Material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys

Yesterday I started reading John Buchan’s Huntingtower, a 1922 adventure novel that introduced recurring character Dickson McCunn, a Glasgow “provision merchant” or grocer. Newly retired at the age of fifty-five and with his wife out of town, taking a cure at a Continental spa, McCunn decides to go on an adventure. Buchan informs us that “Mr McCunn—I may confess at the start—was an incurable romantic.”

The source of this incurable romanticism? His imagination, as fueled by decades of reading:

“He . . . sought in literature for one thing alone. . . . material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys.”

He had had a humdrum life since the day when he had first entered his uncle’s shop with the hope of some day succeeding that honest grocer; and his feet had never strayed a yard from his sober rut. But his mind, like the Dying Gladiator’s, had been far away. As a boy he had voyaged among books, and they had given him a world where he could shape his career according to his whimsical fancy. Not that Mr. McCunn was what is known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought in literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on a frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite not because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new landed from France, among the western heather.

C’est moi. Like McCunn, what I wanted out of anything I read as a kid was to feel these things—to fall in with dangerous pirates, to narrowly escape kidnapping and murder, to wait in the cramped dark to spring a surprise attack, to go undercover among enemies, to fight monsters and elude giants, to witness the unfolding of world-shattering battle—and the exhilaration of living through it all. I would not just “watch” in my mind’s eye but imagine myself there thanks to all the raw, vivid, concrete sensory detail good writers provided, and would go on “to construct fantastic journeys” of my own. Like McCunn, I was a daydreamer. Still am. And like McCunn, I sympathize with the desperate, the uncertain, the underdog—with adventurers.

Recently the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore shared a list of the historical novels that inspired his love of history. I may have to put together just such a list of my own. In the meantime, here’s his list (or this screenshotted version to avoid the paywall). And Huntingtower is a delight so far, much the kind of adventure McCunn himself would have enjoyed.

We better not

Reviewing a new mini-series adaptation of Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, the story of notorious Communist agent Kim Philby, Charlotte Gill takes issue with an invented character named Lily Taylor who is scrupulously designed to appeal to certain sensibilities—a working class woman who don’t take guff off of nobody. Gill argues that Taylor’s intrusion into what is meant to be a dramatization of a true story is evidence of the filmmakers’ ideological capture. I don’t disagree.

Gill briefly outlines many other problems with the series from an historical and storytelling standpoint, but the fictional Lily Taylor highlights a problem with the storytellers themselves, and with modern storytelling more generally. Gill:

But what is most perplexing—not just with [A Spy Among Friends], but every drama or book that sees the past as a canvas that can be reworked—is why writers think their fiction (which they call history) is better than reality. It takes a certain arrogance to believe that you can improve it, worse still that you have the moral responsibility to erase parts you find objectionable. There is a reason people come back to the Philby story; because it is fascinating in itself—without the need for Lily Taylors. Sadly, as in the case of Kim Philby, ideology will remain paramount for some.

Spot on. And I have often wondered by filmmakers and all the others “reworking” historical stories or great literature for “modern audiences” don’t grasp that the appeal of most stories, whether historical or literary, is the story as it stands. It’s already interesting. It takes ideological capture, arrogance (but I repeat myself), and—it should be added—a startling lack of creativity not to see this.

Some years ago that great YouTube seer, Mr Plinkett, reviewed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in his inimitable style. Near the end, in considering whether it was a good idea to make a fourth installment in the series at all, he laid down a good prudential principle: “We all love Indiana Jones, yes, but everybody needs that part of their brain that says ‘We better not.’”

Ditto those who would “improve” the past to suit their own preconceptions.

Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts about the use of fictional characters in true stories or settings, as they are often an important tool in adaptation. I may delve into those here sometime soon.

2022 in movies

I almost named this year of movies The Year of Indifference. After struggling along for several years, I finally turned a corner in the spring and just stopped caring about most of the movies that came out.

I can remember the moment. It was April, the year barely begun. I was sitting in a theatre waiting to watch The Northman when the non-stop pre-trailer fluff turned toward the mandatory Disney agitprop. Two youthful people announced—as if any of us could have forgotten—that next month Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would arrive in theatres. Fine. Whatever. But their second sentence was something like, “Here are all the movies and Disney+ shows you need to catch up on before the movie!”

I’m still not sure if I said it out loud, but I certainly thought, “Well, the hell with that.”

I had most looked forward to three movies in the spring of 2022. As it turns out, those were my three favorite movies of 2022. From the last of those in late spring right up to New Year’s Eve, I slid downhill into utter apathy. Movies came and went and I did not care. I did not see the new Dr Strange, or Jurassic World, or Thor, or Black Panther, or any edgy A24 stuff, or any prestige movies about movies like The Fabelmans or Empire of Light or Babylon, or anything that came out on any streaming service, and I probably will not in the future. Not that I felt any hostility toward these movies—the only one I bestowed hate upon was Avatar: The Way of Water, which I certainly will not see—I just did not care. Even the things I felt some flicker of interest in I could not be motivated to go pay money to watch. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

But I hope so, because while the lows of 2022 were, for me, very low, the tiny handful of high points were most high indeed.

So having explained how I came to be even more pessimistic than usual about the state of filmmaking, let me focus for the rest of the post on the purely positive. Rather than The Year of Indifference, I’m taking a cue from a coincidental symmetry in the titles of my top three films and dubbing 2022:

The Year of The _____man (and Top Gun: Maverick)

Top Gun: Maverick

The hype is real.

I have little personal attachment to the original Top Gun, but grew more and more interested in Maverick as it kept getting delayed and as I learned more about it. By the time it arrived in theatres I had even allowed myself to get excited, and boy was that excitement rewarded. A carefully crafted, well-executed action movie with clear stakes, straightforward old-fashioned storytelling, solid if not deep characters, some resonant themes of guilt, mentorship, hard work, and courage, and genuinely awesome action, Top Gun: Maverick thrilled me.

What is more, the movie holds up. I saw it twice in theatres in the late spring. My wife gave me the Blu-ray for Christmas, and my dad set up a great family movie night in his office’s conference room over Christmas break—massive TV, loud, bassy speakers, and plenty of pizza. The movie was just as exciting as the first time I saw it on the big screen.

You can read my full review from May here.

The Batman

The Batman was my first big movie of the year, but one I had looked forward to with some trepidation. I intentionally avoided reviews and information about the movie because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I went in almost cold, with few expectations though admittedly some hopes that it would be good.

Those hopes were fulfilled. The Batman proved a legitimate crime movie, serial killer mystery, police procedural, action thriller, and detective story all at the same time, with a good script, excellent acting, a wonderfully detailed Gotham City—the best I’ve seen in a Batman movie, in my opinion—just oozing and dripping the gloomy atmosphere I’ve always imagined, and a subtle but effective coming-of-age story for Batman. Like Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman takes familiar material and elevates it not only through its surehanded and expert storytelling but through the mature, old-fashioned themes it dramatizes.

You can read my full review from March here, with some further notes, thoughts, and observations here.

The Northman

The Northman is the best Viking movie ever made, and perhaps the only thoroughly good one. (Though I do have a soft spot for one very old-fashioned one.)

Robert Eggers’s stated intention in The Northman was to make a film that felt and worked like an undiscovered saga, one of the many Old Norse stories of outlaws, heroes, revenge, and the supernatural recorded in Iceland a few centuries after the end of the Viking Age. He succeeded brilliantly. This film drops the viewer into an alien world, one utterly indifferent to our modern values or pieties and one in which strength, victory, and the ruthless fulfilment of personal obligations—most notably revenge—offered the only guiding morality. It is a bracing vision, simultaneously breathtaking in its boldness and courage and disturbing in its bleak callousness. Again—accurately capturing the spirit of this lost world.

The Northman is the movie I was most excited about going into the spring of 2022. And while I might have enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more as rock-solid entertainment, The Northman satisfies my most niche historical and cinematic interests like no other film. It’s brilliantly executed and deserves a watch.

You can read my full review from April here.

Three runners-up

In addition to my three favorites, all of which came out in the late winter or spring, here are three good, solidly-made movies I saw that didn’t quite rise to the top. Like my top three, I happen to have already reviewed all three of these in greater detail here on the blog. Links are included with each short recap below.

Devotion—The story of two fighter pilots in the newly integrated US Navy, Devotion follows wingmen Lt Tom Hudner and Ens Jesse Brown—one white aviator, one black—as they get to know each other, testing and pushing one another until a deep bond of friendship grows between these two quite different men. All this plays out as the Cold War slowly escalates, culminating in Hudner and Brown’s deployment to an aircraft carrier providing close air support to Marines in the first terrible winter of the Korean War. It’s here that Hudner and Brown’s skill as aviators and their devotion to one another as wingmen and friends will be tested.

