The Island of Sheep

Today we enter the final week of this year’s John Buchan June by continuing with the “lasts” of Buchan’s fiction career. Last week we looked at his last historical novel, The Free Fishers. Today we bid farewell to Buchan’s most famous hero, Richard Hannay, in the last of his adventures, the book that biographer Andrew Lownie calls “the forgotten Richard Hannay novel”: The Island of Sheep.

After running from German agents provocateurs, crossing the length of war-torn Europe to foil a German plot in the Middle East, surviving the Western Front—among other hazards—and risking his life to save three people kidnapped by a scheming society man, General Sir Richard Hannay is finally and firmly settled in the countryside. He lives contentedly at Fosse, his estate, with his wife Mary and now-teenage son Peter John and journeys into London only on parliamentary business. But, Hannay being Hannay, this peaceful life and comfortable existence feels unearned.

Memories and chance meetings further shake him out of his cossetted torpor. One day in Parliament a chance remark reminds Hannay of Lombard, a driven, ambitious friend from his youth in South Africa and Rhodesia. Hannay has not seen Lombard since a fateful night on the savannah when he, Lombard, and Peter Pienaar had sworn an oath to an elderly Danish explorer named Haraldsen to come to his aid if he ever called for help against old enemies. “More,” Hannay notes, “we must be ready to come to his son's help, for he considered that this vendetta might not end with his own life, and we were to hand on the duty to our own sons. As none of us was married that didn’t greatly worry us.”

On the train back to Fosse after the speech, Hannay realizes that Lombard, now bald, thick in the middle, and much more modest in his goals, is sitting across from him. The two chat pleasantly and discuss meeting and catching up sometime, but Hannay senses that Lombard is embarrassed that he never accomplished his youthful plans and Lombard, we later learn, sensed correctly that Hannay looked down on him. The suggested meeting never comes.

Later, on a holiday to the coast with Mary and Peter John, an avid birdwatcher and falconer, Hannay meets a man traveling under the name of Smith who is clearly foreign. He joins Hannay and Peter John on their hunts but sympathizes with the prey rather than the hunters, and disappears suddenly. A hunted man, Hannay thinks, and turns out to be right.

Because the “Smith” Hannay and Peter John get to know is, in fact, Haraldsen’s son Valdemar, and Hannay and Lombard owe a debt to him based on that long-ago pledge under the African moon.

The elder Haraldsen, it turns out, has died at a great age in a remote corner of East Asia in pursuit of the Old Testament Ophir, and Lancelot Troth, the son of a crooked former business partner—who had tried not only to swindle but to kill Haraldsen the night that Hannay, Lombard, and Peter Pienaar saved him—has come back for revenge. Troth has teamed up with his dead father’s former partner, Erick Albinus, and an investor named Barralty, who seems to be the intellectual of the bunch. Together, they have hounded the unassuming and unworldly Valdemar Haraldsen from his island home near the Arctic Circle to hideout after hideout in the British Isles. Hannay, honor-bound to keep his oath, agrees to host Haraldsen in cognito at Fosse.

Haraldsen’s pursuers don’t allow him to rest for long. Soon Hannay, his family, and Haraldsen have decamped to Scotland and Laverlaw, the estate of Hannay’s old friend and comrade-in-arms Sandy Arbuthnot. Lombard arrives with Haraldsen’s daughter Anna, having barely saved her from kidnapping by Troth’s henchmen and cannily shaken the kidnappers off during a cross-country car chase. Reunited with his daughter and enjoying the company of Hannay and his son, Haraldsen loses the hunted, furtive look he has taken on and becomes bolder and more confident—so much so that he decides, after his enemies discover his whereabouts again, that he must face them directly on his own home turf, the Island of Sheep.

The novel thus takes place across three homes: Fosse, where we first meet Hannay at rest; Laverlaw, where Hannay and Sandy retreat with Haraldsen and his daughter; and the Island of Sheep, where the group meet with the power behind Troth, Albinus, Barralty, and their co-conspirators in a final confrontation.

Though I’ve loved The Thirty-Nine Steps for years, I’ve been surprised to discover, since starting this annual project, that Richard Hannay is not my favorite of Buchan’s recurring heroes. I much prefer Sir Edward Leithen and find Dickson McCunn, though his adventures are nowhere near as thrilling, better company. And after the one-two excitements of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle I found Mr Standfast a bit of a slog and The Three Hostages enjoyable but hardly a return to form. So I approached The Island of Sheep a bit hesitantly. I’m glad to say it was wonderful.

The Island of Sheep is not, however, The Thirty-Nine Steps or Greenmantle. Though exciting and suspenseful this, Buchan’s penultimate novel, the last before Sick Heart River, already has something of that posthumously-published work’s reflective tone. Hannay, older now if not much wiser, is troubled by big questions and new kinds of enemies. The novel begins with his guilt over what he feels to be unearned comfort, and the plot is driven by the unresolved hatreds and loyalties of multiple generations. The ending, which I realized reminded me a lot of the climax of Skyfall, suggests that simplification, a return to basics—old vows fulfilled, old ways preserved, national character embraced—and direct confrontation of evil are the only lasting solutions. Until then, a man must live discontented and ill at ease. “Every man,” Lombard says in the end, “must discover his own Island of Sheep.”

The novel is thus thematically rich, but it is also technically excellent. Though written over a busy year and “finished with difficulty” according to Buchan himself, it has none of the pacing problems of Mr Standfast or The Three Hostages, and though—looked at objectively—Hannay does not actually do much in the novel, one is not aware of this as the story unfolds. The early chapters in particular, which are full of flashbacks and stories-within-stories, are especially well paced, and broaden the scope of this adventure through Hannay’s memories of Africa and Sandy’s recounting of journeys in the Far East.

Most of the characters will be familiar to readers of the other Hannay stories, but the newcomers stand out, especially Peter John, last seen as an infant in The Three Hostages, and Anna Haraldsen. Andrew Lownie, in his introduction to the edition I read, compares Peter John and Anna favorably to the young heroes of Robert Louis Stevenson. They are handsomely matched, both in temperament and expertise—Peter John the falconer, hunter, and bird expert, Anna the relict Viking girl, a powerful swimmer and kayaker. One wonders what Buchan might have made of them had he lived longer. The ultimate villain, whom Sandy first infers is behind the plot against Haraldsen, returns from The Courts of the Morning, a novel I haven’t read, though I didn’t find that this hurt my reading of The Island of Sheep. It certainly didn’t make the climactic showdown—which involves fire, cliffs, harpoons, whaling, a terrible thunderstorm, and the legendary berserkr rage—any less suspenseful or dramatic.

