Mr Standfast

John Buchan June continues today with the third Richard Hannay novel, the conclusion to an informal trilogy concerning Hannay and the Great War. The Thirty-Nine Steps detailed Hannay’s accidental discovery of a German plot to start a war and defeat England. Greenmantle followed him across Europe and beyond as he uncovered a new German plot to foment religious upheaval in the Middle East. And this novel, Mr Standfast, traces his total commitment to the war—on both the Western Front and the home front.

Mr Standfast begins with Hannay, now Brigadier General Hannay, recalled from the trenches for a special assignment by his old spy chief Sir Walter Bullivant. Bullivant tasks Hannay with infiltrating a genteel manor house in the Cotswolds frequented by upper crust pacifists, antiwar activists, leftwing literary snobs, and, just possibly, German spies. In order to do this, Hannay must playact again. If you’ve read The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle you’ll know that this comes naturally enough to Hannay, but here he meets a serious challenge—he must pretend to be a pacifist.

Despite his revulsion at acting such a dishonorable part and his embarrassment at being perceived as a conscientious objector, Hannay successfully ingratiates himself into the community. In doing so, he meets two crucial characters: Launcelot Wake, a real conscientious objector whom Hannay suspects of treason, and Mary Lamington, a beautiful nurse whom Hannay finds himself falling in love with, and who also turns out to be his handler.

Hannay, on Bullivant’s orders as relayed by Mary, infiltrates another group of pacifists and meets Moxon Ivery, a leading voice of the British antiwar movement. He also meets an old friend, the American John S Blenkiron, who is undercover as a rabble-rousing dove. Blenkiron suspects that Ivery is the German agent they’ve been looking for, “the cleverest devil” and “the most dangerous man in all the world.” The task now is to prove it, stop him, and use his connections to feed disinformation to the Germans.

Hannay’s investigation takes him all over Britain, establishing contacts in Glasgow, pursuing his quarry to the Isle of Skye, fleeing authorities who are convinced he is a criminal, losing his pursuers in the midst of a mock battle staged for a propaganda film, and surviving a Zeppelin raid on London. It is while stalking Ivery during this raid that Ivery lets his guard down and Hannay recognizes him as the German agent who nearly killed him in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He also learns that Ivery has proposed to Mary.

From here Hannay returns to the front but keeps abreast of the situation at home as much as he is able, gathering intelligence from intercepted German newspapers and tracking clues about Ivery’s network near the front. Aided by Mary; by friends like Geordie Hamilton, his Scots batman; Sir Archie Roylance, the young pilot who had flown him out of trouble in Scotland; and by Launcelot Wake himself, who was inspired by Hannay to take a noncombatant role as a laborer on the front, Hannay uncovers more of Ivery’s activities and is enlisted by Blenkiron in a scheme to capture him.

The plan takes Hannay to Switzerland, where he is reunited with his old South African friend Peter Pienaar, now a former pilot who was shot down, severely wounded, imprisoned by the Germans, and released to neutral territory because of his disability. Peter is pleased to see Hannay but bridles at inactivity. As it turns out, that inactivity will not last long.

After the twists and reversals of the Switzerland plot, the climactic action of the novel takes place on the Western Front. Hannay, returned to regular duty and promoted to Major General, uses the intelligence gathered from disrupting Ivery’s spy ring to prepare for the massive German attacks of the spring of 1918. The German offensive tests Hannay’s division—and the entire British and French coalition—and nearly succeeds, but the Allies hold out and all of Ivery’s efforts on behalf of the Germans fail thanks not only to good intelligence but to the heroic self-sacrifice of two brave men.

Mr Standfast is difficult to summarize, and I hope you’ll read it knowing that what I’ve written above contains as few spoilers as possible, with a lot of twists and surprises concealed and a whole lot more simply left out. It is the only Buchan novel I’ve read that I would call “sprawling.” It is also the only one that I’ve struggled to finish.

After Buchan successfully scaled the thrills of The Thirty-Nine Steps up for Greenmantle I looked forward to the even more sweeping Mr Standfast, but to my surprise I found it overburdened, awkwardly paced, with a plot that was difficult to track, and with many secondary characters—such as Ivery’s henchmen—who were underdeveloped and difficult to distinguish. I found this surprising because a deft stylistic touch, distinct and memorable characters, brisk pacing no matter how complicated the plot, and a well-developed and intuitive story are all among Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer.

I think this novel simply tries to do too much. At 128,000 words, Mr Standfast is more than three times the length of the Hannay’s first tight, spare adventure. Buchan also wrote Mr Standfast over the course of a whole year, from July 1917 to July 1918, an unusually long time for him. The finished book, as biographer Andrew Lownie notes, “shows signs of being written over a long period,” introducing and dropping characters and subplots haphazardly and being extremely episodic, though without the breakneck pace and clear goals that unified the first two Hannay novels, keeping them moving and easy to follow.

That’s what I found unsatisfying in Mr Standfast. But the novel is not without strengths.

First, though constructed of numerous small episodes that never quite cohere into a well-paced plot, many of those episodes are small masterpieces of thriller writing. Hannay’s pursuit of a spy up a rock chimney and his subsequent fight with a dark figure in a cave on the Isle of Skye, his flight from the authorities in Sir Archie’s unreliable plane, his exploration of a creepy abandoned French chateau by night, his dangerous mountaineering shortcut through the Italian Alps with Wake, his capture by the enemy at a crucial moment—all of these are exciting and expertly constructed.

Second, Mr Standfast brings back several good characters from previous Hannay adventures, most notably Peter Pienaar and Blenkiron, and introduces others like the brave and resourceful Mary. Mr Standfast also features the first appearance of another important figure from the Buchan canon: Sir Archie Roylance. Sir Archie is, by some counts, Buchan’s most commonly recurring character, and its easy to see why. From his first appearance through his roles in Huntingtower and John Macnab he is a charming, disarming, but capable figure with some unusual skills and no lack of guts. I look forward to rereading all of these in publication order someday and charting Sir Archie’s growth from novel to novel.

Third, despite its plot and pacing problems Mr Standfast is deeper and thematically richer than the standard espionage thriller. I’ll consider why in more detail below, but part of it comes down to Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Buchan’s favorite books and an anchor in the swirling plot of this novel. Hannay and Mary use Pilgrim’s Progress to pass coded messages, and Peter Pienaar reads it while recuperating in a German POW camp. Hannay sees himself as the beleaguered traveler Christian, and Peter Pienaar determines to take action against the enemy regardless of his injuries thanks to the example of Mr Standfast, who lends his name to Buchan’s story. Buchan invokes it in ways both bold and subtle, giving the action greater meaning and resonance as a result.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, this novel has the strongest pathos of any of the Hannay adventures so far. The war is not only the single unifying feature of the plot but a predominating fact looming over every action Hannay takes. The passages in which Hannay rejoins his unit at the front are among the strongest in the book, but even on the Isle of Skye or among the labor activists in Glasgow Hannay is keenly aware that enormous loss of life results from every victory of Ivery and his spies. If The Thirty-Nine Steps was the story of one man on the run and Greenmantle the story of a team working to prevent chaos in one region, Mr Standfast is continental in scope—the story of whole civilizations in a death struggle. Even when the plot meanders, the stakes are clear.

Partly this is born of Buchan’s own experiences. Though too old and ill to serve at the front line, he was active throughout the war, writing an ongoing history of the conflict that reached 24 volumes and serving at various times on the staff of General Haig, in military intelligence, and finally in the Ministry of Information, a dedicated propaganda department formed near the end of the war. And like many others in Britain, he lost people. Perhaps the greatest blow fell on April 9, 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, when both his brother Alastair and his old friend and publisher Tommy Nelson were killed. He began writing this novel just a few months later.

But Mr Standfast’s pathos also stems from Buchan’s deep capacity for sympathy. I’ve written about this before in the dramatically different context of colonial South Africa, but Buchan’s ability and willingness to see the other side and to understand even those he disagrees with is a strength of all of his fiction. In Mr Standfast alone Buchan gives us moving, sympathetic vignettes not only of the civilians of wartorn France, the common soldier in the trenches or recovering in hospital, and the patriotic desk jockey, but of people quite unlike himself.

