John Buchan’s Julius Caesar

For last year’s John Buchan June I dipped for the first time into Buchan’s enormous body of non-fiction with his short critical introduction Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work. This year I’ve read another of his late-career works of history, this time the 1932 biography Julius Caesar.

For those who know Buchan as a writer of adventure novels and do not know about his education in the classics or his extensive work in history and current events, having edited the publisher Thomas Nelson’s multivolume history of the First World War while the war was in progress and eventually writing long biographies of Scott, Montrose, Cromwell, and Augustus, a life of Caesar might seem an oddity. But Caesar as a subject combines all of Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer—the classicist’s mastery of Greek and Latin literature, the MP’s insight into political rough-and-tumble, the historian’s big-picture view, the propagandist’s PR sensibilities, the novelist’s yearning for adventure. That Buchan is such a good writer, strong, vivid, concise, and therefore powerful, helps as well.

Buchan begins Julius Caesar with a brief portrait of the Roman Republic in Caesar’s youth, flush with success and grown beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. The accidental empire carved out by the Romans over generations strained its political system, which was created to govern a single city of sober, principled, self-governing men. By Caesar’s day, Rome had grown culturally decadent and its system corrupt. Elections were about choosing between oligarchs bent on enriching themselves and voting boons to the public, policy was not so much decided in debate and voting but through bribery and influence-peddling, and the law itself had grown so sclerotic that the government resorted more and more often to once-rare emergency measure like dictatorships.

This was an all-too-recognizable Rome of empty formalities covering practical lawlessness and decay. Caesar, a sharp young man, discerned this early.

Buchan gives good attention to the great crisis of Caesar’s young adulthood, the civil war between Marius and Sulla that pitted, at least notionally, a party appealing to the masses against a party with elite support. The former favored expedients (and massive public benefits) and the latter favored tradition and order. Both used strong men to get what they wanted. Thousands were murdered in seesaw purges before Marius died and Sulla, on behalf of the Senate, crushed what was left of his popular movement.

This conflict created the world in which Caesar began his career proper. It also made the careers of the slightly older men who rose to prominence before him, like the plutocrat Crassus but especially Pompey, whose rise was fueled by military glory. Cicero came along shortly afterward, an outsider rising to prominence in law. These and other major figures—Clodius the demagogue, Cato the Younger, Milo, Catiline, and, later, Brutus and Cassius—receive good attention despite the brevity of Buchan’s narrative.

Buchan charts Caesar’s rise to prominence through the complicated, corrupted, testy arena of Roman politics elegantly, including his two consulships and what it took to achieve them. Buchan looks especially closely at the roles of political allies, debt, and the mob in making careers and suggests the jockeying and jostling of interests and personalities vividly without bogging down in detail. Likewise his chapter on Caesar’s decade in Gaul, the years that made him a legend to the masses and an enemy to partisans of the Senate, succinctly covers his major campaigns with perhaps the most attention being given to his war against the uprising led by Vercingetorix.

Throughout, Buchan narrates skillfully, with incisive and nuanced explanations of the major problems facing the Republic. His narrative nicely balances broad trends and the long view with the repeated shocks of specific crises. When Herbert Butterfield wrote that the quintessential task of the historian is to find “a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity,” he could have been describing Buchan’s work in Julius Caesar. Though covering one of the busiest and most tumultuous lifetimes in history in a little over one hundred pages, it never feels incomplete or foreshortened.

Crucially for a short biography like this, Buchan also excels at the concise character study. His portraits of Cicero, Pompey, and Clodius are especially sharp and fairly presented. But the book belongs to Caesar, and Buchan evokes both the fundamental personality of his subject—the charm, ambition, pragmatism, and keen intelligence—as well as the way Caesar learned and grew over the course of his career, first developing canny political instincts before becoming alert to possibilities he could never have imagined as a vulnerable, inexperienced young man in the wake of Marius and Sulla’s purges.

It’s in the final chapters covering Caesar’s war against the Senate, his dictatorship, and his assassination, that Buchan ventures his most controversial interpretations. The Republic, Buchan suggests, had it coming. Look at the adjectives I’ve used above: corrupt, decadent, testy, sclerotic, empty. In a community riven by personality-driven faction, mob violence, and corrupt elites, polarized, deadlocked, and myopically focused on the squabbles of its political class, Caesar’s tyranny, Buchan suggests, was a grand act of simplification if not purification. The Republic was no longer worth preserving, and Caesar represented the best possible form of destruction.

Further, Buchan argues in the penultimate chapter, Caesar was prepared as dictator to usher in a new kind of Rome, broadened and strengthened by its subject peoples, who would be Romanized just as they contributed their earnestness and vigor to the decaying original. Not only a skilled politician and military genius, Caesar was a visionary ready to unite the world.

I disagree with this interpretation. Though Buchan pointedly highlights Caesar’s self-serving pragmatism early in the book, he is too charitable in his reading of Caesar’s later actions, especially in arguing that Caesar was right to defy and wage war against the Senate and that Caesar’s mercy toward his enemies was motivated by a deep-seated kindness. Cato, whom Buchan deplores as a simple-minded contrarian, was right to see Caesar’s public forgiveness as a political stunt. And interpreting Caesar as a simplifier sweeping away hopelessly corrupt systems accepts rather too readily the premises of every would-be tyrant since.

The bigger picture of Caesar’s conquests being a tool of broadening and uplift, sharing Rome’s resources and taking in the best that the Empire has to offer, strikes me as a very British (and therefore Christian, modern, and technological) vision that does not reckon with the realities of Roman statecraft, war, and governance. Here I think Buchan’s justifiable admiration of Caesar the political maneuverer and Caesar the general misleads him. Idealism and cynicism can and often do coexist in great personalities—Buchan chooses to believe Caesar was mostly an idealist, and that his ends justified his means.

Reflecting on the future fate of Rome near the end of the book, Buchan includes a Latin tag: de nostro tempore fabula narratur, “About our time the story is told.” True to history, Julius Caesar is also explicitly meant to draw parallels with Buchan’s present. It also works with our own. As I noted above, the contemptible parody of the old Republic, recognizable in the Britain and Europe of 1932, is just as recognizable in 2025. Are we, then, to hope for a Caesar? The old Roman in me, the opponent of the populares and the fan of Cicero, the last of the true believers, shouts No. It was Buchan’s way to be hopeful, but it is far too dangerous to hope for the kind of Caesar he describes here.

While I disagree with much in Buchan’s final estimation of Caesar that does not detract from the enjoyability or value of Julius Caesar. This is a brisk, elegantly crafted short biography based on a command of the original sources and extensive late 19th and early 20th century historical research. Buchan offers us an excellent short character sketch of a great man and the times that made him—before he remade them, and us.

John Burnet of Barns

This first week of John Buchan June concludes with a high-spirited historical adventure set in the hills of the Scottish Borders. This may sound like a familiar Buchan setting until one gets into the specifics. This is his first full-length novel, published in 1898 when he was just twenty-three: John Burnet of Barns.

Taking place mostly in the late 1680s, during a time of widespread unrest and disorder throughout Britain but especially in Scotland, this novel follows the adventures of John Burnet, the scion of an old and respected Border Reiver family from Barns, near Peebles on the River Tweed. Burnet may have rollicking, swashbuckling ancestors but he is a shy, diffident, scholarly sort. Where his aging father crippled himself racing a horse through the hills with other young bloods, John is set for university studies in Glasgow.

But the old yearning for adventure in his blood shows from the very first chapter, in which John, as a boy, skips out on a lesson from his tutor to go fishing in the River Tweed. There he meets the beautiful Marjory Veitch who, like him, comes of old aristocratic stock and, like him, has an imaginative, adventurous streak. They become constant companions and playmates right up until John departs for university.

