Napoleon Bonaparte, teenage blogger

Yesterday I shared a post about Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life on Instagram. Coincidentally, when looking back at Goodreads to see how long it took me to read it, I discovered that I finished it eight years ago today, which I’m taking as an excuse to share a line that has amused me ever since.

Writing of the young Corsican’s submission for a French literary prize, Roberts relates:

Napoleon would later claim that he had withdrawn the essay before it was judged, but that is not in fact true. The Academy’s examiners gave it low marks for its excessively inflated style. One judge described it as ‘of too little interest, too ill-ordered, too disparate, too rambling, and too badly written to hold the reader’s attention’. Years later, Talleyrand obtained the original from the Academy’s archives and presented it to Napoleon.

Napoleon’s reaction speaks for all of us who started a blog during college:

“I found its author deserved to be whipped. What ridiculous things I said, and how annoyed I would be if they were preserved!”

One sympathizes.

Napoleon then—like anyone who has at some point deleted some ancient, teenage musings—burned the essay, “push[ing] it down with the tongs” to make sure it was good and gone. After all, “It might have exposed me to ridicule.”

That's not how any of this works

Director Ridley Scott talks with Dan Snow about Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon

Yesterday History Hit released a 16-minute talk with Ridley Scott covering some aspects of his epic drama Napoleon, which comes out in three weeks. The interview is mostly interesting even if host Dan Snow doesn’t dig very deep, but Scott got strangely testy when Snow—over a clip of cannonballs smashing up the ice of a frozen pond beneath the feet of retreating Russian infantry at Austerlitz—raised the question of historical accuracy:

Snow: What about historical accuracy? When a historian says, “Uh, sorry, Sir Ridley, it didn’t quite happen like that,” you say, “Listen, I’ve done enough with you.” You have to have artistic license, right?

Scott: You know, I would say, “How would you know? Were you there?”

Snow: [laughs]

Scott: They go, “Oh, no, right.” I say, “Exactly.” So I said, You know, Napoleon [?] had four-hundred books written about him. So it means, maybe the first was the most accurate. The next one is already doing a version of the writer. By the time you get to 399, guess what—a lot of speculation.

Oof. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Historians don’t know things because they were there, they know things because they study. It’s work. They’ve read and researched and compared notes and argued and walked the ground. Scott’s rejoinder is surprisingly childish for such a sharp and accomplished man.

Further, his breezy explanation of how history works as a discipline and a profession is simply bizarre. The implication of what he says about how books cover a subject over time is that historical facts are established at the beginning, and the rest is just eggheads batting ever more intricate theoretical interpretations back and forth.

The truth is that, as I’ve had cause to reflect here recently, the first accounts of an event are fragmentary or partial even if they’re accurate. It takes diligent study, the perspective of time, the synthesis of all available sources, and a good bit of luck to piece together a big-picture account of what actually happened. And with big, heavily-documented subjects—like, say, a French emperor—new material is being discovered all the time. There is no substitute for a primary source or eyewitness account, but if you want accuracy qua accuracy, you will absolutely want a secondary source, a book written later.

I’m all for allowing responsible artistic license—I’m always interested to hear filmmakers explain how and why they choose to change what they change—but Scott doesn’t stop at artistic license. His arrogant dismissiveness toward truth in historical storytelling is breathtaking. Maybe he picked up more from Napoleon than he’s aware.

To be fair, Scott was speaking off-the-cuff, and is 85 years old. I’m not even absolutely certain he said “Napoleon” when he cited the figure of 400 books because he was mumbling. (The real figure, if he was talking about Napoleon, is tens of thousands, more than 300,000 by one old estimate.) But given his track record with using history for his own purposes—I stand by my thoughts on Kingdom of Heaven from the early days of this blog—and the forcefulness with which he said this, I have to assume he means it. I can’t say I’m surprised.

At any rate, I’m cautiously optimistic about Napoleon, but I’m not hoping for much more than interesting performances and exciting spectacle.

