot. I’ve never seen it done better.

I wanted to laud this in a little detail because I usually dislike gimmicks like this. In other films that are either “one shot” or simply include lots of long shots—“oners”—I find the result off-putting, especially as the “hidden” cuts are usually plainly obvious and the camera continuously glides and shifts and pivots to mimic the effect of traditional shot-reverse shot editing. Here, the camera lingers even as it and the characters move, and Deakins and Mendes often allow the characters themselves to change the composition rather than whipping the camera around. (Compare “the Spielberg oner.”) The style is always under tight control.

The greatest virtue of Mendes’s direction and Deakins’s cinematography in 1917 is their willingness to embrace stillness. Many times throughout the film the camera reaches a carefully composed point and settles, allowing important scenes to pass with our observation unbroken. It’s a painterly or theatrical effect, and is most powerfully used in a scene featuring a surprising—and agonizingly slow—death. It’s brilliantly done.

I’ve already emphasized the detailed recreation of the trenches and the sensory effect it has, but the visual splendor of 1917 shouldn’t be overlooked. Deakins’s work, especially in the austere landscapes through the middle of the film, as Blake and Schofield walk through the empty countryside behind the former German lines, reminds me not a little of Dunkirk, but employed to even better effect. The visuals throughout—from the muddy, cluttered trenches at the beginning through the wreck of no-man’s-land and the darkness of the German lines, to the vast emptiness behind, the nightmare world of flare-lit rubble in a French village, and finally the shallow new trenches dug into chalky ground facing the German lines—are striking, both in their detail and their spareness, and are perfectly calculated to support the mood of the characters as they leave the established, busy, and familiar behind for unknown danger.

Writing, cast, and characters

That points as well to the writing. 1917 is thematically rich despite being so straightforward, and everything in the film is carefully set up. It’s easy to miss because of the film’s amazing technical achievements, but the story is well crafted and brilliantly structured.

The best evidence of this care is how much Mendes and his co-writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, are able to make us care about two men we get to know in real time. We learn very little about them—at first. Blake is chipper, talkative, blithe. We intuit that he’s younger, or at least less experienced, than Schofield, and talks freely about home and family in a way Schofield pointedly does not. Schofield has been previously decorated—we never find out why—but is more taciturn and bitter. He says early on that it would be easier simply not to go home on leave since coming back to the trenches is so painful. He is more clearly haunted by what he’s been through, and George MacKay’s expressive, hollowed out face conveys more of the war than any dialogue could. The two men’s fear as they approach and then enter no-man’s-land is palpable, and things only get worse from there.

Other, more recognizable actors pop up in one-scene roles—Colin Firth as the general who sends Blake and Schofield on their mission, Andrew Scott as an officer who has given up on everything, Mark Strong as another, more gentlemanly sort who helps them along the way, Benedict Cumberbatch as the haughty colonel meant to receive the general’s message, Richard Madden as Blake’s brother—but Blake and Schofield are the stars and Chapman and MacKay are excellent. You can feel their camaraderie, even when they bicker, and you see it in a simple but moving image repeated several times—Blake bending wordlessly to give Schofield a hand, helping him to his feet, and the pair moving on.

Neither man—particularly Schofield—would think of themselves as heroes, but they do undeniably heroic things in the course of their mission. They do so because of the situation they’ve been thrust into, a situation they didn’t ask for—as Schofield makes plain after one near miss—but also because of their love for one another, their families, and the men like them who could be killed if they fail.

The reality of war

The two stars are also, crucially, very young looking, a good reminder than wars tend to be fought by men in their teens or early twenties. This boyish looking pair and thousands of their fellows live through conditions most of us could never imagine, and 1917’s invitation to see, to consider, and to live through those things with this pair—to feel compassion, literally “suffering with”—is one of its greatest strengths.

I’ve already talked about all the detail that went into 1917—the impeccable recreations of the trenches, the attention to clothing and gear—and how that helps us feel what it was like, but the thing that really sells the film’s vision of what it was like is the actors—both the stars and the hundreds of extras. The overwhelming impression of the soldiers of the Great War that one takes away from 1917 is one of unutterable weariness. The film begins and ends with characters stopping for some much-needed rest, Blake complains constantly of being hungry and even rifles through abandoned German supplies for food, and Schofield is so tired that at one point he drifts to sleep in a river. And any time the camera takes us through the trenches, anyone who is not actively at work—marching forward or to the rear, bringing in the wounded, shoring up the walls of the trench—is sitting, either asleep or staring blankly at the curiosity Blake and Schofield present as they pass through. We see men sleeping, smoking, eating, all haggard, all slouched into the most relaxed position available to them. The world of 1917 is a world of endless movement and exhaustion, which may make it one of the most realistic war films ever made.

