The Poseidon Gary Stu

Rev Scott heroically tells everyone how it’s going to be in The Poseidon Adventure

Film criticism YouTuber Like Stories of Old posted a video yesterday examining “the cornered villain.” He offers several examples, the best of which are Die Hard’s Hans Gruber and Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre, antagonists whose well-laid plans face genuine threats of failure and who are therefore driven not only by greed, hatred, or ego, but by desperation. Their suavity, intelligence, cruelty, and ruthlessness may make them interesting, but what makes them compelling is their vulnerability.

This is a striking insight, and a good thing to remember when creating any character, not only villains. As it happens, this has been on my mind lately thanks to a recent reacquaintance with the hero of The Poseidon Adventure, which I watched a few weekends ago with my wife and kids.

The late great Gene Hackman plays Rev Scott, some kind of defrocked liberal priest or minister who preaches a weird existential gospel of helping oneself. What I remembered from the many times I enjoyed The Poseidon Adventure as a kid was the risks he ran in leading an escape from the capsized ship, his self-sacrifice at the end, and the heavy-handed religious allegory—crudely obvious to even twelve-year old Jordan. What I did not remember is how obnoxious Rev Scott was.

Loud, abrasive, self-regarding, confrontational, hectoring, and a condescending know-it-all to boot (watch his introductory scene and tell me whether any real human being talks about themselves like that), the film positions Rev Scott as a powerful hero but I found myself wishing something bad would happen to him. He has all the qualities the filmmakers want us to admire and no weaknesses. He is, in internet parlance, a Gary Stu. For most of the movie, he struggles only against the elements and the complaints of the doofuses relying on him to lead them out. He always knows the right path to take and succeeds at everything he attempts.

Almost everything, that is. In a famous sequence late in the film, elderly, overweight Mrs Rosen (Shelley Winters), a former champion swimmer, volunteers to swim a long flooded corridor. Rev Scott insists she stay behind and let him do it—of course he does—in the process of which he is trapped by debris. Mrs Rosen then swims the passage, frees him, and leads him the rest of the way through only to die of a heart attack. Scott is, temporarily, wrecked by her sacrificial death.

It’s a justifiably famous scene, one of the most memorable in the movie. And why? The obvious answer is that Mrs Rosen, who has been dead weight up to this point, gets a moment not only to shine but to save the day.

But this sequence is also the first time we see this cocksure hero vulnerable, and the first time he has a relationship with another character beyond lecturing, bossing, and—in the weird case of the teenage girl—feebly comforting. For the first time in the film Rev Scott actually becomes interesting, because it is the first time he fails at anything and needs anyone else.

A few points of comparison from my recent reading:

• Every character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—and most notably the titular Eddie—is working to stay ahead of situations that threaten constantly to spin out of their control. Their desperation increases throughout the novel.

• In The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, protagonist Brendan Doyle and the host of villains he faces have palpable, intense vulnerabilities. (Powers really puts poor Doyle through the wringer—which helps make Doyle one of his best characters.) Guarding against weaknesses, like a dog favoring a wounded leg, is almost as important to them as what they want to get.

• In Freaky Deaky, Elmore Leonard creates a truly loathsome archvillain in Robin Abbott, a society girl turned hippie terrorist—manipulative, carnal, and frighteningly greedy. But as threatening as she is, she only becomes interesting once her plans start unraveling about two-thirds of the way through. By contrast, lesser villains like gangsta Donnell Lewis and wealthy burnout Woody Ricks have to navigate numerous vulnerabilities and are more interesting than the lofty Robin.

I love Gene Hackman—if I could use a time machine to cast a Griswoldville movie using actors from any time and place, he would play the grandfather—but he is shockingly bad in The Poseidon Adventure. Part of the problem was his phoning it in for a paycheck. But a more significant was the character of Rev Scott himself.

It seems a piece of obvious advice, but characters, whether heroes or villains, need vulnerabilities and limitations not only to be believable, but to be interesting and compelling. If you want an example of how not to do it, The Poseidon Adventure might prove instructive.

It was all a dream

I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.

That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:

One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:

• Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.

• Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.

It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.

But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:

• It is heavily foreshadowed.

• Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.

• The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.

• Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.

• Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.

• Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.

On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:

• The dream is thematically relevant.

The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.

I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.