Literary cameos

Yesterday Alan Jacobs posted a longish recommendation of Francis Spufford’s latest novel, an alternate history detective noir titled Cahokia Jazz. I’m intrigued. But I especially enjoyed this minor note from the end of Jacobs’s post:

At one point, late in the story, our hero is at Cahokia’s railway station and happens to see a family, “pale, shabby-grand, and relocating with their life’s possessions”—including, curiously enough, butterfly nets: “white Russians on their way to Kodiak, by the look of it.” One of them, “a lanky twenty-something in flannels and tennis shoes,” is called by his family Vovka, and he briefly assists our hero. Then off they go, leaving our story as abruptly as they had arrived in it. Assuming that they made their way to Kodiak—or, more formally, as our map tells us, NOVAYA SIBIRSKAYA TERRITORII—it is unlikely that their world ever knew Lolita or Pale Fire.

This is “one of several delightful cameos” in the novel, and Jacobs’s recommendation and praise got me thinking about such cameos in fiction.

I haven’t read Cahokia Jazz yet, though I intend to, but I’m willing to take Jacobs at his word that Spufford does this well. The example he cites certainly sounds subtle enough to work. But done poorly, such cameos awkwardly shoehorn a well-known figure into the story and call unnecessary attention to themselves. Think Forrest Gump in novel form. They can also, if used to denigrate the characters in the story, turn into the kind of wink-wink presentist authorial irony that I deplore.

I think the best version of the literary cameo functions much like a good film cameo—if you spot the cameo and know who it is, it’s a nice bonus, but if you don’t it doesn’t intrude enough to distract. And, ideally, it will work with and add to the story and characterization of the main characters.

A good and especially subtle example comes from Declare, which I’m almost finished reading. Early in the novel we read of protagonist Andrew Hale’s background, specifically where he was in the early stages of World War II before embarking on his first espionage assignments in occupied France:

In November he successfully sat for an exhibition scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and in the spring of 1941 he went up to that college to read English literature.

His allowance from Drummond’s Bank in Admiralty Arch was not big enough for him to do any of the high living for which Oxford was legendary, but wartime rationing appeared to have cut down on that kind of thing in any case—even cigarettes and beer were too costly for most of the students in Hale’s college, and it was fortunate that the one-way lanes of Oxford were too narrow for comfortable driving and parking, since bicycles were the only vehicles most students could afford to maintain. His time was spent mostly in the Bodleian Library researching Spenser and Malory, and defending his resultant essays in weekly sessions with his merciless tutor.

A Magdalen College tutor ruthlessly grilling a student over Spenser and Malory? That can only be CS Lewis.

They’re not precisely cameos, but I have worked a few real-life figures into my novels in greater or lesser supporting roles: David Howarth in Dark Full of Enemies, Gustavus W Smith and Pleasant Philips in Griswoldville. I’ve aimed a little lower in the name of realism, I suppose. But the precise dividing line between a cameo of the kind described here and a real person playing a serious role in a story is something I’ll have to figure out.

At any rate, a well-executed literary cameo is a joy. Curious to see who else might surprise us in the pages of Cahokia Jazz.

The King's Choice

King Haakon VII (Jesper Christensen) and the Norwegian government meet while on the run in The King’s Choice

A few weekends ago I coincidentally watched two movies about kings and resolved to review both of them. The first was The Lost King, the story of how Richard III’s grave was found. Here, after a regrettable delay, is the second—The King’s Choice.

The Second World War in Europe began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, but after this initial blaze of violence the war—at least from the Western perspective—settled into months and months of inactive “phoney war.” Britain and France were technically at war with Germany but there was little shooting. That changed dramatically in the spring of 1940.

After protracted diplomatic wangling, Germany invaded both Denmark and Norway on April 9. Infantry and armor attacks as well as history’s first paratrooper assaults overwhelmed the Danish border, and King Christian X chose to capitulate the same morning. But across the Skagerakk, the strait separating Denmark and Norway, his younger brother King Haakon VII reacted differently.