Glenn Powell, who plays Hudner here and another naval aviator, Hangman, in Top Gun: Maverick, was a producer on Devotion and clearly learned a lot of lessons about how to shoot aerial sequences with real aircraft from his experience on Top Gun. So it’s unfortunate that Devotion and Top Gun: Maverick ended up coming out the same year, as I’ve heard several unfavorable comparisons between the two. Devotion is a different kind of movie, with a statelier pace and a greater emphasis on character drama, but it is well-crafted, well-acted, and handsomely shot and both deserves and rewards viewing.

You can read my full review of Devotion—a dual review with Glass Onion—here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play is a fast-moving but stately and intensely moody film. The acting is excellent, but the real draw is the film’s style, an atmospheric throwback to impressionistic black-and-white silent films complete with stagey sets and dramatic high-contrast lighting, all of which intensifies the drama of murder and deception and the pervasive eeriness of the story. This adaptation captures the mood of Shakespeare’s play better than any of the other film versions I’ve seen.

You can read my full review of The Tragedy of Macbeth from January here.

Glass Onion—This is the one exception to my statement above that I saw nothing released on any streaming service, but that’s only because Netflix gave this a short theatrical run ahead of its streaming release. This is apparently a trend, and I hope it continues. Glass Onion is a lot of fun (though I erred in my review when I wrote that it was probably the most fun I’d had at the movies that year, as that distinction obviously belongs to Top Gun: Maverick), with the same whimsical, trickster style of Knives Out but more outright comedy. Writer-director Rian Johnson deftly satirizes the fatuity and self-congratulation of modern day influencers—whether tech billionaires, do-gooder leftist politicians, celebrity fashionistas, or the rise-and-grind types hawking male-enhancement drugs—and the intricate overlapping construction creates genuine mystery, surprise, and humor. I have a few reservations and misgivings about Glass Onion, but as pure entertainment it was a rare treat.

You can read my full review of Glass Onion—a dual review with Devotion—here.

New to me

While most of the movie year was a bust for me, I did see some great old films for the first time. These were the best—or at least most entertaining—of the lot:

The Beast—This is a lesser-known 1988 film directed by Kevin Reynolds, who would go on to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a few years later. The Beast (aka The Beast of War) takes place during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and begins with a platoon of Russian T-55 tanks destroying an Afghan village. The tankers wantonly murder civilians and try to torture information out of a tribal elder by slowly rolling over him—from the feet up—with one tank. After the massacre one tank becomes separated, and its efforts to escape hostile territory as well as violent disagreement among the crew form one half of the film’s story. The other half follows Taj (Steven Bauer), now the Khan of the tribe attacked at the beginning of the film, as he and a band of mujahideen seek revenge. The two stories intertwine suspensefully, converging on the character of Koverchenko (Jason Patric), a Russian tanker tested both by his commander, the violent Daskal (George Dzundza) and the mujahideen. Both a harrowing small-scale war film and an intense, well-acted character drama, The Beast was the best surprise of my year and deserves to be much better remembered.

Dunkirk—Not to be confused with the more recent Christopher Nolan film, this 1958 Ealing Studios film starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee retells the title story of collapse, retreat, desperation, and rescue in the traditional style one would expect from the late 1950s, and it’s excellent. Well-acted, told on a grand scale, and moving between multiple stories that converge in the evacuation, Dunkirk gives the real events well-rounded and unsentimental treatment and represents old-fashioned war movies at their best. Far from being superseded by Nolan’s more stripped-down modern action-thriller, this Dunkirk holds its own. The result is two movies about the same events in two dramatically different styles. The two complement each other well and would make a great double-feature for fans of film history, action, or war movies. Regardless, this Dunkirk is well worth seeing for its own sake.

The Mummy—I have a set of the classic Universal monster movies on Blu-ray and have been working through them for Halloween over the last few years. I had seen Frankenstein and Dracula before, but this year I finally got to the original 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Slow, quiet, and straightforwardly told, The Mummy nevertheless achieves a wonderfully eerie atmosphere—helped in no small part by Karloff’s creepy and tightly controlled performance as Ardeth Bey—and steadily builds tension from beginning to end. This was one I didn’t expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did, and I look forward to revisiting it.

Grizzly—I’m not going to pretend that this movie is good, but it was highly entertaining. (See my carefully qualified introduction above.) Grizzly is an obvious, beat-for-beat knockoff of Jaws, but instead of a shark in the ocean the threat is a bear in the woods. The woods in question are those of Rabun County, Georgia, and part of the fun for me was spotting all the recognizable local places used in the film (e.g. the Rock House in downtown Clayton, an intersection on the Tallulah Gorge Scenic Loop used as the entrance to a fake national park, and the driveway and lab room of my childhood doctor’s office, a moment that gave me the willies because the perspective in the film was exactly that of a patient sitting down to get a finger prick). Also, my dad is in it as an extra. I gather that RiffTrax has done one of its commentaries on Grizzly, and that sounds like it’d be worthwhile. I’d recommend this as a potential Lousy Movie Night classic.

Special commendations—TV

I long ago gave up on most TV shows, not out of the indifference I plummeted into this spring but out of the inability to pick where to start. There’s so much TV out there. And a TV show takes up hours and hours and hours of time I’d rather spend on reading, or playing with my kids, or watching multiple movies. But, given the dearth of good stuff at the theatre, this year my wife and I did get into two excellent shows that provided some of the highlights of our 2022.

“Ghosts”—This is the original BBC series, though there is a recent American adaptation. “Ghosts” follows the centuries’ worth of dead people who have, for whatever reason, not departed the once-stately Button House in the English countryside. There’s a decapitated Tudor nobleman, an early 1990s Conservative MP who died in a compromising situation and so dwells in eternity with no pants, an infantile Georgian lady, a genteel Edwardian lady who falls screaming from an upstairs window every night, a Scoutmaster who died in an archery accident, a Romantic poet killed in a pistol duel, a stalwart British Army officer from the Second World War, a basement full of medieval plague victims from a mass gave under the foundation, and—reaching way, way back—perhaps my favorite character, a caveman.

As befits a show developed by and starring the “Horrible Histories” team, “Ghosts” is hilarious, packed with wit, slapstick, and lots of great historical humor. All these characters from many time periods, plus the two new owners of the house, make a wonderful ensemble, with a rich variety of personal foibles, conflicts, affections and rivalries, and running gags. The show also proves surprisingly moving at times, as in an episode in which the Scoutmaster’s now-elderly widow and son make their annual visit to the house.

My wife found “Ghosts” on DVD at our local library and we watched the entire first season in a few days, stopping ourselves after two episodes each night so that we didn’t stay up until the wee hours binging it. I can’t attest to the other seasons of the show, but season one was a great show that was funny without being mean-spirited, dirty, or insulting to your intelligence. We look forward to watching more.

“Bluey”—Let me repeat what I said about Top Gun above: the hype is real. “Bluey” is a pure delight—a kids’ show that isn’t insulting or annoying, that prizes playfulness and imagination, that showcases a loving, functioning family in which all the members love and respect each other, and that is beautifully animated. It’s also so well-crafted and -written that it works on multiple levels, so that in my family, all three kids—ranging in age from three to seven—as well as my wife and I can enjoy the show together and get different things out of it. (Favorite line: Bandit, the dad, while plunging the toilet: “What are these kids eating?” Based on a true story.)

And speaking as a father, I appreciate seeing a show in which the dad is fun but not an idiot, and has a relationship of mutual love, respect, and hard work with the kids’ mom. That’s vanishingly rare in modern entertainment, and one of the many, many things that make “Bluey” special.

What I missed in 2022

Movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons—including not wanting to pay for a half-dozen streaming subscriptions and finding Redbox a bit of a pain—I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to see these in the new year.

• Operation Mincemeat—Based on the excellent Ben MacIntyre book, a fascinating true story performed by a great cast.

• Munich: The Edge of War—Based on Robert Harris’s novel, a political thriller with personal stakes in a crucial historical setting. Jeremy Irons looks like an inspired choice to play Neville Chamberlain.

• See How They Run—Looks like a charming historical whodunnit. My wife and I actually made plans to see this but it was gone from cinemas before we could make the arrangements for a date night.

• Nope—I still haven’t seen any of Jordan Peele’s films, but this one involves—or at least appears to involve—UFOs, and is supposed to have smart and hard-edged satire.

• Amsterdam—An intriguing premise and kooky characters hooked into a fictionalized version of a fascinating true incident—the “Business Plot” to overthrow the US government.

• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—I love Weird Al and, far from a straightforward musical biopic, this looks like an appropriately irreverent parody of what is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre in Hollywood.

• The Banshees of Inisherin—Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, two favorites who have previously starred in one of my favorite films, In Bruges, reunite with that film’s director for this dark comedy about a man from a small Irish village who inexplicably but very pointed ends his long friendship with another.

• The Menu—This didn’t look like my kind of thing when I first read about it, but I’ve added it to the get-around-to-eventually list on the strength of favorable comments from friends.