John is a good student but never fully settles into university life. After a chance encounter in the streets with his arrogant and soldierly cousin Gilbert, who comes riding through town wearing his fashionable best, John decides on the spot to drop out and return home to Barns. To his surprise, Gilbert has beaten him there. To his greater and much less welcome surprise, Gilbert has met Marjory and decided to make her his own.

The encounter in the streets of Glasgow and Gilbert’s intrusion into John’s innocent world back home mark the beginning of an escalating series of confrontations. Gilbert’s attentions to Marjory provoke an epiphany in John—he realizes he loves her and always has, and sets out immediately to propose. She accepts. Soon after, John’s father dies, and he becomes the laird of his family estate much sooner than expected. He delays his marriage to Marjory so he can step fully into his new role.

But he also decides, thinking he has settled the matters of betrothing Marjory and getting his father’s affairs in order, that he should complete his studies—not at Edinburgh, but on the continent at Leyden in Holland. Marjory agrees to wait for him.

In Holland, John meets and clashes with Gilbert again. After John defeats him in a duel, Gilbert departs Holland in a sulk. This seeming victory proves fateful for John. Shortly afterward, John receives word that Gilbert has returned to Tweeddale, has insinuated himself into Marjory’s drunken brother’s company, and is menacing her and the household. Once again he drops his studies and heads home.

But Gilbert has baited him. Upon returning from Holland, he has fabricated documents showing John to be conspiring against King James II. A warrant is out for John’s arrest, and no sooner has he landed in Edinburgh than he flees to the hills to live as an outlaw accompanied only by Nicol, his shrewd and resourceful servant.

The central action of the book follows John through his months of outlawry—falling back from one hiding place to another, encountering numerous colorful characters, passing along secret letters for Marjory, and occasionally surprising and humiliating his pursuers—a condition only ended by distant political revolution. The climax of the novel is a relentless horseback chase across Scotland to Gilbert’s remote estate in the West Country with Gilbert and the captive Marjory always staying just ahead of John and Nicol, who must contend with freezing weather, drunken ferrymen, closed gates, scaled walls, and swordplay among the dangers.

I’ve actually owned a copy of John Burnet of Barns since the first John Buchan June in 2022 but have hesitated to read it. It’s among the earliest of Buchan’s published work and Buchan himself regarded it with some embarrassment, later calling it “immature and boyish” and “a hotch-potch.” In her biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan writes that he thought it “cumbersome and ill put together.” The very first of his novels that I reviewed here, A Lost Lady of Old Years, came out the year after John Burnet of Barns, and though I liked and admired it I noted pacing problems and a passive and slightly dense protagonist. If Buchan himself viewed the even earlier John Burnet of Barns as inferior, how bad must it be?

As it happens, not bad at all. I began it with some trepidation but quickly found myself engrossed. Despite some evident problems that mark John Burnet of Barns as an early and, yes, immature work, it has all of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction and was some of the most purely enjoyable reading I’ve had in a while.

The narration itself is not as tight and economical as is typical of later Buchan. As a narrator, John tends to overexplain, and even interesting incidents sometimes drag on. There are a number of free-floating incidents, like a flash flood on the Tweed that introduces the character of Nicol, that last perhaps too long and contribute too little to the plot. But the biggest weakness of the novel, at least in its first third, is pacing. John narrates his own life, and a real life is episodic, but it takes several chapters for the narrative to gain direction and momentum. The early chapters are unfocused and diffuse. We are a long way from the skillful in medias res openings of similar historical adventures like Midwinter or The Free Fishers.

These are real faults, but they barely detract from an accomplished, carefully constructed, and—most importantly—exciting story.

Technically, despite faults in pacing and overlong start, the novel is strongly written and intricately plotted. Every plot element is set up for later payoff. Considering the reputation Buchan still has for relying on coincidence in his fiction, there is very little of that in John Burnet of Barns. With such care taken over preparing the elements of the climax, the novel’s cross-country chase succeeds brilliantly.

The novel also features great historical detail in vividly and authentically described 1680s settings. Historical elements like the Covenanters and the Glorious Revolution are well integrated into the plot without overburdening it. Buchan also creates tactile, evocative atmosphere throughout. A cave full of outlaws, a lethal swordfight in a snowy forest, a rough crossing in a small ferry, hiding in the tall grass and heather as the enemy searches, and a shallow rocky fishing stream at sundown—all are beautifully imagined. And despite some incidents lasting too long or leading nowhere, others add such color and texture or are so fun and exciting that they’re worthwhile. A chance encounter with another outlaw, a nameless man with a terrible yearning to swordfight with someone, anyone, a man whom John never sees again, is especially wonderful.

But the novel’s greatest virtue is its stock of lifelike and engaging characters, most especially Nicol, Marjory, and John himself. Nicol is a recognizable type, the faithful lower-class servant (imagine a more dangerous Samwise Gamgee from the Scots Borders) but Buchan imbues him with life as a distinct, memorable individual. During his months in hiding John never seems more vulnerable than when he has sent Nicol on an errand, a clear testament to Nicol’s strength as a character.

Modern readers would unthinkingly critique Marjory as a damsel in distress, but this would be to misread a strong, canny woman with a lot of endurance. She’s sharper than John, which makes their awkward courtship sweet and funny, and in staving off Gilbert—right up until he uses his authority as a cavalry officer to kidnap her—she shows great tenacity. John and Marjory may not be Buchan’s best romantic pair—I’d still give that title to Sir Archie Roylance and Janet Raden in John Macnab—but they are well-matched and fun to read about.

But this is John’s story, and whatever the flaws of his narration he keeps the novel interesting and engaging. A recognizable Buchan archetype, the retiring scholar who is forced into action and daring, it is remarkable to see how clearly Buchan has both imagined and realized him so early in his career. Intelligent and learned but also recklessly impulsive, his earnestness, his senses of duty and honor, his friendship with Nicol, and his love for Marjory make him enormously likeable and carry us along with him as he changes. John Burnet of Barns is a coming-of-age story, and John’s flightiness and indecision gradually give way to the steadfastness and determination of maturity.

The man racing on horseback through sleet and snow in the middle of the night is unimaginable when we first meet him skipping out on school to go fishing, and that unexpectedness, through surprising turns and slow transformation, helps make John Burnet of Barns thrilling—a wonderful opening movement to a great career in storytelling.

The Runagates Club

John Buchan at his desk in 1939

John Buchan June begins its fourth year today! I started this event as a way to reclaim my birth month for something worth celebrating, and it’s grown beyond anything I could have anticipated. This year I’m reading some of Buchan’s more obscure or lesser known novels, another short biography for a taste of his non-fiction, and emphasizing some of his short fiction with three collections of short stories. We begin with one of those today, Buchan’s 1928 anthology The Runagates Club.

The club of the title is The Thursday Club, a London club to which many of Buchan’s recurring characters like Richard Hannay, Archie Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen, John Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha belong. It appears in a few previous books, most prominently The Three Hostages, where Hannay describes its meeting place as “a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street, a pleasant room, panelled in white, with big fires burning at each end.”

That’s the setting. The premise of The Runagates Club is that it is a collection of a dozen stories told by its members in the course of conversation. Like the characters themselves, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, politicians, fighter pilots, scholars, and businessmen, the stories range widely in tone, topic, and form, but they’re never very far from adventure.