The King’s Choice (Kongens nei) tells Haakon’s story. Opening on the day before the invasion, when word of the sinking of a German ship in Norwegian waters arrives in Oslo, the film follows Haakon (Jesper Christensen) and Olav (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), his son and heir, and the German ambassador Curt Bräuer (Karl Markovics) as Germany launches its invasion and Norway scrambles to respond. Haakon faces difficult choices: Escape to Britain? Evacuate his family but remain behind himself, like his brother in Denmark, and face occupation? Capitulate, and head a German puppet government under the loathsome Vidkun Quisling? Haakon determines early on to resist, but faced with the overwhelming might of the German war machine, how much resistance is appropriate, for how long, and to what end? Simultaneously, Olav struggles to reconcile his duty as the Crown Prince with his strained devotion to his father. Both are burdened with choosing what is best for Norway.

Bräuer’s parallel struggle is especially interesting. An awkward choice as a diplomat, Bräuer speaks little Norwegian but admires Norway and its people and sincerely desires peace. He also believes, naively, that the conflict brewing up between Nazi Germany and Norway can be resolved by men of goodwill, and that if he can present moderate terms to Haakon personally, before it is too late, the war can be halted if not prevented. Where Haakon and Olav’s story is one of finding strength to face an enemy, Bräuer’s, tragically, is one of disillusion.

The film nicely balances these character studies with the events of the opening days of the invasion. As Bräuer’s diplomatic woes play out in the background, Haakon, Olav, the royal family, and the Norwegian parliament flee Oslo. They fall back repeatedly, working their way farther north and ever closer to the Swedish border with the Germans only a few hours behind them. Escape and exile beckon, and death is a constant danger. At one point, Haakon, Olav, and their families narrowly escape German bombing, and at another, only the dedication and bravery of the young reservists manning a roadblock hold back a German paratrooper assault as the royals and government escape to their next hiding place.

These sequences—and a truly brilliant early action scene depicting the defense of Oslofjord and the sinking of the German cruiser Blücher, which looms out of the nighttime murk like some primeval monster—are the only combat in the film. The King’s Choice is a film of hastily called nighttime conferences, ad hoc meetings, and breathless situation reports. But the filmmakers use the sparse action judiciously, punctuating the movements of Haakon, deepening the crisis surrounding Bräuer, and raising the stakes for both—and for the people of Norway. By the time Bräuer finally receives his audience with the king, the potential consequences of the king’s choice are abundantly clear.

It further helps that the central performances are so good. Jesper Christensen will probably be most familiar to viewers in the Anglosphere as Mr White of the Daniel Craig Bond films. He plays Haakon as a strong, principled man keenly aware of his own vulnerability and the longterm ramifications of his choices. His duties toward the people weigh on him—especially since, unlike his older brother, he was not born to the throne but chosen by the people—and as he nears seventy years old he struggles manfully to withstand the bodily pains worsened by the political pressures placed upon him. Repeated scenes in which he tries to stretch and ease his bad back provide a perfectly understated human note.

Markovics (who played the lead in The Counterfeiters, a powerful German film you should watch if you haven’t) offers an excellent counterpart as Bräuer, a principled man who is nonetheless deeply deceived about his position and the forces at play in the conflict. And Christiansen as Crown Prince Olav, who feels pulled in multiple directions by his loyalty to his father, his love of his family, and his duty to the people of Norway, brings both tension and respect to his relationship with Haakon, with past hurts and family troubles only further complicating the king’s position during the invasion.

I was only passingly familiar with the role played by Haakon and the Norwegian government in 1940, so I can’t say whether the film’s interpersonal dramas are accurate or even fair. I will note that both Haakon and Olav, regardless of their differences, real or imagined, are presented respectfully. But like a comparable British film, Darkest Hour, such drama heightens the action and offers a way for the viewer to grasp the personal and emotional stakes of the geopolitical maneuvering. I certainly intend to study Haakon and his family in more detail in the future.

The King’s Choice is a finely dramatized sliver of World War II history, one very often overlooked in the American memory of the war. Like all the best films about the war, it brings the viewer into the uncertainty of the moment and underscores the principled courage of leaders who withstood aggression and guided their people through the darkness. It is well worth seeking out.

More if you’re interested

Two other Norwegian war films that I’ve seen in recent years are Max Manus: Man of War and The 12th Man, both of which concern the Norwegian resistance. I reviewed each briefly on the blog here and here. Haakon briefly appears in the former. And as a good companion film to The King’s Choice I’d recommend 9. April, a Danish movie that follows a company of bicycle infantry from the last midnight hours before the German invasion to the King of Denmark’s capitulation later that day. I gave it a full review here and it is available in its entirety, at least for now, on YouTube here.

