Stories or themes?

Eric Ambler (1909-98)

I’ve wondered for some time whether stories are studied and taught the right way. I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve read a lot of critiques of the modern literary establishment and English education, especially at the college level, and I’ve come back again and again to an approach that has bothered me for years: the emphasis on “themes” in fiction.

A few years ago, in reflecting on my first reading of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I quoted a PBS documentary’s summary of the story: “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

“Well,” I wrote, “that is kind of what happens.” Kind of. But not really. Not if you’ve read the story Poe actually wrote, all the complexity and horror of which is here reduced to a talking point.

I had a similar experience this week as I looked for articles on the great spy novelist Eric Ambler. One that I turned up, an introductory guide to Ambler’s life and work, should prove genuinely helpful to the newcomer, but when it recommends six “key” novels it includes the following “themes” for five of them:

• Epitaph for a Spy: “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world.”

• Cause for Alarm: “The dangers of apolitical individuals in a politically charged world.”

• The Mask of Dimitrios: “The intersection of crime and politics, and the corrupting power of ambition.”

• Journey into Fear: “The thin line between courage and fear, and the impact of war on individuals.”

• The Intercom Conspiracy: “The futility of espionage in an increasingly chaotic world.”

Well… that is kind of what those are about. Kind of.

You’ll have noticed a few things about these themes. First, they are formulaic. Three of the five fall into a “the _____ of _____ in a _____ world” pattern, like a Mad Lib. These are all rich, complex, intricately constructed novels that place their characters in crises that admit of no easy answers. Boiling these stories—or any stories—down to something as simplistic and digestible as these themes should arouse our suspicions. Already particularity and nuance are being sanded off and forgotten as we prepare to slot each story into a pre-prepared box.

Second, these themes are vague. As it happens, I’ve read three of these five novels and started one of the others yesterday, and just about any of these “themes” could be applied to any of the novels.

Granted, all of this comes from one internet guide to a single author’s work, but based on my own experience and reading they are broadly representative of the way theme is extracted from story in textbook after textbook, class after class, essay after essay. The complex, diffuse, and imaginative is reduced to the simple, comprehensible, and ready-made. The narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” disturbs us, but we know what to do with “fear” or “guilt” or even “insanity.” Treasure Island is a rollicking adventure, but that’s not enough to make it an important book, so it becomes primarily a depiction of the danger of greed. This is also simpler, easier to understand, and—not insignificantly—to test.

More perniciously yet, at the college level the hunt for themes tends to mean subjecting stories to ideological scrutiny in order—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—to extract political messaging from them via liposuction without anesthesia. Thus assertions like this, which I once saw online: “The Last of the Mohicans is about the taboo on sex between whites and Native Americans.” Most of the time this comes from an overtly left-wing “tenured radical” perspective, but there is a right-wing version of it, too. Just this week a random stranger on Substack, commenting on something I had shared, wrote that Blood Meridian “depicts the southwest as irredeemably corrupt” and is therefore “a wokester wankfest.”

Again—is that really what The Last of the Mohicans or Blood Meridian are “about”? These books aren’t adventures set in particular times and places and happening to specific characters? Is all that matters the barely hidden pathologies or the political messaging?

It seems to me that the dangers of overemphasizing theme in the study of literature are:

• Gnosticism, by which I mean the suggestion that the “real” meaning of the story is hidden behind the words and events of the story, which leads students to either ignore the particulars or be frustrated with literature in toto.

• Didacticism, especially through the implication that good stories must have some broad meaning that should impart a lesson, describe life, or otherwise be useful to the student. If they cannot detect such, it must not be a good story.

• Political hijacking, which is easily the most high-profile, outrageous, and abominable form of this but is therefore also the easiest to identify and resist.

• The aesthetic smoothie, in which students are taught to look for big themes so thoroughly that all literature eventually loses its particularity and runs together into a bland abstraction puree. Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian are apposite here; one could say that both are “about” something like “the violence of whites and Native Americans on the frontier,” but are these books really as similar as this suggests?

This is by no means exhaustive, just the things that occur immediately to me and that I have found most frustrating.

But the final result of all of these is boredom. This is a boring, dull way to study fiction, especially when you’re introducing the young to great stories, and risks leading them away from simply enjoying reading. Great storytellers and their stories are powerful because they are specific. “Themes” are not.

Note that we don’t recommend books to each other this way. To return to one of my original examples, Epitaph for a Spy, would you rather read a book about “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world,” something that could as easily be said of Kafka, Max Barry, or a one-star Google review of the local DMV, or a book about “A teacher on vacation who is mistaken for a spy by the police and forced to help catch the real spy”?

None of this is to say one shouldn’t look for, study, or teach themes in stories. Sensing and understanding a story’s theme is an important part of interpreting it, but themes should arise from the specific, concrete, particular details of the story, and placing as much emphasis on theme as we tend to do inverts that, elevating broad, big picture abstractions above the particulars that make a story what it is. Until we can treat stories as stories first again—and until we can just enjoy them—I think we should downplay theme.

Ironies and reversals

I came down with something over the weekend that has contrived to keep me home mostly immobile today. I have, however, been able to read a little bit, and to reflect on several striking ironies in two of the books I’m reading right now.

First, a pair of reversals. From Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, in a chapter discussing Fleming’s career hopping—diplomacy, reporting, stock trading—during the early 1930s, a seemingly aimless trajectory that looked especially unimpressive next to his older brother Peter, who was already a daring and accomplished travel writer:

As at Eton, Peter’s literary success thrust Ian back into the shade; only now, Peter’s shadow stretched in pretty well every direction.

For the next twenty years, Ian had to steel himself to be called the brother of writer Peter Fleming, as a decade before Evelyn Waugh had been the brother of Alec Waugh, after Alec’s controversial, best-selling novel The Loom of Youth (1917), written when he was still a schoolboy, had sent shudders of horror down many respectable British spines.

Like Ian, Evelyn had grown up in the slipstream of a successful elder brother. Then in the 1950s both Alec and Peter were to experience a dramatic reversal.

By the time of lan’s death in August 1964, it would be Evelyn Waugh and not Alec who had grounds to be considered England’s most eminent living writer—and Ian Fleming and not Peter, England's most popular.

Interestingly, Peter Fleming and Alec Waugh were both the older brother, and both outlived their (eventually) more famous sibling.

Second, cruel ironies. I’m also reading The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, a thematic, somewhat impressionistic study of Friedrich organized according to the four classical elements—fire, water, earth, air. Author Florian Illies includes numerous ironic incidents from the artist’s afterlife. Among them is this anecdote regarding Two Men Contemplating the Moon, which was narrowly saved from destruction and looting at the end of World War II:

Those Two Men Contemplating the Moon leave Dresden only very rarely. Once, early in the twenty-first century, they flew to New York because the Metropolitan Museum proposed to hang them, for the first time in almost two centuries, beside another Two Men Contemplating the Moon that Friedrich had painted about the same time, but for his doctor, who had been so enamoured of the original version that he accepted a copy of it as payment for his services. But, when the two paintings were finally reunited for the first time, no one could see them. Just on the day the ‘Moonwatchers’ exhibition was to open—11 September 2001—a handful of Islamist terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center. The age of Romanticism was over just when it was about to be reopened. On the evening of 11 September, no one in downtown Manhattan was able to contemplate the moon: dust and ash clouded the sky, and fear obscured the view heavenward.

The ironies are especially terrible and saddening in the first part of the book, “Fire,” and this is the worst of all:

In Leipzig in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a legendary collector of art and music, an unprepossessing building society clerk called Manfred Gorke. He scrimped and saved to purchase art treasures, which he horded in his Leipzig home. . . . Gorke was originally from Hirschberg, Silesia, a mountain town Friedrich had particularly loved; hence he felt a special connection with [Friedrich]. . . . And while dire financial straits forced Gorke to part from his paintings by Carus and Runge in the early years of the war, he would never give up his Caspar David Friedrichs.

As the fighting came closer, and the air raids grew more frequent, Manfred Gorke decided to bring his Friedrichs, yet unknown to art history, to the University of Leipzig to be photographed and safely stored. On the afternoon of 3 December 1943, he personally handed them over to the university. But just the next day, in the early morning hours of 4 December 1943, 400 British aircraft bombed Leipzig, passing over the city centre in three waves between 3.50 and 4.25. They dropped countless explosive and incendiary bombs, enough to set the whole city centre ablaze. The university quarter was levelled; the Department of Art History was burned to the ground; Manfred Gorke’s Caspar David Friedrichs were reduced to ash just twelve hours after being stored away.

And, after listing some of what was lost in the blaze, Illies notes a final awful irony: “Gorke’s flat, where the Friedrichs had hung until the afternoon of 3 December 1943, survived the war unscathed.”

Sometimes it’s remarkable that anything old has survived at all.

On the need to be “deeply grounded”

I don’t pay as much attention to YouTuber Critical Drinker as I used to, especially since, over the last year or so, he aggressively crowdfunded a short film based on his line of action thriller novels starring agent Ryan Drake. A trailer for Rogue Elements looked indifferently produced, with a lot of the typical limitations of low budget action shorts. The finished film—rebranded as a TV show “proof of concept”—was only made available on his Patreon at first, pushing it even further back in my mind and priorities. When it was finally posted to YouTube I didn’t bother to watch it.

It turns out that Rogue Elements wasn’t very good.

This in itself shouldn’t be so surprising. I’ve watched a lot of short films in my time and most of them are embarrassing in one way or another. But Rogue Elements took a lot of flak because, after years of the Drinker smack-talking Hollywood not only for its woke politicking but also for its incompetent, incoherent storytelling, he had attempted to show the bigwigs how it’s done, offering Rogue Elements up as the antidote to modern Hollywood and calling a lot of attention to the project along the way, and failed spectacularly. Among its shortcomings, viewers have griped that is poorly produced, badly written, and simply repeats many of the tropes and cliches the Drinker himself regularly complains about.