The collection begins with Hannay, whose story “The Green Wildebeest” takes place in his pre-Thirty-Nine Steps days as a mining engineer searching for ore deposits in remote stretches of South Africa. While hunting for water during one expedition, Hannay and his companion, a highly-educated, rationalistic younger man, have a chance encounter with shaman, a sacred grove, and an otherworldly animal. The younger man is shaken, and Hannay narrates how his haughty intrusion changed his life for the worse.

After the eeriness of that story, the Duke of Burminster tells a comic two-part story called “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” The story begins with a high-spirited dare between the Duke and Archie Roylance leading to a footrace through the hills of the Scottish Borders and, through mistaken identity and a series of misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous coincidences, ends with the Duke plotting his escape from a mental hospital.

Palliser-Yeates follows with “Dr Lartius,” a story about espionage during the First World War and a mysterious, popular young doctor with mystical powers suspected of being a German spy. That story’s twist ending leads into perhaps the darkest story in the collection, “The Wind in the Portico.” This story concerns a rich eccentric who, having come into possession of a country house with the ruins of a Roman-era temple in the grounds, attempts to rebuild the temple and revive its ancient worship. His efforts get him the wrong kind of attention.

“‘Divus’ Johnston,” the short followup from Lord Lamancha, continues the theme of gods in a humorous vein. A story within a story, it is a tale told to him by a Scottish sea captain who, shipwrecked in Indonesia, was captured and prepared for sacrifice to a local god—who turns out to be an old friend from Glasgow, also shipwrecked.

The story told by Oliver Pugh, “The Loathly Opposite,” concerns codebreaking during the First World War and the obsession one side’s cryptanalysts can develop for their opposite numbers. In this case, a young man working in codebreaking develops an elaborate picture of the mastermind behind German codes, a picture and an obsession that continues after the war with surprising results.

Sir Edward Leithen follows with a story about how a world of adventure can be had without leaving London—shades of Leithen’s debut in The Power-House. “Sing a Song of Sixpence” relates his encounter with a charismatic but embattled South American president named Ramon Pelem and the surprising way he was able to help him both avoid assassination by revolutionaries and keep a social engagement.

“Ship to Tarshish,” one of the most moving and challenging stories, is about a friendly, well-connected, completely useless young man whose wealthy father dies immediately after a crash in the family business’s stocks. Unable to cope with the pressure of righting the ship, he flees to Canada with a small amount of cash and sinks lower and lower through lack of skill and experience. The allusion to Jonah in the title is aptly chosen for a story of manfully confronting unasked for obligation.

The uncanny returns in “Skule Skerry,” in which an ornithologist forces his way onto a remote island—one of the Norlands, later to appear in The Island of Sheep—to observe birds despite the objections of locals, among whom the island has a bad name and a reputation for the supernatural. There he has a terrifying encounter with something he later believes he can explain, though the reader may be left doubting his comforting, too-neat rationalization.

The uncanny of a different kind occurs in “Tenebant Manus,” another story rooted in the First World War, in which the unremarkable brother of an officer killed on the Western Front takes up his mantle for a brief, bright, forceful career in politics.

A final humorous story, “The Last Crusade,” is a satire of fake news avant la lettre. When a bored journalist working the South African frontier drops in on an elderly minister’s sermon, in which the minister inveighs against the Bolsheviks for threatening to execute an Orthodox patriarch, he files an amused, scoffing column which is stripped of context, exaggerated, and presented as news—as is the public response. Every news cycle makes the story bigger and wilder and less connected to the real world. By the end, the media is announcing the launch of an amateur invasion of Russia by a fictitious army of American Fundamentalists motivated by the words of the minister, who is now dead. The whole incident, according to the narrator, veteran journalist Francis Martendale, ended with fortunate real-world results, but that was no thanks to the news media.

The last story, “Fullcircle,” concerns Sir Edward Leithen but is told by historian Martin Peckwether, and begins with a time the two were tramping across the countryside and encountered an impeccably progressive, high-minded young couple in an old estate. Catching back up with them two years later reveals the power of the land to transform people.

These twelve stories originated as magazine pieces, mostly published in the mid- and late-1920s, and the frame structure of The Runagates Club was Buchan’s inspired excuse to collect and unite them. Quite apart from the fun of imagining Buchan’s regulars hanging out and chatting over a good meal together, one of the joys of this collection is the imaginative variety of the stories. Buchan was at the height of his powers as an author of fiction in the 1920s, writing novels like Huntingtower, Midwinter, The Dancing Floor, and my two favorites, John Macnab and Witch Wood, in the years leading up to this book. With horror, humor, satire, suspense, straightforward human drama—and with many stories mixing two or three of these—The Runagates Club shows off Buchan’s range to great effect.

Throughout the stories, Buchan revisits many themes and subjects familiar from his novels. The foolish things of the world confounding the wise, a biblical truth invoked explicitly at the end of “The Last Crusade,” comes through in several stories of reversal and unlooked-for grace. The virtues of integrity, physical courage, and duty, old-fashioned and neglected even then, feature in many of the stories and most prominently in “Ship to Tarshish,” in which a moral weakling, cossetted by an undemanding life of privilege, must choose hardship not only to do right by others but to be able to live with himself.

The First World War also looms large. The clubland characters narrating these stories made up the officer class of the British Army and suffered disproportionate losses in terrible combat. Buchan himself lost his best friend and brother and knew many others who never lived to see 1918. The weight of that loss comes through in stories like “The Loathly Opposite” and especially “Tendebant Manus,” but it’s there even in lighter wartime tales like “Dr Lartius.”

Buchan even seems to have a little fun with himself. I’ve noted before his reputation for wild coincidences playing a part in his fiction, a tendency noted in his own lifetime. The humorous stories in The Runagates Club like “‘Divus’ Johnston” embrace this to the point of comedy and “The Frying Pan and the Fire” is built entirely out of a cascading series of coincidences and bad luck, like the steady escalation of a Marx Brothers sketch.

But the most powerful recurring theme throughout, one revisited over and over again in Buchan’s novels, is the fragility of civilization, which Buchan justifiably saw as a thin, translucent veneer laid over bottomless barbarism. Sometimes this takes on a this-worldly political aspect, as in Leithen’s assistance of Ramon Pelem against leftist revolutionaries who, we learn in the painful coda of the story, eventually do take Pelem down.

More often, in at least three stories, civilization lulls modern man into hubris, a complacent confidence in his all-encompassing materialistic worldview that leads him to trifle with forces older and more powerful than he can reckon with. Thus the fate of Hannay’s assistant in “The Green Wildebeest” and the ornithologist in “Skule Skerry,” in which the scientific arrogantly ignore local custom and tradition and suffer for it. But this theme comes through most chillingly in the case of the amateur neopagan in “The Wind in the Portico,” who seeks an encounter with something he has romantic notions of but does not and cannot understand. His fate, quite pointedly, is the fate of mortals who trespass against the gods in Greek myth. Ancient paganism was not a hobby.

Buchan’s good solid prose and skills with structure, pacing, and description strengthen all of the stories in The Runagates Club, but these last three, with their gothic atmosphere, vividly imagined landscapes—the remote hills of South Africa, a ramshackle English country house converted into a temple, a misty uninhabited island in the North Atlantic—as well as their thematic depth, were my favorites. With such a variety to choose from, I imagine any reader could pick up the book and come away with an entirely different set of favorites. I hope some of y’all will. If you do, I’d love to hear which you liked best.

John Buchan June is off to a great start with these stories. I look forward to writing about the first full-length novel of the month, and the first full-length novel of Buchan’s career, next time.

Cicero vs Sumner

One of my “runners up” or honorable mentions in last week’s spring reading list was Josiah Osgood’s Lawless Republic, which describes Cicero’s legal career with special emphasis on the early cases that made his name. I finished the book conflicted.