“Rather than indulge in the crude jingoism with which Buchan is often tarred,” Lownie writes, “he in fact tried . . . to present various views of the conflict. . . . [D]espite his own commitment to Allied victory, his sympathies were rather wider than might be assumed.” Buchan includes what must be one of the first fictional descriptions of a man suffering shell shock—at a time when many on the home front were inclined to think of it as malingering or simple cowardice—and one of the surprise heroes of his story is the conscientious objector Launcelot Wake. Though Hannay despises the fashionable pacifists who lend aid to the enemy by undermining the war effort and deriding the British army, he recognizes and comes to respect Wake’s good-faith position. Over the course of the novel Wake demonstrates not only moral courage in an unpopular cause but physical courage as a messenger on the front. As in so many of Buchan’s stories, two dissimilar men learn from and better each other.

None of these strengths quite overcomes the disjointed plot, the uneven pacing, or the contrivances of Hannay’s espionage work, but they deepen Mr Standfast and give it an emotional power beyond what you might expect if you only know Buchan as an adventure novelist. As flawed as I found Mr Standfast, I intend to reread it. I may have missed something. And perhaps, like others among my favorite novels, it will reveal more of itself to me.

Cormac McCarthy, RIP

Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. No one else has captured McCarthy’s blend of the old and modern like the Coen brothers.

I was genuinely grieved to learn of the death of Cormac McCarthy yesterday afternoon. No other writer has accomplished something quite like his body of work, and no other writer’s work has meant quite what his has meant to me.

I discovered him in the summer between my last two years of college. I have a standing rule that I will check out any unfamiliar book or author I hear about more than twice within a certain short amount of time. With McCarthy, I ran across references to his novel Blood Meridian in three places within the same week. I picked it up at the Barnes & Noble in town and that was that.

Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s magnum opus. It is also the worst place to start with his work. It is rich, dense, sprawling, arcane, operatic, a deliberate fusion of old fashioned curlicued prose and modern muscularity and bluntness. The chapters have strange headings summarizing the content and McCarthy does not use quotation marks. And of course there is the much-remarked upon brutality. But because of the allusions that had convinced me to pick Blood Meridian up, that was the one thing I was prepared for. 

I was flummoxed. I knew something great was going on but I struggled to wrap my mind around it. I thought the lack of quotation marks was a risible affectation. And I only barely followed the story. I think I gave it three stars on Amazon.

But it stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. And I bought more of McCarthy’s novels. 

I read through everything except Suttree by the time I graduated, and I reread several of them over the coming years. At last, I reread Blood Meridian last year, and while I want to say that I found it a completely different book, it was I who had changed. Age and maturity and years and years of reading McCarthy and reflecting back on Blood Meridian through his other work and—to throw it into relief—the work of less skilled imitators had prepared me for the novel. I had grown into it. It amazed me all over again.

Blood Meridian was the beginning of a long challenge to my way of writing. It was a bold early demonstration to me of the power of the precisely-chosen verb, of how to use a wide-ranging but carefully controlled vocabulary to create texture (or music, if you prefer), of the necessity of deep research presented as an organic part of the story, seamlessly and without ostentation. 

And the lack of quotation marks that annoyed me so much at first caused me to reconsider even more. McCarthy, I realized, had set himself an artistic limitation by refusing punctuation conveniences. He did not use quotation marks—or semicolons or, unless absolutely necessary, commas—the same way a sonnet writer does not use a fifteenth line. It was a self-imposed boundary that strengthened and liberated his style. It meant, as McCarthy has said himself, that there was less to get in the way. It allows the language to tell the story. Pure words.

From this I learned to avoid leaning on typography to communicate meaning. And so while I have not gone nearly as far as McCarthy in this regard, in my fiction I don't italicize words for emphasis or to establish the rhythm of a person's speech or use elaborate punctuation or typesetting. In a scenario like that of his penultimate novel, The Road—which as a student of the early medieval period I don’t have a hard time imagining—how much of your typographical shenanigans will survive transmission? McCarthy wrote to last. I hope to, too.

So much for style. What Blood Meridian and McCarthy’s work also taught me was to confront the harshness and evil of reality head on. Because of the violence and darkness of his work—most especially Blood Meridian, with its scalphunters and Comanches and hangings and the inscrutable, unstoppable Satanic figure of the Judge—people call him a nihilist. He wasn’t. What McCarthy had was a deeply moral sense of the utter fallenness of the world and an unwillingness to look away.

There is a time and place for the opposite approach, but we need our McCarthys, too, in all their bleakness. Witness this passage from a 1992 interview that I’ve seen circulating since yesterday:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Uplifting? No. But it’s true. All the charge of nihilism means is “McCarthy did not reassure me.” Good. Those “afflicted with this notion,” which is most of us nowadays, need to be unsettled. McCarthy, a master of this kind of prophetic unsettling, showed us how.

Cormac McCarthy, novelist, prophet, and personal hero, RIP.

Coming soon: The Snipers

I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest book, a World War II novella titled The Snipers.

The Snipers takes place during the Battle of Aachen in October of 1944. Four months on from D-day, the Allies are pressing into the western edges of Germany and slowly, laboriously penetrating the Siegfried Line. Aachen, the former chief residence of Charlemagne and one of Germany’s most prestigious and historical cities, is heavily defended, and as the US Army enters the outskirts of the city one unit comes under devastating sniper fire. Their battalion commander, unable to slow the offensive, instead calls up the leader of his reconnaissance squad, Sergeant JL Justus for a special assignment—find and kill the German sniper harrying the men of Charlie Company.

Justus has only two men left in his squad after the continuous slog from Normandy to Germany, and he has just settled down to some much-deserved rest in reserve as other units push into the city. But he has sharpshooting experience from the weeks following D-day and the boys under fire need him. And so he and his buddies Whittaker and Porter load up and enter the city.

Justus, a Georgia boy with an abiding interest in the Civil War and a wry sense of the absurd, has his doubts about the mission. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how is he supposed to find him? Can he do so before many more men are killed? And why is the commander of Charlie Company so certain that there is more than one sniper?

The rest of the story, which takes place across a single day of block-by-block, house-to-house fighting through the rubble of a once-beautiful city, will challenge and shock Justus in more ways than one. I hope it will do the same for the reader.

I’m quite excited about this one. I may related the genesis of the story here sometime soon, but for now I’ll say that once I had it in my head it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d gotten it down in writing. My hope is that it will prove a brisk but involving action story, both thought-provoking and poignant and with a dash of humor, ideal for reading in two or three sittings. At 35,000 words, it’s a little less than half the length of my previous World War II novel, Dark Full of Enemies.

The first paperback proofs of the novel arrived just this afternoon. I’ve included a gallery below that I hope y’all will accept as a preview. Pending tweaks and final corrections—which should be minimal thanks to the efforts of friends and beta readers who have already looked at the manuscript and provided helpful feedback—I hope to have The Snipers out and available on Amazon before the end of the month, just in time for the Independence Day holiday.

Last week I reorganized my website’s Books page to divide full-length novels like Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville from short fiction, and to add The Snipers. You can look at the dedicated page for The Snipers, with paperback and Kindle purchasing links (not yet activated), here.

Thanks for reading! This one came together unusually quickly and I hope y’all will check it out once it’s available. Stay tuned!

The Dancing Floor

John Buchan June continues with an eerie slow-burn thriller that anticipated some of the themes and terrors of Witch Wood. The novel is the third Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Dancing Floor.

Written after but taking place chronologically before Leithen’s poaching lark in John Macnab, Leithen narrates this novel in the first-person, as a series of wide-ranging reminiscences. In the first half, Leithen introduces the reader to Vernon Milburne, a young man of noble family and every advantage who is nonetheless pensive and withdrawn, a haunted man. As Leithen gets to know him, he learns that Vernon has been terrorized annually by a nightmare. Once a year, on precisely the same night, he dreams of someone or something approaching his bedroom though a long series of interconnecting rooms in the family home. Every year it comes one room closer. When the person, or presence, or creature finally reaches his bedroom, Vernon believes, he will come into some terrible destiny. All he can do is wait.