The Civil War as “psychological test”

An interesting perspective from across the Atlantic in military historian Charles Townshend’s introductory chapter in the updated 2005 edition of The Oxford History of Modern War:

Had Europeans been able to recognize it, a still more sobering vision of the future had been provided by the American Civil War. Moltke himself dismissed the American armies—nearly half a million men on the Confederate side, over twice that number raised by the Union—as mere mobs chasing each other about the countryside. Certainly they were quite unlike European armies, more mercurial in temper and unreliable in discipline. But the failure to meet Abraham Lincoln’s unambiguous demand to ‘destroy the rebel army’ was not simply due to lack of military efficiency. Admittedly, Union generals before Ulysses S. Grant often lacked his confidence and energy. His epigrammatic assertion that ‘the art of war is simple enough; find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can, strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on’ was suitably Clausewitzian; but even he could not easily overwhelm entrenchments of the kind dug by the Confederate defenders of Petersburg in 1864. The fruitless pursuit of decisive military victories was eventually replaced by a policy of devastation, targeting the civilian roots of Confederate strength. General Philip Sheridan's systematic devastation of the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 was paralleled by William T. Sherman’s frankly terrorist six-month ‘march to the sea’ across the heartland of the Confederacy.

The American Civil War was a war of attrition, won by the slow mobilization of the industrial and technical superiority of the Northern states.* But it was not primarily a technological struggle. The Confederacy could only succeed by making the cost of the war too great: ultimately, the war was a psychological test. On the Union side, the challenge produced a response which was, in Clausewitzian terms, absolute. But while the Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared ‘we are fighting for existence’, the South proved ultimately unable to draw on the resources of modern national solidarity. The war thus confirmed the European model: national will was the basis of military force.

I appreciate the cultural and political emphasis here rather than the easy but incomplete technological or material explanation. Why the Confederacy was thus “unable to draw on the resources of modern national solidarity” is covered well in books like Emory Thomas’s The Confederate Nation and, in a much more specific study of how this affected a specific army, Larry Daniel’s Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed.

Viewing the Civil War alongside the simultaneous wars of Italian and German national unification, in which strong states (Piedmont-Sardinia, Prussia) invoked artificial national identities to enforce union and conformity, with long-running culture wars to follow, really helps make sense of what was happening on our side of the Atlantic at the time. Certainly, when teaching Western Civ II, when I invoke the Civil War after having taught the unification of Italy and Germany, I can see the relationship click for students. Conscription, propaganda, constitutional flexibility, and the state suppression or demonization of anti-war or pacifist elements are other familiar aspects of nationalist wars that relied (and rely) on the psychology of mass politics for victory.

Of course, Townshend’s invocation of attrition in the grinding bloodbath of the Civil War subtly underscores the psychological or “national will” factor. Since I’ve mentioned him here several times lately anyway, here’s John Keegan in Intelligence in War—which, coincidentally, includes a long chapter on Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign:

War is ultimately about doing, not thinking. . . . War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one. War always tends towards attrition, which is a competition in inflicting and bearing bloodshed, and the nearer attrition approaches to the extreme, the less thought counts.

Severe attrition in ancient and medieval armies usually resulted in one side breaking after a few hours at most, but modern armies—the mass conscripted armies of “people’s wars,” the subject of other chapters in The Oxford History of Modern War—endure it for days, weeks, months, with far worse results than in ancient and medieval wars. Here, as Townshend suggests, the Civil War is a prototype.

* Protip: Avoid mentioning this aspect of the outcome of the war online; though manifestly true, it will summon someone with a Sherman profile pic to come and call you a “Lost Causer.”

The fog of war is no excuse

Speaking of John Keegan, here’s a passage from the chapter on Waterloo from The Face of Battle that I’d like to enlarge upon. Regarding the way the Battle of Waterloo is traditionally described as unfolding—in five “phases” of engagement—Keegan writes:

It is probably otiose to point out that the ‘five phases’ of the battle were not perceived at the time by any of the combatants, not even, despite their points of vantage and powers of direct intervention in events, by Wellington and Napoleon. The ‘five phases’ are, of course, a narrative convenience.