On one hand, it offers a succinct, vividly drawn picture of the legal system and courts in the late Roman Republic, including some insightful explanations of procedure and the way lawyers could try to game Rome’s intricate system of holy days to influence cases. I learned a lot in these passages, even with regard to familiar stories like Cicero’s prosecution of Verres. On the other hand, as I briefly noted last week, the book is not content to tell Cicero’s story, but has to reach—strain—to impart some kind of usable lesson for us in the present.

Here’s an odd interlude in the conclusion: writing of Cicero’s “achievements as a public speaker” and his belief that the legal system “offer[s] a better chance for accountable government and justice than does violence,” Osgood notes how “Cicero’s speeches have remained valuable examples of how to convince others.” He offers this example:

[I]n 1856 the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, delivered on the floor of the United States Senate a five-hour speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner attacked senatorial colleagues for trying to extend slavery into into the territory of Kansas. Of Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina, Sumner said, “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery.” Famously, two days afterward, Sumner was brutally caned at his desk in the Senate by Senator Butler’s nephew, Representative Preston Brooks.

After cataloguing a few Ciceronian rhetorical features of Sumner’s speech, features that could just as easily be found in the oratory of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or Jefferson Davis, Osgood concludes:

Cicero’s speeches should still be studied today for their limitations but also their rhetorical power. We shall be able to better understand the achievement of later orators such as Charles Sumner by doing so, even as Sumner's caning reminds us of the problems a republic faces when it denies equality to all.

Fair enough, but that very last point is a strange thing to take away from either the history of the Roman Republic or the Sumner-Brooks incident. The Romans would have been confused by our idea of equality and the demands we make based upon it. Their legal system wasn’t meant to create or enforce equality—and it is highly questionable whether any state should or even can—but to balance the interests and prerogatives of competing orders in order to maintain Order. The Romans had many flaws but they had no illusions about what a breakdown of order meant.

In the Sumner incident, however, a self-righteous, hypocritical blowhard publicly insulted a severely ill man who wasn’t present to answer him, and said man came from a culture in which personal honor would be defended by force if necessary. Sumner viewed that culture with contempt, to his detriment. Brooks’s caning—after, in accordance with protocol, challenging Sumner and demanding an apology—had immediate and lasting propaganda value. That turned a personal dispute into a political allegory that persists to this day. Here it is popping up in a book about Cicero.

The tacked-on quality of comments like these make me wonder if they were something demanded by the publisher. Regardless, I’d still recommend Lawless Republic for its early chapters, its insight into the functioning of Roman courts, and the important fact that Osgood does not annihilate the sources through gainsaying or deconstruction in order to allow himself to explain what “really” happened, like some prominent anti-Cicero classicists I could name but won’t.

As it happens, with John Buchan June just around the corner I’m reading Buchan’s short 1932 biography of Julius Caesar. Buchan, no mean classicist himself and an elegant writer, is more charitable toward Caesar than I’m inclined to be, but his narrative is compelling and his portrait of Cicero is quite good. A sample:

Cicero was for the moment the most popular man in Rome, for even the mob had been scared by the orgy of blood and ruin involved in Catiline’s success. He deserved the plaudits which he won, for he had made no mistakes; his secret service was perfect; he gave Catiline the necessary rope to hang himself; he had the nerve not to act prematurely, and when the moment came he struck hard.

It’s shaping up to be a Roman summer. I have Osgood’s previous book on Cato the Younger on standby. Stay tuned.

Moral intelligibility

In “Ship to Tarshish,” a short story in The Runagates Club, a collection by John Buchan published in 1928, a member of the titular club tells the story of Jim, a young man whose father, a wealthy businessman, dies immediately after a collapse of the company stocks. Unprepared for responsibility after a sheltered life of luxury and entertainments, Jim buckles under the pressure to save the family business and flees to Canada to start over on his own.

There he spirals, unable to hold down a job that requires hard work or any specific skill or even consistently showing up, and lands in “a pretty squalid kind of doss-house.” The narrator describes Jim’s ruminations there:

The physical discomfort was bad enough. He tramped the streets ill-clad and half-fed, and saw prosperous people in furs, and cheerful young parties, and fire-lit, book-lined rooms. But the spiritual trouble was worse. Sometimes, when things were very bad, he was fortunate enough to have his thoughts narrowed down to the obtaining of food and warmth. But at other times he would be tormented by a feeling that his misfortunes were deserved, and that Fate with a heavy hand was belabouring him because he was a coward. His trouble was no longer the idiotic sense of guilt about his father’s bankruptcy; it was a much more rational penitence, for he was beginning to realise that I had been right, and that he had behaved badly in running away from a plain duty. At first he choked down the thought, but all that miserable winter it grew upon him. His disasters were a direct visitation of the Almighty on one who had shown the white feather. He came to have an almost mystical feeling about it. He felt that he was branded like Cain, so that everybody knew that he had funked, and yet he realised that a rotten morbid pride ironly prevented him from retracing his steps.

Back at the beginning of the year I wondered how much the values and commitments of the characters in Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic, would even be intelligible to a modern reader. Waltharius is over a thousand years old, relating a story from almost half a millennium before that. “Ship to Tarshish” is not even a hundred years old and is set in the 1927 world in which it was published. And yet we have the same problem.

The story’s drama grows entirely from the requirements placed upon Jim. Repairing damage from his father’s time proves too much for him. He can’t take it, and is ashamed that he can’t and that everyone knows and that he made it worse by running away. The redemption in the story comes from, as Kate Macdonald puts it in her introduction to The Runagates Club, “facing one’s fears and demonstrating courage and moral strength,” even when one is “shockingly inadequate.”

But, as I wondered about the bonds of loyalty and obligation in Waltharius, how much of this would a modern reader get? The ideas of Fate and retribution from God, or that certain behavior is shameful and that one should listen to critics, or the very concept of duty—Buchan conveys these powerfully but moderns scoff at all of it. Even the cultural allusions that gave the story resonance in 1927—Jonah fleeing to Tarshish, the mark of Cain—cannot be counted on to convey meaning to them. What John Keegan called the “moral atmosphere” of Buchan’s work would be not so much rejected as missed completely.

The modern reader is more likely to sympathize with the “useless” Jim at the beginning of the story: a well-liked, inoffensive, sociable non-entity whose only noteworthy skill is dancing. Rather than tough talk and hard work, they’d recommend therapy. And yet that would leave Jim stranded in his weakness. Worse, it would probably give him a flaw he lacks, a lack that is one of his few saving graces in the story—entitlement.

You can read “Ship of Tarshish” at Project Gutenberg. The Runagates Club is a fine collection of a wide variety of stories and will be one of the first books I write about next week, as this year’s John Buchan June gets underway.

Riddles in the Dark

I’ve previously mentioned here the precise moment I knew I loved The Hobbit—reading “Riddles in the Dark” in the car on the way to the MLB Home Run Derby in Atlanta, July 10, 2000. I had just turned 16 the month before and The Hobbit was my first Tolkien, picked up on a friend’s recommendation and read with uncertainty. That car ride made me a devoted fan.

It’s unusual to be able to date one’s love for a favorite book so precisely. The special event associated with this one helps it stick in the memory, I’m sure, but it’s that chapter specifically that is so powerful. Up to Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum I had enjoyed The Hobbit, but that chapter was a revelation, the moment I became aware that I was reading something great. To this day, rereading that chapter brings back that feeling of breathless anticipation.

The special character of this chapter has been on my mind this week because I just read “Riddles in the Dark” aloud to my kids. I’ve read The Hobbit to them once before, a few years ago. They enjoyed it, but, being much younger, I think what they enjoyed most was simply that I was reading to them.