Apparently some of his enemies—especially enemies on political grounds—have used this to dunk on him. The accusation of hypocrisy provided an especially juicy opportunity to twist the knife. I’m not interested in any of that. I was indifferent, at best, to his project, and take no satisfaction in its lack of success. Anything tempting us into the poisonous Schadenfreude of the modern world is to be shunned. In fact, I only found out about this whole mess because of Substack.

Having just launched Quid, my Substack digest, I’m still figuring out a lot about how the platform throws essays and notes my way. Somehow I came across some post mortem discussion of Rogue Elements, and one interesting sympathetic take on the Drinker’s failure was best summarized by its title: “Art is Hard.” It is one thing to sit back and critique—whether drinking or not—and another to make. (As it happens, at least one good movie has been made about exactly that.)

But the most incisive response came from Librarian of Celaeno, an anonymous classics teacher and fellow Southerner, who offered up this response to that essay:

The problem [the Drinker] has, one that a great critic like Poe would never have had to worry about, is that while he gets what’s off with modern storytelling, he’s unfamiliar with any other kind. He’s never shown any evidence of being deeply grounded in his own culture, even when he’s aware that others are, as when he references Tolkien. Having no real background in myth or older literature or religion, the best he can do is to try to make a good version of the bad stuff he decries.

This is spot on. The Critical Drinker can see clearly the problems with modern movies (and he focuses almost exclusively on movies) but, lacking deep roots in older stories and forms of storytelling, can see no way out but to rearrange the inferior materials available at present. No wonder the results are disappointing.

Way back in the early days of this blog, I reflected on this passage in a letter by poet Donald Hall about the self-inflicted limitations of mid-century modernist poets:

You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that.

In the last year, I’ve talked with a successful sci-fi/fantasy author about up-and-coming sci-fi writers who haven’t (or won’t) read Asimov or Heinlein or Philip K Dick, and with an English teacher about young poets who haven’t (or won’t) read the classic English language poets or anything that rhymes. What fruit do they expect to bear, cut off from the roots? Thus also the YouTube critic, whose chronological range is even narrower—not centuries, but decades or years.

A useful object lesson and an experience that, one hopes, thoughtful, driven, earnest, but shallow people like the Drinker can learn from. Because on the other side of such chastening is a rich tradition to explore, participate in, and enjoy.

You can read the whole of Hall’s letter at the Paris Review archives here. And if, like me, you’re new to Substack, subscribe to Quid and go explore some of the good and thoughtful writers who are on there.

Further notes on Nosferatu

Willem Dafoe as Prof von Franz in Nosferatu (2024)

I’ve been thinking about Nosferatu a lot since I first watched it. I managed to get a short summary of my thoughts down in my “2024 in movies” year-in-review, but here are some more oddments and reflections I’ve had since.

Outside reading

Writing at National Review, Jack Butler, whose opinions I respect, “expected to be wowed but was merely entertained.” This is almost the opposite of my reaction, not least since I found Nosferatu too spiritually oppressive, too uncompromising in its presentation of the twisted, predatory, consuming nature of sin and evil, to be entertaining.

Nevertheless, Butler makes a good point earlier in his short review: “one character literally invites the demonic into her life,” he notes, followed by the pointed parenthetical “(Be careful what you ‘manifest,’ kids!)”

At his UnTaking Substack, my friend Danny Anderson contends with two misreadings of Nosferatu, and along the way makes this incisive point about Eggers’s meticulous quest not merely to capture the fashions and hairstyles of past times—those are the easy parts—but the inside of people:

In the end, I do think that Holmes is correct in his focus on Eggers’ attraction to the past and the metanarratives that once inscribed meaning onto life. This is what I admire most about his work, in fact. His films create worlds that shouldn’t still exist. They are anachronisms. He re-creates the mind of the past, not just images. The confrontation with that mind, which is alien and beyond our modern comprehension, is part of what makes his art valuable.

Agreed. We need to be confronted with past minds more often than we are. This is one of the things old books are good for, but since fewer and fewer people read, the need for such movies is growing. May Eggers’s tribe increase.

A few other points that I’ve been mulling, especially points that have proven controversial:

Nosferatu and Christianity

One line of criticism against Eggers’s Nosferatu has accused it of watering down or eliminating Christian elements present in Stoker’s original. I’m not as familiar with Dracula—the fons et origo of all this vampire stuff—as I should be, but I thought the evidence of Nosferatu itself is ambiguous. Crosses and crucifixes are both prominent and subtle throughout, but it’s not clear, as I’ve seen several critics online point out, that they do much to repel or impede Count Orlok. It’s possible that he only appears in rooms in, say, the Harding house where there are no religious decorations, but I didn’t pay close enough attention to be sure.

More pointedly, I’ve seen Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz accused of being a paganized Van Helsing. I don’t think so. The doctor who introduces von Franz name-drops at least one Christian occultist (in the early modern sense of someone who studies hidden forces, like magic and magnetism), and late in the film von Franz instinctively makes the sign of the cross.

Von Franz is also from Switzerland, from the southerly and more predominantly Catholic regions of German-speaking Europe. In this way he’s a contrast to the other characters, the Hutters and Hardings and Dr Sievers, who come from the fictional Wisburg, which is clearly a North Sea or Baltic port city—the Germany of Luther and Kant. Prof von Franz is coded from the get-go as more attuned to the eminent but hidden and the power of the liturgical. A nice touch by Eggers.

It’s not explicit, but I think von Franz is meaningfully Christian, albeit a Christian steeped in esoterica—but not of the Faustian variety.

But the strongest showing for Christianity belongs to two groups—the Romanian peasantry and the Orthodox nuns who nurse Thomas Hutter back to health. Out of all the characters in the film, they are the ones who most clearly understand what Orlok is and what it takes to resist him. Further, their explicit affiliation of Orlok with Satan is allowed to stand unchallenged. They, like Prof von Franz, know what they’re talking about and suffer no illusions.

Orlok, by moving from Transylvania to northern Germany is escaping the “superstitious” who know what he is to live among the “enlightened” who are easy pickings. A pretty powerful statement by itself.

Ellen’s sacrifice

The final act, in which Ellen makes herself available to her predator as carnal bait, luring him to their deaths, didn’t quite land for me. As I put it in my year-in-review, “I thought the ending stumbled a bit.” That’s the best I could put it at the time, but I’ve read and talked to other viewers who had the same sense of unease about it. As I put it in e-mail conversation with one of y’all, is Ellen’s final action a Christ-like self-sacrifice or an act of pagan expiation?

I think it has to be the latter. It was Ellen, after all, who first transgressed by summoning Orlok as a child. (See Butler above.) She was lonely and ignorant, but circumstances play no role in the pagan understanding of transgression. Whole mythologies have grown out of this conception of sin as crossing a line. By giving in to Orlok Ellen allows his appetite to consume him—and her. There is no eucatastrophe, only the methodical, inevitable outworking of the process she initiated years before. She has not received grace so much as restored balance.

This undercuts whatever is going on with the Orthodox nuns or the Catholic von Franz. However subtly and powerfully Nosferatu evokes their pre-Enlightenment liturgical Christianity, grace in this story ultimately has nothing to do with defeating evil. There’s an unfulfilled yearning for grace here. Eggers ends up framing Orlok’s defeat as an act of independent will, but under the influence of Orlok, how independent can Ellen be, really?

As clearly as Eggers can perceive and expose evil—and there’s no one else in Hollywood today who sees it this clearly—he seems to lack a countervailing sense of the good. Something to think and pray about.

Minutiae

• As I’ve said to a couple of y’all, I’ve been amazed at how totally my tolerance for bad things happening to children in movies has evaporated over the last several years.

• Relatedly, the role of the Harding family as mere cannon fodder for Orlok and the utter lack of redemption for Friedrich felt like a misstep into gratuitous shock.

• An uncharacteristic bit of internet nit-picking for me: If both Thomas Hutter and Prof von Franz know that Orlok sleeps in his coffin during the day—which Thomas knows because he came within a hair’s breadth of killing him and ending the nightmare earlier—why do they wait until night to go to his house outside Wisburg? Why not go directly there and stake him in the middle of the day? Perhaps I’m forgetting something.

• Finally, I can’t saw enough good things about the cast, but let me specifically point out Ralph Ineson as the unfortunate Dr Sievers. A lesser actor would have made him an unthinking period quack. Ineson makes him a thoughtful student of medical science who is doing his best against something impervious to his tools. This is his third role in an Eggers film and I hope the two keep working together.

Concluding unscientific postscript

I’m grateful to Chet for the e-mail correspondence that helped me give a shape to some of these thoughts, observations, and intuitions.

Nosferatu is a great movie but, again, not mere entertainment. It’s much more, but that doesn’t make it fun. I hope to watch it again someday, and to see more in it. But that will probably be a while.

Notes on the history of spy thrillers

This week, courtesy of Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack, I discovered Alexander Larman’s review of Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd. Larman has become one of my favorite critics and is always insightful, as in the first two paragraphs here, where he offers a very short précis of the history of the spy thriller and the pivotal place of John le Carré in that history:

Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a very great consumption of expensive food and wine, a MacGuffin that everyone wants to lay their hands on, and, last but not least, a love interest whose loyalties remain ambiguous right up until the final page.

Accurate, both specifically and generally. The boredom Larman notes, for example, is present in characters as different as Richard Hannay and James Bond, but for different reasons. The tone of the thriller changed between Buchan and Fleming even if some of the trappings remained, appropriately, unruffled. Larman continues:

Le Carré removed pretty much all of these elements, minus the mass duplicity and, in doing so, made the spy novel more intellectually respectable but (whisper it) just a tiny bit boring. If I was given the chance to read a rip-roaring page-turner in the vein of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its ilk, I should take it without hesitation.