Interwoven with Leithen’s narrative of his friendship with Vernon is how the two of them met Koré Arabin. Beautiful, popular, and rich, Koré is also the only daughter of a legendarily depraved eccentric, an Aleister Crowley type who moved to Plakos, a remote island in the Aegean, where he could research and experiment with the occult and practice his sexual debaucheries with utter liberty. He also, it is darkly hinted, preyed upon the local Greek islanders. But he is dead, and Koré, his only heir, is now the mistress of his house and the most powerful person on the island.

So Koré arrives in England already the subject of salacious rumor. And her personality does not help. When she meets Leithen and Vernon she is brusque, forward, and aggressive. Leithen finds her off-putting. Vernon is offended and deliberately avoids her. But as Leithen almost accidentally gets to know her—and even falls in love with her—she reveals that there is much more to her than her dark family history. Abrupt and ill-mannered owing to her remote and strange upbringing, she nevertheless rejects her family’s occultism and is concerned to help the people of Plakos. Far from using her position to indulge, as her father and ancestors did, she embraces the responsibility she was born into and hopes to make amends.

But Leithen is not sure this is possible. Through various means and sources, the well-connected Leithen learns that the people of Plakos, particularly those in the village nearest Koré’s house, have not forgotten her father’s evil. And following a hard winter and bad harvest, the dimly remembered pagan rites of their ancestors have resurfaced. These entail nighttime footraces, a symbolic marriage, and human sacrifice, all played out on the broad plain near Koré’s house known as the Dancing Floor. Leithen suspects—accurately, is it turns out—that the selected female victim of the sacrifice will be Koré.

In the second half of the novel, Leithen assembles a team and journeys to Plakos, aiming to intervene personally and either evacuate or protect Koré. But the locals are more suspicious and hostile than even he expected. Armed men guard Koré’s house and every movement Leithen and his friends make is watched and followed by a mob. Only the tenacious Orthodox priest, damning the locals’ apostasy, offers Leithen aid. But Leithen cannot save Koré by holing up in the village church.

Finally, as the locals capture and imprison or scare off Leithen’s men, as Leithen explores the island by night and wonders what he can possibly hope to do, and as the night of the sacrifices on the Dancing Floor approaches, he detects that he is not the only person creeping around the island by night. Is he being stalked? Or is there someone else on the island with dark and secret purposes?

The Dancing Floor, like Sir Edward Leithen’s debut in The Power-House, is a seemingly rambling personal narrative that slowly lays the groundwork for the tight, complex, and exciting events of the climax. (I’d encourage the reader beginning this novel to stick with it even if it seems to be going nowhere; the first half is Buchan setting the pieces on his chessboard.) But unlike that earlier adventure, The Dancing Floor relies far less on coincidence. It is, if anything, a character-driven thriller—a true oddity but a successful one.

It is successful in no small part thanks to the characters. Despite his infatuation and emotional vulnerability early in this novel, Leithen is his solid and reliable self, a steady professional who won’t back down from a task no matter what the hardships or risks once he has determined that it is the right thing to do. Vernon offers an intriguing departure, a moodier and more phlegmatic character than is typical for a Buchan story. Vernon has good reasons to be so, having spent much of his life as an orphan tormented by nightmares in a vast lonely house, but overcoming this, embracing his inheritance, and stepping into the role he was born to play—going from passively awaiting fate to actively pursuing it—gives him a compelling arc.

That arc also makes Vernon an interesting mirror of Koré, who is inarguably the best character in the book. With her strange and terrible background, her struggle to fit in, and a core of goodness that she is determined to act upon, she is a beautiful woman not only because of her looks but because of her character. She proves a challenge to Vernon, and an important and necessary one.

The other aspect of The Dancing Floor that makes it so successful as an adventure is its atmosphere. With its dream-haunted young men in empty houses, its lonely and desolate woods and cliffs, its dark pagan rites recounted in obscure old manuscripts, its hero creeping through dark landscapes filled with inscrutable and violent enemies, its mob of justifiably angry peasants, and the same peasants’ unjustifiable human sacrifice by firelight under the moon, The Dancing Floor is steeped in the gothic. Even beyond my personal taste—and I am an absolute sucker for gothic atmosphere—the foreboding and gloom, which even the indomitable Leithen struggles to overcome, pervades the novel and gives it weight. I relished it.

Buchan wrote The Dancing Floor the year before Witch Wood. Pagan survivals—relict human sacrifice, nighttime revels, and “elaborate cultural and religious transactions with death” as David Bentley Hart has described them—were very much on his mind. Some critics have suggested the influence of the (now utterly debunked) theories of Margaret Murray. That may be. But it certainly reflects Buchan’s recognition of the fragility of civilization. A bad harvest, a harsh winter, and a truly wicked foreign interloper in the big house on the hill is all it takes to drive people back into blood sacrifice, into the smoke and ash and the shrieking of burnt offerings.

But more importantly, this evil is only a background against which virtue and goodness can be glimpsed more sharply. Koré and Vernon, in complementary ways, demonstrate this. As in Witch Wood, true goodness in the face of evil takes two. And the redoubtable Leithen is our witness.

Having read them so close together, I can’t help but compare The Dancing Floor to Witch Wood. The latter is far better. But as an exercise in the some of the same themes, on a smaller, contemporary scale and structured as a thriller, The Dancing Floor is a gripping, moody, and unusual thriller, and another good entry in Sir Edward Leithen’s adventures.

Borges on the two registers of English

An interesting clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language and some of its peculiar strengths has been going around lately. In the clip, excerpted from Borges’s 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line,” Borges talks about why he regards English as a “finer” language than his native Spanish. After describing how he grew up reading English books in his father’s library (“When I think of the Bible, I think of the King James Bible”) and how even having forgotten Latin is better than never having known it, Borges continues:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

WFB: The most what?

Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.

WFB: “Asomó?”*

Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.

You can watch the whole discussion here, with the above beginning at approximately 17:20.

I speak no Spanish and so can’t vouch for Borges’s perspective on his native tongue—though I’d seriously hesitate to call his perspective into question, as some internet commenters on this clip seem unduly confident in doing—but I think he perceptively draws attention to two useful and beautiful features of English.

First, the interplay of verbs and adverbs. Immediately after the examples he gives of “live down,” “laugh off,” “dream away,” and “live up to,” Borges offhandedly suggests, “I suppose they can be said in German.” Any German speaker will be familiar with the separable prefix verb, a verb-preposition pair with a distinct (sometimes dramatically different) meaning from the root verb. I’ve always thought this feature had a grammatically more flexible cognate in the English use of prepositions in the way Borges describes. The physicality of these idioms, many of which give a subtle spatial quality to an abstract action, is worth considering.

This extends to rhythm as well. Here’s Borges on English adverbs slightly later in the interview:

Borges: Of course, in Spanish words are far too cumbersome, they’re far too long. Well, I go to one of my hobbies: For example, if you take an English adverb, or two English adverbs, you say for instance “quickly,” “slowly,” the stress falls on the significant part of the word. Quick-ly. Slow-ly. But if you say it in Spanish, you say “lentamente,” “rapidamente,” then the stress falls, let’s say, on the non-significant part, on the gadget.

The capacity of English for onomatopoeia is an often overlooked and underexploited quality. English isn’t limited to being spoken or written—it can be played.

But what I really love is Borges’s talk of the “two registers” of English, which seems to me exactly the right metaphor for the way English meaning and especially connotation work. (Another metaphor I’m accustomed to use: texture.) Depending on which words you choose to say something, you can pitch it high, low, or anywhere in between, with subtle variations in meaning in each. The good speaker or writer will choose carefully and precisely.

Consideration of the registers of the language—direct versus vague, concrete versus abstract, blunt versus diplomatic, coarse versus tactful—lies behind what many writers have written about the relative merit of Germanic and Latinate vocabulary. It is not precisely correct to say, as Borges does, that English is both Germanic and Latinate. It is Germanic. But it does have an enormous hoard of loanwords from Latin and other Romance languages. These borrowings were often heavily contextual—the jargon of medicine, theology, government, and even military ranks are often Latin, Greek, or French—and brought with them not only synonyms but finely differentiated shades of meaning.