• All Quiet on the Western Front—A new adaptation of one of my oldest favorite novels, and the first in the novel’s original language. I eagerly anticipated this when the first trailer finally dropped but, since then, have had a number of the film’s major departures from the book spoiled, so I’m somewhat more hesitant about it now. Still hoping to see it at least once in the days to come.

So, again, there may be several more great movies out there leftover from 2022 that I’ve simply missed, but I’m going to have to overcome quite a lot of weariness and inertia to seek some of these out.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

I’m afraid my superhero burnout and general apathy continues as I look ahead at 2023’s release schedules, but the few films I look forward to I really look forward two. In order of anticipation, from highest to lowest, they are:

• Mission: Impossible—Dead Recoking Part I—I don’t see how this could be terrible. Cruise, McQuarrie and company have been on a roll for the last several films in this series. I’ll be there opening weekend.

• Oppenheimer—It’s striking to me that Christopher Nolan, out of his twelve films, has made three superhero movies, three near-future sci-fi thrillers, three crime films, and three historical films. And out of this last category, two out of the three have centered on crucial events from World War II. I’m very curious to see how he approaches the seemingly uncinematic story of the Manhattan Project’s R&D of the atomic bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer’s role in it.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—Please don’t be terrible. At least be better than the CGI in the trailer.

• Dune: Part Two—Villeneuve’s Dune was one of the most pleasant surprises for me at the movies in the last several years, and as a result I am, to my continuing surprise, quite looking forward to Part Two.

• Napoleon—Ridley Scott has a shaky relationship with historical fact but his movies are always breathtaking to behold, and Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a nigh-insane sense of drive and intensity to every part he plays, should do something interesting with old Boney.

These are the ones I am actually excited for, but let’s hope that, as in any moviegoing year, there will also be some nice surprises along the way.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the top, despite my overall negative impression of film and the film industry in 2022, the good things I saw weren’t just good, but excellent. I gladly recommend any of the films praised above. Here’s hoping for much more like them in 2023!

2022 in books

I read a lot of good books in 2022, and I had a hard time narrowing them down in the “best of” categories I typically use for these posts, and once I had done that I still had a lot to say about them. So let me end these introductory remarks here and get you straight into the best fiction, non-fiction, kids’ books, and rereads of my year.

Favorite fiction of the year

This was a fiction-heavy year of reading thanks in no small part to two wonderful series recommended by friends, about which more below. I present the overall favorites in no particular order:

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—A really charming and witty mystery from the early 1950s in which the mystery is not who killed the narrator’s awful Uncle Titus but who is going to. A genuinely romantic will-they-won’t-they love story, a variety of humorous and farcical plot complications, and a dash of small-town political shenanigans round out this fun story. Long out of print and probably hard to find, but worth seeking out.

John Macnab and Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—This year I declared my birth month John Buchan June and read and wrote about as many of his novels as I could. I squeezed eight in, and these two were my favorite new reads. One a high-spirited outdoor heist caper set in the Scottish highlands, the other a moody and contemplative outdoor odyssey through the furthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies, both are excellent, gripping, absorbing reads, albeit in dramatically different ways. You can read my full John Buchan June reviews of John Macnab and Sick Heart River here and here.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris—A Kripo detective in Berlin investigates the murder of an obscure Nazi Party functionary as the city prepares to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday—in 1964. I’m not usually one for alternate history, but Fatherland approaches a fantasy world in which the Nazis won World War II through a brilliantly structured mystery-thriller, giving the reader two levels of investigation and discovery that interlock with and complement each other. It’s vividly imagined, plausibly detailed, and briskly written. “I couldn’t put it down” is a hoary cliché, but in this case, for me, it was true.

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—A strongly written and hard-hitting novel about two soldiers—one experienced, one green—in the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—The story of a buffalo hunt in a remote pass of the Rockies, Butcher’s Crossing balances a gritty, sweaty, bloody plot with intense character drama, pitting the naïve and sentimental New England boy Will Andrews against the Captain Ahab-like Miller, the guide and trigger-man leading the expedition. Beautifully written and gripping. I blogged about Williams’s use of the senses in Butcher’s Crossing here.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey—A severely injured police inspector tries to solve a 450-year old mystery from his hospital bed. It’s better than it sounds—astonishingly good, in fact. Full review from last month here.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—The work of Agatha Christie is a weird lacuna in my reading, and until this year the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express way back in high school. I fixed that this fall with one of her other most famous books, And Then There Were None. This review will be short: it’s regarded as a masterpiece for a reason.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe—Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym purports to be the journal/memoirs of a New England youth who stowed away on a ship and got considerably more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a final voyage into terra incognita, violent encounters with undiscovered peoples, and… something far worse. Poe combines Moby-Dick-style kitchen sink realism, a Robinson Crusoe-style spirit of adventure, and plenty of his own trademark feel for the uncanny and terrifying for an engaging and uniquely thrilling tale. I had only ever heard bad or dismissive comments about Pym up until this time and was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy—Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road sixteen years ago starts as a sort of New Orleans No Country for Old Men in which Bobby Western, the brilliant son of a Manhattan Project physicist who is now a salvage diver, starts his own investigation into the mysterious crash of a private jet in the Mississippi River only for terrible unseen forces to array themselves against him. This storyline is interspersed with that of Bobby’s sister, a child prodigy afflicted with intrusive schizophrenic hallucinations, whom we know from the opening pages eventually hangs herself. But neither storyline goes anywhere, exactly. Long, talky, meandering (none of which are intended as criticisms), The Passenger is as vividly written as any of McCarthy’s other work but clearly has much more going on in it thematically than the straightforward plot elements, and I knew even while reading it that it would stick with me and reward me more later through simply letting it sit in the back of my mind for a while, and that has proven to be the case. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying read. So, caveat lector. The companion volume focusing primarily on Bobby’s sister and her institutionalization, Stella Maris, is already out but I haven’t gotten to it yet. We’ll see how this informs and recasts the events of The Passenger in the new year.

Witch Wood, by John Buchan—I read this just a week or so ago, so you can expect a full, thorough treatment this coming John Buchan June, but for the time being let me recommend it as a strongly written, engaging, atmospheric, suspenseful, and genuinely spooky historical novel in which a young minister discovers the existence of a devil-worshiping cult in his seemingly upright Scottish parish. A favorite of CS Lewis, who wrote of it, “for Witch Wood specially I am always grateful; all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish. That's the way to do it.”

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—This was a reread, but it was a special reread for me. This was the first novel by McCarthy that I read as a callow college student more than fifteen years ago, and I was unprepared for it. (I’ve described starting McCarthy’s corpus with Blood Meridian as “jumping into the deep end first.”) But it stuck with me, haunting me, and steadily grew in my regard, and within a year or two I had read almost everything else McCarthy had written up to that point. This year it was finally time to revisit Blood Meridian, and with the intervening years and maturity and experience it was like reading a different novel, or the fulfilment of the novel I struggled with one summer in college—gripping, bleak, and overwhelmingly powerful. So I’m including this reread among my favorite fiction reads of the year, and giving it a stronger recommendation than ever.

Discoveries of the year

Let me here thank my friends Dave Newell and JP Burten (whose novels Red Lory and Liberator y’all should check out) for introducing me to the following two series, of which I read too many volumes to include in the usual “favorites” format above but which I have to acknowledge as highlights of the year:

The Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments, by Alexander McCall Smith—An absolute hoot, these short stories and novellas follow the marvelous philologist Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an aristocratic German scholar of the Romance languages and proud author of the seminal 1200-page study Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Von Igelfeld is a brilliant creation, simultaneously pompous and polite, rigid and kindhearted, humorless and eager to please, tone-deaf to social niceties but ostentatiously courtly, jealous of his own honor and childishly naïve. (He does not understand, for instance, why so many other prominent professors have such attractive graduate assistants, or why so many students are so obliging about coed room assignments on what is supposed to be a scholarly reading retreat in the Alps.) This is a charming combination of foibles that consistently lands him in uncomfortable situations ranging from awkward silences to high farce, situations from which he is either too proud or too oblivious to extricate himself. Pure, unalloyed fun.

• Volumes read: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

• Volumes remaining: Your Inner Hedgehog

The Slough House series, by Mick Herron—An excellent series of spy thrillers featuring the outcasts, losers, and screwups of MI5 who, rather than being fired and creating public embarrassment, are shunted into dead-end jobs at a site called Slough House under the management of the slovenly former “joe” or field operative Jackson Lamb. Each volume is intricately plotted, engagingly and suspensefully written, and—what sets it most apart from the novels the series is most often compared to—funny. I’ve enjoyed these so much that I’ve forced myself to space them out so that I can squeeze in other reading.