This is a paragraph calculated to get my attention, The Thirty-Nine Steps being the old favorite that started the whole John Buchan June thing here on the blog and Rogue Male being one of the best pure thrillers I’ve read in the last several years. As much as I like le Carré—something I’ve been chatting with a couple of y’all about for a while—I have to agree.

The result of le Carré’s transformation of the genre? Larman:

But most contemporary espionage fiction follows in the le Carré vein, alas, rather than the Ian Fleming mold. Carefully worked-out social criticism is plentiful, genuine thrills, and intrigue either meanly rationed or nonexistent.

Larman is pointing to the two main thematic components of the spy thriller: moral or at least intellectual weight, and action. Prior to le Carré, these were typically joined in the spy thriller. As the late great Sir John Keegan noted of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan’s thrillers in particular had, in addition to chases, danger, and wild hair’s-breadth escapes, “moral atmosphere.” As different as all of them are from each other, Buchan, Ambler, Household, and Fleming all had some measure of both. The drama gave the action weight and the action sold the book.

Le Carré bifurcated these, aiming for subtle and intensely introspective, chilly, cerebral drama. An Ambler or Fleming hero sweats when he faces capture and torture; a le Carré character—one hesitates to call them “heroes”—sweats when he has a terrible epiphany while looking through old files.

As Larman notes, le Carré’s astounding skill and success at this means it has become the model ever since, with “serious” spy novels almost always adhering to the introspective dramatic mode. Action continued to flourish in pulps before eventually taking on a highly technical, suspense-oriented character in writers like Frederick Forsyth and—the god of this kind of thriller—Tom Clancy.

So the spy thriller today is apt to be all dingy rented rooms, cynicism, and (usually left-wing) social criticism or all gear, gadgets, technical specs, and three-page chapters that begin with military time. (Occasionally you get writers who do both, with mixed success. Mick Herron, whose Slough House books are great favorites of mine for their wit, pacing, and suspense, recently published a turgid, commentary-heavy parallel novel burdened with smothering introspection. I’ve kept all the Slough House books to reread later but that one went straight to the used book store.)

But it need not be this way. Buchan, Ambler, and Fleming are still good models, and I was glad to learn from Larman that Gabriel’s Moon “is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school,” balancing character drama and a fast pace. I’m looking forward to it. I picked up a copy Wednesday night and start it today. Here’s hoping it’s part of a reunification of the two halves of the spy thriller that, though they can succeed alone, work wonderfully together.

Eight Hours from England

Anthony Quayle (1913-89) in Albania during World War II

If you grew up, as I did, on classic war movies, you might not know the name Anthony Quayle but you’ll probably know his face. Quayle appeared in many of the great war films of the 1950s and 60s, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Guns of Navarone, often playing earnest, well-intentioned officers frustrated by ugly reality. That is certainly the case in the two films I named, and to judge from Quayle’s 1945 war novel Eight Hours from England, which was based on his experiences with the Special Operations Executive in Albania, he didn’t have to strain his imagination to portray those characters.

Eight Hours from England covers a few months in the winter of 1943-44. Major John Overton, a decent man with several years of experience in the war, has returned to England on leave. The homefront bores him, and his unrequited love for Ann, the woman he has hoped for years to marry, convinces him to accept an offer of a new mission on a whim. He bids Ann good bye, struggling to express his yearning for her, and leaves.

His trip east is long and frustrating. He arrives in more than one staging area unannounced and has to wait for orders. When he is finally redirected to Albania, which was not the mission he initially agreed to, he goes along with it, a knight errant ready for any quest.

He arrives in Albania by boat in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and eager to get to work. The officer he is replacing has become standoffish, hiding in a cave and refusing to have anything to do with the Albanian guerrillas he was sent to help. Overton determines to make a better job of it. With a handful of other British commandos, a few American intelligence officers, and an Italian officer who, his country having lost and swapped sides following Mussolini’s ouster, is committed to helping the Allies, Overton sets out to connect with the locals as well as the two groups fighting both the Germans and each other: the Balli and the Partisans.

The Partisans are Communist guerrillas backed by the Soviets, and claim to have both huge numbers and an insatiable need for materiel—weapons, ammunition, clothing, food, medicine, even blankets. They also regularly attack the anti-Communist civilians. The Balli, on the other hand, are the local anti-Communist resistance who have made the grave mistake of partnering with the Germans in order to eradicate the Partisans.

Acting as a go-between, hiking back and forth across the mountains trying both to liaise with the locals—who care more about finding pretexts to demand British cash than anything else—and to convince the Balli and the Partisans to cooperate, Overton finds his earnestness fading. The Albanians, whom he regarded as colorful potential allies when he landed, come to look more and more thuggish and untrustworthy. His work grinds him down physically and mentally, especially after he receives word by radio of a major British operation in the Balkans that needs all the local help he can organize. And, lurking in the background, busy but hidden from view, are the Germans.

The impossibly rugged terrain, the remoteness from home and people making the decisions, the backwater hit-and-run fighting, the betrayals by local “allies,” the seeming fruitlessness of one’s efforts, and the bloody small-minded rivalries among the locals, whose backward customs and moneygrubbing pettiness and simple thievery Overton gradually grows fed up with—I have to wonder how much Eight Hours from England would resonate with veterans of Afghanistan.

This is an unusual war novel in that it is not action-oriented. Quayle’s story is a drama of logistics, organization, and diplomacy. The Germans appear only occasionally and at great distance, visible as lines of trucks on the other side of a valley or as gray dots setting up heavy weapons far below, but their threat is omnipresent. False alarms send Overton and his group scrambling to fallback positions and hideouts more than once. And the difficulty of communication—with headquarters, with each other—as well as bringing in supplies is clear. To charge their radio batteries they need petrol; to get petrol they must bring it in by boat; to request it on the next boat, they need the radio; and when it arrives they have to keep the Albanians from stealing it. Eight Hours from England is a novel of what goes on behind the scenes of special operations, and of just how unbearably frustrating and exhausting war can be even when—perhaps especially when—there is no fighting.

Quayle conveys all of this beautifully, with vivid descriptions of the people and landscapes. (The actual landscapes, by the way. The locations Quayle names are all real. Here’s the base where he entered and left Albania. Some of his equipment is still there.) Quayle captures the impossibility of Overton’s situation and makes the reader feel it, as well as making it clear that, whatever the outcome of the war of the Allies against the Axis, Albania will not enjoy a simple happy ending.

I read Eight Hours from England in the recent paperback edition published by the Imperial War Museum as part of its Wartime Classics series. There are sixteen books in the series and I already have several more lined up for this year. Eight Hours from England was a good place to start. Strongly and imaginatively written, it brings the reader into a complicated, often overlooked side of World War II and dramatizes it brilliantly.

UFO

I’m going to start this review in an odd place—with online criticism. As I read Garrett Graff’s UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There I looked through the one- and two-star reviews on Goodreads and saw lots of complaints that UFO doesn’t cover a specific sighting or incident, or doesn’t cover it in enough detail, or leaves out a reader’s favorite “researcher” (or skeptic), or—at the extreme end—that Graff is in the pocket of the CIA and his book is a psyop.

Leaving that last tinfoil hat line of criticism aside, the other disappointed or angry reviewers missed a crucial detail about a book like UFO: it is a survey.

When I introduce my courses at the beginning of every semester—I’m set to repeat this speech bright and early Wednesday morning—I explain what I mean by “survey” by talking about hiking back home. From the top of a mountain, as one surveys the view, one does not examine every tree, climb every peak, or dip into every hollow, one simply takes in a literal overview. Surveying the view provides context. This, in a metaphorical sense, is what makes a class like my Western Civ I or US History II or a book like Graff’s UFO useful—it gives an overall shape to the thicket of specifics in which it is easy to get lost.

From saucers to Tic Tacs

Graff narrates the history of UFO sightings and the many attempts to research and understand them from the immediate post-war world of the mid-1940s through the recent past. UFOs and aliens—two topics that we tend to forget don’t necessarily overlap—have become such an archetypal staple of our culture that we tend to forget how different the world was when they emerged.

Beginning with the Roswell incident in 1947, Graff tells the story through three major interweaving narrative threads. First are major incidents that shaped and directed the UFO phenomenon, including the initial Arnold sightings; the Mantell incident, in which a P-51 pilot crashed in pursuit of a high-altitude object; the Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, New Mexico; the Betty and Barney Hill and Pascagoula abductions; the Phoenix lights; and the Flying Tic Tac. The second thread, the one most clearly indicated in the book’s subtitle, consists of the various often halfhearted attempts by the US military and federal government to assess and understand UFOs.

The last thread of the story, interweaving with the previous two, consists of the researchers, a wide and colorful cast including Project Blue Book’s J Allen Hynek, celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, Jacques Vallée, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, and a host of enthusiasts and cranks and shysters who sought to profit from the various phases of the UFO craze. Graff gives good attention to the rifts between these individuals and groups, especially those who, like Hynek, sought a genuinely scientific approach and viewed the feel-good peacenik messaging of people like George Adamski’s “contactees” as a distraction from real research and who was, in his turn, looked down upon by figures like Sagan.

These three aspects—the institutional, the personal, and the incidents themselves—and the decades-long perspective Graff offers are especially helpful in seeing how the phenomenon unfolded, first as flying saucers, then as UFOs, and recently as UAPs. The postwar context also helps explain the US military’s initial keen interest and later apathy. Once the military had determined UFOs were not Soviet weaponry or an intergalactic threat, they lost interest and ceded the field to the enthusiasts—who had been itching to take control anyway.