As a final note, this novel features some of Buchan’s strongest and most beautiful nature writing. The landscapes range from remembered African hills and savannahs to the marshes of the Solent and the cliffs and lochs of the Faroe Islands—thinly disguised as “the Norlands”—as well as the English countryside and the Scottish Borders. Buchan, always skilled in describing places, is in rare form here, and excels not only at his descriptions of places but of the people who live in them and their many folkways. Here’s a passage from the sheep shearing on Sandy Arbuthnot’s estate that I stopped and read aloud to my wife for pure pleasure:

We all attended the clipping. It was a very hot day, and the air in the fold was thick with the reek of sheep and the strong scent of the keel-pot, from which the shorn beasts were marked with a great L. I have seen a good deal of shearing in my time, but I have never seen it done better than by these Borderers, who wrought in perfect silence and apparently with effortless ease. The Australian sheep-hand may be quicker at the job, but he could not be a greater artist. There was never a gash or a shear-mark, the fleeces dropped plumply beside the stools, and the sheep, no longer dingy and weathered but a dazzling white, were as evenly trimmed as if they had been fine women in the hands of a coiffeur. It was too smelly a place for the women to sit in long, but twenty yards off was crisp turf beginning to be crimsoned with bell-heather, and the shingle-beds and crystal waters of the burn. We ended by camping on a little hillock, where we could look down upon the scene, and around to the hills shimmering in the heat, and up to the deep blue sky on which were etched two mewing buzzards.

The Island of Sheep is not, strictly speaking, the end of Richard Hannay. He is mentioned off-hand in Sick Heart River, the very last of Buchan’s novels, as a member of Sir Edward Leithen’s club and a picture of “serene contentment.” But this final adventure is a worthy one, the best since Greenmantle, and one that, in honoring old promises, vanquishing evil, and saving a soul, earned Hannay the peace in which Buchan left him.

The Free Fishers

Today John Buchan June continues with Buchan’s final work of historical fiction, the 1934 novel The Free Fishers.

Set in Scotland and the North Sea coast of Norfolk, during the Regency and at the height of Napoleon’s powers over the Continent, The Free Fishers begins with Anthony “Nanty” Lammas leaving a meeting of a secret society. Despite his position as professor of rhetoric and logic at St Andrews, Lammas grew up among the fishermen and sailors of the Fife coast and is an initiate of the Free Fishers, their underground fraternity, a network connecting its members to thousands of others all over Britain. This evening, Lammas learns that one of his former students, Jock Kinloch, has also joined the group.

Kinloch complains to Lammas that his attentions to a young lady named Kirsty Evandale are not being reciprocated. Miss Evandale only has eyes for Harry Belses—another of Lammas’s former students—and Harry, in his turn, has an apparently unhealthy interest in a mysterious Mrs Cranmer. This lady, whose husband is a wealthy aristocrat, lives on a remote moorland estate called Hungrygrain. She is also rumored to have outspoken Jacobin sympathies. All of which frustrates the volatile Jock and bewilders Lammas.

Shortly thereafter Lammas receives a special assignment from the college: under cover of traveling to London to beg funds from one of the school’s benefactors, Lord Snowdoun, he must save Snowdoun’s son from an impending duel concerning a lady. The son is Harry Belses. Harry’s challenger is the terrifying Sir Turnour Wyse, an excellent shot with a pistol. The lady is Mrs Cranmer.

Lammas, disconcerted to be sent on such a mission, consults the leader of the Free Fishers, Eben Garnock. In addition to smuggling and the usual duties of a guild or secret society, the Fishers occasionally conduct deniable intelligence work on behalf of the crown. Mrs Cranmer, Lammas learns, is rumored to be a Jacobin spy working on behalf of Napoleon. Already Lammas’s task has taken on more serious dimensions than sorting out a young man’s love life.

Lammas sets out for London and almost immediately meets Sir Turnour, a handsome, physically powerful, and arrogant man obsessed with matters of honor who is also a master horseman. Lammas also learns during one stop on his route that Harry, who had been locked up by his own family in London until Sir Turnour could be placated, has escaped and headed north, presumably homing in on Mrs Cranmer. Lammas changes his plans. He must stop Harry and keep him away from Sir Turnour.

As The Free Fishers nears its midway point, Lammas and Jock, with the aid of Eben Garnock and the Fishers, as well as Harry and Sir Turnour independently, all converge upon Hungrygrain and Mrs Cranmer. There they will encounter hostile locals, a suspiciously empty public house with an unhelpful landlord, and a small army of henchmen patrolling the grounds of Hungrygrain. They will also discover the truth about Mrs Cranmer and her husband, and that a plot is in motion to assassinate the Prime Minister.

I can’t summarize much more of The Free Fishers without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that its plot falls into two halves.

In the first half, Lammas leaves St Andrews on his mission and encounters person after person whom he regards, largely on the basis of hearsay, as an antagonist only to find that, not only do they have good qualities, they are ultimately on the same side. This half charmingly reminded me of The Man Who was Thursday, Chesterton’s breakneck thriller in which, one by one, the hero discovers that all of his enemies are actually friends. The second half of The Free Fishers is a suspenseful cross-country race by an unlikely team to stop the assassination and protect an innocent person from being framed.

I mentioned above that The Free Fishers was Buchan’s last historical novel. It is neither his best nor his most famous story but it shows all of his skills and experience as a writer in peak form. Comparison with an earlier historical novel like Salute to Adventurers is instructive. There, an extended prologue gives way to a sprawling, convoluted plot taking place over years, and though the mystery steadily builds in tension, the reader will win no prizes for guessing the identity of the villain. The Free Fishers, on the other hand, is light, high-spirited, and wittily written, unfolding at a fast, steady, expert pace over just a few days and revealing new surprises in every chapter. I greatly enjoyed both books but The Free Fishers is formally superior and, most importantly, more exciting.

Much more. The climactic action of The Free Fishers is suspenseful and the conclusion to Lammas’s story thoroughly satisfying. Though its plot and themes echo many of Buchan’s earlier historical novels—especially the call of a bookish minister to action and danger in Witch Wood and the benevolent workings of an ancient secret society in Midwinter—this is Buchan’s best executed exploration of them. If it has any shortcoming, it is that preventing the assassination of a now lesser-known Prime Minister gives the book lower stakes. The Napoleonic threat does not feel quite as eminent as it perhaps should. Still, The Free Fishers is a wonderful adventure, and I’d rate it just below Buchan’s historical masterpiece, the rich, eerie, and oppressive Witch Wood.

I could say more. The characters are strongly developed and surprising. Buchan proves especially adept at manipulating the reader’s sympathies, the best example being the haughty Sir Turnour Wyse. And Buchan evokes the world of royal roads, mail coaches, and wayside inns—whether in the hills of the Borders or the fens of Norfolk—with effortless vividness. This is the bustling highway world just out of sight of Jane Austen’s Regency.

Shortly after the publication of The Free Fishers, Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada, a position in which he served until his death. This appointment, his move from Elsfield in southern England, illness, and affairs of state slowed his writing of fiction, and he produced only three more thrillers—the final adventures of Dickson McCunn, Richard Hannay, and, most movingly, Sir Edward Leithen—before he died in 1940. But if he produced no more historical novels, at least this part of his writing career ended on a note of adventure, brotherhood, and swashbuckling fun.

On artistic innovations that don’t make art better

For years now I’ve wanted to write a blog post about the Coke machines on my college’s campus. They’re sleek, modern, and high tech, with WiFi-integrated chip card readers and LED lights and a system of robotic conveyor belts that whisk your drink out of the rack to dispense it in a rotating receptacle with its own recessed lighting.

They also don’t work very well. All that innovation has resulted in more points of failure than the rudimentary, purely mechanical Coke machines I grew up with. One of those might occasionally have eaten your change. These can break in at least twenty ways. I’ve counted. Technological sophistication has actually made the machines worse for their original purpose.