• Volumes read: Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country

• Volumes remaining: Slough House, Bad Actors, and Standing by the Wall

Best of the year:

My favorite fiction read of the year is, for the first time in one of these lists, a reread. I had thought that rereading The Road in 2019 was my favorite that year, but it turns out I had misremembered. The novel is James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Deliverance is notorious in my hometown because John Boorman’s film adaptation was shot there and the movie hangs brooding over us like a specter. Plenty of cultures have to live with unflattering stereotypes, but toothless hillbilly sodomites has to be among the worst. Certainly, the “paddle faster, I hear banjos” bumper stickers got old pretty quick.

But as I discovered when I finally read it during grad school, Deliverance the novel is something else entirely—an involving, horrifying, thrilling, deeply and disturbingly beautiful novel with a rich narrative voice and strong, poetic writing.

If you’re familiar with the movie you already know most of the story; the film adapts the novel quite faithfully. But by the nature of its medium, the film has to deal in visuals, actions, and sounds—externals, surfaces. Dickey’s novel is internal, with deep, swift, very cold currents flowing beneath the surface. Its characters, chief among them narrator Ed Gentry, are all psychologically rich, and the seemingly simple actions of the plot—the drive north, the canoe trip, the horrible encounter with the moonshiners, the flight downriver, ambush, killing, and the final lie meant to flood and hide the events of the canoe trip forever—are complicated and intensified by the characterization and by Ed’s transformation from soft suburbanite to killer, a transformation we witness.

Deliverance is a brilliant novel, an intricately crafted prose poem, a haunting evocation of real environments, a thrilling tale of survival, and a weighty morality play concerning sin, guilt, and the thin layer of civilization far too many trust to keep them from the darkness in their own hearts.

Rereading Deliverance after well over a decade of reflecting on it made this the best fictional read of my year. Though it is not for the faint of heart, I strongly recommend it.

After finishing it this summer, I blogged here about John Gardner’s principle of using vivid, concrete detail to create a “fictive dream” in the mind of the reader and used Deliverance as a major example, comparing it to several other favorites from the spring and summer—Blood Meridian, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River. You can read that post here.

Favorite non-fiction of the year

While fiction threatened to take over my reading this year, I plugged away at a number of good works of history, biography, literary study, and cultural commentary. In the best of these those categories overlapped generously. The following handful of favorites are presented, like the fiction, in no particular order:

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and warmly-written literary, philosophical, and theological look at the meaning and significance one of the most perplexing characters in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Full review from earlier this year here.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—A very good short history of the German Empire (1871-1918) with attention to its origins in post-Napoleonic nationalist movements, political intrigue, and military victory; its politics, finances, and imperial ambitions; its culture and key personalities; and, inevitably, its downfall in the catastrophe of the First World War. Well-structured and balanced and highly readable, this is the best book of its kind that I’ve come across.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples—An engaging and insightful short study of the life of Edgar Allan Poe and the chaotic, striving, rumbustious landscape of antebellum America through the prism of the cities where Poe lived most of his life. Full review from October here.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins—Two elegantly written short biographies of Poe that complement each other nicely. Collins’s biography gives extraordinarily good coverage to Poe’s work for such a concise book, and Ackroyd’s gives greater depth to Poe’s tragic personal life. I’d readily recommend either of these to someone looking for an introduction to Poe that cuts through the manifold myths (insanity, drug abuse, etc etc) and fairly represents the man’s life and work. Short Goodreads reviews here and here.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, by CS Lewis—I have tried and failed many times to love Paradise Lost, so I’ll let CS Lewis love it for me. This is an outstanding introduction not only to Milton’s great epic, but to the origins and history of epic poetry generally and to Milton’s place in the story of this genre. Being a fan of epic from Homer to Dante, I most savored the earlier chapters that explain its history and contextualize Milton’s work, but the entire short Preface is an excellent piece of scholarship and worthwhile whether you love Milton or not. (Side note: While I have a very old paperback copy of this book from Oxford UP, I read the nice recent hardback reprint from HarperOne. My only criticism is some slipshod typography, which turned the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ) in Old English quotations into Œs and Ps.)

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—A bracing look at the climate of skepticism and outright hostility to Western civilization and the past, with many thoroughly documented examples and a strongly argued case for preserving, maintaining, and celebrating our inheritance. Would pair well with a read of Murray’s longer, more detailed, but more general The Madness of Crowds, one of my favorites of 2020.

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—Both a summary and extension of the key themes and arguments of Trueman’s longer and more scholarly The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—which is high on my to-read list for this year—Strange New World is an excellent guide for general readers to how we got to where we are today, a world in which the transcendent is regarded as an oppressive myth and personal identity and sexuality are market commodities subject to infinitely recursive individual self-revision. A demonstration that ideas have consequences.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin—A trenchant reappraisal of World War II with Stalin and the USSR as its central focus. McMeekin reminds the reader that Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler—indeed, the two allied to invade and divide Poland, a fact that was memory-holed during the war and has only seldom returned to public consciousness since—and demonstrates that even when Stalin could justifiably claim to be a victim following Nazi betrayal in the summer of 1941, he was a master manipulator who brazenly played the Allies to get what he wanted. And he got everything he wanted. Most damning are the book’s long middle chapters recounting in punishing detail the Lend-Lease bounty continuously heaped upon Stalin, entirely on Stalin’s terms, with Stalin offering almost nothing in return but contempt and ever larger demands, all while dealing high-handedly with Allied leaders and waging war with the same brutality he had brought to the invasions of Poland and Finland. FDR turned a blind eye and forced all around him—from anticommunist members of his administration who found themselves ousted all the way to Churchill himself—to do the same. Stalin’s War both reinforced some conclusions I had already intuited from years of studying and, especially, teaching the war, and placed Stalin at the center of a truly global picture of the conflict and how its results guaranteed decades of Cold War and continued bloodshed. A worthwhile corrective to rosy pictures of World War II—its aims, and prosecution, and its results.

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann—Sharply observed, unflinching, disturbing, and utterly exhilarating, this is one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Like Blood Meridian, this is a reread of an old favorite that has exercised a profound influence on me, but the rereading experience was so gripping, so bracing, that it deserved to be among my other top non-fiction reads of the year. At the beginning of December I typed up some thoughts, observations, and reflections inspired by this second reading, which you can find here.

Best of the year:

If I cheated a bit by naming a reread as my favorite fiction of the year, I’ll do same here by picking two titles to share a best-of distinction for non-fiction. In this case, both books are fascinating, readable, deeply-researched works of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.

The great Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is a short monograph that makes a strong case on a contentious topic.

Less than a century ago, Beowulf was wrongly looked at as a difficult, fatally flawed historical source for the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, a frustrating farrago of myth and vague allusion to things 19th-century scientific historians wanted straight data about. This viewpoint changed with Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which argued that Beowulf is first and foremost a work of great poetic genius and unsurpassed thematic power, and that the historical elements are there to ground a fantastical story in what, for its original audience, felt like a real world.

Now, Shippey argues, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, with Beowulf viewed only as a poem or myth and neglected as a historical source. Marshaling an impressive array of literary, linguistic, and especially archaeological support from sites like Lejre in Denmark, Shippey argues that Beowulf is not only a great poem but also a broadly accurate and trustworthy window into the region, period, and culture in which it is set—the tribal Germanic peoples of early 6th-century Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an indispensable read for anyone interested in Beowulf or this time period, and a boon to anyone who, like me, intuited Beowulf’s importance and authenticity as a representation of this world but lacked the archaeological clout to make such a strong case for it.

Just as readable and well-researched but probably of greater general interest is Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. In this book Parker, a medievalist who maintained the the excellent Clerk of Oxford blog and has an extraordinary talent for making foreign minds understandable, tackles the nature of time itself—how Anglo-Saxon people thought about and reckoned it, and how they marked and celebrated the passage of it, season by season, year by year.

Parker draws from a huge array of Anglo-Saxon literature—part of the book’s purpose, she writes, is to introduce this literature and encourage people to seek out more of it—to describe first how the heathen Anglo-Saxon peoples’ understanding of time, years, and seasons changed with their conversion to Christianity, and then how they lived their lives within this new understanding. She gives good attention to everything from the number and names of the seasons (originally, it seems, only two: winter and sumor, with spring and fall by many other names imported from the Continent along with Christianity), the months, the work and pastimes of people from all walks of life at different times of year, and, perhaps most importantly, the intricate liturgical calendar and its many, many feasts, rites, and holidays. What emerges through this carefully arranged study is a holistic picture of a lost people and its lost way of life.

Appropriately for a culture whose poetry is so thoroughly tinged with elegy and ubi sunt reflection, I ended this book both delighted and saddened: delighted at the richness of this harmonious yearly cycle and the vividness with which Parker narrated and explained it, and saddened at what has been lost since that time. Winter, and specifically the early days of the twelve days of Christmas, unsurprisingly proved the perfect time to read Parker’s book.

I give my highest and strongest recommendations to both Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings and Winters in the World for anyone interested specifically in the Early Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon England or for anyone willing to venture out and explore times, places, and minds alien to our own. You’ll find both books richly rewarding.