A narrative convenience, he might have added, laboriously gathered and constructed after the fact and over many years. He goes on to describe “how very partial indeed was the view of most of” the participants, beginning with distraction and proceeding to visibility:

There were other causes, besides the preoccupation of duty, which deprived men of a coherent or extended view of what was going on around them. Many regiments spent much of their time lying down, usually on the reverse slope of the position, which itself obscured sight of the action elsewhere. . . . A few feet of elevation, therefore, made the difference between a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-eye view . . . But even on the crest of a position, physical obstacles could limit the soldier’s horizon very sharply. In many places, at least at the beginning of the battle, the crops of wheat and rye stood tall enough for the enemy to approach to within close musket shot undetected. . . . [T]he men in the rear or interior of dense columnar formations, of the type adopted by the Guard in their advance, would have glimpsed little of the battle but hats, necks and backs, and those at a distance of a few inches, even when their comrades at the front were exchanging fire with the enemy. And almost everyone, however well-positioned otherwise for a view, would for shorter or longer periods have been lapped or enveloped by dense clouds of gunpowder smoke.

And those are just problems affecting vision. The other senses have equally severe limitations and are just as susceptible to illusion. Look up acoustic shadow sometime. Keegan: “To have asked a survivor . . . what he remembered of the battle, therefore, would probably not have been to learn very much.”

Now compound these limitations and frequent misperceptions and misunderstands by passing them through reporters. But at least reporters are impartial, right?

Visit the New York Times complete online digital archive—or the archive of any old newspaper—and look up a the earliest possible reporting on a conflict you know a lot about. You’ll be amazed at how much is simply wrong. And that’s not even allowing for spin, for bias, for lies, for manifold other motivated errors.

What we know about battles and wars and other conflicts we know because of that laborious process I mentioned above, of gathering, compiling, organizing, and collating sources and information, and then study and study and more study, not to mention walking the ground. There are things happening now that we will never—none of us in our own lifetimes—have the perspective, much less the information, to understand completely. Even then, there will still be unanswered questions, or questions answered after years, even centuries of uncertainty.

“Assume that everything you hear or read about a current conflict is wrong, incomplete, made up, or the precise opposite of the truth.”

So my rule of thumb: Assume that everything you hear or read about a current conflict is wrong, incomplete, made up, or the precise opposite of the truth. And wait. And don’t get emotionally invested in what’s happening, especially if your sense of moral worth depends upon viewing yourself as on The Right Side and raging against a barbarous enemy.

War is tragic, and people will suffer. That’s guaranteed. But there is no reason to compound those facts with ignorant and impotent rage.

If you slow down, you won’t beclown yourself the way certain institutions have in the previous week. Many of these have now, suddenly, discovered the concept of “fog of war,” which has been dusted off to provide a sage reminder to readers instead of a mea culpa. Look here and here for samples, and here for well-earned mockery.

Per Alan Jacobs, who wrote excellently and succinctly on this topic over the weekend:

The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress. . . .

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe . . . But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.

To the New York Times’s credit, it has offered an editorial apology, but, as Jeff Winger once put it, “Be sorry about this stuff before you do it, and then don’t do it!”

I’ll end with a reflection from CS Lewis, in a passage from his World War II radio talks eventually incorporated into Mere Christianity, a passage that was going the rounds late last week:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything . . . as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

Let the reader understand.

We already have something approaching Screwtape’s universe of pure noise. Can we still turn back from a universe of pure hatred?

Making faces at the world

One of the books that most shaped me when I was figuring out how and why I studied history was The Face of Battle, by John Keegan. I read it in grad school at Clemson and ended up writing my own master’s thesis as a similar series of experience-focused case studies. This week I revisited it via the audiobook, which I listened to on my commute. It was great to go back to it after fifteen years of further study and growth, to see familiar passages afresh and to rediscover many, many details I had simply forgotten.