And that’s what both features Borges discusses have in common. The availability of many shades of meaning is one of the things I love most about English, allowing incredibly fine precision. (Note that in the explanation of separable prefix verbs I linked to above, one of the purposes of such a grammatical feature is to be “more precise.”) To use another musical metaphor, English has a range of many, many octaves. Reading widely—especially in poetry—can strengthen your command of them.

A really interesting discussion. I’m watching the rest of the interview in fits and starts today. You can find the whole thing on the “Firing Line” YouTube channel here. It’s worth your while.

*A fascinating bit of trivia: Buckley is quick to suggest a possible Spanish equivalent for to loom over because Spanish was actually his first language. Largely raised by Spanish-speaking nannies, he purportedly didn’t learn English until entering school at age seven.

Huntingtower

For this year’s second entry in John Buchan June, we’re looking at a charming post-World War I thriller set on Scotland’s rugged western coast, the novel that introduced one of Buchan’s best and most popular recurring characters—1922’s Huntingtower.

After a brief and mysterious prologue set in Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution, a prologue in which a boy named Quentin and a girl named Saskia consider the dangers looming over the country, Huntingtower zips away to Scotland to introduce the reader to Dickson McCunn. Fifty-five years old and only one day retired from a long career in the Glasgow provisioning business, McCunn wakes up to find himself—for the first time—with nothing to do. A Buchan protagonist can only tolerate this state for a few minutes, and so Dickson has determined to set off on a Highland walking tour before he has even had his morning coffee.

With his wife out of town taking a leisurely cure at a spa, Dickson has a few weeks to ramble. He puts on his most threadbare tweeds, packs a copy of The Compleat Angler despite never having gone fishing, makes a last-minute donation to a group of local street urchins who want to be Boy Scouts, and leaves Glasgow for the roads, mountains, and heather. As it turns out, all of these decisions are providential.

After a few days on the road Dickson has neared the rugged western coast of Scotland and run into some curious figures—some tramps who rubbish Dickson’s illusions about the noble-spirited lower classes, an embittered veteran of the Great War and wannabe dour modernist poet named John Heritage, a handsome but taciturn foreign traveler whom Heritage takes to be Australian, and a gruff innkeeper who seems determined not to host any guests at the inn in his small, seemingly uninhabited village.

Dickson and Heritage, who despite being at loggerheads over politics and literary taste find themselves thrown together on the road, are especially piqued by the innkeeper. They begin to investigate the area further. And thanks especially to what they learn from Mrs Morran, an elderly widow who takes them in, they look especially closely at the great house standing near the village—Huntingtower. This is the home of the Kennedys, the local lairds, but the family fell on hard times in the war and the current heir, Quentin, is absent. In the meantime, surly men with a curious assortment of foreign accents prowl Huntingtower, keep the inn closed, and try to drive off anyone who comes too near either the house or the village.

This includes Dickson and Heritage, as well as—to Dickson’s surprise—the Gorbals Diehards, the poor Glasgow boys who have used Dickson’s donation to fund a ramshackle scout jamboree. Together, this strange band investigate the men at Huntingtower. They also discover the presence of the princess—Saskia, the Russian girl from the book’s prologue.

Who are all the foreigners occupying Huntingtower? Why have they abducted and hidden Saskia there? What do they intend to do with her? What are they waiting for? And, most importantly, what can Dickson, Heritage, and the boys do to stop them? Having discovered an actual princess imprisoned in a tower, they determine—whatever foul play is afoot—to rise to the occasion and thwart the invaders and their plans by any means necessary.

I don’t want to give away much more. Huntingtower relies on the Buchan mainstays of surprise, coincidence, tenacious heroes, and a fair amount of cunning playacting to bring the reader along to its satisfying conclusion. It’s Buchan at his most playful, using the tools honed through his wartime thrillers and historical novels. And the novel was immediately successful. Only The Thirty-Nine Steps ever outsold it.

Though the plotting and pacing are solid and the settings, as always when Buchan conjures Scotland for the reader, absorbing and beautiful, Huntingtower’s greatest charm is its cast of characters. John Heritage is a special favorite of mine. Partly a parody of the bleak modernist poets teeming in the aftermath of the First World War, Heritage nevertheless has noble qualities and many of the same virtues as Dickson—as well as some Dickson realizes he lacks. The development of their odd camaraderie over the course of the story and the way they sharpen and better each other make Huntingtower an insightful accidental study in male friendship.

Huntingtower also gives us Dougal and his scout “troop” of Glasgow street boys, the delightful Mrs Morran—a more lighthearted and gutsy version of Isobel, the Rev David Sempill’s housekeeper in Witch Wood—and the dastardly gang of Bolsheviks at the heart of the plot against Saskia. It even gives us the second appearance of one of Buchan’s favorite and more frequently appearing characters, Sir Archie Roylance, who would go on to play a key role in the plot of John Macnab.

But the star of Huntingtower is Dickson McCunn, who is both a classic Buchan hero and a delightfully atypical, unheroic one. I’ve noted before that Buchan’s novels often begin with the protagonist, a capable man of action, becalmed, frustrated by the tedium of peacetime and day-to-day life. Richard Hannay at the beginning of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Edward Leithen at the beginning of John Macnab complain of needing something to do—anything. So with Dickson McCunn, who finds inactivity as intolerable as either of the others.

But unlike Hannay the South African mining engineer or Leithen the lawyer and MP, McCunn is an old, comfortably prosperous shopkeeper, an elder of his church with good connections and an excellent relationship with his bank. Respectable and businesslike. In his very first scene he reflects with satisfaction on his new safety razor, and his modest ambitions, good sense, and contentment remain with him throughout the story. It is Saskia’s peril, the pluck and tenacity of the Gorbals Diehards, and the transformation of Heritage that stir Dickson to embrace the danger and virtue of adventure, the kind of thing he’s only enjoyed read about.

This gives Dickson an endearing hobbit-like quality that contrasts strikingly with the ruthlessness of his opponents. Here’s how Heritage describes the dreaded leader of the men who have imprisoned Saskia:

He’s the only thing on earth that that brave girl fears. It seems he is in love with her and has pestered her for years. She hated the sight of him, but he wouldn’t take no, and being a powerful man—rich and well-born and all the rest of it—she had a desperate time. I gather he was pretty high in favour with the old Court. Then when the Bolsheviks started he went over to them, like plenty of other grandees, and now he’s one of their chief brains—none of your callow revolutionaries, but a man of the world, a kind of genius, she says, who can hold his own anywhere. She believes him to be in this country, and only waiting the right moment to turn up. Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust. There are a hundred ways by which that kind of fellow could bamboozle all our law and police and spirit her away.

Not only does this set up the villain and broaden the novel’s scope, it introduces an important theme—the fragility of the good things made possible by civilization and the danger, in the modern world, not only of destroying them but of losing them altogether. The right kind of villain can manipulate the system, outmaneuvering its law-abiding defenders. It takes canny and determined men to defeat that kind of threat.

This theme recurs in Buchan’s fiction almost as often as a character like Sir Archie. It is the central pillar of the first Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Power-House, and crops up over and over in the Hannay novels and serious historical fiction like Witch Wood. But Buchan expresses it more subtly and effectively in Huntingtower by making it less central to the story’s action.

And it is more effective because of those delightful characters. Who will save the princess from the Bolsheviks and civilization from the revolutionaries? An aging grocer, a frustrated poet, a lame aristocrat, a widow who cooks a mean scone, and a gaggle of barefoot scouts.

Writing about his work in historical fiction years later, Buchan noted how seldom he was asked about his historical novels relative to his thrillers. The average reader always wanted to know when the next adventure of Richard Hannay or Dickson McCunn would come out. Having now made Dickson’s acquaintance, I can see why. Light, brisk, humorous, dangerous but never grim, and elegantly contrived (in both senses of the word), Huntingtower is, in the words of one of Buchan’s biographers, “ridiculous but fast-paced and witty.” In a word, fun. Novels like Huntingtower are the reason people read adventure fiction.