Badly written, Emma

The early chapters of Emma concern Emma Woodhouse’s efforts to manipulate people into relationships, most prominently Mr Elton, the vicar, who is not as obliging as he seems, and her friend Harriet Smith, who is a pleasant dope with nothing going for her. When Harriet receives a surprise proposal from Robert Martin, a man held in high regard for his character, intelligence, and work ethic by everyone but who is—gasp!—a farmer, Emma casts about for reasons to tell Harriet to refuse.

When she reads Martin’s letter of proposal she discovers

not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.

In otherwords, it is the kind of writing anyone who cares about writing strives for.

Emma tries to spin this quality as a bad thing. At first she tries to suggest that, because Mr Martin doesn’t speak as well as he writes (heaven help all of us of whom this is true) that his sister must have helped him or written it for him, but by the end of the chapter she is dismissing the letter as merely “tolerable” and has convinced Harriet that it is of no importance because it is “short.”

A few chapters later, she has so warped the pliable Harriet’s perceptions that Harriet explicitly compares Mr Martin’s earnest letter to Mr Elton’s dumb riddle and finds the letter wanting:

“It is one thing,” said she, presently—her cheeks in a glow—“to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this.”

Emma could not have desired a more spirited rejection of Mr. Martin’s prose.

The comedy of these chapters lies in Emma’s blinding self-deception (Mr Elton wants her, not Harriet), snobbery (highlighted most clearly by Mr Knightley’s account of talking to Mr Martin in the next chapter), and her monumental hypocrisy (she counsels Harriet to reject Mr Martin in… a brief and direct letter, which she also ends up writing herself). But it’s striking that Austen chose the art of writing to express so much about Emma’s moral character. Mr Martin’s letter reflects his personal virtue and Emma’s reaction to it—most especially her continued doubling down, trying to will her opinion into reality—reflect her immaturity and selfishness.

Writing style is not an infallible guide to moral character, but deliberately rejecting good writing is always revealing. A certain kind of writer likes to pretend that form, style, and the basic rules of grammar and storytelling don’t matter, that they are free to write in whatever way they want. They scoff at the seasoned writers of yesteryear who have tried to lay out some of what works. George Orwell and Elmore Leonard are common targets, but you can best gauge their commitment by how violently they attack Strunk and White. And, like Emma, they work hard to sway others to embrace their error.

The rules usually find them out. Good writing is good writing wherever you find it, but one writes well by seeking it outside of oneself and conforming to it, not by trying obstinately to will one’s writing into excellence—just as Emma has to learn with regard to character, friendship, and love.

The Butt-Covering Chronicles

Simon & Schuster has just published a new 75th anniversary paperback of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. This edition includes a short essay by Bradbury detailing his process of drafting and revising the stories that make up the Chronicles and expounding some of the philosophical assumptions behind them. It’s an interesting short introduction to the book—especially for anyone interested in a writer’s process and craft—but even more interesting is the “Editor’s Note” that precedes it.

The note begins with some information about the provenance of the essay, which was written shortly after Bradbury submitted the manuscript for The Martian Chronicles in the fall of 1950 and was rediscovered in his papers in the 2000s, but concludes with this, where the real purpose of the note becomes clear:

“How I Wrote My Book” refers to cultural touchstones (e.g., authors, books, music, politics) that may not resonate with today’s reader. Perhaps more disturbing will be some of the words and phrases Bradbury uses. Simply put, the language of the 1950s was not politically correct. Yet “How I Wrote My Book” offers fascinating insight into Bradbury’s creative process and is, at the same time, a powerful, at times urgent, commentary on Bradbury’s beliefs, thoughts, and fears about humanity and our world. And while expressions used by Bradbury in this essay may be anachronistic, his message is timeless and rings as true today as it did seventy-five years ago.

After reading it with mounting contempt I told my wife about it. Had I misunderstood? she wondered. Maybe the note was referring to the stories, not Bradbury’s essay. So I checked again today and, no, the note is very specifically getting defensive about Bradbury’s introductory essay.

And what shocking material in Bradbury’s essay prompted this note? Having gone through the essay twice, I’m still not actually sure. One reads a note like this expecting to run into racial slurs, but there is nothing obviously offensive in anything Bradbury writes. He even goes out of his way to condemn fascism, Stalinism, and Joe McCarthy and to praise imaginative freedom in the kind of stirring, well-intentioned liberal peroration formerly beloved of English teachers.

My best guess is that Bradbury’s frequent use of “man” and “mankind” in discussing human exploration of space, the use of “his” as a generic pronoun (as opposed to now, when every imaginary writer or student is always pointedly “she”), a hypothetical “Mr and Mrs Joe Smith from Ashtabula,” and one sympathetic comparison of his Martians to Indians are the “disturbing” language the editor wants to prepare us for.