This time through has been different. From beginning to end of “Riddles in the Dark” they showed the same breathless anticipation I felt as a teenager. They were scared for Bilbo, creeped out by Gollum, wanted to guess the answers to the riddles, and thrilled with suspense as Bilbo finally made his escape, minus his brass buttons. They loved it, and it’s been one of the best bedtime story experiences I’ve had with them. I’ve also enjoyed the excuse to reflect on one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books.

So: Why is “Riddles in the Dark” so good? A few thoughts:

• After several chapters with a crowd of dwarves, Bilbo is alone. The reader can focus on the protagonist again, and because he finds himself alone in a dangerous situation it is up to him to get out. For the first time since Bag End, he cannot simply (and literally) be carried along by the others.

• Kids can identify with Bilbo. Put-upon, scolded, not often understanding what’s going on, ordered around by seemingly everyone, he now finds himself alone in the dark, and it’s a rare child that doesn’t mind that.

• Further, this chapter confirms every child’s fear—there’s something in the dark! And it turns out to be one of Tolkien’s greatest creations.

• Bilbo and Gollum’s encounter, a surprise followed by mutual curiosity, need, and hostility, feels exceptionally real, especially in the way it moves from one mood into another.

• Games are great to read about if they’re well written and used as extensions of character—even games we don’t understand, like all the baccarat in James Bond—and Tolkien makes the riddle game instantly clear, engaging, and reflective of Bilbo and Gollum as characters.

• Often overlooked, I think, is that despite the atmosphere and the threat posed by Gollum, this part of the story is funny. The tone is perfectly balanced.

• Structurally, this chapter is a perfect story within the overall story.

• Narratively, Tolkien uses omniscience with great skill, shifting back and forth between Bilbo and Gollum so that the stakes of the riddle game are raised and the reader feels tension through dramatic irony, knowing before Bilbo does that Gollum means to eat him.

• I’m not usually one to talk psychology in fiction, but Bilbo and Gollum’s personalities are sharply realized and believable. I’m not sure Tolkien gets enough credit for the truthfulness of the people in his books. A line that stood out this time, when Gollum returns to his island and searches with increasing desperation for the ring: “Utterly miserable as Gollum sounded, Bilbo could not find much pity in his heart, and he had a feeling that anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.” So simple, so much going on.

• I’m also not one to invoke “character arcs” or the dreadful “Hero’s Journey,” but Bilbo’s experience in “Riddles in the Dark” is noticeably transformative. As I noted above, it’s all on him. He has to stick up for himself both through force of arms and his wits (combining the strengths of the warlike dwarves on one hand and the intellect of Gandalf on the other). In the next chapter we learn that he’s earned the respect of the dwarves for the first time and—again, something a child will understand—that Gandalf sees through at least part of his version of the story.

• The whole thing is just brilliantly written, down to the basic level of word choice and sound. Tolkien manipulates both for maximum atmosphere. The darkness of the tunnels, the weight of the stone above, and the cold and damp of Gollum’s cave are tactile.

• Related: last night, after finishing the chapter with the kids, my wife complimented my voices. I couldn’t take credit: reading Gollum’s dialogue aloud almost creates his voice on its own. Tolkien loads it with sibilants, most obviously, but also lots of breathy, open-throated sounds. And unlike the smooth, respectable Bilbo, Gollum speaks with a jarring, sprung rhythm that reads naturally as disturbed and aggressive.

I should make a more formal study of Tolkien’s work in this chapter here sometime. In the meantime, the short version: This chapter of The Hobbit is the work of a great writer at the peak of his imaginative powers and technical skill. A model worth studying—and enjoying for many years.

Spring reading 2025

It’s been a hard semester, but through it all I’ve had some astonishingly good reading. With over thirty books read I feel like my reading has finally bounced back from the birth of the twins almost two years ago. I had a hard time narrowing this list down, but below you’ll find a handful of favorite novels, history and general non-fiction, and kids’ books, as well as a few honorable mentions in the two main categories and the books I revisited this semester.

For the purposes of this post, my “spring” ended Monday the 19th, the first day of summer classes here at my school. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

A Month in the Country, by JL Carr—A veteran of the Western Front, physically and spiritually broken, is commissioned to restore a defaced medieval mural in a small church in the English countryside. A short, seemingly simple, but rich, beautifully written, and moving story. One I plan to reread soon, as even while reading it I was aware that I wasn’t picking up all it had to offer.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle is an undistinguished scholar of 19th-century British literature and an expert on the obscure Romantic poet William Ashbless. When an eccentric businessman contacts Doyle with the opportunity to lead a group of millionaire tourists to 1810 London to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Doyle is skeptical but accepts. To his astonishment, the businessman’s time travel works—but Doyle is stranded in London when the party returns. Reduced to begging, he encounters Jacky, a girl disguising herself as a man in order to avenge her murdered brother; Horrabin, a terrifying street-performing clown who leads an army of beggars from an underground hideout; Dr Romany, a magician with ties to the gods of ancient Egypt; and Dog-Face Joe, a werewolf with the ability to swap bodies as the one he occupies becomes more and more obviously a monster. As Doyle simply tries to survive and find a way back to the present—with the help, he hopes, of Ashbless, whom he knows from his research will be in London soon—all of these characters try to use him, and even the businessman who got Doyle into this mess turns out to have hidden designs for Doyle, for Dog-Face Joe, and for the capabilities he has developed. This is the best kind of time-travel story, with minimal explanation of how the technology actually works and a great emphasis on a realistically rendered past for the characters to get lost in. The horror elements are, as a friend put it, a “fever dream,” a totally involving and mysterious adventure, and the intricately constructed plot resolves with one of Powers’s most satisfying conclusions. One of the most purely absorbing and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.

Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd—A short but complex and well plotted spy novel concerning a journalist, having gotten a rare interview with the president of a revolutionary government in the decolonizing Africa of the early 1960s, being slowly pulled into the world of espionage and deception. Shades of Buchan and Ambler with a more powerful sense of uncertainty and paranoia than is usual in either. Full review on the blog here.

Bomber, by Len Deighton—The story of a single day and a single fictitious air raid by the RAF on Germany in the middle of World War II. Deighton moves between the bomber crews, ground personnel, German radar operators and night fighter crews, and the civilians and military authorities of the small German town that the bombers, through technical malfunction and bad luck, accidentally target. Brilliantly executed, gripping from beginning to end, with powerful and moving irony throughout. With The Anubis Gates, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—The Jim of the title is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in history at a small English university. Jim is not very enthusiastic about his job but needs to pass the review chaired by his department head, the vague, inscrutable Professor Welch, in order to have his probationary position made permanent. In his increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Welch he gets drunk and embarrasses himself at a party hosted by the Welches, antagonizes Bertrand, Welch’s bohemian artist son, and must contend with a manipulative sometime girlfriend, irrationally hostile flatmates, an earnest student who knows more than he does, and his own growing attraction to Bertrand’s girlfriend, the angelically beautiful Christine. Hilarious and cringe-inducing, Lucky Jim’s vision of hapless academia is often all too recognizable, and Jim himself vies with Ignatius J Reilly as the worst-case-scenario version of myself. Another one I intend to revisit soon.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A short, snappy crime thriller about low-level Boston thugs selling guns and an aging con trying to play the cops and other crooks off each other to his own advantage. Any plot summary will make the novel sound more familiar and predictable than it is. Higgins’s dialogue is excellent and his storytelling reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard. A great surprise, and I’m going to seek out more of Higgins’s work.