The historical perspective the book offers also demonstrates clearly how the mythology evolved and just how much time it had to do so. Hynek and the Air Force’s investigations went on in fits and starts and the long, slow process of declassification of projects like Mogul, the nuclear-monitoring balloons responsible for some early sighting and the Roswell debris, also fed speculation. Notably, Roswell was forgotten until its reemergence in the lore during the 1980s, when it was recontextualized as an important event—with lots of suspicious new testimonial—by UFO hobbyists.

Surprises and sympathies

That point about mythology brings me to the two surprises UFO gave me. First, early in the book, Graff quotes Carl Jung, who lived long enough to see flying saucer enthusiasm through its earliest phases and who viewed the mania—whatever the reality behind it—as the genesis in real time of a new world mythology.

This insight may not explain the entire phenomenon but is clearly correct. Viewed in chronological order, without the cross-pollination of details from different stories and the projection of later elements of the mythology backward onto earlier parts,* it is easy to see the UFO phenomenon evolving and growing in intensity and complexity—from sightings to encounters to abductions to speculation about government treaties with aliens and underground bases full of reverse-engineered alien tech. UFOs, which are ambiguous enough to mean different things to almost everyone, provide a decentralized, do-it-yourself mythology for an age of disenchantment and materialistic science.**

The second great surprise for me stems directly from the narrative shape UFO’s survey offers, and that is the sympathies I developed for different groups of researchers. UFO includes a number of cads and frauds, the kind of “flying saucer people” Charles Portis’s Gringos so sharply parodies, but beyond these low-hanging fruit are two different groups of genuine scientists who engaged with the UFO phenomenon.

The first include people like Hynek, who worked for decades with the Air Force and then on his own to understand what people were seeing and—increasingly from the early 1960s—encountering and even boarding. Men like Hynek did actual field work—when they had the funding and the manpower, anyway—visiting sites, talking to witnesses, and making a good-faith effort to sort genuine unidentified objects from those that had clear this-worldly causes. Further, they were open-minded enough to change their minds and acknowledge mistakes, which became a key part of Hynek’s story specifically.

Meanwhile, the second group are those like Carl Sagan, who dabbled in UFO research before contenting themselves with ivory tower activities—gazing deep into the navel of the Fermi paradox, fussing with the arbitrary numbers in the Drake Equation, hypothesizing about Dyson spheres as a measure of civilizational progress, fretting over the best ways to encode stick figures in signals to be transmitted to distant stars, opining on the insignificance of earth and its human inhabitants, begging for more and more taxpayer money, and occasionally abandoning spouses. For all their posture of superiority to men like Hynek, it was the latter who seemed to have his feet more firmly planted in the real world, who most directly engaged with the real, particular mysteries of the phenomenon. Not all UFO researchers are created equal.

UFO therefore does what it sets out to do: provide an overview of the history of UFO sightings and abduction stories from the perspective of researchers, both military- and government-affiliated and private enthusiasts. The book covers about eighty years of an complex and controversial topic in just over 400 pages and even manages to work in lots of odd side stories—the men in black, UFO cultists, the Majestic 12 documents, and the attitudes of various presidents to UFOs among them. Graff simplifies and excludes of necessity, but what he includes is very good, and he proves remarkably evenhanded in his treatment of ambiguous evidence.

Caveats

That said, UFO does have flaws.

The first I’d point out is a matter of emphasis. Given that Graff’s focus on the noteworthy “unexplained” cases from the early Air Force investigations, it is easy to miss that the overwhelming majority of UFO reports were and are “explained”: misidentifications, panics, and fakes. The noise-to-signal ratio is lopsidedly noise. This fact is present in UFO, between the lines—the wearying quality of UFO investigation, at least for a sincere, scientific mind, comes through clearly—but could have used closer attention.

Second, UFO has numerous puzzling footnotes, many of which have little to do with the passage they annotate. Others seem to be there to take potshots at figures like J Edgar Hoover or to work in information Graff presumably turned up for his previous book on Watergate. Most of them could be cut.

A third flaw is thematic. Graff makes much of the openness of non-Western religions and Mormons like Harry Reid to life on “other worlds.” He implies more than once that scientific resistance to extraterrestrial life stems, directly or indirectly, from Christianity, which in his telling limits intelligent life to earth and would be threatened by its existence elsewhere. This is a myth reinforced by the pronouncements of the irreligious. Here, contra that idea, are the evangelical Michael Heiser and Catholic Jimmy Akin on actual Christian approaches to life on other planets. This is a minor point but an annoying one.

The fourth flaw has more to do with the subject itself. As UFO folklore spread and evolved it grew enormous. A survey like this must be selective, and Graff mostly selects well. But the later chapters, covering the 1980s to the present, felt rushed compared to the earlier sections, and it is here that there is some merit to accusations that Graff has omitted crucial material. The most obvious example is Bob Lazar, a man I take to be a fraud but whose testimony has had a death grip on UFO enthusiasts for decades. He is not even mentioned. Given Lazar’s purported background at Area 51, this material is firmly within the book’s subject area and could have been useful in conveying how the phenomenon has evolved in the recent past, especially considering how often he comes up in UFO discussions now. Again, not everything can—or should—make it into a book like this, but bringing in Lazar and emphasizing the increasing influence of Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronauts theories, among other recent aspects of the movement, could have strengthened the later passages of the narrative.

The final flaw with UFO is something I rarely bring up, but that is presentation. UFO has the most typos, misspellings, and syntactical mistakes of any professionally published book I’ve ever read. Every chapter has multiple errors. I don’t take this to be Graff’s fault, but it’s so pervasive it’s worth mentioning. If Graff ever produces a second edition, I hope the publisher will take more care over this.

Conclusion

Even with those quibbles in mind, UFO is a timely, useful, and enjoyable book, covering a vast amount of material from numerous perspectives. With new if inconsequential UFO revelations every year and more and more rampant speculation, especially in the podcasting world, where the last eighty years of material can frantically crossbreed newer and more powerful conspiracy theories, having a survey view of how this all began should prove helpful to anyone interested in the topic. UFO may not cover everything, but it offers a detailed and nuanced look at the people and events that gave rise to our present obsessions with the little green men.

* “Greys,” for example, which come into the mythology relatively late with later versions of Betty and Barney Hill’s story before being heavily popularized by Whitley Strieber (whom Graff writes about) in the 1980s, are often inserted into modern visual interpretations of earlier incidents like the Eagle River “pancakes from outer space” incident (which Graff does not include), in which a Wisconsin farmer encountered the occupants of a UFO and afterward described them in entirely humanoid terms. Later depictions frequently substitute greys for what he described.

** As I have theorized here recently, UFOs and aliens offer the thrill of the gothic within non-threatening materialistic modern parameters.

Flying and nesting

This week’s episode of the Great Books podcast covers The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, which I read early last year and made my year-end best-of list. During their discussion, host John J Miller and guest Andrew Hui tease out of a lot of the seemingly endless riches of this novel but give special attention to Eco’s allegorical presentation of two kinds of learning, or two visions of the purpose of books: the closed and the open.

The closed vision is exemplified by the blind old monk Jorge of Burgos (a play on Jorge Luis Borges) and by the Aedificium, the monastery’s labyrinthine “closed stacks” library, which locks knowledge away. In this vision, books and learning are for preservation and understanding, a project of continuity. The open vision presents books and knowledge as a tool of continuous inquiry and is represented by the novel’s hero, William of Baskerville, who pursues a project of constant revision.

I don’t think I could have articulated this without Miller and Hui’s discussion. This is a major theme of the book and brilliantly brought to life in the plot. But what is frustrating in Eco’s exploration of this theme is that—in addition to coming down in William of Ockham’s nominalist camp, a gross error that must stem from Eco’s postmodernisms—he presents these two visions as fundamentally opposed: closed or open; preservation or inquiry; continuity or revision. Eco is too subtle to get preachy about it, but he constantly nudges our sympathies toward the latter in each pair.

But learning—or, worse, an entire society—built only on openness, inquiry, and revision will become unstable, something that should be obvious these 45 years on from Eco’s book.

I’ve had a few friends and acquaintances over the years who operated like this to a fault. I remember one saying many times that the goal of reading and research was to be able “to ask more interesting questions,” never to get answers or to know anything. (It occurs to me now that he actually used a picture of Sean Connery as William of Baskerville as a social media avatar for a long time.) Others, especially in grad school, never treated any topic as settled—except the need to keep every topic unsettled. They were the “Question everything” crowd, who followed through on questioning everything—except the command to question.

An endless recursion to questioning might be enjoyable to some people—and, indeed, this type is usually impossible to pin down on any topic, a trait they seem to think is puckish but quickly becomes annoying—but our minds aren’t designed for that. Even Socrates was always driving at some kind of final answer.

When the open and closed are set in opposition, as in Eco’s story, we get a demand that birds either only fly or only nest when the two actions are complementary. Birds have to fly out to explore, if only to find food, but they also have to land somewhere. Birds that never leave the nest will die—a fact that’s become proverbial—but likewise birds that never land and never build will never rest, never lay eggs, and never send forth a new generation to fly.

Ties that could never be chosen

Yesterday Alan Jacobs shared a thought-provoking short post on “the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen,” a deep cultural shift that has made all of us more autonomous and less human. Jacobs mentions family ties specifically, which we all receive rather than select, and includes the following quotation from the late Sir Roger Scruton’s final book, a study of Wagner’s Parsifal:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

As it happens, I’ve just finished reading a new edition of Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic about Walter of Aquitaine. The poem is set in the mid-fifth century world of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Huns. The action begins in the court of Attila somewhere in central Europe. There, we meet:

• Walthari, heir to a Visigothic kingdom in the west

• Hildigunda, daughter of the Burgundian king

• Hagano, a Frankish nobleman

All three are hostages to Attila, collateral in a peace deal between Attila and their respective kingdoms. Further, Walthari and Hildigunda have been pledged to each other in marriage since childhood, and Walthari and Hagano, through the trials of combat in the ranks of Attila’s allied fighters, have become fast friends.