(Also, how can expressions you use in your own time be “anachronistic”? Bradbury didn’t slip into Old English or some future Anglo-Martian creole. This is just silly.)

At least the publisher didn’t censor or rewrite Bradbury’s essay. The irony of past attempts to censor Fahrenheit 451 probably ruled that out. But I was left wondering what kind of mealy-mouthed weenie wrote this, or even thought using up a whole page for it was a good idea in the first place. Notably, while an “editor’s note,” there is no editor named anywhere in the book. No one wanted to put his name on this—or, more likely, hers.

Last year I looked at some publisher’s notes and copyright page notices in recent reprints of Agatha Christie as a way to chart the hopeful trend away from “updates” and the “removal of offensive terms” toward their unexpurgated publication. Such notes are an improvement over stealth edits and censorship, but as long as this butt-covering instinct remains the work of authors who are no longer here to defend themselves will be in danger.

I ran across this new copy of The Martian Chronicles in Walmart. Just around the corner on an endcap were boxes of those cheap, faux-leather reprints of public domain classics. (Curiously, these are also published under the Simon & Schuster umbrella.) After reading this note I picked up a few of those that were likely suspects for censorship—Treasure Island, a fat volume of Lovecraft—and saw this in 8-point type at the bottom of the copyright page:

These works have been published in their original form to preserve the author’s intent and style.

Exactly right. Simple, to the point, and all the explanation necessary. More of this, and less of the editor’s note above.

Hollywood as volcano god

I’m about halfway through CM Kushins’s new biography of Elmore Leonard Cooler than Cool, and just read the hilarious, frustrating story of Leonard’s attempt to get his Edgar-winning crime novel LaBrava adapted for the screen.

LaBrava’s film rights were picked up by Dustin Hoffman, who, to put it generously, turned out to be a bit of a needy flake. He shopped the project around multiple studios before bringing in Cannon—of mid-80s Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson fame—skipped out on meetings with Leonard and potential directors like Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, demanded repeated rewrites from Leonard, fought to get co-director credit (nixed by the DGA), objected to his love interest being a much older woman (a key plot point of the novel), and finally dumped the project when Cannon published an ad in Variety using a publicity photo he didn’t like. Thanks to Hoffman, for almost a year and a half Leonard was unable to work on his novels.

I love books and movies. As I read, I imagine the movie I’d make of the book, especially if it’s good, and when I write I’m always imagining how I’d turn it into a movie. But I know that the relationship between the two art forms is fraught at best, and that the movie business is a business first. Though I’d love see movie versions of my books, I have no illusions about what might happen to them along the way. So I was especially interested in the commiseration offered Leonard by two other crime novelists once the story of LaBrava’s travails got around.

Here’s John D MacDonald (whose A Deadly Shade of Gold I’m reading right now), reinforcing my non-joiner instincts: “I don’t see how you endure those people, and endure group effort, and endure conferences and stupid revision requests and kindred bullshit. . . . Please write the Hollywood book and kill them off in ugly ways.”

That “Hollywood book” would eventually be Get Shorty.

And here, more vividly, is Donald Westlake: “Dutch, why do you keep hoping to make a good movie? The books are ours; everything else is virgins thrown into the volcano. Be happy if the check is good.”

Kushins ends this part of Leonard’s story with a great stinger:

[A]s he began his next novel—the New Orleans crime epic he’d been planning since the previous year—he, along with [LaBrava producer Walter] Mirisch, took solace in the film Dustin Hoffman had opted to make instead of LaBrava.

Behind closed doors, they were among the only ones who found Ishtar very funny, indeed.

I read LaBrava last summer, and it’s one of Leonard’s best. Perhaps it’s a mercy that there’s no Dustin Hoffman-starring mid-80s movie version floating around out there. It still belongs to Leonard—a virgin pulled back from the brink of the volcano, just in time.

Short, fun, and good

We’ve been traveling for Independence Day but I wanted to put something short together before the weekend. A few recent items that have been on my mind:

• Last month my friend Joel Miller shared “A Brief Argument for Short Books” at his Miller’s Book Review Substack.

• Shortly before that, YouTuber Man Carrying Thing (aka Jake) posted a short video essay on the purported lack of reading among adult men and what may or may not lie behind it.