Here’s a quotation I’ve been meaning to share for a while, a passage from poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Notes on the New Formalism,” which was published in 1999 but that I first ran across last year:

These young poets have grown up in a literary culture so removed from the predominantly oral traditions of metrical verse that they can no longer hear it accurately. Their training in reading and writing has been overwhelmingly visual not aural, and they have never learned to hear the musical design a poem executes. For them poems exist as words on a page rather than sounds in the mouth and ear. While they have often analyzed poems, they have rarely memorized and recited them. Nor have they studied and learned poems by heart in foreign languages where sound patterns are more obvious to nonnative speakers. Their often extensive critical training in textual analysis never included scansion, and their knowledge of even the fundamentals of prosody is haphazard (though theory is less important in practice than mastering the craft of versification). Consequently, they have neither much practical nor theoretical training in the way sounds are organized as poetry. Ironically this very lack of training makes them deaf to their own ineptitude. Full of confidence, they rely on instincts they have never developed. Magisterially they take liberties with forms whose rudimentary principles they misconstrue. Every poem reveals some basic confusion about its own medium. Some misconceptions ultimately prove profitable for art. Not this one.

The failures of both modern poetry and modern Coke machines stem from a fundamental misapprehension of their purpose—what they’re for, how they’re supposed to work. The basics are neglected. Not for nothing does the phrase mechanical failure apply in both instances. What you end up with is pointless sophistication (cf. Jacques Barzun’s definition of “decadence”) that often doesn’t even work.

A silly comparison, probably, but one that is broadly applicable.

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work

Today marks a first for this blog’s observance of John Buchan June: the review of one of Buchan’s non-fiction books. Though now primarily remembered for thrillers like The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan also wrote many, many works of non-fiction, including biographies, legal analysis, literary criticism, memoir, and a history of the First World War begun while the war was still in progress and eventually totaling 24 volumes. Take a look at his bibliography sometime to get a clearer sense of the breadth of his literary career.

Following the end of the war and through the 1930s, Buchan wrote several biographies of figures he admired—Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, Montrose—as a way to recuperate from both the strain of his duties during the war as well as recurrent illness. Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is the first and shorter of two that Buchan wrote about Scott (1771-1832). Originally published in 1925 as The Man and the Book: Sir Walter Scott, part of a series of short authors’ lives from his publisher, Thomas Nelson, this book is more an introduction to Scott’s life and a brief critical appraisal of his work than a full biography.

Buchan begins with a capsule overview of Scott’s background, ancestry, childhood in Scotland, and education, covering as well Scott’s career in law, through which he gained a position that made his literary work possible. After this introduction Buchan closely examines Scott’s writing, beginning with his poetry. Scott started off as the author of long narrative verse and an anthologizer of Scots border ballads, two activities that established Scott’s reputation as a poet and national folklorist and raised interest in Scots poetry and culture more generally.

Scott’s turn from verse to fiction—and his virtual invention of the genre of historical fiction—marks the most important event of his career, and Buchan spends the greater part of the book on Scott’s novels. Appropriately so, as these are the works for which Scott is still read and remembered. Visit a bookstore of your choice and, if they have Scott in stock, it will almost certainly not be Glenfinlas or The Lay of the Last Minstrel but Waverley or Ivanhoe or Rob Roy.

It is easy to see why Buchan admired Scott. Both were of Scottish extraction, deeply educated, and naturally gifted storytellers; both rose from relative obscurity through talent and hard work and moved among the great names of their day; and both produced exciting fictions marked by an idealistic but fundamentally patriotic traditionalist vision of the world. Buchan is no hero-worshiper, however. He bluntly acknowledges deficiencies in Scott’s work—pacing problems in Waverley, for example, or unnecessarily melodramatic speeches in Rob Roy or “the weak and careless ending” of Heart of Midlothian. But Buchan also makes it clear that these flaws are only flaws, that they count little against the craft, insight, and delight of the best of Scott’s work. I’ve written here before about Buchan’s assessment of Scott’s basic tools as a novelist, but he also praises Scott for his skill at describing landscapes, his ability to evoke the spirit of long-gone times, and for his characterization of familiar Scots types, including, amusingly, “the greatest alewife in literature.”

Following his overview of Scott’s long and successful career as a novelist, Buchan turns from “The Sunshine of Success,” the period following the 1819 publication of Ivanhoe, “which had a more clamorous welcome across the Borders than any other of the novels” and “marked the high-water point of Sir Walter’s popularity,” through the prolific output of the 1820s to “The Dark Days,” Scott’s final years—years of decline and near financial ruin.

Given how thin this book is on the details of Scott’s life, I found this penultimate chapter especially interesting. Having invested heavily in his publisher but not taken care to oversee how the business was run, Scott was left responsible for enormous debts upon the firm’s collapse. Rather than declare bankruptcy, which Scott viewed as cheating his creditors, he worked like mad despite his failing health to see that they were all paid in full. Buchan presents this as the admirable action of a principled and honest man, but he notes that not all of Scott’s contemporaries saw it this way. The historian Thomas Carlyle described Scott’s refusal to accept bankruptcy as desperate pride: “Refuge did lie elsewhere,” he wrote, “but it was not Scott’s course or habit of mind to seek it there.”

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is a short book and much of the middle is taken up with long quotations from Scott’s novels—many of them twenty pages long, with one coming in at thirty pages—but in the interstitial critical commentary and chapters of straight biography Buchan offers a concise, vivid, well-rounded portrait of the man. Much of the finer detail of traditional biography is missing, but by the time Scott meets his end, on September 21, 1832, “breath[ing] his last in the presence of all his children,” the reader still feels he knows him and is sorry to see him go. He is also—if I can speak for myself—eager to revisit Scott’s novels, or to read the many he has never gotten around to.

As mentioned above, this was only the first of Buchan’s books on Scott. The second, Sir Walter Scott, a full biography praised for its research and readability, arrived in 1932. I hope to read that sometime in the future. In the meantime, Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work, offers a good introduction to both the man and the poetry and fiction he left behind, as well as a good glimpse of Buchan himself through this sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of one of his literary heroes.

Buchan and Sabatini (and Freeman)

Something that piqued my interest while reading Salute to Adventurers but that I couldn’t work into my John Buchan June review, which I posted yesterday:

Early in Salute to Adventurers, which begins in Scotland in 1685, the narrator encounters a heretical preacher with revolutionary burn-it-all-down politics named John Gib. Gib is arrested and deported as penal slave labor “to the plantations” in the colonies, specifically Virginia. This punishment, taking place in this period, and the later involvement of pirates in the plot reminded me of Rafael Sabatini’s great swashbuckler Captain Blood, which I read once many years ago. At the beginning of that novel, Dr Peter Blood is unjustly arrested and transported to the colonies in penal servitude, in this case to Barbados. I looked Captain Blood up to refresh myself on the details and this also takes place in 1685, during the Monmouth Rebellion.

I read Captain Blood about the same time as The Curse of Capistrano (1919) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and associated it with those, so I had only a vague sense of when Sabatini lived, but it turns out that he and Buchan were exact contemporaries, born just four months apart in 1875. Both started publishing fiction around the turn of the century, though Buchan found success much earlier, Sabatini’s career in fiction only really taking off with the back-to-back successes of Scaramouche and Captain Blood in 1921 and 22. Sabatini outlived Buchan by almost exactly a decade, dying in February 1950—two days after the tenth anniversary of Buchan’s death.