The film also does not shy away from the sheer waste of World War I. The bodies in no-man’s-land—some of which have been there so long that the living have given them jocular nicknames—are the most obvious example, but the wastage accumulates in other ways. As the dreaded assault on the new German line approaches we see a communications trench lined with dozens of stretchers, ready for the inevitable, and even the civilians suffer. In the concluding scene of a nightmarish sequence beginning at night and stretching into the dawn, one of our protagonists literally swims through the bloated corpses of civilians that have washed up in an eddy in a river.

It’s harrowing, and the camera never looks away. Blake and Schofield can’t escape it and neither can we.

Conclusion

1917 is an excellent example of what cinema can do when all its component parts are worked by masters. Its writing, acting, and camerawork are all perfectly integrated, with each supporting the others. It’s a masterpiece. See it on the big screen if you can.

But more importantly, the story and experience the filmmakers have used their skill and craft to tell is unforgettable. 1917 takes us into a lost world and makes us see and feel and remember it in the way it deserves—as an unspeakably wasteful, frustrating, tragic, wearying horror, but a horror in which good, ordinary men like Blake and Schofield showed the greatest kind of love for their friends, which is also the greatest kind of heroism.

Praise for Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville

Back in the spring I submitted my two most recent novels, Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville, to competition in the 27th annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Neither won, but both scored very high in every category of assessment and I appreciated the brief feedback I got from the books’ judges earlier this month. I’ve quoted a few substantial excerpts below.

Praise for Griswoldville

“The close bond Georgie has with his grandfather, Fate, is endearing, and the reader is rooting for their strength and survival (as well as that of Georgie’s father) throughout the novel.”

— Judge, 27th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards

Griswoldville is an in-depth look at what a young boy fighting in a war of the past was really like. The author clearly did his research on the time period and the inner workings of the Georgia militia, and the prose is thoughtful and polished. We learn what it really took for farming families to survive during the Civil War era, particularly when men from the family were away from the farms for years at a time. The close bond Georgie has with his grandfather, Fate, is endearing, and the reader is rooting for their strength and survival (as well as that of Georgie’s father) throughout the novel.

Praise for Dark Full of Enemies

Dark Full of Enemies zeroes in on a seemingly small mission to the Arctic with laser-sharp focus and precision. The narrative structure, much like McKay himself, is clean, crisp, and precise, and reflects the bitter cold and stark darkness of the world around him.

“Dark Full of Enemies expertly captures the cold, dark dangers of Nazi-occupied Norway, and a Special operative team’s desperate race to complete their mission—and make it out of enemy territory alive.”

— Judge, 27th Annual WD Self-Published Book Awards

The characters, particularly the soldiers on the mission, each had their own personality, which was cleverly portrayed to the reader through minimal, yet colorful details. This was especially true of Stallings, whose troubled past guided his decisions in the present narrative, and was a character that readers could empathize with. . . .

The use of setting is clear and effective--never once is the reader unsure of where the story is taking place, or how brutally cold and inhospitable the environment is. And as the mission drags on, and the soldiers become weary from the lack of sunlight, the reader too can really sense how draining the mission is—and appreciate its completion that much more.

Dark Full of Enemies expertly captures the cold, dark dangers of Nazi-occupied Norway, and a Special operative team’s desperate race to complete their mission—and make it out of enemy territory alive.

Heading into the holidays

I appreciate Writer’s Digest taking the extra trouble to send some feedback to the entrants in the contest, and I’ve been gratified and heartened by what I read.

Finally, if you’re looking for something to give the reader in your life this Christmas, please consider Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville—or my other two books! They’re available through Amazon—where both have five stars—in both paperback and Kindle formats. If you’re still not quite sold and would like to read more feedback or some excerpts from the books, visit each book’s page on my website here (Dark Full of Enemies) or here (Griswoldville).

Thanks as always for reading! And I hope y’all have a good holiday season and a merry Christmas.