• Last week, responding to some of the same discourse, Jared Henderson shared a video about “How to Start Reading Again,” with Jake of Man Carrying Thing as a guest.

• Earlier today, Henderson followed that up with his “boring” solution to “the male reading crisis” on his Substack.

All good food for thought, and with an important commonality: the importance of short books. Per Henderson’s Substack essay, an easy either to get back into or to renew one’s love for reading is to “prioritize short and fun books at first.”

My one quibble: I’d strike “at first.” Short, fun books are good at any time of one’s reading life. The following is a list of my own recommendations. All are books I’ve read and enjoyed and would stick up for in a fight, and all are 1) short, 2) fun, and 3) have good literary qualities. I have considered no other factors in selecting them, so if you have some criterion or criteria for a list that you value above 1-3 above, write your own list. The more book recommendations the merrier!

I’ve sorted them into broad categories but, in making these recommendations, I’d also encourage you not to limit yourself to any one category. Again—I’d vouch for all of these.

Familiarity breeds contempt

These are the books that you read—or were supposed to read—at some point in high school. I’m listing these here because despite being on a lot of school reading lists, they’re actually classics and are still being read for a good reason.

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell

• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

• The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

Thrillers and spy novels

Arranged in chronological order.

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan—A man framed for murder by agents unknown must flee both his enemies and the authorities. One of the books most responsible for the shape of the modern thriller and still a lightning-fast read. Long blog review here.

• Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A hunter arrested and tortured by the (unnamed) Gestapo for an attempt on the (unnamed) dictator of a central European German-speaking country must escape his pursuers, who chase him all the way back to England.

• Journey into Fear and Epitaph for a Spy, by Eric Ambler—Two excellent spy thrillers from just before the outbreak of World War II. In both, an ordinary man is caught in the crossfire of international espionage and must contend with his enemies as well as his own ignorance of spycraft in order to survive.

• Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming—Forget the stereotype of movie Bond. The original Bond novel is short, brutal, briskly paced, and brilliantly written. Whether you go on to the rest of Fleming’s original series or not, Casino Royale is worth your time.

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré—A British agent plays a long con on East German intelligence. A Cold War thriller in a deliberately different vein from any of the novels listed above, with heavy emphasis on the intricacies of spying and deception.

Swashbucklers old and new

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope—An English tourist swaps places with the king of a small European kingdom when he gets falling-down drunk on the day of his coronation. Then the king’s scheming brother kidnaps the real king, forcing the bluff to continue. Spawned a whole subgenre of lesser imitators but a rollicking old-fashioned adventure itself.

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson—Another one that’s a classic for a reason. Even if you know the story, it’s hard not to feel a boyish yearning for adventure awaken while reading or re-reading it.

• Salute to Adventurers, by John Buchan—A young Scot embarks on a series of wilderness adventures involving pirates, Indians, and apocalyptic religious extremists in colonial Virginia. Long blog review here.

• Captain Blood, by Raphael Sabatini—An English doctor falsely accused of treason escapes imprisonment and wages a war of piracy against his enemies. Less well-known now than Treasure Island, but one of the canonical pirate tales.

• On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers—The great modern pirate story, combining vividly imagined real-world piracy with magic. An exciting, engrossing read from the first chapter.

Mystery and crime

• The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes and Watson wander into a gothic ghost story. Good mystery, great atmosphere, and sharply and concisely written.

• Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—I’ve enjoyed every Christie novel I’ve read, but the vividly realized ancient Egyptian setting in this one makes it unusual and especially memorable.

• The Moonshine War and Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard—Two good early crime novels from Leonard, one set in Prohibition-era Kentucky and the other in early 1970s California. In both, ordinary men must resist overwhelming odds to do what they think is right. Short, tight, and engaging.

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—Boston crooks scheme, run guns, rob banks, and betray each other to the authorities. A brilliant short crime novel told almost entirely through dialogue.

• The Highwayman, by Craig Johnson—Is a long-dead Indian police officer sending distress calls in an area that is otherwise without radio reception? A short supernatural entry in the Longmire mystery series.

Sci-fi (and adjacent territory)

• The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, by HG Wells—Again, classics for a reason. Both brilliantly imagined, well paced, thought-provoking, and very short.

• The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London—An apocalyptic story of an epidemic that wipes out most of mankind as well as the story of one man left in the ruins who must start over. A great surprise from an author I’d previously associated with dog stories.