Like this, from Keegan’s chapter on Waterloo:

What else are we to make of the experience of the 40th Regiment? They had arrived at Waterloo dead tired after a march of fifty-one miles in forty-eight hours; three weeks before that they had disembarked from America, having been six weeks at sea. During the day of Waterloo, they lost nearly two hundred soldiers dead and wounded out of seven hundred, and fourteen out of thirty-nine officers. ‘The men in their tired state,’ Sergeant Lawrence wrote, began to despair during the afternoon, ‘but the officer cheered them on continuously.’ When the French cavalry encircled them ‘with fierce gesticulation and angry scowls, in which a display of incisors became very apparent’ the officers would call out, “Now men, make faces!’

“Make faces!” is precisely the kind of real-world absurdity in the face of death that can’t be invented. Not without effort, anyway. In all of my war fiction I’ve tried to include surprising or absurd notes—but only because I’ve read of so many like this.

Oddly—but in the free-association spirit of this blog—that moment from Waterloo brought to mind a favorite passage from CS Lewis. In a letter to his friend and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield, Lewis contrasted a certain materialist vision of the world with what living in it is actually like:

“Say what you like . . . the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.”

— CS Lewis

Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity (as if all animals were Germans), but when you study any animal you know, what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.

Indeed, and even in the dark and grim moments. Perhaps especially then.

The Lost King

Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) with Richard III (Harry Lloyd) at Bosworth Field

Over the weekend I watched two movies that, though quite different in nearly every respect, were both about kings in crisis. My aim is to review both this week. Here’s the first.

Few kings have a worse reputation than Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. His death at the Battle of Bosworth Field after a reign of just two years marked the end of the Plantagenet line, the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. And lest you think death in battle would at least leave Richard to rest in peace, a little over a century later Shakespeare came along and made him the central villain in one of his most intricate and celebrated tragedies, a play that cemented the popular image of Richard right down to the present—a cunning, hunchbacked usurper, coldblooded murderer of kin, and failure on the battlefield.

It’s one thing to have a bad reputation. Pray you never have someone of Shakespeare’s talents turn that gossip into entertainment.

But not everyone has been content with the Richard provided by Tudor drama. The Lost King tells the story of one person whose suspicion that there’s more to Richard than the legend bore unexpected fruit.

The film begins with Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), a divorced mother of two and weary Edinburgh office drone, taking one of her sons to a school performance of the play. Langley, who suffers from ME or chronic fatigue syndrome, finds herself intrigued by the disabled man at the center of all the conniving and bloodshed. Surely he is not evil just because he has a hunchback? Glib assurances of the “everybody knows” variety that Richard was evil—everybody knows he murdered his nephews!—and the potted image of Richard from schoolbooks and Shakespeare don’t convince her. An obsession is born.

Langley buys every book she can find on Richard and pores over them on breaks at work or while waiting up for her ex-husband (Steve Coogan) to bring their sons home. She contacts experts and enthusiasts online and attends meetings of the Edinburgh chapter of the Richard III Society, a group dedicated to rescuing the “real” Richard from his popular image. Not only was Richard not a usurper, she learns, he (probably) didn’t murder his nephews and had used his brief time on the throne to enact serious legal reforms. Far from being a villain, he was admirable.

As Langley’s obsession deepens, she neglects her work, spends all her spare time on studying Richard’s life… and begins seeing Richard everywhere she goes. He takes the form of the actor who had played him onstage (Harry Lloyd) and appears, glum and silent and with soulful eyes, sitting on park benches or standing in alleyways. Langley comes to believe she has a purpose to serve for him.

She finds that purpose when she decides to visit Richard’s grave and learns that he has none. No one knows what became of his body after he was cut down at Bosworth Field. If his body wasn’t disposed of in a river, he was likely buried somewhere in nearby Leicester. She learns that the leading candidate for his burial place is Greyfriars, a Franciscan house—which was dissolved by Henry VIII and demolished. No one even knows where it used to be. But, after a visit to the Leicester neighborhood where it once stood, she has a feeling.