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.

On exoticism and annoyance

A curious passage in an otherwise measured and informative book that I read this spring. Referring to early 16th-century rumors of Maya cannibalism, the authors write:

There is, in fact, no evidence that the Postclassic Maya were cannibals devoted to slaughtering captives in religious rituals, despite the popular (and sometimes scholarly) obsession with “human sacrifice”—vividly reflected in images stretching from early modern European woodcuts accompanying accounts of discovery and conquest to modern equivalents such as Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto. There is no doubt that the Maya ritually executed war captives, people judged as criminals, and people, animals, plants, and objects chosen as religious offerings. But such executions have been practiced in almost all human cultures. Nor were such rituals in Maya society necessarily religious, despite the Western tendency to exoticize and exaggerate Maya executions as always religious and always human sacrifice. Maya culture was no less violent than any other, but nor was it any more so.

There’s a strange movement here from disputing evidence of cannibalism to ranting against popular curiosity about human sacrifice. Despite clearly disapproving of such curiosity and putting “human sacrifice” in scare quotes, the authors follow this rant with a pretty definitive concession that the Maya “ritually executed” people* “as religious offerings.” (If only there were a term for ritual execution of captives as religious offerings!) The capper is the paragraph’s concluding reflection, two weak and patently false appeals to moral equivalency.

I’ve mulled this paragraph over for a while now and what strikes me most about it—beyond handwaving and minimizing a particularly brutal form of ritual murder—is the sense of scholarly annoyance throughout. As if the authors, after getting questions about human sacrifice for the five hundredth time, respond, “No! Well, yes, actually. But not really. But yes. But everybody else has done it, too. And why are you so obsessed with this, weirdo?”

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to this kind of irritation. Anyone who has ever specialized in anything must either get comfortable facing the same set of popular misunderstandings over and over again or get irritated and snippy. Both feelings are understandable. The latter comes naturally. The former you have to work at. In the best case scenario, the scholar (and/or teacher, though I recognize the two don’t always overlap) can address common misperceptions of his field frankly and as an invitation to learning more. You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .

Having introduced the much-maligned and -misunderstood Middle Ages to students in this way for years, I can tell you that this approach works. But you have to subsume whatever irritation you feel at putting the same myths to rest again and again and let your passion for the subject take over.

What the above paragraph tries to do instead is dismiss curiosity (via the telling word “exoticize”) and dodge (by playing word games). A smart or skeptical student wouldn’t be fooled. And the genuinely curious will go somewhere else with their questions, probably to untrustworthy internet sources.**

But the accusation of exoticism is perhaps the worst element in all of this. I’ve seen this rhetorical charge most often in a certain kind of polemical academic discourse and, occasionally, in a vaguer version that has trickled down into the mainstream among the kind of people who rage against “cultural appropriation.” It seems, to me, to be way to spin curiosity as a bad thing. Notice something unusual, interesting, or even horrifying about another culture? Don’t you dare ask about it. You’re not allowed to be interested in this thing in this way.

Which is too bad, not only because of the uncharitable assumptions built into an accusation like this or the perceptible annoyance in writing like the paragraph above, but because of the way it worsens the insularity of academics. Charging the curious with exoticism, condemning questions to which you have to concede the central facts, and redefining terms—these are bridge-burning instincts when what I think we need most right now is greater curiosity.

*And plants, leaving one wondering how one “executes” a plant.

**Jackson Crawford, the Old Norse linguist I’ve referred to many times here, has a lot to say about this phenomenon on his YouTube channel.

Further notes on the term Anglo-Saxon

The first page of a 16th-century manuscript copy of the Welsh priest Asser’s 9th-century Life of King Alfred in the British Library. The term “King of the Anglo-Saxons” is visible in two places on this leaf.

Late last year I finally got a long-gestating post on the term “Anglo-Saxon” into writing. For several years now, a cadre of leftwing academics has striven to purge the disciplines of medieval history and literature of the term on the specious grounds that it is either racially loaded or straightforwardly racist. I disagree strongly, and set out my reasons why—with an assist from Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook—in that post. You can read that here.

Earlier today the cover story The Critic’s June issue went up on the magazine’s website. Titled “Anglo-Saxon extremists,” it’s an essay by Samuel Rubinstein that covers some of the same ground and makes similar arguments as mine from last year, including the intellectual sleight of hand required to make anti-Anglo-Saxon arguments plausible and even some points regarding the intense racial neuroses that seem to be my country’s chief export nowadays. Rubinstein also helpfully digs into the genesis of the controversy, which has mostly been stirred up kept going by a small number of academics with ulterior motives. A few choice excerpts:

On the cultural chasm separating British perceptions of the term from those of the rare American who has even heard it:

“What are you studying at the moment?”, an American student asked me once, as we ambled back from a seminar. “The Anglo-Saxon paper.” She gave me a disapproving look, told me she was more into “global history”, and mumbled something about “WASPs”. I wondered what St Boniface or St Dunstan might have made of the “P” in that acronym.

From this interaction I learned of an important cultural divide. Insofar as Americans encounter “Anglo-Saxons” at all, it is in this “WASP” formulation. When Britons encounter “Anglo-Saxon”, meanwhile, it is in Horrible Histories, Bernard Cornwell, or Michael Wood on the BBC. The Anglo-Saxons appear to us as a benign link in the chain of Our Island Story: they come after The Romans, coincide with The Vikings, and abruptly transform into The Normans at Hastings in 1066. Peopled with colourful characters, it is an exciting, murky part of the story.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the trans-Atlantic house of “Anglo-Saxon studies” cannot stand. Americans laugh at “it’s chewsday, innit”, and, in a similarly imperious vein, they judge us when we use language which, though anodyne to us, seems “problematic” to them.

A deeply unfortunate state of affairs, and one, for reasons of background and a somewhat eccentric education, I only recently became aware of.

On the use of the term among 19th-century scientific racists, whose definition was and should still be regarded as a secondary or even tertiary usage:

It is doubtless true that “Anglo-Saxon” abounds in the lexicon of nineteenth-century scientific racism, and it seems that these resonances reverberate more in North America than here. It is not true, however, that this is the only value-laden use of the term, or that “whiteness” is the only political meaning that its users have historically wished to conjure up. Again, such “misuses” of the term are by the bye, and historians should be permitted to use it in their correct way regardless. But although terms such as “Anglo-Saxons” have been invoked in support of this or that agenda, it is worth pointing out that this has not been the sole preserve of racists and bigots.

Further, on the fact that, despite the prevalence of the term WASP and the abuses of scientific racism, the modern use of Anglo-Saxon still mostly reflects its technical meaning:

Like plenty of terms which have a specialist definition, “Anglo-Saxon” has been deployed over the centuries to convey all manner of different things. Since none of this is inherent to it, it would be perverse for historians to cede ground altogether to any of these disparate groups. Indeed, Anglo-Saxonists should feel fortunate that the specialist sense is the dominant one, at least in British English. They are luckier in this respect than their colleagues who study the Goths or the Vandals.

A great line with which to end that paragraph. I’ve always taken great pains, when teaching late antiquity or the Early Middle Ages, to be clear about what Goth and Vandal mean. As one long ago student helpfully put it, Goths are are people group, not “a phase.”

In Rubinstein’s conclusion, he returns from the sound arguments in favor of keeping and using the term to point out that, in this contest, these scholars are not actually engaged in scholarship: “[Rambaran-Olm] and Wade’s arguments are the stuff not of academic history but political activism. And for all the veneer of scholarship, it seems to me that they know this and are proud of it.” Very clearly, if you have ever read their stuff. And, the conclusion of the whole matter: “The moral of the story is this. Don’t let American idiosyncrasies disrupt sound history. Don’t let scholarship give way to activism.”

Hear hear.

An excellent essay, much more detailed and elegantly put together than my own post about it last year, and worth taking the time to check out. I encourage y’all to read the whole thing at The Critic here.

Spring reading 2023

At various times this spring, weighed down and dragging inch by inch through the semester, even my reading felt unfulfilling—like I was plodding through book after book with nothing to enjoy or take away from them. But then I opened up my Goodreads reading challenge and started looking back through the 39 books I finished and was surprised—so many of them were excellent! It was an unusually rich season of reading.