Runners up:

• Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John Le Carré—Two short, brisk, sharply observed detective stories that also happened to introduce George Smiley, one of literature’s greatest spy characters, to the world. Read before revisiting The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time since grad school.

• Baron Bagge, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—A moving, dreamlike novella about an Austrian cavalryman’s brushes with love and death during World War I. Full review for Substack forthcoming.

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—An involving fictional account of one of World War II’s many frustrating side-shows by a man in a thick of it. Full review on the blog here.

Special mention

Back in January I read Uppsala Books’ newly republished edition of Waltharius, a medieval Latin epic translated by Brian Murdoch. The story is set in the mid-5th century and concerns Walther of Aquitaine, Attila the Hun (briefly), and other semi-historical figures familiar from centuries of subsequent legend and poetry. I greatly enjoyed it, and wrote about it in some detail here.

Favorite non-fiction

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, by Russ Ramsey—The followup to my favorite non-fiction read last year, Rembrandt is in the Wind, this volume is not quite as good as that book but was still a thoroughly involving, moving, and thought-provoking look at art and faith with the added dimensions of pain and suffering as a theme. I hope to revisit both of Ramsey’s books sometime soon.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—A massive account of the life of James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare has not only read every source, he has spoken to every possible living connection to Fleming and incorporates all of it into the story. At first the level of detail is overwhelming but once Fleming reaches adulthood and steps into his crucial role in British intelligence during World War II the book settles into a confident stride and breezes through hundreds of pages. The result is an exhaustively detailed picture of Fleming, his world, and his work. Bond doesn’t come along until at least two-thirds of the way through, a good reminder of how much life Fleming was drawing from by the time he created this character. It is also powerfully sad. One gets a sense of Fleming as both a first-rate bounder and a damaged little boy who lost a sterling father and lived his life under the thumb of a ghoulish, manipulative mother—and then married a woman just like her, who mocked his books with her highbrow friends during all-night salons while Fleming tried to catch up on sleep. Far from “failing upwards” because he was posh, as I’ve seen some online critics of Fleming assert, Shakespeare shows that Fleming had both natural talent and a powerful work ethic alongside serious personal flaws. Charm and connections may have gotten him far but can’t account for his success—as reporter, intelligence officer, and finally novelist. This is probably far more Fleming than casual readers will want to spend time with, but a very good biography and a worthwhile read.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers—A comprehensive, readable, and fair biography of Poe that pays good attention to his life, character, work, and reputation. A few years ago I read short biographies of Poe by Peter Ackroyd and Paul Collins as well as thematic studies of his life and work—Poe and science, Poe and the American city. I’d recommend Meyers’s longer biography to anyone wanting a more thorough treatment. His examination of the confusing and controversial parts of Poe’s life is especially judicious, and his account of the posthumous smearing of Poe’s reputation and the long process of rehabilitation since is very good.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—Why do so many kids from affluent families have vaguely-defined anxiety? Why do so many in sheltered suburbs suffer from trauma? Why are so many taking psychoactive meds? Why are so many seeing therapists? And, most importantly, why is none of it helping? Shrier’s basic thesis is that modern American parents, operating from fundamentally flawed premises about harm, have panicked and committed whole generations to regimes of psychiatric “help” that actually leave them emotionally stunted and make them more anxious, passive, morbidly self-absorbed, and less resilient. Shrier couples this with a critique of the child psych industry and the dangerous theories its practitioners often field-test through their patients. A tough but necessary read. Should pair well with The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which my wife read about the time I was reading this and which I mean to read sometime soon.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A wide-ranging thematic account of the life and art of the great German Romantic painter as well as a poignant, often bitterly ironic look at his work’s afterlife—forgotten, rediscovered, repurposed, occasionally stolen, and much of it destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson—An interesting look at the political events, social trends, and intellectual currents in a single year that contributed to our present WEIRDER world. I found some chapters weak and the overall point muddled, but the majority of the book is excellent.

• Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood—A good overview of Cicero’s legal career that also attempts to chart the breakdown of law and order in the late Republic. The former is better than the latter, which is when the author strains for relevance or lessons in this story.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garret M Graff—An enjoyable if necessarily incomplete survey of the evolution of the UFO phenomenon since World War II. Full review on the blog here.

Rereads

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Kids’ books

• Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Gareth Hinds from William Shakespeare

• The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander

• Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

• Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim

• James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

Looking ahead

I’m still reading a few books I had started before my cutoff date and I have several more promising reads lined up, including more John Le Carré and Len Deighton and several books for John Buchan June. Stay tuned next month for those. In the meantime, I hope as always that this list leads you to something good to read, and that y’all have a pleasant and restful summer. Lord knows we need it.

Thanks for reading!

The Return

Ralph Fiennes strings Odysseus’s bow in The Return

Last night I finally had a chance to watch The Return, last year’s film adaptation of the climactic second half of the Odyssey. After anticipating it eagerly for some months, and more so as a steady drip of information about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey epic for IMAX has begun, I was underwhelmed.

First, the good. Ralph Fiennes is an excellent choice to play Odysseus and got into gnarly physical shape for the part. He looks every bit the weathered and toughened old warrior-king, and when he first opens his eyes on the beach at Ithaca they shine with sharply focused intelligence.

And, to be honest, that’s about it. There are a few nice touches I want to come back to, but the best I can say of The Return is that Fiennes performs excellently at the center of a movie that doesn’t measure up to what he’s doing.

I had two big problems with the film. The first is that, from production design and costuming to tone, the film is relentlessly dull and bleak. In the first two areas this bleakness betrays a depressing unoriginality and inauthenticity: inauthentic because this is not what Homer’s or Odysseus’s world looked like, unoriginal because The Return offers the same coarse, dingy, brown-on-brown vision of past peoples as primitives that was already old when Monty Python and the Holy Grail spoofed it.

The Return reminded me of Franco Zefirelli’s Hamlet in that it makes token nods toward a popular misconception of what a period is like—rough wool clothing in impractical designs, rickety dwellings made of sticks, cavernous stone palaces—while using flagrantly anachronistic elements—medieval castles in both cases—to create atmosphere. This could be forgiveable. Indeed, I love Zeferelli’s Hamlet. There will probably never be a movie that gives us a realistic look at the Bronze Age world Homer describes, but at least try to come up with something other than a stereotype.

The bleakness of the film’s tone is the bigger problem. Homer is serious when he needs to be, and presents the stakes—for Odysseus, for Penelope, for Telemachus, even for the suitors—seriously, but is never dour. The Return is simply dour. The film has no comic relief, no joy, no gratitude, no fond reminiscence or hope for the future. There is not even an Athena to pity or help or intercede for Odysseus. The Return is not just demythologized, it’s dehumanized.

This tonal problem is rooted in the film’s approach to the source material. The screenwriters have used the Odyssey to dramatize and explore modern pathologies. This is most evident in the case of Odysseus’s two most important allies upon his return, Eumaeus the swineherd and Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. In the film, both of them hate Odysseus for leaving for Troy and tell him so. They help him grudgingly. When he finally reveals himself and kills the suitors, Penelope reacts in horror and intervenes to spare Antinous, one of the ringleaders, whom Telemachus kills anyway. Penelope turns on them both, berating Odysseus for turning their hall into “a slaughterhouse” and leading Telemachus into a life of violence.

At this point, by replacing Homer’s characters with modern people, the story becomes absurd. What did you think was going to happen when Odysseus came back, lady? When Telemachus hesitated to give Odysseus his bow in the first place, why did you tell him to do so? Why did you bother to delay the suitors at all?