But then the peace treaty between Attila and the Franks ends and Hagano flees before he can be killed, and when Attila, as a reward for Walthari’s brave and loyal service (being a medieval hostage involved a lot more collaboration with one’s host than the word suggests now, and could be quite cushy), announces his plan to marry Walthari into his family and keep him on permanently, Walthari decides to flee, too, and to take Hildigunda with him. They love each other and don’t want their childhood betrothal undone.

One might expect a frantic pursuit across Europe but Walthari and Hildigunda’s flight goes smoothly until they reach Frankish territory. There, Gundahari attempts to stop them and confiscate not only Walthari’s horse and treasure but Hildigunda herself. He calls on Hagano’s aid, but Hagano refuses to fight his old friend until ten other men—including, crucially, some of his own kinsmen—have been killed. The climactic action is akin to that six-minute brawl in the alley in They Live, a brutal knock-down drag-out that ends with renewed friendship.

Much of the tension in Waltharius therefore comes from the attempts by the characters to honor unchosen obligations. Namely:

• Walthari, Hildigunda, and Hagano’s hostage relationship with Attila, which was chosen for them by their families (and is threatened by events back home and Attila himself)

• Walthari and Hildigunda’s betrothal, which was chosen for them by their parents (and is threatened first by Attila and then by Gundahari)

• Walthari and Hagano’s friendship, which was chosen for them, in a sense, by Attila and their families (and is threatened by Gundahari)

• Hagano and Gundahari’s lord-vassal relationship, which was chosen for them by Gundahari’s succession (and is threatened by Gundahari’s presumption and Walthari’s skill with a sword)

Per Scruton, these are conflicts that cannot easily be resolved, if at all, and medieval people were acutely aware of that. The conflict of obligations is hardly unique to Waltharius. Think of the Volsungsaga, in which Signy must not under any circumstances fail to avenge her father, but can only do so by killing her husband Siggeir, whom she must not under any circumstances fail to protect. No happy ending there.

In each case above, the characters must choose which obligation is prior, and honor that. One suspects that a modern person in similar circumstances would nope out of there, as the kids say. Medieval people had a word for that.

That “we cannot always rectify” such “predicaments” does not make them absurd, however. The unchosen is prior to and deeper than any transactional alternative that the world of what Jacobs calls “metaphysical capitalism” can offer. But one wonders, given the inescapable success of the commodifying, transactional vision of the world, whether a story like Waltharius is even intelligible to modern people.

All the more reason to read, study, and share it.

Take a minute to read all of Jacobs’s post, as well as the handful of earlier posts he links to at the top. The edition of Waltharius I read is an updated version of Brian Murdoch’s translation published by Uppsala Books. It’s a delight. Check it out here or at Uppsala’s website here.

2024 in movies

2024 turned out to be a good year for forces of nature. From tornados to sandworms, vampires, and giant radioactive lizards, the movies I liked most showed a welcome return of the genuinely monstrous. The misunderstood villain, whose wickedness is explained away as the result of marginalization—or whatever—has had its moment for several years and seems to be going strong, but I’m hoping a new recognition of evil and our need to resist it will take firmer root and let us dramatize and celebrate goodness again.

So much for my hopes for the future. In the meantime, I often start these movie recaps lamenting how little there is to be excited about at the movies, but the truth is that this year I was so busy, pulled in so many different directions, that I barely had time to think about the movies and was lucky to catch even a handful in theatres. 2024 was, therefore, short on good new movies for me but with plenty of good older movies to discover, as we’ll see.

Nevertheless, let me start with the handful of standout new films, presented in no particular order:

Dune: Part Two

A worthy follow-up to Villeneuve’s first Dune, further developing the characters and the world of Arrakis and taking the plunge into the weirder aspects of Herbert’s fiction. The highlight, for me, was the gnarly climactic attack involving sandworms. I think the first part is still the better movie overall, as I thought a few of the performances here faltered under the weight of the story, but that’s the difference between an A+ and an A-. Dune: Part Two still shows more craft and care for the story than the majority of movies coming out right now. Full review from back in the spring here.

The Wild Robot

My kids love Peter Brown’s Wild Robot novels, and having finally gotten around to reading the first one myself—I finished it using a flashlight during the Hurricane Helene power outage—I shared their excitement for the movie. The Wild Robot is beautifully animated, and while it departed from Brown’s novel too much for my taste, enough of the spirit and tone of the book was there to be really enjoyable. Fun, funny, moving, and exciting, this is a genuine family movie in that it worked both for me and my kids.

Twisters

This movie generated some weird hostility online, which I have to credit to the derangement of internet bubbles. Twisters is good straightforward entertainment, with a simple story executed well, good performances, and good special effects. And, as I noted when I finally saw it, while not a message movie by any means—and by design—Twisters sincerely explores a few themes that are worthwhile for their very rarity in mainstream movies.

As for comparisons between Twister and Twisters, my wife and I rewatched the original ahead of seeing the sequel and, with it fresh on our minds, concluded that Twisters actually improved on it in a number of ways, not least in its less cartoonish supporting characters and in giving its villain a more obviously wicked goal than corporate sponsorship. This isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s engaging, exciting, and economically told, which, again, is more than you can say for a lot of other movies right now.

Nosferatu

Another incredible work by Robert Eggers, whose The Witch and The Northman are still two of the best historical films I’ve ever seen, Nosferatu nonetheless places me in the unusual position of praising a movie and saying I probably wouldn’t ever recommend it.

Nosferatu, a remake of the silent German horror movie which was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, is both artistically and technically brilliant, with fantastic costumes and sets and cinematography and sound design that create a precisely staged atmosphere of moody, oppressive cold and darkness which deepens until the very last moment. It is also brilliantly acted. Lily-Rose Depp as the demonically tormented Ellen Hutter and Willem Dafoe as Professor von Franz, the film’s Van Helsing character, were the standouts, but this is also the best I’ve ever seen from Nicholas Hoult. Bill Skarsgård, as Count Orlok, is genuinely terrifying.

Eggers, true to form, not only works hard to get into the minds of past people but also wrestles with some serious ideas, including the tendency of post-Enlightenment man to be blinded to evil. Professor von Franz gives a stirring speech on this point about halfway through. In order to fight the darkness, he argues, one must not only know something about it but admit that it is real.

And Nosferatu dramatizes that reality clearly and starkly. Eggers’s vampire is not tragic or misunderstood or some superhuman marginalized for his transhumanist beauty; he is gross, predatory, and parasitic, preying on the weak and wanting only to possess, enslave, and consume. “I am an appetite,” he says. “Nothing more.” Stripping the allure from evil and refusing to psychologize or pathologize it, as other characters more “rational” than Professor von Franz do, is a fatal mistake.

But it’s precisely that clear-sighted, even theologically inflected motif that makes me hesitate to recommend Nosferatu. The mood is so oppressive and some of its third-act horrors are so horrifying that I think it would be wrong of me to direct someone looking for entertainment to Nosferatu. Because as brilliant as this movie is, and as seriously as Eggers treats these themes, I would not call this movie entertainment. A hard, much-needed look at evil, but not fun and not one to be taken lightly.

There are other, more minor problems. It is perhaps too slow in some parts and I thought that the ending stumbled a bit, not quite resolving some of what Eggers so carefully set up earlier. But Nosferatu is, overall, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just not one I’d recommend for the even mildly faint of heart, and not one I’ll watch again any time soon.

Two near misses

Gladiator II—Slickly entertaining and substance-free. Gladiator II didn’t drive me to performative outrage the way it did some online movie reviewers, but I also wasn’t moved by it. Full review from November here.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare—My wife and I saw this for a date night late in the spring and we both enjoyed it. It’s light, frothy, World War II-flavored action-comedy with a unique setting and fun characters. And yet the very levity of the movie bothered me. After trying and failing to review it here on the blog a few times, I finally realized that I’m sick of gleeful killing in historical movies.

“But they’re Nazis!” All of them? The more common that excuse has become the more I’ve started to question it—and worry about it. Oddly, the movie actually acknowledges, just once, that the scores and scores of enemies Henry Cavill and company effortlessly wipe out are ordinary people when Cavill, about to kill yet another German sailor, sees how young the sailor is and lets him go. The rest of the movie is a numbing sub-Tarantino shooting gallery. It’s entertaining, yes, but its winky approach to slaughter—with never a single jam or misfire in hundreds of rounds fired from Sten guns, by the way—downplays the soul-damage wrought not only on participants in this kind of killing but on the audience as well.

There’s likely a good movie in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, but it would have required a sweatier, more earnest approach than what Guy Ritchie gives us here.

Favorite of the year: Godzilla Minus One

I’m cheating a bit by choosing this as my favorite of the year rather than bumping it down to the “new to me” section, but it was only briefly in theatres here in 2023 and I missed my only opportunity to see it during that window owing to sickness. And—not insignificantly—Godzilla Minus One is far better than anything else I saw during 2024.

This is not simply a good Godzilla movie (I’ve only ever see one other, one of the so-so American movies made over the last decade), this is a well-acted, beautifully shot, thematically rich, exciting, terrifying, and moving drama that happens to have a giant radioactive lizard in it. It is, in fact, those human elements that make Godzilla’s arrival so powerfully effective. I’ve watched it several times now—on my own, with my wife, with my family over Christmas—and it’s impressive and moving every time.

Full review from November here.

New to me

They Live (1988)—Classic John Carpenter sci-fi, with a great concept presented in a subtle, low-key way that only enhances the big revelation about halfway through. Wonderfully creepy, funny, and entertaining. I blogged about a recurring conspiracy motif that appears in the film here.