There’s an interesting comparison of the two men’s lives and careers waiting to be made here, but unfortunately I have only read Captain Blood. I remember enjoying it. I’ll have to make time for more Sabatini down the road.

Salute to Adventurers’ Virginia setting also reminded me of Buchan’s broader interest in Virginia history. I’ve briefly mentioned this story here before, but in the 1920s Buchan made a trip to Virginia during which he made a fascinating literary acquaintance. Here’s Ursula Buchan’s account in Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps:

It was a thrilling ten days for [Buchan], especially as he had long had in mind writing a biography of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader for whose generalship he had the greatest admiration. But when at Richmond, he met the journalist and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who guided them over the country of the so-called ‘Seven Days Battles’, from the [Chickahominy] River to Malvern Hill, he backed off, because Freeman had already begun his magisterial four-volume study of Lee.

Andrew Lownie, in his biography, quotes Buchan as saying that he “would rather write that life than do any other piece of literary work I can think of.” Lownie goes further, writing that it was Buchan who first suggested the Lee project to Freeman, but Freeman had already been approached about it by a publisher long before the two met.

One imagines Buchan and Freeman would have gotten along well, both being devout, high-minded patriots with a keen historical sense and a frankly unbelievable work ethic. (Here’s a summary of Freeman’s daily routine.) Freeman’s four-volume RE Lee is a classic, but I would certainly have appreciated Buchan’s perspective in a shorter life of Lee.

Salute to Adventurers

This year’s John Buchan June continues with an earlier Buchan story, his first novel after the success of his colonial South African thriller Prester John in 1910 and one that sees him in his finest Robert Louis Stevenson historical high adventure mode: the fittingly titled Salute to Adventurers.

The narrator of Salute to Adventurers is young Andrew Garvald, the descendant of a once-prominent aristocratic Scots family that, by the 1680s, has fallen on hard times. When the novel begins in 1685, Garvald is a young student at Edinburgh on his way back to the city from his home in the hills nearby. After first getting lost and being helped on his way by a beautiful young woman and then happening upon an ecstatic outdoor prayer service led by a crank preacher, the massive and frightening Muckle John Gib, Garvald finds himself unjustly thrown into jail with Gib and his followers. The girl he had earlier met, whose name, he learns, is Elspeth Blair, helps secure his release. Gib will be transported to the colonies in penal servitude. Garvald returns to his life.

Following this prologue, some years go by in which Garvald joins his uncle’s trading business in the city and agrees to make a trip to the colonies on his behalf. Not long after arriving in Tidewater Virginia he realizes he must go into business for himself, and his hard work and rapid success pose a threat to the mercantilist concerns that have monopolized Virginia trade. Garvald finds himself commercially indispensable to the merchants and planters of the colony but socially shunned and even threatened. He catches arsonists at work on his property and, mysteriously, the pirates that prowl the coast consistently target not only his ships but his merchandise specifically.

Garvald consults the colonial governor but, finding a friendly ear but little help there, seeks out a man he had once run into in Edinburgh—one Ninian Campbell, who Garvald now learns is the notorious pirate Red Ringan. On the basis of their brief connection in the old country, Ringan agrees to help Garvald. He also confirms Garvald’s suspicions that the colony, a thinly populated agricultural region hugging the coast and still clutching its lifeline to Britain, is vulnerable to Indian attack. Garvald, acting on his own initiative and with the advice and contacts of Ringan, travels the settlements of the colonial backcountry constructing a private militia network for the colony’s defense.

Meanwhile, Garvald also reconnects with Elspeth, who now lives on a plantation with a wealthy uncle of her own. More ominously, he catches one brief glimpse of John Gib, now working a tobacco field dressed in rags. But the man recognizes Garvald and slips away.

Busy with trade and business, working against his unpopularity with the snobs of the planter class, striving to build a network of protection along the frontier, shyly trying to prove himself to Elspeth, and less shyly defending himself from aristocratic challengers for her hand, Garvald is already preoccupied when he learns of a serious threat on the frontier. But this turns out not to be the aggressive bands of Cherokee raiders that he initially suspects and fights with, but a much larger, more formidable, more terrifying and bloodthirsty force no one has seen or heard of before. And, as these circumstances unexpectedly converge, Garvald realizes that only he knows about the danger.

Salute to Adventurers is hard to summarize, partly because it is so uncommonly rich for an adventure story. It takes much of what worked in Prester John—the tough-minded but inexperienced Scottish youth, the faraway colonial setting, the dangerous environments, the fanatical hidden antagonist—and expands upon it, mingling in the high-flown dramatic sensibilities of stories like Kidnapped and Treasure Island—pirates, duels, Indians, colorful sidekicks, quests for buried objects, hopeless sieges in wilderness stockades, trial by combat, torture, and heroic sacrifice. The complicated plot uncoils smoothly and with a maximum of suspense, helped as always by Buchan’s sense of pacing. Salute to Adventurers was published the same year as The Thirty-Nine Steps, a much shorter book, and both are masterpieces of pacing in their respective genres.

Another of Buchan’s strengths, setting, also proves crucial. Buchan has been lauded by many readers and critics for his attention to geography and his ability to make imaginary landscapes visible and understandable to the reader, and that is especially true of this rare New World adventure. And, of course, the ways the land and its history shape its people matter, too. Here’s Garvald’s pen-portrait of Virginia as he knew it in the 1690s:

He who only knew James Town and the rich planters knew little of the true Virginia. There were old men who had long memories of Indian fights, and men in their prime who had risen with Bacon, and young men who had their eyes turned to the unknown West. There were new-comers from Scotland and North Ireland, and a stout band of French Protestants, most of them gently born, who had sought freedom for their faith beyond the sway of King Louis. You cannot picture a hardier or more spirited race than the fellows I thus recruited.

In Salute to Adventurers Buchan brings to life whole worlds: the thriving, striving, and rumbustious land of tobacco planters and merchants on the Tidewater; the hard-bitten frontier of small farmers, hunters, and fugitives; and the unimaginable wilds of Indian territory beyond.

This is not to say that Salute to Adventurers is historically perfect. Buchan introduces teepee-dwelling Sioux in a few places in Virginia and the Carolinas and Blackbeard plying the Atlantic about twenty years before his time. But what he realistically captures is the spirit of the age and every manner of person living in the chaotic social grab-bag of Virginia at the time. I’ve hardly mentioned it, but Salute to Adventurers even works as a comedy of manners or class drama in some early chapters.

But what holds the novel together is not just its plotting and pacing and beautifully realized setting, but its characters. Garvald, the narrator, is a solid example of a common Buchan narrator—young, driven, manly, and principled but self-reflective enough to doubt himself or wrestle with fear, not to mention honorable to a fault. Elspeth is less vivacious and outdoorsy than Buchan heroines like Janet Raden or Alison Westwater, but is tough, whip-smart, and as principled as Garvald, which makes her stand out from the striving Virginia elite and complicates their romance. Garvald’s allies Red Ringan and the mysterious Indian exile Shalah prove excellent allies, as does an initially antagonistic young planter named Charles Grey, who is jealous of Elspeth’s attentions. Grey in particular has a good character arc, passing from childish antagonism toward Garvald to principled loyalty in the face of danger.