Then, in their long-anticipated reunion, Odysseus tells Penelope that he took so long to come home because he was ashamed of what he had become during the war. At this point all clicks into place: he’s been traumatized you see. Everyone in The Return is dealing with trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma, just like a bunch of suburbanites moping their way through life. In place of Homer’s lost world of custom, loyalty, duty, ritual, and protocol, a world in which there is still room for love between father and son and tenderness between a well-matched husband and wife, The Return gives us angst and resentment.

It’s strange to me that the film finally squandered what goodwill I still had toward it during the climax, the well-staged slaying of the suitors. But I suppose it was there that the film shows its hand and I realized how far from Homer this story has wandered.

And yet a few glimpses of Homer shine through. When Odysseus poses as a beggar and is beaten and mistreated by the suitors, I felt an outrage true to the poem. When Eurycleia, Odysseus’s elderly nurse, recognizes him from a scar on his leg and is overpowered by excitement that he has returned, I felt that excitement, too. And, most poignantly of all, Odysseus’s encounter with his dying hunting dog Argos, abandoned outside the palace and the first creature on Ithaca to recognize his master, makes it into the movie. This simple, wordless scene moved me to tears.

If I’m being harsh it’s because I’m disappointed. I’m grateful to see an attempt to treat this story seriously, but grieved that the original wasn’t apparently good enough for the filmmakers. That the most emotionally powerful moments in the film were those lifted from the Odyssey with the least alteration or meddling makes The Return a useful warning against trying to improve on the classics.

I suspect it’s already too late for Nolan to learn the lesson. We’ll see next summer. In the meantime, I plan to reread Homer.

Backwards ran technology

I’ve been setting up one of my summer courses all day. As I’ve been doing the drudge work of the process—changing due dates, editing attendance rosters, rearranging grade columns—I’ve listened to a few episodes from the back catalog of a favorite podcast. It’s a sort of “Unsolved Mysteries” from a Christian angle and, though I’m not interested in every topic it covers, I’m very fond of it.

But in listening to episodes about the Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting, purported Area 51 insider Bob Lazar, and the Pascagoula abduction in 1973, I noticed the host returning several times to an assumption that I have to question. Though ordinarily properly skeptical about a lot of this stuff, he nevertheless infers advanced technological development in other sciences—medicine in the Pascagoula case, propulsion systems in the Zamora case—on the simple assumption that That’s the kind of thing a civilization able to achieve interstellar space travel would have.

There are a lot of points to argue about here, but I don’t think that assumption is a safe one. Consider the nearest thing the real world has ever experienced to an actual alien encounter: the contact of Europeans with Native Americans.

• The Spanish and Portuguese had sufficient shipbuilding and navigational technology to cross the Atlantic, but their astronomy was nowhere near as accurate as the Mayans’—or ours, since the Ptolemaic geocentric model was still the unchallenged paradigm at the time.

• The Mayans and Aztecs on the other hand built vast cities that astounded their European guests, but had never developed metal tools (despite the availability of the raw materials to do so), domesticated animals, or even invented the wheel.

One could multiply examples across many other cultures and civilizations. (Every time you hear someone dog on medieval medicine, go look at a gothic cathedral.) Scientific development in one area might proceed linearly, but not all of them will develop at the same pace or toward the same ends. To assume otherwise is to read our own present state of science and technology and its history backwards into circumstances that are almost entirely speculative.

Imagine a flying saucer landing, a ramp descending, and creatures from another world disembarking bearing spears.

It is entirely possible that an alien civilization could develop interstellar faster-than-light travel and have rudimentary medical science, or no written language, or no projectile weapons, or no way to communicate beyond the nearest hill much less with their home planet. I’d even say—granting the existence of such civilizations, which I doubt—that it’s not only possible but likely.

Intelligence in 1066

Harold Godwinson listens to a messenger in the Bayeux Tapestry

This morning on my commute I listened to the latest Rest is History Club bonus episodes. Among the questions Holland and Sandbrook fielded was one about the intelligence networks available during the Norman Conquest. Could William have known what Harold was doing before he sailed from Normandy?

Such questions are ultimately, per Holland, “unanswerable,” though it is not quite true that, as Sandbrook says, there is “no evidence.” The following passage from Wace’s Roman de Rou, which I cited and expanded upon in my master’s thesis, comes immediately to mind. From Glyn Burgess’s translation:

One of the knights in the area [of Pevensey] heard the noise and the shouting coming from the peasants and villeins, who saw the great fleet arrive. He was well aware that the Normans were coming with the intention of taking possession of the land. He took up position behind a mound so that no one could see him; he stood there watching how the great fleet arrived. He saw the archers emerging from the ships and afterwards the knights disembarking. He saw the carpenters, their axes, the large numbers of men, the knights, the building material thrown down from the ships, the construction and fortification of the castle and the ditch built all around it, the shields and the weapons brought forth. Everything he saw caused him great anguish. He girded on his sword and took his lance, saying he would go to King Harold and give him this news. Then he set out, sleeping late and rising early. He travelled extensively night and day in search of Harold, his lord, and found him beyond the Humber, where he had dined in a town. Harold was acting with great arrogance. He had been beyond the Humber and defeated his brother Tostig; things had gone very well for him. . . . Harold was returning joyfully and behaving with great arrogance, when a messenger gave him news of the sort which made him think differently. Suddenly the knight who had come from Hastings arrived.

‘The Normans have arrived’, he said, ‘and established themselves in Hastings. They intend to take the land from you, unless you can defend it. They have already built a castle with brattices and a ditch.’

Later, in a passage I’d forgotten about until rereading it this morning, Duke William benefits from similar intelligence:

In the land there was a baron, but I do not know his name, who had loved the duke greatly and become one of his close advisers; he would never have wanted things to go wrong for William, if he could manage it. He sent him word privately that he had come with insufficient forces; he had few men, he believed, to accomplish what he had undertaken. There were too many people in England and it was very difficult to conquer. In true faith he advised him, and in sincere love sent him word, that he should withdraw from the country and go back to his land before Harold arrived; he was afraid that things would go badly wrong for him.

Wace is a late, poetic source and is problematic for reasons both obvious (his portrait of Harold as a hubristic usurper) and subtle (using post-Conquest feudal terms like “baron” and “knight” and “villein” in an Anglo-Saxon context), but here he presents a plausible picture of what is now called HUMINT or human intelligence. It jibes with many, many other stories from the world before signals intelligence and aerial and satellite surveillance, a world of eyewitnesses desperately offering actionable information to their side’s leadership—something they can only do as quickly as the fastest horse can carry them—not to mention a world of rumor, uncertainty, and, in the case of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon lord who feeds information to William, secret betrayal.

Further, it jibes with the Bayeux Tapestry, which several times shows messengers bringing word to Harold, William, and others and the recipients listening intently, and other sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the Chronicle writes, over and over in every extant version, that Harold “was informed” or “came to know” of some new development, we should probably picture something like what Wace describes.

The evidence is extremely limited and raises as many questions as it answers, but it gives us enough for reasonable inferences. It also—and this is why I remembered the story so many years later—offers a rare glimpse of the men involved in these campaigns at the ground level. Who can read Wace’s account of that anonymous thegn, alerted by the people fleeing in terror and watching from behind a hill as the invasion proceeds unopposed, and not feel his “great anguish”?

You can read the whole passage of Wace in an older translation at Project Gutenberg here.

The King of Kings

We were too late for Easter, but last weekend my three older kids and I finally saw The King of Kings, a new animated movie about the life of Christ from Angel Studios.