The Arctic Convoy (2023)—An immediately involving Second World War action-drama about a fictional Norwegian cargo ship traveling with a convoy based on PQ 17, which was en route from Iceland to Murmansk when its naval escort was withdrawn and the convoy was ordered to disperse. U-boats and German bombers stationed in Norway did the rest, sinking all but 11 of the 35 ships in the group. This film, something like Greyhound aboard a merchant ship rather than a destroyer, puts the viewer in the shoes of the ship’s crew and vividly presents the dangers of such work. There are a few excellent action sequences, but the heart of the film is a drama pitting the stalwart captain against his first mate, a broken former captain who was one of the only survivors of his previous ship. Worth seeking out.

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)—A gritty, well-acted, suspenseful show-don’t-tell prison drama with a great central performance by Clint Eastwood. Economically told and engaging right from the get-go. I’ve known this story for years without ever having seen this dramatization, and I’m glad I finally did.

Radical Wolfe (2023)—A solid feature-length documentary on one of my favorite writers, with an appropriate zing-pow energy to the presentation and some good attention to Wolfe’s background as a fish-out-of-water Southerner in the northeast and his early days as a reporter.

Looking ahead

Ordinarily I include a list here of what I’m anticipating in the new year, but I’m afraid that list is exceptionally short this time, consisting of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (at last), with Black Bag, Tron: Ares, The Amateur, and the new Superman four movies I’m curious but not necessarily excited about. (The last time I got excited about a Superman movie it was Man of Steel, which my wife and I watched on our honeymoon.) And just yesterday I discovered the upcoming Warfare, a real-time war movie co-directed by Alex Garland and based on an incident involving Navy SEALs during the Iraq War. I’ll also be taking my kids to see Dog Man, my eldest son being a huge fan.

I hope there’ll be more to get excited about, or that I’ve forgotten something, but 2025 may turn out to be another good year for new-to-me viewings of classics.

2024 in books

Happy New Year! This was a busy and eventful year for us, including a lot of sickness (as I pieced this post together over the last couple weeks, both twins and one of the older kids got the flu) but also a lot of good. And I’m glad to say that even if I didn’t read as many books as I have in some previous years, I still found time for lots of good reading.

So, as usual, here are my favorite reads in fiction, what I broadly call non-fiction, kids’ books, and those books I’ve read before that I revisited in 2024. I had a lot of good surprises and I hope you’ll find some here, too—especially when we get to my overall favorites of the year.

Favorite fiction

Hill 112, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A vividly imagined, totally absorbing look at the Normandy campaign from the grunt’s-eye perspective of three young British soldiers. One of my absolute favorites this year. Full review here.

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—An engrossing, atmospheric historical mystery set in a medieval monastery perched high above the Italian countryside, The Name of the Rose also features one of the great one-off detectives of modern fiction: English Franciscan William of Baskerville. Intricately plotted and densely imagined, loaded with great period detail (and, unfortunately and frustratingly, some modern stereotypes of medieval people). It’s a weighty, learned novel with the nimble pacing of a thriller. Glad I finally got around to reading this.

Mexico Set and London Match, by Len Deighton—The second and third in Deighton’s Game Set Match trilogy starring British spy Bernard Samson. These two novels deal with the aftermath of the defection to the Soviets of a highly-placed member of British intelligence in the first book. In Mexico Set, Samson attempts to entice a KGB agent into defection but the ongoing work of the first novel’s defector for the Soviets risks making Samson himself look like a double agent, and in London Match, Samson investigates the possible existence of a second, previously undetected mole in the intelligence service’s leadership. Both are excellently done: complex, atmospheric, funny, and surprisingly moving, with London Match ending the trilogy with a satisfying but profound sense of melancholy. I look forward to more of Samson in the six other novels Deighton wrote about him before retiring in the 1990s.

The Free Fishers, by John Buchan—A fast-paced, fun historical adventure set in a well-realized Regency England—not the Regency of country houses and balls and ten thousand a year but of rural highways, coach schedules and horse changes, wayside inns, and, remotely but threateningly, the Napoleonic Wars. The Free Fishers has a lot of the hallmarks of Buchan’s other historical fiction but has an especially good ensemble of clashing characters who have enough virtue and strength of character to learn how to cooperate against evil. Full review for John Buchan June here.

The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham—What if an alien threat came not from the sky but the deepest ocean abysses? And how does one wage war on an enemy one never sees much less understands? Another excellent, surprising sci-fi novel by Wyndham. Full review here.

The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Walter Tevis—A man simply appears in the Kentucky countryside one day, patents and licenses a series of otherworldly technologies, and profits—while, predictably, attracting a lot of suspicious and greedy attention. Who is he? What’s he up to? And what burdens him so heavily that his character threatens to collapse under the weight of addiction? A light, fast read that proves instantly intriguing and suspenseful and, eventually, frustrating and moving. A great surprise.

Wake of Malice, by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson—The third in Nicholson’s series concerning Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a diminutive, pun-loving Dominican friar who also happens to be a vampire hunter. The first, A Bloody Habit, was my favorite fictional read of 2019. Wake of Malice is another strong entry, following Hugh Buckley, a young Irish reporter for a London daily newspaper who travels to his homeland to cover a story on Church malfeasance. A parish priest has been accused of embezzling charitable funds but something much more sinister is afoot, the first sign of which is the priest’s chief accuser turning up dead—and partially devoured. Local politics turned murderous? A relict pagan cult? Or is it something far older that emerges from the caves beneath the moors at night? Fun, well-paced, set in a vividly drawn rural Irish setting and full of vivid and interesting characters—especially Buckley himself, best friend and press photographer Freddie Jones, and the incomparable Fr Thomas Edmund—Wake of Malice is also intensely atmospheric.

LaBrava, by Elmore Leonard—A blackmail scheme, a sardonic hero, a classic movie actress whom danger seems to orbit, violent crooks who are none too bright, a brilliantly described Miami setting, and some good third-act surprises, this is a crime novel in Leonard’s finest 1980s form. As I noted in my summer reading review, I’d probably rate only Rum Punch and Freaky Deaky higher.

The Long Lavender Look, by John D MacDonald—The first of MacDonald’s Travis McGee thrillers that I’ve read, this novel begins with “salvage expert” McGee and his best friend Meyer, while traveling through the remotest parts of Florida by night, veering off the road into a canal to avoid hitting a woman who appeared in their headlights. The next morning, the local sheriff arrests them for the murder of someone they’ve never heard of. When a thuggish deputy roughs up Meyer, McGee vows revenge against the sheriff and to find out what really happened that night—disappearing woman, car crash, murder, and all. A tough, gritty crime mystery leavened with humor and McGee’s sharp observations. I already have several more of these lined up for 2025.

The Year of Ambler and Powers

This year I read several books by two new-to-me authors who could hardly be more different from each other. One is a master of intricately plotted and detail-rich sci-fi and historical fantasy, the other a master of fast-paced, buttoned-down espionage thrillers. Both, crucially, write totally absorbing novels. They are Tim Powers and Eric Ambler.

The result was a year full of good fiction, but always with a return to these two authors. So rather than selecting one overall “best of the year” from among my fiction reading, I’m cheating big time and naming all eleven of the books I read by these two authors as my best of the year, with a single overall favorite for each.

First, beginning with Tim Powers:

• Medusa’s Web—The last remaining scions of a dysfunctional California family, two sets of brothers and sisters, reconnect at their crumbling family mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Thanks to sinister illustrations they call “spiders” they have the ability to mind-hop, not just in the present but into the past. As they relitigate old disagreements and try to use the spiders to investigate unsolved crimes from Hollywood’s silent era, the threat of a supreme, original spider looms. Propulsive and uncanny right from the beginning, with some great overtones of Poe.

• On Stranger Tides—A rousing, eerie, vivid supernatural adventure among the 18th-century pirates of the Caribbean ranging from Jamaica to the swamps of central Florida. One of my favorites of Powers’s books for its exuberant storytelling, its attention to realistic historical detail, and its sheer inventiveness.

• My Brother’s Keeper—Powers’s most recent novel, a look at the Brontë family and their secret history with lycanthropism. After encountering a strange man with wounds that heal suspiciously quickly, Emily begins probing her father’s life story and her brother Branwell’s odd behavior. Family secrets, an ancient werewolf cult, Catholic werewolf hunters, breath-stealing ghosts, heads in bags, a werewolf brawl in a kitchen, and a lonely crag on the misty moors also figure. Packed with gothic atmosphere and great—true!—detail about the Brontës.

• Down and Out in Purgatory: Collected Stories—A richly varied collection of twenty-one short stories involving ghosts, time loops, vampires, the disintegrating edges of the afterlife, and HP Lovecraft himself alongside such workaday concerns as growing tomatoes, browsing for used books, and confession. I listed my favorites of the collection back in the spring.

Favorite Powers of the year: Last Call

Scott Crane is only a small boy when his father, a crook who has settled in Las Vegas, attempts to exercise some kind of supernatural power over him using a deck of tarot cards. Scott’s mother saves him, shooting his father and fleeing, but not before Scott has lost an eye. Taken in by a professional gambler named Ozzie and raised with a foster sister named Diane, Scott grows up learning how to work the card tables, both the ordinary kind and the kind where decks that draw otherworldly attention are shuffled, dealt, and played for eternal stakes.

It is at one of these games, a game Ozzie had warned Scott not to attend, that Scott plays an arcane card game using an antique tarot deck against a sinister dealer. Unwittingly, Scott wagers and loses his soul.

After a prologue establishing Scott’s past history, the novel picks up with Scott as an adult estranged from Ozzie and Diane, and a widower to boot. He’s also the subject of his new neighbor Arky’s attention. Arky has a terminal illness and has, through trial and error, worked his way toward Scott as the center of some kind of uncanny power that might be able to help him. And the man Scott lost his soul to decades before, a powerful entity who aims to set himself up as the new Fisher King of Las Vegas, has plans to find Scott and collect what he’s owed.