And of course there is Muckle John Gib, the heretical preacher and would-be revolutionary. It should not be a spoiler to mention that, after Garvald’s two brief run-ins with him, Gib returns to the story in an important role. Gib is a case study in Buchan’s concern about fanaticism, but what Buchan presents in Gib—unlike, say, the ideological Laputa of Prester John or the German agents sowing religious violence in the Middle East in Greenmantle—is the fanatic as the man of principle run amok. In this way, Gib is a counterpart to Garvald rather than an opposite, and it is not through force of arms that Garvald eventually triumphs over Gib and his plot, which I don’t want to spoil, but through reason and moral suasion. Even if you can predict that Gib will return, you cannot predict the nature of their final confrontation, though it is suspenseful and thematically perfect.

Salute to Adventures proved a pleasant surprise for me. It is not readily available now (there is no John Buchan Society-authorized edition from Polygon, unlike so many I’ve read so far) and is not today one of Buchan’s better-remembered books. But it deserves a place among the best of his historical fiction and especially his early work, and was a most enjoyable adventure.

Concepts and ideas in the novel

From critic and essayist Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? an apologia for the novel as a form:

“Create a concept and reality leaves the room.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

Concepts have their value, but they tend to explain more than they can justify. From Karl Marx’s class-struggle to Max Weber’s linking the rise of capitalism to the rise of Protestantism to Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex, conceptual thinking tends invariably to be both overly ambitious and sketchy, leaving out crucial aspects of human experience, and thereby necessarily highly simplifying. “Create a concept,” Ortega wrote, “and reality leaves the room.”

What Epstein calls “concepts” could also be called “theories” or, more precisely, “ideologies,” though the line between all of these is blurry. Epstein continues this paragraph with an observation on the similarly limiting effects of specialization:

Scientists, historians, politicians, economists, and poets all perceived the world, as Michael Oakeshott noted, through what he termed their separate “mode of experience,” but for him each of these modes was partial, incomplete, only part of the story. Oakeshott also felt that the whole story was not to be encompassed through any discrete mode of learning, even through philosophy, with its pretensions to be architectonic.

The novel, Epstein argues, has an important role in culture because of its ability to create comprehensive imaginative visions of human experience informed by the author’s understanding of human nature, something the arts and sciences tend to approach from only one angle.

Later, Epstein contrasts the ideological novel, the novel of “concepts,” with “the novel of ideas”:

“[W]hile all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas.”

— Joseph Epstein

Of the various forms the novel has taken-the family chronicle, the picaresque, the satire, the novel of ideas—the last, the novel of ideas, may seem a contradiction. I say a contradiction because, first, while all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas. . . . When ideas are at the forefront in fiction, when ideas dictate fact, characters seem diminished, plot suffers, and reality leaves not only the room but the novel.

That is, ideas and theory have to be expressed in “facts,” as characters, places, events, deeds, and choices. Epstein quotes the critic Northrop Frye: “An interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.”

Which is not to say that ideas have no place in fiction, just that they must take concrete form if they are to work as fiction. Epstein praises Dostoevsky and other 19th century Russian novelists as the masters of this form of philosophical storytelling. Certainly there have been many poor attempts to write novels of ideas, and the more the ideas veer into “concepts” or a systematized ideology—whether of the Dalton Trumbo or Ayn Rand varieties, though we are of course afflicted with a lot of strongly ideological fiction today—the more the storytelling suffers.

Food for thought. I’m enjoying The Novel, Who Needs It? and if I’m able I’ll have a full review when I’m done.

Castle Gay

Today marks the beginning of my third annual John Buchan June. I started this blog series two years ago in an effort to reclaim my birth month from other themed celebrations and turn it in a more fun, wholesome, and adventurous direction. As it happens, the Buchan novel we’re starting this year’s festivities with fits that description perfectly—the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay.

Buchan introduced Dickson McCunn, a retired Glasgow grocer with a businesslike mind and a romantic heart, in 1922’s Huntingtower. Castle Gay picks up six years after his retirement and first adventure as he hosts two of the Gorbals Die-Hards, the young scouts from a Glasgow slum who had assisted him in routing Bolshevik agents and saving a Russian princess. Now grown, Jaikie Galt is a Cambridge rugby star and Dougal Crombie a reporter for one of the largest newspaper chains in Britain. McCunn, who had taken the boys in after the events Huntingtower, is justifiably proud of them, and sees them off on a walking tour of Scotland ahead of Jaikie’s return to Cambridge.

But this being a John Buchan novel, not long after setting out Jaikie and Dougal fall headlong into a plot that slowly grows more complex and dangerous the more they discover about it. First, they happen upon Dougal’s wealthy employer, Thomas Carlyle Craw, under apparent house arrest deep in the countryside. It turns out that local students have kidnapped Craw as a prank, mistaking him for an older student running for rector of their university, and the befuddled landlady is holding him there. Dougal and Jaikie offer to contact Craw’s staff and the outraged Craw sends a letter with them announcing his predicament.

When they arrive at Craw’s vacation home, Castle Gay, they discover the gates locked and barricaded and reporters from rival newspaper chains skulking the grounds. With the help of a spirited local girl named Alison Westwater they enter the castle and learn that not only are reporters snooping the countryside trying to find out why Craw is missing, but an envoy of agents from the eastern European republic of Evallonia are in the neighborhood, hoping to meet him. Craw, in the high-minded editorials he dashes off from the seclusion of his homes around the country, has taken a hard pro-monarchy stance on this distant country’s politics in the hopes of preventing its takeover by Bolshevik-aligned radicals.

At first Jaikie, Douglas, Alison, and Craw’s staff assume that the visiting Evallonians are republicans hoping to kidnap or otherwise harm Craw for his influential opinions. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the group represents the monarchist faction, and that the heir to the Evallonian throne himself may be among them.

But the republicans are not out of the picture and, as Jaikie shuffles Craw through the countryside and Dougal works to prepare the way for his boss’s return following his strange absence, they learn that this faction is also present in the area, that they’re watching the land around Castle Gay closely, and that their intentions are much more sinister than those of their monarchist rivals.

And so Jaikie and Dougal find themselves saving a newspaper magnate from one kidnapping plot and trying to foil another, meanwhile guarding Craw’s reputation as well as his life by dodging rival reporters from London and Bolshevik spies from eastern Europe, facilitating a nighttime escape by sea, and even managing a costume ball in which real European royalty appear in disguise, all leading to a dramatic final confrontation in the stately library of Castle Gay. Along the way, Dougal comes into his own as a reporter, Craw reconnects with the real world, and Jaikie falls in love.

Castle Gay is not as good as Huntingtower, which benefited from a simpler plot with the lovable Dickson McCunn at its heart, but it is greatly enjoyable. No less a reader than Evelyn Waugh praised its masterful handling of tones that should clash—the thrilling, the romantic, the comic. Buchan has a lot of fun at Craw’s expense, with Jaikie dragging the put-upon media mogul through the rain and mud and cold of the Scottish countryside. And while fun and often funny, Buchan also gives Craw a clear character arc. This fussy, picky, detached newspaperman, who lives in carefully controlled comfort, has his expensive suit ruined and his impractical shoes destroyed on what to Jaikie is an unremarkable walk through the hills, but once he has gotten past his outrage and his discomfort he discovers real physical courage and, Buchan suggests, rescues his soul.