Rereads

In addition to a lot of good reading this year, I did a lot of good rereading. Rather than pick and choose and then burden y’all with more one-paragraph summaries, I’ve simply listed all of them as usual. But by virtue of my having taken the time to revisit these this year, please understand all of them to rank somewhere between good and excellent. Audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

• Greenmantle, by John Buchan

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

• Beowulf, Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff

• Life of King Alfred, by Asser, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge

• Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann

• The Third Man, by Graham Greene

Kids’ books

All of the books listed below were read-aloud favorites for myself and our kids this year. I had a hard time narrowing this selection down, but these are certainly the favorites, and I’d recommend any of them without hesitation.

• Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin. A beautifully illustrated children’s version of an important Anglo-Saxon story related by Bede. Short Goodreads review here.

• Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—An old favorite of mine that proved an excellent introduction to these stories for my seven- and five-year old.

• Alexander the Great and The Fury of the Vikings, by Dominic Sandbrook—Two volumes from Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series that I read out loud to my kids this fall and winter. Perfect for our seven-year old, who thrilled to Alexander’s campaigns and the various Viking Age figures (e.g. Ragnar Loðbrok, Alfred the Great, Leif Eiriksson, and Harald Hardrada), and though our five-year had a somewhat harder time tracking with the stories he still enjoyed them. I strongly recommend both and look forward to other entries in the series.

• Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—A fun, light, nimbly paced adventure with a clever mouse-level perspective on Sherlock Holmes and just enough of the trappings of Conan Doyle’s stories to hook new fans.

• Read-n-Grow Picture Bible, by Libby Weed, illustrated by Jim Padgett—A childhood favorite, a surprisingly thorough and serious illustrated Bible, read to my kids over several months. Short Goodreads review here.

• A Boy Called Dickens, by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix—A delightful and beautifully illustrated short retelling of Charles Dickens’s childhood and the influence growing up among the workhouses and debtors’ prisons of industrial London had on his imagination.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson*—A hilarious and genuinely moving Christmas tale that combines farce, nostalgia, and remarkable depth, especially on one of my favorite themes: the foolish things of the world confounding the wise. My whole family enjoyed this greatly on our car trip to Georgia for Christmas.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you’ve found something enticing to seek out and read during the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best in 2023!

The world of the day after tomorrow

As we close out 2022, here’s Ernst Jünger in 1922:

We have become old and comfortable like the elderly. It has become a crime to be or to have more than others. Now, unaccustomed to the strong intoxicants, men and power have become an abomination to us; our new gods are the masses and equality. If the masses cannot become like the few, then let the few become like the masses. Politics, theater, artists, cafes, patent leather shoes, posters, newspapers, morals, the Europe of tomorrow, the world of the day after tomorrow: the thundering masses. Like a thousand-headed beast, crushing all that does not allow itself to be swallowed up, envious, parvenu-like, cruel. Once again, the individual was defeated, and didn’t his own representatives betray him? We live too close to each other, our great cities are grating millstones, rushing torrents that grind us against each other like pebbles. Too hard, the life; don’t we have our flickering life? Too hard, the heroes; aren’t these flickering screen heroes enough for us? And how beautifully they flow, smooth and silent, these stories. You sit in the cushion and all the nations, all the adventures of the world swim through your brain, as light and gestalt as an opium dream.

This comes from War as an Inner Experience, a short collection of essays elaborating on some of the themes latent in Storm of Steel, and it is striking how closely in anticipates the concerns and arguments of the longer and more sophisticated The Forest Passage, published almost thirty years later. It is also striking how closely this description of Jünger’s world before and after the war resembles the world of a century later with its angry levelling, its conformity, its politics of envy, its proud and corrupt urbanism, and most especially its retreat from the real and the difficult into the easy and imaginary. Excessive screentime is not a new problem.

This passage prompted a lot of thinking on my part, but I only have time for a little of it here. It occurs to me that one could respond a couple ways to what Jünger writes here:

• A person of one persuasion might—ignoring the present-tense in the passage—say, “How prophetic! Look at how bad things have gotten!”

• A person of the opposite persuasion might say, “Things haven’t gotten worse! That you perceive this as applying to 2022 just proves that some people will always be speaking doom no matter how good things get.”

To which I say You’re both right—things have gotten bad, and we have not fallen from a golden age—because a century is too short a perspective from which to be viewing the trends between Jünger’s time and our own. Things have been bad in many of the same ways for a very long time. The problems of 2022 are different from those of 1922 not in kind, but in degree.

The Forest Passage was the first book I finished reading in 2022, making this passage of War as an Inner Experience a nice thematic bookend. So that I don’t end this year of blogging on too dour a note, let me refer back to a post from January about The Forest Passage, where I quote Jünger’s 1951 prediction of what kind of men the modern world would produce—as well as the beginnings of a remedy:

[M]an is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence. . . . Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

I’ve returned to this line and meditated on it many times this year. Living so that the gray and hopeless modern man will feel “what has been taken from him”—let this be our hope, motto, and prayer for 2023.

Butterfield, Elton, and what historians are for

Earlier this week, while recharging my batteries back home in the mountains with Christmas, friends, and family, I read a good short piece at The Critic titled “What are historians for?” What immediately got my attention was the picture of Herbert Butterfield, a now lesser-known but influential historian and philosopher of history. His Whig Interpretation of History was an especially strong influence on me at a crucial time in my growth.

The author, Jack Nicholson, begins with latter day historian David Cannadine as an example of a historian trying to create a “usable past” for pragmatic political purposes (on this side of the Atlantic, compare Joe Biden’s court historians Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, and company, who have provided both dubious history-flavored PR for the administration as well as even more dubious historical raw material with which to browbeat opponents).

For contrast, and for a glimpse of the historian’s proper purpose, Nicholson reaches back to invoke first Geoffrey Elton and then, more pointedly, Butterfield. A sample:

Another historian, Herbert Butterfield, remarked just over fifty years ago: “Sometimes I wonder at dead of night whether, during the next fifty years, Protestantism may not be at a disadvantage because a few centuries ago, it decided to get rid of monks.” He saw the emerging postmodern condition which we still grapple with, and the way in which Western civilisation and the Protestant world in this country, specifically, was beginning to wane. Elton saw many “faiths”, many ideologies, people divided. Butterfield feared the absence of monks who would bear witness to objective truth for others. 

It could be that the task of the historian remains in effect to be like a monk. That is what Butterfield and Elton seemed to be driving at in their life’s work—and now we are fifty years down the line. Within the five decades which have elapsed, Britain’s growth problems have not been resolved nor its constitutional dilemmas, and politicians offer quick-fix solutions. Others suggest that we should be tearing down statues and denouncing our forebears. Do something. Anything.

Historians should tell us, if anything, to stop and think. We should be challenged and humbled by the past before acting. 

Compare Butterfield’s words of warning from The Whig Interpretation of History:

[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.

Fortunately, there are plenty of historians who resist the easy, facile, superficial comparisons and quick-fix propositions, but it is the others who are in demand—for soundbites, for specious comparisons, for fuel for grievance politics, for dodges, excuses, and rationalizations of radical change. In other words, that’s what sells.

Reading Nicholson’s whole short piece, and if you can’t be an Elton or a Butterfield, at least seek them out.

I discovered Elton during my graduate school historiography survey and was intrigued by how angry he made more postmodern or deconstructionist classmates—those who didn’t believe there was such a thing as objective truth. I recommend his book The Practice of History. I’ve written about Butterfield a few times here before, on the foolishness of having “faith in human nature” here and on presentism here. And to be fair to Cannadine, I am only familiar with him from his volume on George V in the Penguin Monarchs series and Victorious Century, volume eight in the Penguin History of Britain, so I cannot say whether he has been accurately represented or was simply a handy example for Nicholson.

Dr No - a BBC Radio drama

Based on Ian Fleming’s novel, BBC Radio 4’s Dr No stars Toby Stephens as James Bond and David Suchet as Dr Julius No

I grew up on radio dramas—mostly religious ones like “Adventures in Odyssey” or “Patch the Pirate” or, when, to my grief, I woke up in the deep watches of the night with WRAF on my clock radio, the harrowing “Unshackled”—and have enjoyed rediscovering them as an adult and a father. My own kids are getting to know the town of Odyssey’s large cast of characters, and we especially loved “Odyssey”-veteran Paul McCusker’s joyous and intelligent radio drama The Legends of Robin Hood.

But BBC Radio’s literary adaptations have become particular favorites of my family. We’re a third of the way through their classic Lord of the Rings starring Ian Holm, and we have enjoyed their radio adaptations of Treasure Island and the Richard Hannay adventures The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. And there is a great favorite among my kids, The Mark of Zorro, starring Val Kilmer, which I reviewed here a year ago today. Last weekend, I finally delved into their James Bond series.

The first in this series adapts—like the first Bond film—the fifth of Ian Fleming’s original novels, Dr No.