• The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham—Two great postwar sci-fi novels. In one, killer plants escape and wreak havoc after the majority of mankind is blinded, and in the other, alien invaders wage war against mankind from beneath the ocean. Both brilliant, suspenseful, and surprising reads. Long blog review of The Kraken Wakes here.

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy—Father and son cross a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Again, don’t let its popularity and the Oprah endorsement lull you into contempt. This is a genuinely great and powerfully moving novel.

Westerns

• Massacre at Goliad, by Elmer Kelton—Human drama and action in the Texian Revolution.

• Last Stand at Saber River and Valdez is Coming, by Elmore Leonard—Two of Leonard’s best Westerns. As in the crime novels recommended above, both feature principled men seeking restitution against stronger and less scrupulous enemies and monstrous injustice.

• True Grit, by Charles Portis—Whether you’ve seen one or both film adaptations, Portis’s original novel is still better. A masterpiece of tone and voice with a compelling story whether you’re reading it for the first or the fifth time.

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy—Another brilliant novel brilliantly adapted for the screen, but still better than the movie. Not a bad place to start with McCarthy if you find The Road’s post-apocalyptic bleakness daunting.

Other (I dare not say “literary”)

• Shiloh, by Shelby Foote—A great short Civil War novel told from multiple points of view over two days. A great fictional account of real events, beautifully written and rich in detail.

• The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis—The souls of the dead take a field trip to the edge of heaven. Simple, straightforward, but wonderfully rich and powerful. One of my favorites of Lewis’s books and one you can easily read in an afternoon.

• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King—My estimation of King has steadily fallen for the last decade, but this novella remains a small masterpiece and one of the handful of books on this list that I read in one sitting, without stopping. Still one of my favorite reading experiences. I reread it recently and it holds up.

• Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton—Beowulf retold from an outsider’s point of view. A great adventure, a wry spoof of academia, a shocking horror story, and a lot of fun if you also know Beowulf. Long blog review here.

• Grendel, by John Gardner—Though “Beowulf retold from the monster’s point of view” might sound like a familiar, overdone premise in our age of Wicked and Maleficent and Cruella, Gardner’s novel differs from those in presenting Grendel as sympathetic but still evil and Beowulf as still heroic. A great read with hidden depths.

• The Loved One and Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh—The darkest of dark comedies from a sharp-eyed master of stinging humor. I laughed so hard I cried in both books.

Again, these are just the ones that came easily to mind, and I’m sure I could supply a list twice or three times as long. Whether you’re one of the people described above, someone who wants to become a reader again, or you’re just looking for something to refresh your reading life here in the middle of the year, I hope you’ll find something good in this list.

The Path of the King

This year’s John Buchan June, in which I’ve tried to focus more on Buchan’s short fiction, draws to a close with a book that is both a collection of short stories and a coherent novel and may be my favorite read this month, a sweeping set of interconnected tales spanning a thousand years: The Path of the King.

Beginning in the 9th or 10th century with the son of a Norse king, Buchan follows his descendants through multiple countries and widely varying fortunes. In the first story, the king gifts his son Biorn with a golden arm-ring. Biorn has just come of age to sail to war with his father, and in the year the story takes place famine and bad weather have placed greater than usual pressure on the outcome of their Viking raids. They strike west, avoiding Britain because of the hard-earned vigilance of its kingdoms, and settle on pillaging Frankish lands along the English Channel. When they are ambushed, Biorn is one of the only survivors, snatched out of the fight by a foreigner in his father’s war band and left in the woods. He wanders until he finally begs help at a peasant’s hut, where the story leaves him—alone, bereft, with nothing left to him but his arm-ring and an old woman’s prophecy that a great kingdom would one day arise from him.

The ring reappears in the next story on the finger of one of William the Conqueror’s more principled knights, and then on the finger of an impoverished descendant, a girl who escapes England by marrying a Bruges cloth merchant and making a fortune in commerce. One of her descendants goes on Crusade with St Louis and departs on an ill-fated mission to meet the Mongol Khan Houlagou, a mission from which only his arm—still wearing the ring—returns. One of his descendants hosts Joan of Arc, who convinces her to marry a good knight when she has doubts about the future, and one of their children becomes a Renaissance Humanist scholar and, finally, a voyager with Columbus.

A generation on, the ring returns to England with an aristocratic Huguenot refugee following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, is on the hand of one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s men during one of Raleigh’s last voyages to Virginia, and on the hand of one of the regicides who signs Charles I’s death warrant at the behest of Oliver Cromwell.