Buchan also plays with irony and mistaken identity, not only in Craw’s initial kidnapping, in which he is merely the victim of a student gag, but later, when one of the reporters finally gets into Castle Gay and has a surprising interview with the reclusive Craw—not knowing that it is actually Dickson McCunn. When the interview is published in a rival paper, Craw is furious at the very McCunn-like opinions ascribed to himself, but can’t disavow them.

All of which is humorous, but it also hints at Buchan’s genuine concern with the influence of the news media. Buchan wrote Castle Gay while recovering from an illness in 1929 and published it in 1930, a time when central and eastern Europe were still in a tumult as a result of the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles. Opinions on foreign politics were hotly debated in the Anglophone world, which was often a point of resentment in the countries in question. The influential Craw, stumping for monarchy in a republic presumably carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (the Evallonians’ names are all scrupulously polyglot, making Evallonia impossible to pin down as a stand-in for any specific country), attracts the wrong kind of attention from both parties in Evallonian politics, both of whom wish to manipulate British media coverage to their advantage. The fact that the coverage is exposed as often wrong, as when McCunn’s opinions are breathlessly reported as Craw’s to a stunned readership—and a stunned Craw—is not only funny but subtly shows how dangerous this influence can be. As biographer Ursula Buchan points out, Buchan “perfectly understood the concept of ‘fake news.’”

But while this is an interesting and, Lord knows, still-relevant theme, the joy of Castle Gay is in the complicated maneuverings; the slapstick discomfiture of Thomas Carlyle Craw; the shy love of Jaikie for Alison, one of the most attractive of Buchan’s female characters, rivalling John Macnab’s Janet Raden; and the stir of chivalrous romance in the end as Dickson McCunn, brought into the plot by Jaikie and Dougal, gets to participate in an adventure like something out of a book again—the thing he’s always desired.

Castle Gay may not be my favorite of Buchan’s adventures, but it has many touches of his best fiction and is an enjoyable romp through the Scottish hills. Not a bad way to begin John Buchan June.

A vain aspiration to self-sufficiency

“The mistake is to see No Country for old men as being about the bad guy.”

I’ve argued for years, including here on this blog, that despite its darkness and violence Cormac McCarthy’s work is not nihilistic. Good and evil have clear meaning in his novels, and the tiny flame of hope shines all the brighter for the omnipresence of evil—a burning tree in the desert, a horn full of glowing embers. This theme recurs especially often in his later novels.

In a review of an anthology titled Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe posted today, Anthony Sacramone considers an essay on the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men by Carson Holloway. The essay mounts a “successful effort to redeem No Country for Old Men from the charge of nihilism,” a view Sacramone himself had previously held:

I, too, had dismissed No Country as another affected, self-consciously “cinematic” Coen brothers’ dead end, but Holloway’s careful reading converted me. The mistake is to see No Country as being about the bad guy. Instead, it’s about a traditional Hollywood good guy, the local sheriff, Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): “a kind of traditionalist conservative, … a lifetime lawman, a proud member of a line of lawmen.” But when this old-fashioned guy is confronted with radical evil in the person of Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who possesses not “an inordinate attachment to some real good” but a sadistic need to show everyone who crosses his path the utter worthlessness of their existence, Bell is lost.

Why? The lawman is unable to contend with Chigurh’s perverse brand of lawbreaking because he fears God has abandoned him and that “he may somehow be drawn into this evil.” In the end, Bell “quits” the fight because a “low estimate of himself arises from a vain aspiration to self-sufficiency.” When you believe you’re in a fight against the odds all by yourself, that you’ve lost God as your backup, what else is there to do but turn tail and run?

A great insight, and one that I hadn’t considered before. Bell’s despair, an outgrowth of his self-sufficient isolation from God, is underlined in the film by small changes the Coen brothers made to the novel. For one, Bell’s father in the novel “was not a lawman,” though his grandfather was. The “line of lawmen” Holloway notes—three generations in the film version, with Bell and his grandfather serving as sheriffs in separate counties at the same time—is the Coens underscoring this aspect of Bell’s history. A subtle but important detail.

But having just reread No Country I thought immediately of the ambiguity of this exchange between Bell and his elderly Uncle Ellis. After a long bit of dialogue from Ellis:

Bell didnt answer.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion of me that he does.

You dont know what he thinks.

Yes I do.

He looked at Bell.

Ellis continues the conversation at that point, but who exactly is saying what here? The paragraphing and lack of dialogue tags leave it unclear. I’ve puzzled over it since that last reading. But in the film, the Coens assign the despair of that first line not to Ellis, whom Bell worries has “turned infidel” in the book, but to Bell himself.

Not only Sheriff Bell—who we learn in the novel was the sole survivor of his unit during World War II and only lived because he ran away when holding out alone proved hopeless—but also Llewellyn Moss and Carson Wells aim at self-sufficiency and fail utterly. Their greed and pride tempt them into isolation, where Chigurh destroys them both. Bell at least survives to receive prophetic word that hope remains alive. God or grace is reaching for him.

June 13 will mark the one-year anniversary of McCarthy’s death. I paid tribute to him following his death here.

White whales and bleak houses

Napkin doodle by yours truly

Earlier this week, Jay Nordlinger at National Review wrote of an aging concert pianist who had “made peace” with never conquering some famously difficult classical pieces. Nordlinger continued:

This reminded me of Bleak House—Bleak House and me. I won’t retell my tale. (I wrote about this in an essay a few years ago, here.) But suffice it to say: Decades ago, Harold Bloom said that Bleak House is pretty much the best novel in English. I tried to read it for years and years. Just could not. Could not persevere in it. After a final push, I gave up.

I don’t say there is anything wrong with Bleak House, heaven knows. But there is something wrong with me—with me and Bleak House. And I have made my peace (sort of) with never reading it, or finishing it.

He solicited comparable stories and titles from readers, some of whose responses you can read here. A lot of readers concur on Bleak House, and Moby Dick and Middlemarch both come up several times. Readers also name The Sound and the Fury, Crime and Punishment, Les Misérables, and War and Peace, among others. Thematic headiness and sheer length seem to be recurring features of such books.

The one that immediately came to my mind is The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve started it at least three times, maybe four, at different periods of my life and in different circumstances, but I can never make it more than thirty or forty pages. I’ve made a game effort because I always try to finish what I start and one of my oldest friends is a huge Steinbeck fan, but somewhere just past the explicitly phallic farm equipment and the hypocritical preacher recounting his misdeeds I always set it down and never resume.

That’s the one that I thought of right away, but toward the end of Nordlinger’s post one of his readers mentions another book that I’ve worked even harder to finish and never have: Paradise Lost. Like the reader who mentioned this one, I love Dante’s Comedy and much other epic—at times I’ve read nothing but long narrative poems—but I just can’t hack Milton. I’ve written about that here before.

“The courage to put down a book,” Nordlinger writes. “It’s necessary.” And while I can own up to not liking or being able to finish certain books and recognize the value of resigning myself, setting them aside, and moving on, I can’t help but feel that each is an ancient hoard that will remain buried to me until I come back and, finally, read it.

As for Bleak House, I’ve owned a copy for years but have never even opened it. Whenever I hear the title, I always remember a conversation my best friend in high school had with his grandfather. I don’t remember why or under what circumstances, but for some reason his grandfather revealed that he had once read Bleak House. My friend asked him what he thought. After a long pause, his grandfather said, “It’s a bleak house.”