Dr No takes place several months after From Russia With Love, which ends on a stunning cliffhanger requiring Bond, in the followup, to have undergone extensive convalescence. The radio drama opens with Bond’s briefing from M, who wants to make sure Bond is fully recovered but still gives Bond what he thinks will be an easy assignment. One Commander Strangways, a key intelligence operative in Jamaica, has gone missing along with his secretary. The gossips have already concluded that the pair created false identities for themselves and eloped, but M wants Bond to make sure.

Bond departs Britain both relaxed and resentful. He is glad to be back in the Caribbean and working with a Jamaican local, Quarrel, who gave him life-saving assistance in Live and Let Die, but his familiarity with Jamaica and his resentment of the simple job given to him by M cause him to let his guard down. He immediately regrets it. A Chinese girl claiming to work for the Daily Gleaner snaps his photo as he arrives at the airport, and reappears when he and Quarrel have dinner and drinks at a Kingston dive. His suspicions are aroused and never allayed.

Bond encounters another Chinese girl working as a secretary for a local contact. The contact informs Bond that Strangways had been investigating one Dr Julius No, the reclusive owner and operator of a guano mine—which he works exclusively with imported Chinese labor—on nearby Crab Key. Asked to retrieve the files on the case, the secretary reveals that they are missing.

Though Quarrel warns him off of approaching Crab Key, which has a bad reputation—especially after a series of strange accidents involving representatives of the Audobon Society, who have taken an interest in the rare birds that nest on Dr No’s island—Bond decides to investigate more directly.

Quarrel and Bond make the 20-mile voyage to Crab Key by night and, the next morning, meet Honeychile Rider as she gathers shells on the beach. When Dr No’s men arrive and machine gun Honey’s canoe, the three form an ad hoc team as they work both to uncover what Dr No is doing and to survive long enough to escape the island. Not all of them will make it, and the danger will only grow crueler and more grotesque once Dr No captures them.

BBC Radio 4’s adaptation, first broadcast in 2008, hews very closely to Ian Fleming’s novel, even retaining many of the rough edges I would have expected to be sanded off in a modern adaptation—and kudos to them for letting the story be of its time and place. Sticking close to Fleming’s originals is always a plus. Dr No has always impressed me with its strong writing, characterization—especially for Honey Rider—suspense, and grim, brutal survivalist climax. Take what you imagine a Bond film to be like, remove the campiness of the worst of the movies, and cross it with The Most Dangerous Game, and you’re approaching the tone of this book. The adaptation conveys Bond’s doggedness and Dr No’s cruelty expertly, and the story builds steadily in excitement and intensity right up until the end.

The voice acting is excellent across the board. Toby Stephens, who played Bond villain Gustav Graves in the execrable Die Another Die and gave an outstanding audiobook performance of From Russia With Love, is very good as James Bond. Stephens’s Bond combines intelligence and a hard edge where screen Bonds often skew toward one or the other. Lisa Dillon and Clarke Peters offer solid support as Honeychile Rider and Quarrel—Quarrel and Bond’s strong laird and gamekeeper relationship is an often overlooked friendship in the Bond stories—and fans of certain British media will enjoy Peter Capaldi’s brief appearance as The Armourer, Major Boothroyd, the character who first equipped Bond with the Walther PPK and who eventually evolved into the films’ Q.

The standout, however, is David Suchet as Dr No. The villain only appears in the film third or so of the story and has limited “onscreen” time with Bond, but Suchet makes the most of it. His halting, metallic, alien voice is eerie and threatening, and the way he delivers his life story and cold, amoral, transhumanist worldview to Bond and Honey seems believable rather than the mere “monologuing” lampooned in The Incredibles. If, like me, you know Suchet primarily as Poirot, this performance should prove a startling surprise.

Dr No also features good sound effects that set the scene well, especially scenes on the beaches, in the mangrove swamps, and in the warehouses, subterranean quarters, and deathtraps of Crab Key. The adaptation’s original music by Mark Holden and Sam Barbour is a nice accent to the story, invoking the sound of classic Bond film scores without aping it.

For those with children, Dr No may be on the intense side. I listened to it with my kids and they were engrossed by it, finding the story unbearably suspenseful and Dr No unbearably creepy. I selected this one to listen to with them both because it was the first in this series and because I knew the novel had more action and less sex than some of the other stories. That held true for the adaptation, too. Aside from a scattering of mild language—most of it rather blunt discussions of Dr No’s bird guano—it was a good listen for my kids.

If the adaptation has any flaws, it is only through sins of omission rather than commission. This radio drama is just under ninety minutes long, and so while all the major events of the novel are present, they have been streamlined. The novel’s characters are presented well and excellently performed, but some of the depth of the novel has been lost. Bond’s resentments and his interiority are downplayed. Honey tells a shortened version of her tragic backstory—which I wrote about briefly a few months ago—but her goals and her reason for being on Crab Key are not elaborated upon. Likewise, I know why Bond was in the hospital for so long before the events of this story, but someone less familiar with the novels may not. I had to explain a little bit of that to my kids. But these are minor complaints.

The upside of this short adaptation is precisely that it is short—right at an hour and a half, an hour and a half spent on a perfectly paced and executed action-suspense story, perfect for a shorter holiday road trip or a quiet evening listening to the radio.

I had heard lots of good things about these radio adaptations of Fleming’s novels, and now I know why. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, the 2010 dramatization of Goldfinger, starring Stephens as Bond and Ian McKellen as Auric Goldfinger. You can listen to Dr No, Goldfinger, and the rest of the series in this YouTube playlist.

If you’re traveling over the holidays I hope BBC Radio 4’s Dr No will give y’all a good hour and a half of thrills, and that you’ll go on to listen to more, as I plan to. Even better, read some Ian Fleming in the new year! Regardless, have a merry Christmas, and thanks for reading.

Five years of blogging

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Five years—half a decade—does not amount to much in the end, but this website and blog began in a time that now feels utterly remote to me. I had just started a new job, my first full-time teaching position, and was getting used to a commute I could now do in my sleep. Sarah and I only had two kids, one only a few months old. We weren’t quite aware of it just yet, but we were outgrowing our apartment. And the year before, I had self-published my first novel and a novella I had whipped up in two weeks. There was kind enthusiasm among friends but few sales.

I created this website to coincide with and, hopefully, help promote the release of Dark Full of Enemies, a novel which had itself lain dormant for almost five years, from its completion just before Sarah and I got married until that winter of 2017. I had written but not yet finished revising Griswoldville, and I hoped a website would help with that project, too.

It may surprise y’all, now, but I almost deleted the blog option when I first started building this site. I had even scoffed when I saw it on the default version of the template. Thanks, but no thanks, had been my attitude. I don’t want to get fired for something I write there. And who reads blogs, anyway?

But I hesitated. I had run a blog in college, one of those free blogging sites that one now only encounters in the dirty alleys and out-of-the-way park benches of Google searches, and I had found it great fun. This remembrance also brought to mind the diary I had kept for four or five years, daily from January of 2008 through most of grad school, then sporadically, catching up when I missed days here and there, and finally sputtering out sometime in the years between grad school and marriage.

What that Blogspot page and the diary had in common, though, that made me hesitate to write off blogging on this new site, was practice—both in the sense of training and in the Alasdair MacIntyre sense of a life-shaping routine. A regularly maintained blog is good practice.

When I had kept that blog during and just after college, I had also produced one almost complete World War II novel as well as the manuscript that became No Snakes in Iceland. When I had kept that diary, I had also finished No Snakes in Iceland, put it through its first rounds of readers and revisions, and written the rough draft of Dark Full of Enemies. Habitually writing something, I decided, would prepare me for the day I need to write the important thing.

And so here I am.

I have no regular schedule and no real plan. I just know that I need to write here occasionally, often enough to keep limber, the same way I need exercise. (More than ever, in fact.) Five or six posts a month feels, to me, like I’m staying on track. And I have no set topic. This blog, to borrow a concept from Alan Jacobs, whose blog I regularly read, is a commonplace book, and so whatever catches my eye, interests me, irritates me, makes me stop to think, or that I enjoy and want to tell others about may wind up here.

So now, half a decade after launching this blog, my wife and I have three kids, we live in a house in a slightly more country part of a crowded county, I have published two more novels and yet another is going through the usual cycles of hibernation, reading, and revision—and I have hundreds of posts here. (I have the specific number written down in my office at school, and am now on Christmas break. Excellent foresight.) These have been fun to write—good practice, just as I’d hoped, as well as a place to ruminate and occasionally just vent—and have connected me to some good people whom I might never have “met” otherwise. I am deeply grateful.

A few statistical giblets for those of y’all who are interested:

Traffic to my site, most of which goes to the blog, has steadily increased every year since I started. In 2019, with two years to get established, the site got over 6,700 distinct visits. In 2020 that nearly doubled to over 12,500. In 2021 it doubled again: 25,390. And already this year, with a couple weeks to go, it’s received 36,000. Pageviews are even higher, though I am no web analytics expert and can’t tell you much of what this signifies. Now all I need to do is turn this traffic into book sales!