This marks the beginning of a descent in the line, and the next generations we meet are skulkers and spies. One, the regicide’s grandson, works half-heartedly as a Catholic spy in England and, fearing he will be exposed by a judge who has discovered his secret, has decided to murder him when someone else does it first. Caught in an arcane plot, he is himself killed and used as manufactured evidence of a Catholic plot to invade England. His grandson, spying on the Jacobites for the Duke of Marlborough, is caught by Jacobite agents and forced to admit that, though he comes “of an ancient house” it is “somewhat decayed.” The ring is his only proof.

Spared, he vows to change his way of life, though the decay of the house seemingly continues. The next story finds one of his descendants in the wilderness of Kentucky with Daniel Boone. Like the ancestors who populate the previous stories, he is bold, intelligent, and restless. Also like them, he is ill-fated. Boone retrieves his ring and we next find it, in The Path of the King’s next-to-last story, in the possession of Nancy, a dying frontierswoman in a rickety cabin. In her final day of life, her beloved son Abe loses the ring while using it as a sinker on a fishing line and she has a vision of all the boys through her ancestry who had desired and proudly worn the ring. Whatever the ring signified, she decides, has reached its end.

The final story, told in four vignettes spanning four years of war and upheaval, follows her son Abe as President of the United States.

The first story in the first book covered this month, “The Green Wildebeest” in The Runagates Club, is introduced by Richard Hannay as a meditation on the way ancient things survive and recur in groups of people. The Path of the King is a book-length elaboration on this theme as well as many other familiar Buchan motifs, especially providence. Denied his father’s throne, Biorn and all of his descendants nevertheless keep the kingliness of their blood alive, and all of their actions and decisions—from the Conquest, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years’ War to the Reformation, English Civil War, and the American frontier—prepare the way for the man who will close the circle and fulfil the promise made to Biorn, ruling as “the last of the Kings.”

But as I’ve written before, a theme by itself is nothing. The power of a theme grows from particularity, the concrete specifics with which an author dramatizes it. The great strength of The Path of the King lies in Buchan’s vividly imagined historical vignettes. Each is populated by distinct characters in well-realized historical scenes that, despite their brevity, breathe the spirit of each story’s age strongly and authentically. It is totally absorbing. The book’s thematic connecting tissue, much like the ring itself, is always present but never the point, which gives The Path of the King both subtlety and a staggering cumulative effect.

Also crucial to this effect is the elegiac tone of much of the book. Though a few of the stories at the beginning and end span years and are long enough to be subdivided into chapters, many of them are vignettes—single historical moments. Most of them concern death. The stories, small instances in the thousand years of this family line, are moments of handing over and transition. Epiphany plays an important role, especially as the family’s fortunes rise and fall—and fall and fall—and more than one character has a deathbed vision, a glimpse of past and future. All of this, rooted as it is in the lifelike detail of the individual stories, creates a profound sense of the passage of time and the brevity of life. Ubi sunt?

I could quibble with a few things. The historical tone in places is a bit whiggish, but Buchan, ever fair-minded, does not present a straightforward progressive picture of upright Protestant modernizers triumphing over the backward. The Puritans and Parliamentarians of the Civil War and the anti-Catholic Whigs of the Restoration come off looking especially bad and Buchan presents the Jacobites, as in A Lost Lady of Old Years and Midwinter, as noble, principled, but doomed—more obsolete than evil. A bit more galling is the celebration of Lincoln as a ruling like a king. For a Southerner and an Anti-Federalist sympathizer, this is not the endorsement Buchan thinks it is.

But those are quibbles. The final story about Lincoln is of a piece with the others in its imaginative qualities, in its portraits of real people—Lincoln’s story is told from the perspectives of Edwin Stanton and William Seward, who are as vividly drawn as St Joan of Arc, Raleigh, Cromwell, Titus Oates, and Daniel Boone in others—and in its emotional strength. The scenes of Lincoln’s death, at least when Stanton is not opining on his majesty, are a fittingly moving conclusion to the story.