This is why we reflect on the past. We need that perspective. Suddenly, my spring semester doesn’t look so much like the slog it often felt like, and I look forward to sharing the best of what I read.

So without further ado, my ten favorites in the broad fiction and non-fiction categories, plus some rereads and children’s books that I enjoyed. I hope y’all will find something good to read below.

Favorite fiction

For years I’ve fiddled with what order to put these in, usually falling back on “no particular order,” and only this spring did it occur to me to arrange them alphabetically by author. So please enjoy these ten favorites novels from this spring:

The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard—An absorbing, atmospheric, and brilliantly written historical mystery featuring one of my favorite real-life writers that is fatally compromised by one storytelling decision. Still glad I read it, though. Full review here.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie—I’ve mentioned here before that Agatha Christie’s work has been a strange gap in my reading for much of my life. Prior to last year, the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express, and that was more than twenty years ago in high school. I’m starting to fix that. This is Christie’s debut novel as well as the first appearance of the great Hercule Poirot, and even beyond starting the career of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most popular novelists, it’s rightly regarded as a classic of the mystery genre. I greatly enjoyed it.

Paths of Glory, by Humphrey Cobb—French soldiers assigned an impossible objective fail and are punished for it by a glory-hungry commander. I was prepared for Paths of Glory to be a straightforwardly cynical antiwar story, but it turned out to be a brisk, well-written, psychologically complex, and hard-hitting novel peopled with interesting characters and a subtle but sophisticated study of how morally compromised people take advantage of institutions to the detriment of everyone else. Considering how good Kubrick’s film adaptation is, I was surprised to find Cobb’s novel even better.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A dark, thematically rich, and tragically moving story of a family of prehistoric Neanderthals coming into fatal conflict with a band of strange, technologically sophisticated, and cruel Homo sapiens. Almost certainly the best novel I read this spring. Full review from earlier this month here.

Trigger Mortis, by Anthony Horowitz—A newer James Bond novel written as a direct sequel to Goldfinger, which is both a daring experiment by Horowitz and the novel’s only serious flaw. It has an interesting plot, a good villain, and some excellent action and suspense, but Horowitz’s need to “fix” one of the outcomes of Goldfinger causes the pacing in the first half to lurch awkwardly. Otherwise excellent. Full length Goodreads review here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—An English hunter sets himself the challenge of seeing if he could, just hypothetically, get close enough to a certain unnamed German dictator to get him in his gunsights. He can, and does, and gets caught. This is the story of his escape, his slow and steady recovery from torture, and his flight, all of which have to occur at the same time and hundreds of miles inside a hostile central European country preparing for war. Imagine a whole thriller with the continuous action, breathless pacing, and survivalist improvisation of the middle third of Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps. Rogue Male is that novel.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Tess Lewis—Part fable, part allegory, part fantasy, part satire, this is a typically unique and unclassifiable novel by Jünger. Set in a timeless coastal paradise called the Grand Marina, On the Marble Cliffs follows two brothers, world-weary former soldiers who have settled into a tranquil life of botany and zoological research. But throughout, a looming threat grows from the forests to the north, where a jovial and contemptuous brute known as the Head Forester rules an aggressive warrior society. Dark rumors reach the brothers of the rites practiced in the north and of the Head Forester’s intentions toward the Grand Marina and its people. Jünger published this shortly after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and though parallels with the rise and aggression of the Nazis will suggest themselves even from this brief description, Jünger intended the book as a more broadly applicable warning. It’s well worth reading—and heeding. I wrote about it earlier this year here.

Massacre at Goliad, by Elmer Kelton—A short, well-paced, and finely crafted historical adventure about two brothers from Tennessee making a new start in a region of northern Mexico called Texas. Nicely dramatizes the complexity of Anglo migration to Texas and the relationships between the new arrivals and the native Tejanos, and subtly works in a lot of great detail about the move toward revolution in Texas. Goodreads review here.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson—I realized after reading so much John Buchan last year that my own taste for Buchan had been prepared by a lot of childhood reading and watching of abridged Stevenson novels and their Disney adaptations. I have reread Treasure Island since then but had never read another childhood favorite, Kidnapped. I decided to fix that. While its second half never quite recovers the suspense and intensity of the betrayal, kidnapping, sword fights, shipwreck, and assassination in the first, it has strong and enjoyable characters and a sharp and satisfying conclusion. A great adventure novel, one of the quiet masterpieces of the genre.

This Thing of Darkness, by KV Turley and Fiorella de Maria—Grieving war widow Evi Kilhooley, who is making ends meet by writing for a Los Angeles magazine, accepts an assignment to interview the dying film star Bela Lugosi. All is not as it seems—most obviously in the case of Lugosi, who continuously lies about his past, but of Evi and her relationship with Hugo, a fellow British expat, as well. Imagine a mixture of 10% Ed Wood, 10% LA Confidential, and 80% The Exorcist.

Special pre-summer mentions:

I read two John Buchan novels in preparation for the second John Buchan June: Huntingtower, Buchan’s first Dickson McCunn adventure, and The Dancing Floor, a Sir Edward Leithen adventure that takes him to a Greek island to thwart a murder plot by desperate neopagans. I excluded them from consideration for my top ten here, but be on the lookout for reviews in the first week or so of next month.

Favorite non-fiction

From this spring’s excellent and plentiful history and general non-fiction reading, my ten favorites arranged alphabetically by author:

The Nicene Creed: An Introduction, by Phillip Cary—I was excited to come across this book, as the creeds are a fascinating and important topic and Cary’s earlier book Good News for Anxious Christians proved helpful to me at an crucial time in my life. In this short handbook, Cary introduces the Nicene Creed to a lay audience with a good short historical overview followed by a line by line, article by article march through the statements of the creed. His explanation is deep but accessible and clearly, concisely written, making this book an ideal introduction to the history of Christianity and its theological core. I’m always looking for book recommendations on complicated but important subjects for students and this will be on the short list from now on. As a bonus, it’s beautifully designed and bound; another great offering from its publisher, Lexham Press.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—A brisk and readable 200-page history tracking the story of the Finns and Finland from the first rumors-of-rumors mentioned by Tacitus through the Viking Age, Christianization, the Reformation, successive control by the Swedes and Russians, its 20th century civil war and wars of self-preservation, to Finland’s application to join NATO in 2022. Clements covers a lot in this short book, giving time both to the political tides that have ebbed and flowed over Finland—and occasionally broken on it—as well as the development of the Finns themselves and the growth of their national self-awareness. His examination of Finnish culture and the Finnish attitude is one of the book’s strong points. Another is his care with nuance, especially with controversial topics like the three wars Finland fought within World War II. As with any short history, there were subjects I was left wanting to read more about, but Clements allocates his limited space well and includes a detailed bibliographical essay for anyone wanting to dive deeper.

Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, by Eric H Cline—An excellent short guide to the history of the discipline of archaeology (why I read it) as well as the modern state of the field. Cline’s clear, solid writing, even on complicated concepts, and evenhanded approach to controversial topics make this well worth reading. Another one I’ll gladly recommend to students.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A very good dual biography of two antebellum Georgia politicians and friends, a real odd couple who paired powerhouse oratory and a truculent and dynamic personality (Toombs) with chronic ill health and a studious intellect (Stephens). Davis follows their political evolutions from unionist Whigs left behind by the shifting political situation of the 1850s through secession (Toombs pro, Stephens anti), their renewed friendship as framers of the Confederate constitution, their almost immediate frustrations with the government they helped to create, and their roles, both active (Toombs) and passive (Stephens) in the waging of war and the defeat of the Confederacy. A short, well-researched, and readable book about the political side of the war.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—When Johnson died earlier this year, I began his mammoth Modern Times—which I still haven’t finished—and this, his short, punchy entry in the Penguin Lives series. Johnson approaches Bonaparte with the same bracing attitude that he brought to the subjects of Intellectuals. It’s incisive, blunt, elegantly written, and hostile without being unfair. Exactly what I think Napoleon deserves, and a very good short biography.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer, by Edmund Morris—Johnson’s Napoleon set me off on a jaunt through several short biographies I’ve had waiting on the shelf. This was another excellent one, narrating the life of a childhood hero about whom I didn’t actually know much. Morris’s good writing, good research, brisk pacing, his ability to explain what is so special about Beethoven’s music and why to a technical naïf, and his admiring, charitable, but not uncritical feel for Beethoven the man all make this a worthwhile read. I posted a short excerpt about a critically ill-regarded composition here.

Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945, by Thomas R Nevin—A meticulously researched and informative but sometimes dry intellectual biography of the first half of a long, dramatic, and complicated life. I strongly recommend this if you have more than a passing interest in Jünger or the interwar intellectual world. For a sample of the kind of detail and surprises it contains, see this post from January.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another volume from the Penguin Lives series. Remini was one of the great historians of the Jacksonian era and he brings an expert understanding of the context of Smith’s life to this short biography. Situating Smith in his time and place—a world of democratic populism, commercialism and self-promotion, post-Enlightenment mysticism, highly emotive and apocalyptic revivalism, and even fortune hunting through dowsing—helps make a lot of sense of his life and the movement he spawned. One of the best such biographies I’ve read, and one I’ve already recommended to my US History students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson, trans. Agnes Broomé—Part memoir, part science history, part naturalist essay, Svensson’s Book of Eels is the biggest surprise of my spring. I picked this up on a whim and was riveted from the first chapter. I was passingly familiar with the European eel from its occasional appearances in medieval history and literature (e.g. the death of Henry I), but I had no idea that so much about them was still mysterious. Though the book drifts into climate alarmism near the end and Svensson sometimes stretches a bit too far to connect the eel to major events and intellectual trends (e.g. was the adult Freud really fascinated with the unconscious because he spent a summer as a biology student dissecting eels looking for testicles?), the chapters on the eel’s life cycle, habitat, and behavior and the researchers who spent centuries—from Aristotle to the present—trying to learn more about them were worth the read. The additional memoir material, Svensson’s reflections on growing up fishing for eels with his father, make this an uncommonly rich and moving book.

The Legacy of the Civil War, by Robert Penn Warren—A fascinating and elegantly written centennial reflection on the place of the Civil War in the American imagination, politics, and character. Earlier this month I posted a short reflection on ideological moralism and political extremism inspired by Warren’s essay here.

Honorable mentions:

On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden & Gift of Living, by Alan Noble—A helpful, compassionate, but honest short reflection on pain, suffering, and mental anguish and the goodness and necessity of living life despite them.

If You Survive, by George Wilson—A lesser known World War II memoir by a ninety-day-wonder, a replacement officer who joined the 4th Infantry Division shortly after D-Day and fought through Normandy, across northern France, in the Hürtgen Forest, and finally in the Battle of the Bulge. Blunt, unembellished, and therefore powerful. Goodreads review here.

Rereads

Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis—The first Bond “continuation” novel written after Ian Fleming’s death. Bond journeys to Greece to rescue M, who has been kidnapped by a Chinese intelligence operative plotting to escalate tensions between the Soviets and the West. A slower burn than most of Fleming’s books, but Amis captures much of Fleming’s tone and world-weariness and very presciently creates a scenario in which Communist China is more dangerous than Russia.

Norwood, by Charles Portis—Portis’s first novel. Not my favorite of his five books, but a fun, short picaresque following the title character on an unpredictable cross-country jaunt with a lot of good individual episodes.

Gringos, by Charles Portis—I reread this in the Yucatan, where it takes place, and took it with me to the Mayan city of Tulum. A fantastic novel, and slowly overtaking True Grit as my favorite of Portis’s works. It is certainly his most complex and maybe his best-written. No description can suffice—go read it yourself. I blogged about it twice this spring, here and here.

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, by Alexander McCall Smith—Two longer Prof Dr von Igelfeld misadventures, taking him to Oxford in one and South America in the other.

Children’s books

The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A solid young adult historical adventure about French Canadian fur trappers on the Great Lakes. A great surprise.

The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A historical fantasy concerning Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion from Troy as told by Nicostratus, Helen of Troy’s son. A good old-fashioned retelling of some events late in the siege from an unusual perspective.

You Are Special, by Max Lucado, illustrated by Sergio Martinez—A beautifully illustrated children’s picture book with a good story and powerfully moving message. This is apparently one of Lucado’s best known books but was new to me. I loved it, and I loved reading it to my kids.

The Easter Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Nicely illustrated Bible stories covering the life of Christ, one for each of the forty days of Lent. We picked this up after enjoying the Advent book by the same author-illustrator team.

Indescribable, by Louie Giglio, illustrated by Nicola Anderson—Another nightly read with our kids, this is a 100-chapter devotional on scientific topics—nature, animals, geology, astronomy, and more. Our kids are especially interested in animals and space, so this was an exceptionally enjoyable part of our bedtime routine for several months.

Conclusion

The summer is young but already passing swiftly away. I’ve started some good new books and am trying to finish up a few leftover from the spring, and I’m looking forward to more. I hope something on this list sounds good enough to check out in the coming months, and that you’ll enjoy both the read and your summer. Thanks as always for reading!

Tell them...

I think about mortality a lot—possibly too much. This is the elegiac streak that has caused everything from the Iliad and Beowulf to True Grit and The Inheritors to resonate so strongly with me. And one particular aspect of death that I often reflect on is last words, whether famous or not.

Wikipedia has a marvelous collection of last words—hundreds and hundreds of examples. As with all things Wikipedia, especially bulk lists of information, you should certainly check the source of each quotation before you plow ahead with it, but simply reading through them one after another is a powerful opportunity for reflection.

Death catches people at unpredictable times, and a person’s last words have a way of freezing each speaker’s final moment in all its particularity and, often, peculiarity. Tellingly, Wikipedia’s list includes a subheading for “Ironic last words” like the example par excellence of General John Sedgwick. Warned of Confederate sharpshooters during the fighting at Spotsylvania Courthouse, he said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” He was shot in the head moments later.

But I’m particularly interested in the last words of people who knew what was coming, that their time was short. What is that like? I often wonder. The knowledge of their approaching death seems to have sharpened their speech. It is poignant in an almost literal sense. These words fall into several varieties.

A certain kind of poncey literary type seems to go out with a sniffy quip. Thus Lytton Strachey, author of the dishonest and low-minded Eminent Victorians: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” Or, in perhaps the most famous example, the last words of Oscar Wilde. Others offer proto-Oprah pablum, as in the case of William James: “These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Pure treacle. There are others who greet death with defiance, especially among those who were executed, like Breaker Morant (“Shoot straight, you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it.”), or who plead for mercy, or who scorn their killers.

But two other kinds of last words strike me especially deeply. The first are those who, in their final moments, were more concerned for others than themselves. Among these are New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall, on the phone with his pregnant wife as he froze to death on Mount Everest: “I love you. Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Or Abigail Adams, to her distraught husband: “Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long.” There are many more examples among soldiers killed in battle like Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, who is most famous for coining the phrase “Retreat, hell!” but, upon being gassed at Belleau Wood, told a corpsman, “Don’t bother with me. Take care of my good men.”

These lay dying and tried to tell those around them it would be all right or to look after someone else. I can only pray to have the courage and clarity and simple goodness to emulate them when my time comes.

The other kind, which often overlaps with the above, are those who use their final moments to send messages—asking someone to tell others something for them. I started paying close attention to this when I noticed a lot of such last words among men killed in the Civil War.

Some of these can seem petty, or at least spiteful. When Union officer George Dashell Bayard succumbed to a mortal wound from a ricocheting cannonball at Fredericksburg in December 1862, he took his final moments to say this: “Tell McClellan that my last regret as a military man is that I did not die serving under him.” That’s General George McClellan, former commander of the Army of the Potomac, whom Lincoln had replaced with General Ambrose Burnside a few months prior. Bayard’s last words were a dig at Burnside. You did this to me. I don’t know what to make of that.