At any rate, the website and blog have served their purpose: I am getting practice, and people are reading and, occasionally, seeking out and buying my books. And I’m most thankful for that.

Again, I’m thankful for those of y’all who regularly read what I post here, especially considering what an idiosyncratic jumble of topics it must seem to be, and thanks most of all to those who have reached out over the years. Hearing from y’all has been an encouragement, a fun source of conversation, and it has made me a better writer. Just last week one of y’all caught a glaring error in my post about run-on sentences, which I was able to fix—or at least slap a Band-Aid on.

I’m looking forward, God willing, to five more years of writing practice here! Thank y’all for being here, and thanks, as always, for reading.

Deception in the name of crisis management

Last week I finished reading Sean McMeekin’s mammoth study Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. It’s a weighty book in both senses, by turns overwhelming, depressing, and infuriating. I may or may not write a full review here, but it will certainly be in my year-end reading recommendations. For the time being, here are two passages quoted by McMeekin that struck me pretty forcefully, which I present with a minimum of context and comment.

The first comes from Nikolai Verzhbitski, a Russian journalist who recorded the following in his diary on October 18, 1941, when the Germans had advanced to within a hundred miles of Moscow from the both west and the south. Verzhbitski describes a Moscow prostrated by the invasion:

Who gave the order to close the factories? To pay off the workers? Who was behind the whole muddle, the mass flight, the looting, the confusion in everyone’s minds? . . . Everyone is boiling with indignation, talking out loud, shouting that they have been betrayed, that “the captains were the first to abandon ship” and took their valuables with them into the bargain. People are saying things out loud that three days ago would have brought them before a military tribunal. There are queues: noisy, emotional, quarrelsome, agonising. The hysteria at the top has transmitted itself to the masses.

That’s the crisis and the way the leadership botched it, and, according to Verzhbitski, the people saw clearly the many ways in which their leadership failed them:

People are beginning to remember and to count up all the humiliations, the oppression, the injustices, the clampdowns, the bureaucratic arrogance of the officials, the conceit and the self-confidence of the party bureaucrats, the draconian decrees, the shortages, the systematic deception of the masses, the lying and flattery of the toadies in the newspapers. . . . People are speaking from their hearts. Will it be possible to defend a city where such moods prevail?

This kind of deception, as it turns out, is contagious, and at least some people were alive to that fact. McMeekin quotes an address from Senator Robert La Follette Jr delivered on June 23, 1941, the day after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa:

[I]n the next few weeks the American people will witness the greatest whitewash act in all history. They will be told to forget the purges in Russia by the OGPU, the persecution of religion, the confiscation of property, the invasion of Finland and the vulture role Stalin played in seizing half of prostrate Poland, all of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. These will be made to seem the acts of a “democracy” preparing to fight Nazism.

Amnesty for Stalin, perhaps? “Let’s acknowledge that [he] made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.” That was more or less the Roosevelt approach, anyway—minus any acknowledgement.

McMeekin also charts the consequences—in the United States!—of criticizing Stalin and the Soviets: purges in the federal bureaucracy, often conforming to enemies lists provided by the Russians; the replacement of diplomatic and military leaders with either Roosevelt lackies or actively pro-Soviet agents; the burial or rewriting of inconvenient reports; official coordination with the press to suppress damaging stories, smear dissenters, and spread Soviet spin; and, of course, widespread, purposeful deception. All in order to win the war, of course.

The more things change. And, of course, Verzhbitski’s concluding question remains pertinent.

The passage of Verzhbitski’s diary quoted by McMeekin comes from Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War, by Rodric Braithwaite, who quotes the diary at greater length. La Follette’s speech was reported in the New York Herald Tribune’s June 24, 1941 issue, which I haven’t been able to access (for free) in full.

Frozen II’s big dam problem

Runeard’s Dam in Frozen II

This month Before They Were Live, a Christian Humanist Radio Network podcast covering every film in the Disney animated canon in chronological order, finally reached Frozen II. Or, as my kids used to call it—with unwitting accuracy—Frozen Number Two. Hosts Josh and Michial have a great discussion about the film’s strengths and its many, many shortcomings, but there’s one aspect of the film I’m going to take this sliver of an excuse to vent about—the dam built by Anna and Elsa’s grandfather.

Having a daughter who was four when Frozen II came out (so you know where I was opening weekend), having watched it far too many times since, and—the sticking point for me—having once written a book about destroying a dam in Norway, I have thoughts.

Frozen II’s dam was built as “a gift of peace” to the Northuldra people, the film’s thinly-disguised Sami, who live in the Enchanted Forest, a region both far, far away (i.e. a couple hours’ walk) from Arendelle and near enough to be at the head of the same fjord. Over the course of the film, Anna and Elsa learn that the dam was actually a Trojan horse attack on the peaceful Northuldra because of their grandfather’s wicked suspicion of magic-practicing peoples. The dam has, somehow, shrouded the Enchanted Forest in an everlasting fog. Only destroying the dam will dispel the fog and make things right, but doing so will also unleash a torrent of water that will destroy Arendelle. It’s a social justice trolley problem.

So—what’s been bugging me since that Saturday morning three years ago:

First, what is this dam doing? People don’t just build dams for fun. The Frozen movies apparently take place in the early 1840s, so this is too early for the dam to provide anyone with hydroelectric power, but it also doesn’t seem to be providing anyone with hydraulic power, either. Even if that was the intention, it’s too far away from Arendelle to do them any good. Flood control is the most plausible reason, but even this is a stretch given the environment. As for the recipients of this dam, the Northuldra are reindeer herders—why give them a dam at all? And even if it was offered, why would they accept?

Beyond serving no obvious purpose, Frozen II’s dam doesn’t even function like a dam. The water of the deep lake behind it does not apparently flow over the dam—or anywhere else. Having no hydro station, it doesn’t even have intakes that could redirect the water through the cliffs to the valley below the dam. Here’s the dam that I scaled up in imagining the Grettisfjord dam in Dark Full of Enemies. Look at it on Google’s satellite view and you can see on the right, the southeastern side of the lake, the intakes for the pipeline to the power station downriver. Frozen II’s dam is just a literal wall plopped in the wilderness that created a lake that somehow just sits there.

In Before They Were Live, Josh and Michial hesitate to fault Frozen II for sloppy storytelling, but I am less inclined to be charitable. The dam makes it clear that the story is secondary to the politics. It is a symbol and only a symbol. It has to be there so it can be destroyed, just like the Northuldra have to unnecessarily accept the gift of useless infrastructure so they can be haplessly victimized. And all of this has to happen so that the audience can vicariously grieve over generational injustice and accept that the cost of Doing Better is utter, year zero, civilizational destruction.

And that brings me to my biggest problem with Frozen II on this score: the seemingly minor detail that man-made lakes can be drained. The lake could be drained, the fog dissipated, the dam demolished bloodlessly, in controlled conditions that would not annihilate everything downriver. (Seriously, read about dam failures, both unintentional—here’s one from my neck of the woods—and otherwise. Anna might as well atone by nuking Arendelle.) The destruction at the end of the film—which is prevented by a deus ex machina anyway, because all recent Disney films toothlessly refuse to follow through on their own logic—is completely unnecessary.

Josh unfavorably compares Frozen II to other, better films’ “fairy tale logic,” arguing that Frozen II lacks it. He’s right. Frozen II’s story is governed by Jacobin logic. Bolshevik logic.

I’m only half kidding, and only barely overstating it. Regardless of whether you agree with the politics or not, this is bad storytelling. Fortunately—since I do not agree with the film’s politics—the storytelling is so bad, the plot is so slipshod and scattered, and the climactic action so blunted in its effect on the characters, that few people who are not already ideological fellow travelers will end the film having had some kind of awakening. But, Lord knows, I could be wrong.

I’ve embedded the latest episode of Before They Were Live in this post—give it a listen! And I highly recommend subscribing to the show. Josh and Michial bring great dedication and insight to the show, and their discussions always maintain a high standard. Though I wouldn’t call myself a Disney enthusiast by any means, each new episode sidelines whatever else I’m listening to. I think y’all will enjoy it, too.

You can visit the show’s official website here and the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s main page here. The CHRN also has a Facebook page which you can like or follow for regular updates on all of their shows.

What run-on sentences are (and aren't)

Back in January I grew sufficiently annoyed with misunderstandings of what passive voice is to write about that here. Now it’s December and as the result of a more recent irritation I’m bookending 2022 with another post on misunderstood grammar, this time concerning a much rarer creature from the bad writing bestiary.

In the “Dumb Sentences” segment of a recent episode of 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, a bad books podcast hosted by Mike Nelson of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and Conor Lastowka of RiffTrax, a listener submitted the following sample from the show’s current read, a cozy mystery called Murder in Christmas River:

But then, a pickup truck pulled up, and a boy got out and pulled his guitar from the flatbed, and he walked over and sat down, and mesmerized everyone there with his playing and singing.