Langley’s mission to find Greyfriars and, possibly, Richard’s grave takes her out of the world of cranks and amateur researchers and bewigged reenactors into that of tenured historians, underfunded archaeologists, and university administrators. The rest of the film chronicles her effort to fund a dig, to convince the powers that be that her feelings are born of solid research and intuition and not wishful thinking. Along the way she wins skeptical allies like the archaeologist in charge of the dig (Mark Addy) and battles dismissive obstructionists in high places, like a University of Leicester registrar (Lee Ingleby) who mocks her feelings, tries to block her project and, later, steals the glory when, against all expert predictions, the dig turns up Richard’s bones.

The Lost King is a fun film that tells its story briskly and engagingly. It boasts an excellent cast, with Hawkins and Coogan bringing a real poignancy to their strange, separated-but-cooperative relationship, and I especially liked Mark Addy as the put-upon archaeologist. The film also does a good job presenting the essentials of the debate over Richard III and his legacy, covering several of its sprawling sub-controversies on the way to focusing on the search for his body. If you like historiography, the art of juggling and judging disparate historical sources, or just a good historical mystery, The Lost King will introduce you to a perennially interesting topic.

But while the object of Langley’s quest is Richard’s bones, the movie is really about Langley. Suffering from ill-health and the misunderstanding or outright hostility of others, she sees herself in Richard, and to find and restore him to a royal tomb is also to find and redeem herself. Once she has done this, her apparition of Richard—clothed, at last, in the royal arms—can depart, and she can accept a humble life of telling others her story.

Despite what could have been a silly conceit—a ghost king following the protagonist around—this is all wonderfully written and movingly executed. As a movie, The Lost King offers wonderful light drama. But I couldn’t avoid asking some questions about its own treatment of the past.

The filmmakers use most of the standard based-on-a-true-story techniques to fit Langley’s story into a movie-shaped narrative. The timeline, for instance, is heavily compressed. Not every step in Langley’s search is dramatized and she was not the first person to posit Greyfriars as Richard’s resting place. I remember my undergrad British History professor suggesting a parking lot as Richard’s grave years before Langley and the team uncovered it. And you might be forgiven for thinking these the events of one busy autumn in Langley’s life when the real Langley’s interest in Richard began fourteen years before the discovery of his grave. Again—these are standard techniques.

But when the movie premiered in the UK last year the University of Leicester protested the way it was misrepresented in the film. Particularly, the administrator played by Lee Ingleby, who helped fund the dig and is thanked by the real Langley in her book, is depicted as a flippant mansplainer who elbows Langley out of the limelight when it comes time to take the credit—and the filmmakers use the man’s real name for this character. The University and the administrator justifiably argue that the filmmakers, in the way they chose to simplify and massage the story for dramatic effect, have streamlined the story into falsehood, crafting a narrative about one plucky outsider woman against a host of stodgy establishment men.

This kicked off a predictable he-said, she-said, with the filmmakers standing by their dramatization, the University countering with documentary and film evidence, and Langley falling back on her “experience.”

None of which necessarily detracts from the film as a film, but it is good for the viewer to be aware of. I’ve been concerned with filmic character assassination for a long time because, as Chesterton once noted, a film’s version of events could “be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had . . . only seen the film.” For a movie about rescuing not only the body but the reputation of a man unfairly maligned and mischaracterized by his enemies to have unfairly maligned and mischaracterized others in its turn is an almost Shakespearean irony.

The Lost King is well worth your time, and Langley’s efforts to exonerate Richard and see him properly buried are laudable, but watch the film remembering more than usual that it is entertainment, and that both feelings and facts matter.

More if you’re interested

You can get the basics of the controversy over the film from this BBC News article. If you’re interested in the investigation into Richard’s life and purported crimes, check out The Daughter of Time, a mystery novel by Josephine Tey about a bedridden detective’s quest to uncover the truth about Richard. Its trajectory of interest and obsession matches Langley’s quite closely. I reviewed it here last year.

Tim Powers on the danger of chasing trends

Over the last few weeks I’ve been (very, very slowly) reading Declare, a supernatural Cold War espionage thriller by Tim Powers. I reached the halfway point the other night and it’s so continuously involving and intriguing, so brilliantly imagined and deeply realized, and so different even from the science fiction that I occasionally read that I looked for some interviews with Powers. I found several recent ones on YouTube and they haven’t disappointed.