Perhaps my favorite stories in The Path of the King were the first two, “Hightown under Sunfell” and “The Englishman,” which is unsurprising since they’re set in my beloved Early Middle Ages. Buchan imagines the Viking Age and the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England brilliantly. “Eyes of Youth,” the Crusader’s adventure into Central Asia, and “In the Dark Land,” with Daniel Boone, offered the most adventure of the lot, with men striking into vast wildernesses full of alien dangers. The two spy stories, “The Marplot” and “The Lit Room,” offer some quality Buchan espionage in a historical vein. The most moving, for me, may have been “The Maid,” in which a young noblewoman who has just rejected an offer of marriage receives a visit from Joan of Arc and, a year later, has a vision of her on the day of her martyrdom. Buchan’s Joan is refreshingly both pious and human, an earthy farm girl in armor fired by love of God and France. And the penultimate story, “The Last Stage,” in which Nancy Hanks Lincoln is gifted a vision of her ancestors and her son’s future, has a similarly mystical power.

The Path of the King was serialized over a year from the fall of 1920 to 1921 and published in book form in 1921. It was Buchan’s first historical fiction since Salute to Adventurers before the First World War and would be followed not only by more great thrillers but by the best of his historical novels—Midwinter, Witch Wood, The Blanket of the Dark, and The Free Fishers. Elegantly constructed, rich in meaning, and beautifully imagined throughout, The Path of the King is a fitting beginning for the peak of Buchan’s literary career.

* * * * *

Thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June. I’ve greatly enjoyed the four years of this project, most especially because of the people it’s brought me into contact with. I’m looking forward to next year, though with twenty-nine books under my belt—including the overwhelming majority of Buchan’s novels—I’m already trying to plan what to read. I may have read all of his most famous books by now, but as The Path of the King, The Watcher by the Threshold, and John Burnet of Barns show, there is still plenty of wonderful reading among the more obscure Buchan.

I hope y’all have a pleasant July, and that these posts can guide you toward something good to read in the long hot evenings. As always, thanks for reading!

The Courts of the Morning

This year’s John Buchan June enters the home stretch today with one of Buchan’s later thrillers, a South American adventure featuring filibustering European adventurers, American big business, kidnapping, regime change, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and two favorite recurring characters—The Courts of the Morning.

After a introduction by Richard Hannay in which he explains some of the background to the novel’s events, The Courts of the Morning picks up with Sir Archibald Roylance and his new bride Janet as they begin an overdue honeymoon. They decide to visit the small, prosperous Republic of Olifa on South America’s Pacific Coast. Meanwhile, Sandy Arbuthnot, now Lord Clanroyden, has grown restless in peacetime Britain—always the first tremor of adventure in a Buchan novel—and set off into the wild as a knight errant.

Olifa impresses Archie and Janet. Economically booming thanks to its copper deposits, the republic boasts a thriving capital city with both picturesque Latin American charm and every modern convenience, a smooth, charming president with modern ideas, a modern transportation network, and a modern, motorized army and air force staffed and advised by officers collected from around the world. Modernness—their guide insistently emphasizes it.

And yet, the more Archie and Janet see of Olifa, the more unease they detect. It takes enormous effort to get permission to tour the copper mines in the arid Gran Seco region near the mountains, as if someone is hiding something, and the presence of the mining company’s paramilitary guards and police forces strikes a discordant note. Castor, head of the mining conglomerate and de facto ruler of the Gran Seco, strikes Archie and Janet as superficially charming and cultured but cold, methodical, and ruthlessly pragmatic toward his workers, who sometimes end up in cities looking like the used up husks of human beings. The old families of Olifa, people who can trace their ancestry back to the soldiers of Pizarro, are unhappy. They resent the protection of a class of international mercenaries, and Castor’s mining has gained the unwelcome attention of the United States, which has begun to throw its weight around in Olifa in order to protect its interests in the mines.

Olifa sits poised between two fates: to become a commercial satellite of the United States or to become a vestigial attachment to Castor’s mining company.

Sandy and another old Buchan stalwart, the American spymaster John S Blenkiron, reappear. They’ve been spying on Olifa and Castor both as outsiders and, having infiltrated Castor’s operation, from the inside. They have uncovered extensive abuses by the company, which has functionally enslaved the local Indians and used a powerful local narcotic to keep employees like Castor’s bodyguards compliant, as well as Castor’s personal ambitions: to sweep away “the debris of democracy” in Olifa, establish himself as ruler, and use economic power to sow discord in the divided, restless United States.

With this intelligence in hand, Sandy and Blenkiron convince Archie to join them in a plot to foil Castor and shore up Olifa’s independence through revolution. Having kidnapped Castor and whisked him into protective isolation in the remote coastal plateau known as the Courts of the Morning, Blenkiron leads the mines and the Gran Seco in open revolt to Olifa’s government while Sandy takes to the hills and wages a guerrilla war with the help of the Indians. Castor, watched over by Janet and Barbara Dasent, an old acquaintance from America who has fallen for Sandy, bides his time, waiting—and slowly being transformed.