Confederates seem especially concerned with sending a final message. At Gettysburg, Mississippian General William Barksdale was severely wounded leading in an attack on the second day. I’ve seen a few slightly different versions of his final words, but here they are as reported in Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion: “Tell my wife I fought like a man and will die like one.”

Even John Wilkes Booth, a noncombatant, felt something of the same instinct. While his two final words, “Useless, useless,” spoken as he stared at his paralyzed hands, are well-remembered, just before this he told a nearby soldier, “Tell Mother I died for my country.” What might have been moving in a uniformed man on the battlefield feels laughably self-serving in this context—the classic egotism of the assassin. Maybe that’s why the clearer, sharper final words are more famous. They’re more honest.

Perhaps the two most famous Confederate generals, both in delirium on their deathbeds in 1863 and 1870, asked others to tell someone something. Stonewall Jackson, dying of pneumonia, was issuing orders. Just before saying his famous last words, he trailed off with, “Order AP Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks…” And General Lee, seven years later, half a decade after the war, also had AP Hill on his mind just before his most famous final words: “Tell Hill he must come up!”

Colonel Isaac Avery’s dying note

But the two that really get me are lesser-known, ordinary men—a junior officer and a common soldier. Another fatality at Gettysburg, Colonel Isaac Avery of North Carolina, was struck in the neck on July 3 and apparently bled to death. Before he died, he scribbled the following note lefthanded: “Major, Tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.” The note is in the North Carolina state archives.

And then there’s Richard Rowland Kirkland of South Carolina, still remembered as “the Angel of Marye’s Heights.” At Fredericksburg, Sergeant Rowland had voluntarily gathered canteens and taken them over the wall into no-man’s-land to give water to the wounded and dying Yankees scattered all over the open fields below the heights. Less than a year later, at Chickamauga in north Georgia, the situation was reversed, and the recently promoted Lieutenant Rowland was shot leading an attack uphill against dug-in Union infantry. Before he died, he told his men to save themselves and concluded with one request: “Tell my father I died right.”

You feel the weight and meaning of these words instinctively, on the gut level, and yet it is hard to articulate what makes them so powerful.

There are the factors one can describe sociologically—honor, courage, chivalrous masculinity, and all the other things modern scholars write so scornfully about but that meant so much to that generation. There are also what we rather weakly call “human factors”: Thinking of family in one’s final moments, the parallel concern to give them some consolation that their death was a good death, that their memory—all that will be left of them—can be cherished unsullied.

But I think the crucial factor is distance. These men realize they are dying and think of family, and I imagine they have never felt farther away. It’s the particularity of their deaths—the when and where—frozen in their words. Tell them… may be the most terrible and beautiful and revealing phrase in the war.

The Inheritors

Years ago I wrote here about Chesterton’s definition of bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” Chesterton wrote of contemporaries refusing to see one another’s political or religious perspectives—a distance that is difficult enough to bridge at any time. But what about perspectives separated by millennia? The Inheritors, William Golding’s second novel, attempts to reaching deep into prehistory to imagine a mind far more alien than any political or cultural opponent we resent today.

The Inheritors follows Lok, a Neanderthal man who is one of the junior males in a dwindling family group. The group is led by Mal, the eldest male; the old woman, who the reader gradually infers is Lok’s mother; Fa, Lok’s mate; Liku, their young daughter, to whom Lok is affectionate and devoted; Ha, another young man; Nil, his mate; and the new one, Ha and Nil’s infant boy.

When the novel begins, Lok’s group are returning inland from a winter by the sea. In the first of an series of troubling complications, Lok’s group discovers that the log they have always used to cross a river in their path has gone missing. They find another shorter, thinner log and lay it over the water and all cross safely except Mal, their capable but aging patriarch. He falls off as he crosses and though he is able to crawl out to safety, the chilly river, swollen with snowmelt, breaks his health. By the next evening, as the group shelters under a cliff overhang by a large waterfall upriver, Mal lies dying. And Lok has begun to notice that their group, despite the precautions they take against wolves and big cats, are not alone.

Snatches of strange voices and glimpses of figures and fires through the trees alarm Lok, who tries both to investigate the strangers and to warn the rest of his group about the “new people.” But Mal’s sickness, death, and burial, the delay in their journey, and their constant need for food distract and disperse them. When the scale of the threat the new people pose finally becomes clear, it is too late. The new people kill several of Lok’s band and kidnap Liku and the new one.

Lok and Fa are able to escape and observe the new people from high in a tree for one long, terrible night. The new people not only use fire—like Lok and his band, who relied upon the old woman to carry live coals from stage to stage on their journey upriver—but make it. They build roaring bonfires around which they gather, eat, and argue. They make artificial caves to shelter in at night. They can cross the river at will in hollow logs. They wear skins and furs and jewelry. They make honey-smelling liquids that provoke wild and violent behavior. The men and women intrigue with and against each other. And they carry bent branches with which, when they catch sight of Lok, they attempt to “give” him sharp flint-headed twigs.

The middle and end of The Inheritors follows Lok’s epiphany that, with Mal dead, he is the new Mal, a startling and terrifying realization of responsibility in the face of danger. The Inheritors is, then, a coming-of-age story of a kind. With Fa, Lok, the newly minted leader of their threatened group, determines to save Liku and the new one from the strangers. It is not a spoiler to say that their rescue attempt does not end well.

The final chapter shifts perspective from Lok to one of the new people—a group of modern man, Homo sapiens, in flight after their leader stole another man’s woman—and ends the novel with a note of tragedy and a deep sense of foreboding. After all, for the modern men who encountered Lok and his band by the river, this only the beginning of the story.

The Inheritors does several things I really love in a novel. First, it drops the reader into a completely foreign time, place, and mindset and trusts the reader to keep up and figure it out. Golding narrates this world in a stripped-down, direct, and forceful style with a deliberately limited vocabulary. He involves the reader in Lok’s perspective immediately—it is totally absorbing. Golding makes this alien world comprehensible and carefully prepares the way for the reader to understand while never spoonfeeding information. It’s expertly crafted.

This is because, second, Golding commits totally to telling this story from the point of view of Lok, who has an alien mind. The Neanderthals, in Golding’s telling, are intuitive rather than rational, relying on mental “pictures” that they can communicate to each other through minimalistic callbacks and shared memory. Their world is a flux of habit, play, affection, fear, and hunger. This attempt to bring the reader into the Neanderthal mind could have gone horribly wrong—but Golding executes it brilliantly.

That’s because, third, Golding uses the immense dramatic irony of this perspective to provoke suspense, horror, and above all a deep sympathy. I’ve written before about how the irony of a past person’s limited knowledge and understanding is a tricky, distancing authorial tool, one more often used to scorn or belittle characters than to understand them, but Golding evokes nothing but pathos for Lok and his people. He treats them and their situation seriously, and their fates as genuine tragedies. Lok may not have a word for the love he feels for Liku, but Golding makes us feel it as Lok feels it. And the dread—a far more powerful emotion to me than mere horror—that Golding generates is nearly unbearable. Fa, who sees more and understands quicker than Lok, is perhaps the most compelling character in this regard. The conclusion of their night watching the new people from the tree, in which Fa turns Lok’s face away from the fire in the clearing while she watches the new people with wide, unblinking, tear-shining eyes, is the stuff of nightmares.

I have to point out that the Neanderthals as described by Golding don’t match what we know of Neanderthal life today. Unlike Lok and his group, Neanderthals made and used tools, hunted and waged war, built dwellings, ate meat, and wore clothes. (My own, personal, non-expert suspicion based on Neanderthal archaeology is that Neanderthals were really just a funny-looking subgroup of modern man.) I actually wondered a few times if Lok’s people were not some yet earlier form of man and the new people Neanderthals, but these modern scientific terms are not used and it doesn’t ultimately matter. The Inheritors may not be a textbook description of Ice Age early man, but as an invitation to imagine ourselves and our nature from a radical and unflattering alternate perspective it is unmatched.

I began Griswoldville with three epigraphs, one of which was this favorite line from an essay by Richard Weaver: “It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who are left behind.” The Inheritors is perhaps the ultimate such imaginative alliance, one that not only shocks and moves but should cause us to consider the cost and meaning of progress.