Operation TNT

Twenty-odd years ago, beginning in the mid-90s, TNT (Turner Network Television) would run nothing but war movies for Memorial Day weekend and the week following. The selections ran from classic dramas like From Here to Eternity and The Bridge on the River Kwai—which presumably made the cut because of its one American character—to the old-fashioned big-picture story-of-a-battle films like The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora! to the John Wayne war subgenre with Sands of Iwo Jima and They Were Expendable to pure action entertainment like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes.

For a movie-loving kid with an emerging interest in World War II “Operation TNT” was a godsend. Films I’d seen mentioned in World War II magazine or had recommended by the veterans at church would appear on the lineup. The challenge—in that age before on-demand streaming or even the DVR, when finding a rare movie meant literally finding it at a flea market or a store at a mall two hours away—was to be watching TNT when The Devil’s Brigade or The Bridge at Remagen finally aired.

You’ll notice that all of the movies I’ve mentioned so far are World War II movies. Operation TNT did air movies about other conflicts—I’m pretty sure I remember catching Sergeant York, and, in its later years, a heavily redubbed Platoon—but the preponderance of films dramatized the last “good war.” It was meant as a tribute, after all.

And Operation TNT did pay tribute. Veterans’ stories would be read and letters and reminiscences were solicited during commercial breaks. Here’s someone for whom this meant enough that they recorded it and, years later, uploaded it to YouTube. The theme throughout was earnest and patriotic but, above all, appreciative. It’s hard to imagine something like it airing now.

And, indeed, Operation TNT withered away over the years. When I first remember tuning in, often during trips to the beach, when my parents would have to order me to the pool and away from the movie lineup, the marathon lasted all week. Eventually I noticed it had shrunk to the long Memorial Day weekend. The last I remember Operation TNT, it was a single day of programming on the holiday itself. I don’t remember noticing it disappear.

So in the spirit of Operation TNT, let me propose a movie marathon for your next Memorial Day—or any day for which good movies about men worth remembering are suited.

A proposed Memorial Day movie marathon

The following eleven films cover about a century of American warfare. I’ve tried to pick some lesser known or—in my opinion—underappreciated or unfairly maligned films that still offer entertaining and edifying viewing, and have arranged them in the chronological order of the events they depict:

The Lost Battalion (2001)—A World War I film based on a real incident in which a battalion of New York draftees ended up trapped behind German lines and held out despite heavy losses. A relatively low-budget TV movie, but clearly made with reverence and respect for its subject and the men involved, especially the hundreds who were lost. The commander, Charles Whittlesey, was one of seven who earned the Medal of Honor during the battle but took his own life in 1921.

Midway (2019)—Outnumbered pilots in outclassed planes make a desperate stand and win. Exposition-heavy dialogue, some cheap special effects, and a handful of hammy performances don’t detract from this detailed, earnest, and suspenseful dramatization of the battle that took the United States off the defensive and turned the war against Japan. This film also makes the cost of the war abundantly clear right from the beginning, making this perhaps the most appropriate Memorial Day movie on this list. I wrote a full review here after the pleasant surprise of seeing it in theatres.

Merrill’s Marauders (1962)—One of the rare World War II films that even acknowledges the war in Burma, this film follows a special unit that spent months fighting the Japanese in punishing jungle and mountain environments. Directed by WWII veteran Sam Fuller with less melodrama and a greater degree of authenticity and grit than a lot of comparable movies from the same period.

Battleground (1949)—The first great Battle of the Bulge film, this depicts a small group of paratroopers from the 101st Airborne in the combat around Bastogne and pays special attention to the cold, dark, hunger, general discomfort, and danger of their situation, as well as the heavy losses taken even in a successful defense. Well-trodden ground now, but few other films have told this story with the unromanticized simplicity of Battleground.

Fury (2014)—A solid war drama with powerful religious themes unfairly dragged by internet experts. Fury vividly and authentically dramatizes the desperation of the tail-end of the war in Europe, when Hitler has clearly been beaten but ragtag, borderline amateur units of SS fight on, and suggests that the men who survived had a hard time talking about it not just because of what they saw but because of what they did.

The Great Raid (2005)—A strong dramatization of the successful liberation of a POW camp in the Philippines, with special attention given to Japanese brutality toward the prisoners, the role played by Filipino guerrillas in the American recapture of the islands, and the weight of the cost of every campaign as the war neared its end. Be sure to watch the director’s cut.

Pork Chop Hill (1959)—Probably the great Korean War film, a stripped down, unvarnished war drama in which both the heroism of the soldiers involved and the unbelievably high losses taken in capturing the holding the hill both receive attention. I wrote a full review of the film last year.

Go Tell the Spartans (1978)—An early Vietnam film and an unusual one in that it tells a story from the advisory stage of the war circa 1964, this movie stars Burt Lancaster as a superannuated, put-upon officer leading a small MAAG unit and a larger South Vietnamese force in an effort to secure a remote rural area against the Viet Cong. It doesn’t go well.

Hamburger Hill (1987)—A solid war drama based on the real Operation Apache Snow in 1969, in which paratroopers patrolling a remote area close to the Laotian border took heavy losses in a literal uphill battle against dug-in NVA troops. As in Battleground, the other 101st Airborne story on this list, the characters are fictional but the film captures the reality of their experiences well.

BAT*21 (1988)—A story from 1972, late in the Vietnam War, when US Air Force officer Iceal Hambleton was shot down behind enemy lines, the only survivor of his plane’s crew. He not only survived but was rescued thanks in part to the efforts of a scout plane pilot, who kept in touch with Hambleton by radio and helped guide him to safety and rescue. The film takes liberties partly for Hollywood reasons and partly because some crucial information about the incident was still classified at the time, but BAT*21 nevertheless offers a good look at an unusual story from the war and the risks and losses involved not only in combat, but in rescuing the lost.

The Outpost (2019)—The story of the defense of Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan in 2009. The only genuinely great film to come out of the War on Terror, I think, one that tells a true story well and without either softening the ugliness and horror or romanticizing the men and their actions involved. I wrote a longer review here in 2020.

Conclusion

That’s eleven films totaling just over twenty-one hours altogether, and even if y’all don’t watch all of these—much less one after the other for an entire day—I hope you’ll check out at least a couple of them and watch them not only for entertainment, but to remember. The best of them, as Operation TNT originally recognized, are designed for both.

Spring reading 2024

As I hinted at last month, this has been a tough semester, with a lot of illness in the middle and plenty of simple busyness throughout. For a good part of it my reading felt almost as lifeless as I did. Being wrung out by work, the babies, my commute, and many, many trips to the doctor (all good problems to have), I read more fiction than history or other non-fiction this spring, and much of that I didn’t feel too strongly about. Even the disappointing books were only disappointing, not outright bad. Everything felt grey. But looking back several weeks after final grades were in and I could rest for a moment—mentally if not physically—there was actually quite a lot of good reading packed in with the mediocre stuff.

Here are the highlights: my favorite fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books as well as the handful of books I revisited. For the purposes of this blog, “spring” is defined as everything from New Year’s Day to the end of my first week of summer classes, which was last Friday.