Gambling lore, Arthuriana, divination, body-hopping, ghosts, and the real-life history of organized crime in Las Vegas—Last Call defies easy summary. It’s dense, intricately plotted, and rich with detail, both this-worldly and fantastical. As in all of Powers’s fiction, the magic used by the characters has a lived-in, arrived-at feeling that makes it both more believable and more mysterious. Why does alcohol affect the characters and the unseen magic the way it does? They don’t know, but they try to work with it. As Scott, sensing the trouble coming for him, works his way back to Vegas and tries to unriddle his situation, we are drawn along with him into a dark world existing in plain sight within our own. It’s immediately and totally involving and only escalates in pace and suspense across its five hundred pages.

But what I found most appealing in Last Call were the characters. Scott Crane is a likeable protagonist, naïve and foolhardy as a youth and living with the consequences as well as the sorrows of his adult life. Ozzie is a brilliantly drawn mentor and surrogate father, and Diane a strong and appealing love interest. And I especially liked the wry but hopeful Arky, an unlucky normie along for the ride and loyal to Scott to a fault. The villains are just as strong, and all the more menacing as a result.

It was hard to pick a favorite among these Powers novels, but Last Call, with its eerie, exciting plot and strong mythological and religious themes, was an exciting and rewarding adventure. If you’re looking for the best and most imaginative modern fantasy set in our own world—Powers, refreshingly, has insisted many times that his novels take place in our world, not some alternate universe—Last Call is a great place to start.

And now for Eric Ambler:

• The Mask of Dimitrios—An English novelist on holiday in Istanbul learns of the death of an international criminal and takes it upon himself to unravel the mystery of his terrible life. The book that got me into Ambler back in the spring. Full review here.

• Uncommon Danger—A journalist at a Nazi conference in Munich makes a quick trip across the border to Austria and falls headlong into an espionage plot. Caught between Nazi authorities and Communist agents, both of whom have a penchant for brutal pragmatic violence, he must trust unexpected allies if he hopes to escape. A brisk, suspenseful early work that I greatly enjoyed.

• Passage of Arms—A sprawling story of gun-running in postwar Malaya. As the British try to keep the lid on Chinese-backed uprisings in the remoter reaches of the Empire, an Indian accountant discovers a lost cache of weapons that he hopes will fund his dream of starting a bus company. The intricate, cross-border machinations involved in securing, transporting, and unloading the weapons include shady Hong Kong importers, corrupt officials in at least two countries, and a pair of naïve American tourists who, eager for a windfall of cash, find themselves at the center of a deal gone wrong. Slower and more sprawling than usual for Ambler, but tense, satisfying, and a window into a chaotic world.

• The Light of Day—Taking place in the underbellies of Athens and Istanbul in the early 1960s, this novel is narrated by Arthur Abdel Simpson, a petty crook who is extorted by a group of criminals into smuggling a car across the border. Captured and arrested, Arthur is pressed into service as an informant by the Turks. He thus finds himself trying to work both his criminal bosses, who are casing the Hagia Sophia for reasons they won’t reveal to him, and the Turkish authorities, who hope to foil what they believe to be a terrorist plot. This is both sleazier and more whimsical than Ambler’s earlier books, and a lot of fun. Just don’t read the description on the back of the book—I had a crucial revelation spoiled for me.

• Journey into Fear—Another strong contender for my favorite Ambler of the year, this novel takes place in the early phases of the Second World War and follows Graham, an English armaments engineer working in Turkey. After having been ambushed and almost killed in his hotel room the day before he leaves on the Orient Express, Graham is put aboard a tramp steamer instead. There, far from being safe for his voyage home, he learns that the man who tried to kill him is also aboard. Identifying the assassin among the handful of other passengers and thwarting his attempts to kill him become Graham’s overwhelming concerns. A taut, well-constructed thriller with a colorful cast of characters and steadily building suspense.

Favorite Ambler of the year: Epitaph for a Spy

This is another early Ambler novel, published in 1938, just a year before the Second World War started and tensions were already high. Stateless refugee Josef Vadassy has eked out a living teaching foreign languages at a school in Paris, scrimping and saving a bit at a time for the two luxuries he allows himself: a quality camera and a quiet vacation at a small hotel on the French Riviera. By accident, these two luxuries land him in trouble with the law and, possibly, hostile world powers.

Because one morning as he prepares to walk the coast shooting photos, he accidentally swaps cameras with another hotel guest. When he has his film developed, the first several shots on the roll show secret French military installations and coastal defenses. Vadassy is reported and hauled in for questioning.

The local chief of police realizes that Vadassy is not their man but uses Vadassy’s precarious alien status to convince him to help expose the real spy. Figure out who it is, help the police capture him, and Vadassy’s application for French citizenship will be fast-tracked. The alternative is deportation for espionage, a course that will return him to his divided home country and probably death in ethnic cleansing. Vadassy, understandably, agrees to cooperate.

For the rest of the novel, Vadassy watches the other hotel guests, probes for clues, and, frustrated with the inaction of the police, more than once decides to take the investigation into his own hands, with dangerous and potentially deadly results.

As will be clear from the summaries of the other novels above, Epitaph for a Spy features a lot of Ambler’s hallmarks: a naïve, well-intentioned protagonist blundering into a dangerous international situation; a colorful cast of characters, all of whom could be concealed enemies; vividly realized locations on the Mediterranean; and authorities who coldly and unhesitatingly put the screws to a vulnerable person when they sense an opportunity to eliminate an enemy. Ambler returns to these themes again and again and always executes such stories well, but never better than in Epitaph for a Spy.

If you want a taste of classic espionage thrillers with good characters, realistically complicated real-world settings, intricate plotting, an element of mystery, and brisk, suspenseful, satisfying storytelling, check Eric Ambler out, and start with Epitaph for a Spy.

Special mention: The Mysteries

Back in the spring I classified The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson and illustrated by John Kascht, with my other fictional reads, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Rather than move it to the children’s books—where as a self-described “fable for grownups” with a serious theme it doesn’t belong—or eliminate it altogether, I wanted to give it special mention here. This is a surprising return from the creator of Calvin & Hobbes exploring, in a brief fairy-tale like narrative, the disenchantment and ruin of the world. Simply but powerfully told and hauntingly illustrated. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—Part biography, part literary history, this short book by two-time Orwell biographer DJ Taylor offers an excellent introduction to the life, thought, and writings of a man whose most famous work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, has become a cheap tool for people hoping to stoke political anxiety. A nuanced examination both of Orwell’s books and of Orwell himself that is packed with insight. I blogged about this book twice back in the spring, here and here.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—A short, engaging book that follows two tracks in alternating chapters: one retells, in brief, the life of Edgar Allan Poe up to the year of his death, and the second retells, in finer detail, the events leading up to his mysterious death in Baltimore in October 1849. The investigation into what actually happened to Poe is the chief draw of the book, and Dawidziak offers a reasonable theory that is certainly more plausible than many others offered over the last 175 years, but the capsule study of Poe’s life should also be helpful to anyone who knows nothing more about him than what they learned in middle school lit class. Worth reading.

Homer and His Iliad, by Robin Lane Fox—It has become a standard modern reflex to dismiss or openly scoff at the idea that Homer, the poet behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, was a real person. Working from a mountain of interdisciplinary evidence and a lifetime of study, Lane Fox thoroughly rubbishes that attitude, demonstrating at length that Homer existed as a single, specific individual who composed his poems as unified and coherent works of art for oral performance. There is much we still cannot know—Where was Homer from? Was Homer actually his name?—but that much is certain. Part literary, historical, and archaeological investigation, part critical examination, and part celebration of what makes the Iliad great, this was one of the best works of classical scholarship I’ve read in a long time and one of my favorite books this year. Full review at Miller’s Book Review here.

Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, by Carl Trueman—A helpful short introduction to major intellectual and philosophical pitfalls in historical research and interpretation. Trueman includes several detailed and useful case studies, including Marxist historiography and Holocaust denial. A worthwhile read if you want to know something of how history, as a discipline, works, how it can go wrong, and what to watch out for.

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A moving personal investigation into a relative whom Palin never knew, Great Uncle Harry having been killed on the Western Front during the First World War. Simultaneously a great act of pietas and a fascinating portrait of the world before the war. Full review here.

Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age, by Sarah Irving-Stonebraker—Ask anyone who loves history and they will agree that there is not just a general ignorance of history today, but an almost unconquerable apathy toward the past. In Priests of History, Cambridge-trained historian Sarah Irving-Stonebraker goes further, arguing that we live not just in an age that doesn’t care about history, but is thoroughly ahistorical. That is, most are not only ignorant of the past but regard it as shameful instinctively, do not conceive of themselves as living in continuity with our ancestors, do not believe history has a narrative shape, direction, or purpose, and cannot argue or reason or even entertain the idea of nuance or ethical complexity in history. The past, insofar as anyone cares about it at all, is a morally simplistic cudgel. This ought not be, and Irving-Stonebraker mounts an impressive, passionately argued case for the special role of Christians in cultivating historical memory. An insightful and much needed book, especially its first third, in which she diagnoses our ahistorical character and examines how this came to be.

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, by John Hendrix—A beautifully illustrated dual graphic novel biography of Tolkien and Lewis, paying excellent attention to the stories and myths that shaped their imaginations, the hardships that framed their lives, their shared faith, and how they used all of these to sub-create their own worlds. I know these lives, works, and events well, and was still absorbed and moved. The Mythmakers is a wonderful retelling for those who already know Lewis and Tolkien well and a creative introduction for those who don’t.

The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, by Tore Skeie, trans. Alison McCullough—A dramatic, wide-ranging narrative of the generations of war between the Viking invaders and Anglo-Saxon England beginning in the mid-10th century. These years, especially the reign of the hapless Æthelred, saw a steady intensification of the sporadic fighting that culminated, in the early years of the 11th century, in Cnut the Great’s rule over England, Denmark, and Norway, a vast “North Sea Empire” that was briefly one of the great powers of northern Europe. Well organized and with engaging and lively writing, this is one of the most readable books of its kind on this period and these events.