Here’s an excellent exchange from a 57-minute interview with a channel called Media Death Cult. After discussing Powers’s love of Robert Heinlein and the contemporary obsession with how “problematic” he is, Powers and the interviewer consider whether it is possible to write old-fashioned fiction in a world that adheres so dogmatically to the prevailing political pieties:

Media Death Cult: I think it’s easy to pick on [Heinlein] because his heart was in the right place. You know what I mean?

Powers: Yeah, and he suffers from, uh, being dead, uh, in that the current standards of acceptability move on. Harlan Ellison was certainly progressive, liberal, cutting edge in his time, but now being dead, the standards, acceptable norms, have moved on.

MDC: So you think someone like Heinlein or Ellison, if they were to pop up now and want to write like that, it’s just not going to stick because of this weird situation that the Western world seems to be in with the microscope that you’re put under? I think you’d be a fringe writer, wouldn’t you? Which I think is a shame. I think if we can’t get that kind of thing going again it’s a bit of a shame.

Powers: Yeah. I mean, there’ve always been trends, which I think any writer is wise to ignore. Cyberpunk, nanotech, steampunk, uh, have all been flurries that briefly inspired lots of imitations and, you know, follow-alongs, and I always think it’s a big mistake for a writer to do that—to clock what is acceptable right now, what’s popular right now? I will do that. Because at best you’re going to be one of a crowd following along, and, more likely, by the time you finally get on the bandwagon the wheels will have fallen off and it’s overturned in a field somewhere.

MDC: Yeah.

Powers: And I think these days—and I speak from the advantage of complete ignorance—

MDC: Me too.

Powers: Ha! I think there are a number of bases to touch, boxes to check, especially in current science fiction and fantasy, which I think would be detrimental for a writer to pay much attention to. I think we’re going through a sort of tunnel. I think it may not be related but I think it’s alarming that Roald Dahl, RL [Stine] who did those sort of spooky stories for kids, and Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie are having their works retroactively revised to be acceptable to 2003 [sic] standards.

It’s definitely related. Powers’s choice of the tunnel as a metaphor for our cultural moment is fitting, tunnels being narrow, dangerous, and impossible to escape in any way but getting through it.

Just don’t live unto the tunnel, or take on its shape. Do your own thing. Be your own man, write your own stories, and don’t chase the latest trend—especially if that trend is writing to appease the legion of scolds who want to dictate how you must write your story and what you must include. Bowing to this kind of political orthodoxy is the worst way to fit in and be trendy. After all, recent events have demonstrated that you can toe the line—touch every base and check every box, in Powers’s terms—and still fall afoul of the mob. A lesson anyone familiar with Bolshevism should know.

Powers and his interviewer do, however, offer a hopeful vision of the future:

MDC: You got this kind of weird landscape where everybody is—you’re right, you’re writing through this tunnel. I think we’ll come out of the other side of it, though. There is pushback.

Powers: Oh, yeah.

MDC: And it’s not just the old school who are old enough to have enjoyed these things before the world started turning woke or whatever it is. I think there is a movement, there is pushback on it. We don’t want art to be that way. We don’t want it.

Powers: Yeah, yeah. And certainly, you think, ‘Well, it’s old now, the original text of Fleming and Agatha Christie.’ But then, when I was reading Heinlein, Sturgeon, Leiber, Murray Leinster, Henry Kuttner, those were all before my time. Those weren’t new writers. I was, you know, digging around used book stores and, yeah—I don’t think the readership is going to confine itself to the new editions. I think readers are hungry enough to dig widely.

The used book store may well prove to be the ashes from which literature will resurrect itself. But first we have to pass through the tunnel.

Good stuff, and there’s more I could have included. There’s a lengthy section in which Powers talks about his friendship with Philip K Dick that was especially good. Check out the entire interview at the link above or in the embedded YouTube player.

Special thanks to those of y’all who’ve recommended Declare to me at some point, especially David and Chet. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve already picked up Powers’s supernatural pirate epic On Stranger Tides, which looks amazing, and I’d be glad to hear from other Powers fans which of his other books would be good to look into after that. I’ve already heard good things about Last Call. In the meantime, I’m trying to make time between work and the commute and feeding babies all night to finish Declare. Looking forward to all the big revelations along the way.

The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.