I admit I was skeptical of the project when I first learned about it. The King of Kings is based on The Life of Our Lord, a posthumously published retelling of selected stories from the Gospels by Charles Dickens, of all people, and Dickens appears in and narrates the movie. I also have to admit that I’m a bit wary of Angel Studios, not only because I’m reflexively and mulishly suspicious of popularity but because much of their work, based what I’ve read about their prestige projects like Cabrini and Bonhoeffer and what I’ve seen of “The Chosen,” strikes me as slick but hollow. I’d be glad to be wrong. I’m certainly glad I took the kids to see The King of Kings.

The movie begins, startlingly, with Ebenezer Scrooge in the cemetery, insisting to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that he has repented and changed. When noisy children interrupt him, we discover that we’re watching Dickens give a live one-man performance of A Christmas Carol in London sometime in the mid-1840s. The noisy children are Charles Jr, Mary, and the youngest (at the time), Walter. The King Arthur-obsessed Walter proves particularly troublesome, disrupting Dickens’s reading until his father shouts at him and confiscates his toy sword.

At home, Dickens and his wife Catherine put the older children to bed and Dickens takes Walter into the family library to talk things over. He gives Walter’s sword back and begins to tell him about the true story of the king who inspired Arthur. What follows is a quick, thematically-oriented tour of the life of Christ from his birth in Bethlehem, through some of his ministry, and finally his death and resurrection.

Any movie revisiting such familiar stories must have an unusual angle to make them fresh again. Many of the rote, stagey Biblical epics era of the 1950s and 60s are forgotten today because they never improved upon what The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur did. The King of Kings, to my surprise, brilliantly used Dickens to narrow the focus of the film and tease important but easily overlooked themes out of it.

By starting off with a Victorian boy’s love of King Arthur, The King of Kings takes Christ’s rule as its central theme, and every part of the story portrayed onscreen supports and expands on this. Christ’s birth was the birth of a king, resisted by a rival king. Each miracle shown in the film demonstrates his authority over some part of creation—his kingdom. Beginning with his healing of a blind man and following with the feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, casting out Legion from the demoniac of Gadara, healing the paralytic on the Sabbath, raising Lazarus from the dead and, finally, rising from the dead himself, they also show an unmistakable escalation in his claims to rule.

A parallel theme is the irony of Christ’s lordship. Walter, like those anticipating the Messiah’s rule two millennia ago, expects something else in a king. Born in a stable, followed by a council of fishermen, scorned, humiliated, and killed—at every step, Christ’s life upends those expectations. You have heard it said, but I tell you…

Even the film’s odd starting point—the end of Dickens’s Christmas Carol—proves aptly chosen. The King of Kings begins with repentance among snowy tombs and ends with Jesus leaving a tomb having conquered death and made redemption possible. The writing, by director Seong-ha Jang, is simple but brilliantly effective.

Something else that pleased me: The King of Kings was made with children in mind and is kid-appropriate, but it does not sand all of the rough edges off the Gospel accounts. Christ clearly suffers on the cross and endures relentless mockery from the crowd. The film also includes things I’ve seen in very few kids’ books and no other animated version of the story. Not only are the demoniac and Legion here, so are the pigs into which Christ casts the demons. And following the feeding of the five thousand, when some of the crowd talk about making him king on the spot, the film includes Christ’s sobering note that many of the people following him are doing so for material reasons, not because they recognize in him the Son of God. This is not merely a feel-good Sunday School story, but a challenge.

Technically, the film is fine, better than a lot of similar independent animated features. Limitations in the animation show occasionally, but the characters and environments are nicely designed—some of the disciples have a nice Rankin-Bass claymation look to them—and the directing inventively supports the story. A series of flashbacks to the earlier miracles during the crucifixion works especially well, with Walter imagining himself as Peter sinking into the Sea of Galilee and Jesus saving him only to sink himself. The King of Kings may not be on the same level as Pixar or Disney, but the director and animators did a wonderful job making sure the visuals were part of the story and not merely the necessary visual means of telling it.

The voicework is also good, with Kenneth Branagh’s narration as Dickens being the backbone of the film, Oscar Isaac as a subtle, understated Jesus, and many smaller parts filled by big names for a scene or two—Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, and Forest Whitaker as Peter, for example. But the chief strength of the movie is its story and the manner in which the filmmakers, a South Korean animation team led by Seong-ho Jang, have chosen to tell it.

The King of Kings is not an exhaustive cartoon version of the life of Christ, but through the thoughtful selection of stories that resonate with each other, it offers a surprisingly and wonderfully deep meditation on how Christ transformed what kingship means while clearly demonstrating who the true king is.

Star Wars as a religious experience

Sunday, for May the Fourth, my in-laws took our family to see The Empire Strikes Back with the score performed live by the Greenville Symphony Orchestra. The best Star Wars movie, the best Star Wars score, live—it was great. The orchestra performed with flawless timing and great power. I didn’t think I could appreciate John Williams’s work more than I already did, but hearing the entire Empire score in concert revealed yet more of his genius.

The main draw, of course, was the movie and the orchestra, but I was also struck by the audience. The event took place not in the concert hall or theatre at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville but in Bon Secours Wellness Arena (still the Bi-Lo Center to me), with a crowd of several thousand. I fully expected wackiness—people chanting lines of dialogue back at the movie, hooting and hollering, loudly snacking, and running around in costumes during the movie.

Instead, it was one of the best filmgoing experiences of my life. The audience interacted—cheering twice, once at “No, do or do not; there is no try” and again at “I am your father”—and laughed appreciatively at some of the humor, but the mood, to a startling degree, was one of reverence.

I can’t think of the last time I saw such a large group of people sitting still, paying attention, alert and undistracted. Few people left or walked around during the movie. I didn’t see people on their phones and didn’t hear ringtones or text alerts. I didn’t even notice people talking or whispering. Even the children, some very young, were well behaved. It could be that they were taking a cue from the grownups—something important is happening, something worth our attention.

As it happens, English has a word for giving appropriate attention to something that deserves it—worship, from the Old English worðscip, “the condition of being worthy.” Our idea of worship is severely atrophied. Worship is behaving toward something, especially in the matter of attention and respect, in a manner that demonstrates its worth. The audience Sunday knew that intuitively and acted accordingly, showing, as a group, the esteem in which they hold the movie.

I’m not saying the folks watching The Empire Strikes Back with me Sunday were “worshipping” Star Wars in the narrow way we use the word now; I’m saying I haven’t seen such a truly worshipful attitude toward anything in a long time. That it came along for a popcorn space adventure—which happens to be one of the best movies ever made—is interesting.

In a nice coincidence, this week The Rewatchables dropped a long, long two-part episode on the original 1977 Star Wars. (No, I’m not calling it A New Hope.) Twice during the course of the discussion, Sean, one of the regular guests, makes the point that the Star Wars phenomenon rose during a downturn in religious adherence. He doesn’t make any arguments as to which caused which but my experience Sunday made one thing clear: people are starving for the religious in their lives, and Star Wars meets that need in a way many other overtly religious things are not right now.

Necessary caveats: the sociology of American religiosity is fraught with controversy, rival bodies of statistics, and hairsplitting distinctions, and Star Wars is a relentlessly, cold-bloodedly commercial product—now more than ever. But…

But the audience at Sunday’s concert keeps coming back to me. It was like Easter mass in Notre Dame at the height of the Middle Ages, a congregation of pilgrims and local parishioners turned together in adoration toward the altar, complete with music inspired by and inspiring religious awe. It was clearly, in the manner revealingly described by James KA Smith in You Are What You Love, a liturgy, an act of worship.

It was a marvelous experience on many levels. But I’ve been wondering ever since: what would it take to bring that kind of worshipfulness back to the things that are actually worth it?