Favorite fiction

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—Two monks, a widely-read Franciscan scholar and his young Benedictine assistant, investigate a series of strange, seemingly symbolic murders in a remote Italian monastery ahead of a conference of monastic leaders. This is one of the great literary historical novels even if Eco takes the wrong side in the medieval disputes over Ockham’s Nominalist theories and perpetuates some medieval stereotypes along the way, which is frustrating given how well he knows the era. But those a niggles. Erudite and richly detailed but fun, engrossing, and, above all, atmospheric, I greatly enjoyed it.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers—A wide-ranging collection of more than twenty stories that deal with ghosts, vampires, used books, time travel, custom-edited Bibles, revenge in the afterlife, the sacrament of confession, tomato plants under siege by pests, the grave of HP Lovecraft, and, yes, Purgatory. As with any 700-page collection of short fiction, these are of mixed quality, but all range from good to excellent, with plenty of the creativity, surprises, and wry humor of Powers’s novels. Personal favorites included “The Better Boy,” “The Bible Repair Man,” “Through and Through,” “Fifty Cents,” “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” and the title story, “Down and Out in Purgatory.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler—An English writer in Istanbul, his curiosity piqued by the discovery of the body of a notorious gangster, investigates the gangster’s life and discovers there’s no bottom to interwar Europe’s dark underworld. Evocative and atmospheric, this is a detective story and crime thriller wrapped up in the globetrotting of a spy novel. Full review here.

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers—An intriguing supernatural tale of the last remaining members of a cursed family living in their ramshackle old mansion, ominously named Caveat, in the Hollywood Hills. Scott and sister Madeline return to the family manse following the death of their aunt but their cousins, wheelchair-bound Claimayne and angry, standoffish Ariel, make it clear to Scott and Madeline that the siblings are unwelcome and the house rightly belongs to them. We soon learn that the members of this family can travel through time by staring at eerie, abstract, spider-like illustrations on slips of paper. The downside is that using the spiders is addictive and can cause permanent physical and mental damage. In the course of the family drama, trips into the past involve the characters in unsolved mysteries from Hollywood’s silent era, and an unexpected love story blossoms between one of them and a long-dead film star. It also becomes clear that a fabled über-spider, a drawing that contains the visions of all the others and guarantees lethal insanity if even glanced at, may not only still exist but be much nearer Caveat and the warring cousins than Scott would like. And on top of the visions and body-jumping and Old Hollywood gossip and Lovecraftian threat of world-ending madness there are overtones of Poe’s House of Usher, ancient myth, and more. Medusa’s Web has a lot going on and it’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but I greatly enjoyed it and read the entire book in just a few days. Worth checking out if you’re looking for something completely different.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht—A simple but haunting “fable for grownups” from the creator of “Calvin & Hobbes.” A story of the disenchantment of the world, human hubris, and the inevitable consequences of both. One of my favorite books this spring. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A biography of Palin’s great uncle, a man who was killed in action at the Somme and whom Palin never knew, this is a remarkable piece of detective work, archival research, and familial pietas that also commemorates a lost world and a generation destroyed. A continuously engaging and moving book. Full review here.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—An excellent short introduction to Orwell’s life and work, ranging from his childhood to his death and posthumous reputation—indeed, the book begins with the birth of his legend almost the moment he died—and covering everything from his personal character, novels, journalism, and his evolving political ideas to his attempts at farming, his friendships with other writers, his love of England, and his hatred of pigs. I strongly recommend this book to any and everyone. Taylor is also the author of two (two!) full-length biographies of Orwell. I have his Orwell: The New Life on standby for future reading. I blogged about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four twice based on observations made in Taylor’s book. You can read those posts here and here.

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Mark Brotherton—A solid examination of the psychology of conspiracy theories and conspiracist thinking. Brotherton does not make a case that conspiracy nuts are, well, nuts, but rather that they let run unchecked natural and useful thought processes that simply need discipline. Some of this will be old hat to anyone who has studied conspiracy theories seriously, but this may be the best and fairest one-volume assemblage of this material that I’ve come across. Full review here.

Campaldino 1289: The Battle that Made Dante, by Kelly DeVries and Niccolò Capponi—A thorough and thoroughly-illustrated guide to the bloody battle between Guelf Florence and her allies and Ghibelline Arezzo and her allies, in which a young Dante Alighieri participated. I wrote a paper about Campaldino in a graduate seminar on medieval and renaissance Florence at Clemson and the available material was thin back then. This book would have been a godsend. Worth looking at for anyone interested in Dante, medieval Italy, or military history.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—This briskly written book tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first is an overview of Poe’s life, with all of its hardships and all-too-brief victories, up to 1849. The second is the story of Poe’s final months, in which he both behaved erratically (telling friends in Philadelphia that pursuers were trying to kill him and had, in fact, murdered and dismembered his beloved mother-in-law, who was alive and well in New York at the time) and also seemed to be on the cusp of overdue success (having reached an understanding with a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and working on soliciting support for his long-dreamed-of literary journal) before dying under unexplained circumstances in Baltimore. Dawidziak offers a good capsule life story of Poe in the one half and a thorough examination of Poe in the weeks before his death in the other, and follows these up with a good explanation of the evidence and competing theories about what exactly happened to Poe on that final trip. Had Poe had an alcoholic relapse? Was he the victim of cooping? Some kind of brain swelling? Cholera? Syphilis? Rabies? The theory Dawidziak offers is one of the more convincing that I’ve come across, and he makes a good case for it. I would have liked a slightly more scholarly and well-sourced treatment of this subject but this is a good book and a worthwhile read for any fan of Poe. I wrote a short post about one offhand comment by an interviewee in this book. You can read that here.

Rereads

As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

A strong set of books to revisit, especially Wise Blood, which I last read in college and hardly remembered. I’m enjoying but not loving Lombardo’s translation of the Comedy. I hope to read his Paradiso this summer.

Kids’ books

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series set in the Rome of Diocletian and the Great Persecution, in which the emperor is all-powerful and Christians are despised and suppressed as threats to order. This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far but it has an engaging, multi-thread plot and was enjoyable both to read aloud and, for my kids, to listen to.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—Somehow I’ve made it to the age of 39 having never read anything by Roald Dahl. I read this on my daughter’s recommendation and loved it. (And what a joy to take a book recommendation from one of your children!) Clever, briskly paced, darkly and wryly funny, and most of all really fun to read. Looking forward to James and the Giant Peach soon.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple, but nicely illustrated retelling of the story of two East German families who flew over the wall to West Germany and freedom in a homemade hot air balloon. A fascinating story that my kids really enjoyed, and a good opportunity to talk about why Germany was divided and what Communism is (as opposed to what some people would like it to be). This also prompted us to check out the 1982 film Night Crossing, which we enjoyed.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A delightful picture book with a rhyming story and beautiful woodcut illustrations by the author. Bustard also has books on St Valentine and St Nicholas of Myra—the real Santa Claus—but this Patrick book is far and away his best of the three. Going to add this to my list of recommended St Patrick’s Day reads soon.

Looking ahead

That’s it! I’m already reading some good stuff—a Viking adventure by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, a study of Dante by Charles Williams, a short book on Old Testament wisdom literature by a favorite philosopher, and my first novel for this year’s John Buchan June—and I’m looking forward to more in the relatively more relaxed days of summer. I hope y’all found a book or two above that sound enticing and that you’ll check them out. Thanks as always for reading!