The listener who mailed this sentence in criticized it as a self-evidently ridiculous “run-on sentence.” The writing is inelegant, inconsistently punctuated, and somehow both vague and very specifically cliched, but this is not a run-on sentence.

What a run-on sentence is

A run-on sentence is a fusion of two independent clauses, clauses that could stand on their own as sentences, into one sentence with no division between the two clauses. Some further explanations:

• From Grammarly: “Run-on sentences, also known as fused sentences, occur when two complete sentences are squashed together without using a coordinating conjunction or proper punctuation, such as a period or a semicolon.”

• From UNC Chapel Hill’s Writing Center: “These are also called fused sentences. You are making a run-on when you put two complete sentences (a subject and its predicate and another subject and its predicate) together in one sentence without separating them properly.”

• From the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing: “A run-on sentence is two or more independent clauses incorrectly presented in a single sentence.”

A run-on sentence is not

• Any long sentence.

This is much simpler to explain than the many things people mistake for passive voice, because the one thing people commonly mistake for a run-on sentence is a sentence that, to them, subjectively, just goes on too long. Because it runs on, you see.

But that’s not why the run-on sentence has that name. The mental image conjured by “run-on sentence” should be more like the head-on collision of two trucks than someone wheezing his way through a marathon.

Here are a few things that I’ve seen called run-on sentences that are not:

The opening paragraph of “Great Caesar’s Ghost,” Kevin D Williamson’s marvelous takedown of an annually observed imperial spectacle here in the US:

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship—it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting—with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

This is all one long, elaborately structured sentence—especially in its second half, with parenthetical interjections and dependent clauses—but it is grammatically correct. (Subject: State of the Union. Verb: is. Predicate: all the rest.) It is not a run-on sentence.

Occasionally people mistake a sentence as a run-on not because of its length but because of a stylistic choice, such as Cormac McCarthy’s use of polysyndeton—the repeated use of conjunctions like and, especially as a substitute for commas. Here’s an example pulled at random from McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian:

The last one fell in a doorway and Tobin turned and drew the other pistol from his belt and stepped to the other side of the horse and looked up the street and across the square for any sign of movement there or among the buildings.

Here’s another from earlier in the book:

They posted guards atop the azotea and unsaddled the horses and drove them out to graze and the judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and went off to explore the works.

Again, these are all long sentences that could be broken up into separate ones, but they are joined grammatically correctly with a conjunction. This is a stylistic choice, not a mistake. To break these sentences up would be to lose their tonal effect, one of both busy movement, solemnity, and distance.

I think the author criticized in the listener e-mail to 372 Pages was straining for this effect—a more artistic way to suggest a boy’s activities over an entire evening. It was not well done but not that badly done either, and the author certainly did not commit the catastrophic grammatical blunder of writing a run-on sentence.

Actual run-on sentences

Real run-on sentences are not a matter of stylistic difference or minor mistakes, like spelling errors or typos, but a grotesque mashing together of two sentences that produces obviously wrong grammar. I use the word obviously deliberately. You can dither about stylistic choices all day but there is no mistaking a run-on as anything but an error.

The run-on is such an elementary mistake that I actually had a hard time finding mentions of it in my books on writing. Even the classic, Strunk and White, only mentions the comma splice (see below). But the run-on is covered thoroughly in a lot of writing aids for students, like that UNC guide I linked to above. Here’s the example provided there:

My favorite Mediterranean spread is hummus it is very garlicky.

Here’s one from another university writing center:

Raffi sings upbeat children's songs he is an excellent musician.

Anyone reading these sentences would immediately see the mistake.

As a result, it is exceedingly rare to see an actual run-on sentence in professionally published writing. But they are rife in informal writing, especially—speaking from my own experience—student writing.

Here’s an exmample of a run-on sentence I recently spotted in the wild. This comes from a letter by Maria Clemm, Edgar Allan Poe’s beloved mother-in-law, recounting his last words to her as he left on a business trip from which he never returned:

God bless my own darling Muddy do not fear for your Eddy see how good I will be while I am away from you, and will come back to love and comfort you.

This is three sentences fused into one, but I think anyone would be forgiving of an old lady writing a personal recollection by hand in an era in which letters were not held to the same standards of punctuation (or even capitalization, as in this letter by Thomas Jefferson) as published writing. But in rare cases real run-on sentences do show up in modern, professional writing.

The run-on’s more respectable cousin

Let me pause here to note the existence of the comma splice, which makes almost the same mistake as the run-on sentence but separates the two clauses with a single comma, like this:

Greg Maddux played for the Braves for elevens seasons, he was one of their best pitchers.

The comma splice is sometimes conflated with the run-on (as in Dreyer’s English, where he treats them as the same thing), but I learned them as separate mistakes and I’m going to stick with that. My reason: comma splices can sometimes work as a stylistic choice (see the quotation from Garner’s Modern English Usage here), but a run-on is always a mistake.

Identifying and fixing run-on sentences

To return briefly to what a run-on sentence is, it is not just a long or grammatically complex sentence, but will have:

• two or more independent clauses and

• no conjunction or separating puncuation.

The result, as I’ve tried to emphasize, is obviously incorrect. Real run-on sentences sound childish. When you run across one or, God forbid, accidentally write one, identification is not usually the problem. (Misidentification is, which is why I wrote this.)

Fixing them can be relatively easy, depending on how much you care about style. The two simplest mechanical fixes are:

• Sticking a semicolon between the two clauses. Like Cormac McCarthy, I hate semicolons and would prefer two separate sentences to the unholy hybrids created by this punctuation, but separating the clauses this way is grammatically correct and a legitimate option.

• Breaking the clauses into separate sentences. My preferred solution, but one that—again, if you care about style and sound—might turn a run-on into a pair or string of equally childish-sounding simple sentences.

After choosing either of these solutions you can go on to weigh the stylistic choices and all the wonderfully complex artistic questions they raise—sound, tone, structure, rhythm, connotation, and on and on. You may end up reworking an entire paragraph, or more. But sometimes, as anyone who drives an older car will understand, just getting the obvious mechanical problem fixed is the most important step.

Conclusion

My main problem with run-on sentences is not the error itself, which, as I’ve suggested above, is 1) easily indentifiable and 2) easy to fix. My main problem with run-on sentences is the term itself. “Run-on sentence” is misleading, suggesting to many people for a long time that any long or complex sentence is somehow a mistake, and I wish there were a more precise term for this elementary error. Perhaps “fused sentence,” the alternate term used in a few of the definitions I quoted earlier, is the best candidate. It certainly suggests what the actual mistake is with more precision than “run-on.”

But until a term like “fused sentence” or something else can displace the one we’re most familiar with, I hope this will be a helpful guide to what a real run-on sentence is, and that people will go easier on authors who try something a little different and come up a little short.

Missing the point

Or, “Inadequacy of response revisited.”

Ben Sixsmith, a young British writer and a contributing editor of The Critic whose work I enjoy, recently published an interesting review of a new book on “Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment” in the Washington Examiner. This ostensibly academic study includes a chapter on “Jackass,” a show that apparently “takes aim at America.” I’m guessing it also does a lot of “calling into question” and, especially, “interrogating.”

The less said about the state of academia, the better, perhaps, but the book’s “opportunistically ideological” section on “Jackass” is where Sixsmith zeroes in. Having noted that the author suggests that the show’s self-inflicted comic violence is some kind of reaction to “the contextualizing bleakness of America” post-September 11th even though “Jackass” premiered in 2000, Sixsmith makes a more broadly applicable point:

It might seem peculiar to take an analysis of an obscene stunt show quite this seriously, but the point I am prowling toward is that intellectual analysis of pop culture that purports to expose its hidden aesthetic or social relevance often misses the point on the most basic level. Writers would never get away with saying The Waste Land was inspired by World War II, but the lofty heights from which they judge more unsophisticated entertainment allows mistakes to sit unnoticed.

The charge of “politicization” is often philistinic. All culture can have political or at least social implications. When culture is assessed through a specific political lens, though, it can diminish rather than expand its significance.

Coincidentally, this morning a friend passed along this video essay on antiwar filmmaking and the new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. It compares 1917 unfavorably to the new All Quiet because it is not bleak or nihilistic enough to get an antiwar message across but does so without stopping to consider whether that was actually the point of 1917.

You might recognize that this is similar to Slate’s accusation in 2020 that, by not explicitly sermonizing against nationalism, 1917 was an “irresponsibly nationalistic” film. As I wrote then:

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.

All of which cheapens or, in Sixsmith’s well-chosen words, diminishes the story and its power.

See again my remarks on inadequate political or ideological responses to art from a couple of months ago. Or go, as is always recommended, to Chesterton: “Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day.”