An Illustrated History of UFOs, by Adam Allsuch Boardman—A sweeping, wide-ranging picture book that doesn’t delve too deeply into any particular aspect of alleged UFOs and supposed extraterrestrials, but is full of fun, beautiful illustrations including lots of good infographic-style tables. That makes it a fun introduction with enough short stories to point the reader toward a host of new side topics. (I’m now outlining a possible novel based on one that I’d never heard of before discovering this book this summer.)

Favorite of the year: Rembrandt is in the Wind

My late grandmother Mary George Poss was a wonderful artist. Some of my earliest memories involve visiting her in her studio, in an attic room above my grandfather’s real estate office, and watching her paint. She believed in and practiced beauty and craftsmanship, and believed also in sharing her gifts with others. She bought my siblings and I countless watercolor sets, showed us how to use them, and shared big books of full-color prints of great art with us. I grew up around art and still love it.

But I never had formal schooling in it, just enthusiasm, a bone-deep appreciation, and an intellectual and philosophical assent to the importance of beauty. (The late Sir Roger Scruton is important here, helping give form to what had previously been instincts. See my rereads below.) And when I began to read Rembrandt is in the Wind, I realized that, because of my background, I have spent forty years taking art for granted.

Russ Ramsey’s Rembrandt is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith is the great surprise of my reading year. This short, smoothly written, and engaging book presents a powerful theological argument for the importance of truth, goodness, and beauty as manifested in human creativity. Ramsey does so through chapter-length case studies of the lives and work of nine great artists. As if this was not already speaking my language, one of the nine Ramsey examines is the American realist Edward Hopper, one of my grandmother’s favorite artists.

For each artist, Ramsey selects a handful of works, both famous masterworks and lesser known pieces, and describes their genesis: when and where the artist painted them and why, and sometimes the subsequent history of the painting. Along the way, he lays out lessons that can be learned not only from the work itself, but from its place in the life of the artist and its meaning to people since.

This is effective even—perhaps especially—when the artist in question is not an exemplar of Christian living, or even very religious at all. The hedonistic Caravaggio comes to mind, or Michelangelo, or the aloof, needy, self-centered Hopper. Others impress by their reverent self-sacrifice, like black American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, who turned from sensitive naturalistic scenes of African-American life to otherworldly depictions of the life of Christ, or Lilias Trotter, a first-rate talent who gave up her place in the art world to work as a missionary to the poor in North Africa.

All of these themes—self-sacrifice, loneliness, suffering and restlessness, the need for community, our innate hunger for glory, and even the corruption that lives in us alongside our God-given yearning for beauty—Ramsey explores with clarity and insight. I was continually surprised, moved, and encouraged by this book, and found myself wishing, over and over, that I could talk about it with my grandmother. I’m glad to say it has deepened and strengthened my love for art.

If you love art and want to understand it more deeply, not as an accessory to life but as a dimension of faith and God’s grace, I cannot recommend Rembrandt is in the Wind highly enough.

Favorite children’s books

I don’t meticulously log all the children’s books I read to our kids every year, but I do keep track of the standouts and am glad to recommend all of these, which both I and my kids enjoyed.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple picture book retelling of the story of two East German families who collaborated to build a hot air balloon and float to freedom in 1979. Nice illustrations and an easy introduction to the reality of life under Communism.

Vincent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky, by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary GrandPré—A beautifully illustrated picture book about Vincent van Gogh’s insomnia and mental health problems, presented in kid-friendly terms and with attention to the way creativity and comfort can be born of darkness. Dovetailed wonderfully with my reading of Rembrandt is in the Wind.

The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown—Simply told and illustrated but powerfully engaging and moving. Looking forward to reading the two sequels.

The Fall of the Aztecs, by Dominic Sandbrook—Another in Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series, this one, focusing as it does on a discrete event rather than a broad story like that of the Vikings or one of the World Wars, is more detailed and nitty-gritty and leans heavily into the brutality of both the Aztecs and Cortes. There’s a little too much dithering and false equivalence about who was more violent and Sandbrook relies a little too heavily on grins spreading slowly across faces, but those are relatively minor quibbles with a solid, unflinching kids’ account of a genuine clash of civilizations.

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series about a group of friends in Rome and their encounters with Christians during the reign of Diocletian, a favorite of my kids for bedtime reading. I already have the fourth lined up for 2025.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—A classic for a reason.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A simple rhyming picture book about the life and missionary work of St Patrick emphasizing the role forgiveness played in his call to return to the pagan Irish, who had kidnapped and enslaved him as a young man. A new favorite to read aloud for St Patrick’s Day.

John Buchan June and Chestertober

This year I expanded the blog into two themed monthlong events: my third annual John Buchan June and my first GK Chesterton-themed October reading. Here, briefly, are all the books I read for those months, with links to the review post for each. For Buchan:

• Castle Gay (1930)

• Salute to Adventurers (1915)

• Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work (1925)

• The Free Fishers (1934)

• The Island of Sheep (1936)

• The House of the Four Winds (1935)

• Memory Hold-the-Door (1940)

And for Chesterton, this year I started with his novels (and one play):

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

• Manalive (1912)

• Magic (1913)

• The Flying Inn (1914)

• The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908)

Rereads

Part of my ongoing project to make myself more comfortable reading good books more than once. All of these are old favorites and held up to repeat readings this year. I’d recommend any of them. 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

• Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

• The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman

• Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis*

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill,* Manalive,* Magic, and The Man Who Was Thursday,* by GK Chesterton

• Grendel, by John Gardner

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Looking ahead

I already have more Len Deighton, more Tim Powers, more Eric Ambler, and even Russ Ramsey’s new sequel to Rembrandt is in the Wind—Van Gogh has a Broken Heart, which looks more specifically at art, faith, and suffering—lined up for the new year, as well as more history, some good literary biographies, a new translation of a medieval epic, and a big new book on UFOs. And I know there is still more good stuff out there, waiting. I’m looking forward to it.

I hope y’all have had a good 2024 and that this list points y’all toward something good to read in 2025. Happy New Year! And thanks as always for reading.

Screwtape reviews a book

It isn’t often that you can say unequivocally that an artistic judgment is wrong. De gustibus, etc. And yet here are coauthors Philip and Carol Zaleski in their quadruple-biography The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings discussing CS Lewis’s 1942 novel The Screwtape Letters. After half a paragraph of tepid praise, they write:

For all the clever satire, however, the book does, as Lewis feared, begun to smother the reader by the end. It is a one-joke affair, however inventive the variations. The devils’ names—Screwtape, Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Scabtree, Triptweeze, Toadpipe—and their use of inverted epithets—“Our Father Below” for Satan, “The Enemy” for God—delight and then grow tiresome; so, too, do Lewis’s repeated slaps at favorite targets, including psychoanalysis, proponents of the “Life Force,” and overly spiritualized conceptions of prayer (Coleridge’s “sense of supplication” takes a direct hit). It all comes off as terribly clever but a bit sophomoric. The Screwtape Letters is a good, short book; if it were half as long and half as clever, it might have been twice as good.

N.b. most editions of The Screwtape Letters come in at or below 200 pages even with reader-friendly large type.

This is so wrong it is hard to know where to begin. Should one not take swipes at psychoanalysis, one of the stupidest and most damaging theories to run riot in the last century and a half? And sophomoric? “The Miller’s Tale” and Candide are sophomoric. Screwtape is funny but treats its subject seriously, since its subject is ultimately damnation and salvation, a fact underscored by the time and place in which it was written. One infers from Screwtape’s comments that the story takes place, in human terms, during the Blitz, and it is made clear in the final letter that our human protagonist, the object of the devils’ torments, is killed by German bombs—a real fear for the book’s original readers, and one Lewis treats reverently. And artistically, Screwtape is a model of concision. Lewis gets exactly the right amount out of the book’s conceit and epistolary format and ends it with a chilling bang.

And this is not even to address the insight—into everything from prideful self-delusion to the danger of snark to simple carnal lust—that Lewis’s topsy-turvy perspective offers. Its carefully observed portrait of human nature is rightly Screwtape’s greatest appeal and gives it its most lasting power. The attentive reader will see himself more clearly having read The Screwtape Letters, and probably won’t like the view.

I could go on. One suspects that for these authors, Ivy League-connected editors of anthologies of “spiritual writing” for many years, Lewis’s bracing devil’s-eye view of temptation, one in which he dramatizes firm orthodox opinions and depicts devils as real and predatory and sin as real and damning, is rather strong drink. Their suggestion that an unfunny pamphlet-length version of Screwtape would be better only reinforces that impression.

This critique smacks of distaste rather than any legitimate line of literary or artistic criticism. And one can feel the authors’ disapproval when they continue by noting that

The public . . . roared its approval. The book sold very well upon release and remains one of Lewis’s most popular works. The Manchester Guardian (February 24, 1942), eager to canonize it, declared that it “should become a classic,” while The Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 1942) more temperately warned that “time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.” Endured it has; whether that makes it a classic, the next century or two will judge.

The Zaleskis’ book is a finely researched and written biography—though despite invoking “the Inklings” it focuses, predictably, only on Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. (Where is our Hugo Dyson or Roger Lancelyn Green biography? Warnie Lewis has only recently gotten one.) But the Zaleskis’ judgments on specific works are lacking. That passage on Screwtape has bugged me since I first read it nine years ago, and their treatment of Tolkien betrays similarly poor understanding and judgment.

This morning, realizing that I hadn’t cracked open The Fellowship in almost as many years, I put it in a box to trade in at the local used book store. But The Screwtape Letters is still on my shelf.