Even this thin summary covers only the first part of The Courts of the Morning. The civil war sparked by Sandy and Blenkiron goes on for weeks and becomes more and more complex. Castor’s drug-addicted “Conquistadors” reenter the story, kidnapping Janet Roylance in one of the novel’s most suspenseful scenes, and become the most dangerous, unpredictable element in the plot against Castor. This is a rich, detailed, busy novel.

Perhaps too busy. Buchan’s fictional Olifa is convincingly imagined—much better than the Evallonia of his later, more straightforwardly Ruritanian novel The House of the Four Winds—and the war unfolds plausibly. An extended passage late in the book in which Olifa’s commanding general surveys the military situation is thoroughly thought-out and casts what we’ve already read of Archie and Sandy’s adventures into realistic relief. But, as multiple Buchan biographers, the John Buchan Society, and contemporary reviewers have pointed out, this level of detail sometimes overwhelms the novel. JB Priestley, in his review at the time, captures exactly my experience of the novel:

It begins very well indeed with a convincing South American republic, mysterious copper mines in the mountains and a first-class villain on the grand scale. Somewhere about halfway through I found myself losing interest. To begin with, there is no longer any mystery. Then the villain begins to change character, and nobody effective takes his place. And the long and involved accounts of guerrilla warfare that take up most of the later chapters seemed to me below the usual Buchan level of interest. In many ways this is a more ambitious tale than most of his old ‘thrillers’ but it does not seem to me so successful.

With the outbreak of the revolt, the mystery and espionage end, and the novel follows parallel tracks of war and spiritual transformation. It is good—I was not as disappointed as Priestley professed himself earlier in that review—but does not fully deliver on the promise of the absorbing opening chapters.

I’m struck that Buchan returned so often in his later fiction—here, in Castle Gay a year later, in The Blanket of the Dark a year after that, and in A Prince of the Captivity in 1933—to the kidnapping of a villain as a plot element. In all of these stories there is some hope that, cut off from their power and networks of cronies and henchmen, the villains can reconnect with something they have forgotten and repent and use their gifts for good—transformed by the renewing of their minds.

It doesn’t always work. In The Courts of the Morning it does, but this development is only partly convincing. Would Castor, under the influence of a woman like Janet, really turn from his greed, ruthlessness, and lust for power and embrace the cause of Olifa? I have my doubts, but was carried along by the story despite them. Others have flatly rejected it. You’ll have to read The Courts of the Morning for yourself to decide.

And read it you should. Despite the ponderous campaigning of the second half and its debatable conversion of Castor, The Courts of the Morning is good entertainment. There is intrigue and action aplenty, kidnappings and rescues, airplane crashes and sabotage campaigns, and many near misses. And however convincing one finds Castor’s change of heart, the climactic chapter, a nighttime assault on an old Olifero family’s home and a showdown between the last remaining groups of antagonists, is suspenseful and moving.

The Courts of the Morning is, in its way, a fantasy novel, and Buchan’s attention to sub-creating Olifa is one of the book’s joys. Discovering the country alongside Archie and Janet in the first chapters of the novel is almost as fun as the emerging mystery itself. And this vivid, realistic account of Olifa gives weight to the struggle in the majority of the book—whether Olifero nationalists who wish to wrest control of their homeland back from both the mining tycoons and the Yanquis, the Indians who wish to be left alone, or even the déraciné, mercenary henchmen of Castor’s company, the stakes are clear and important. It matters who wins.

The story is also thematically rich. The characters at various points discuss the laxness that comes with affluence, the dilution or corruption of national cultures by wealth and globalism, the abuse of power when centralized in a single man, the fleeting, fallible natures of all governments, and, as mentioned, the need not only for political but for spiritual transformation. Without the latter the former will mean nothing.

But my primary interest in this book, and perhaps the best reason to read it beyond enjoyment, is to see two favorite characters as the protagonists of their own novel. One of the delights of reading through Buchan’s vast body of fiction is the large cast who drift in and out of each other’s stories. Archie and Sandy are two of the most frequent supporting characters. Both appear in Richard Hannay’s First World War adventures (Greenmantle, Mr Standfast) and Archie plays a crucial role in the Sir Edward Leithen adventure John Macnab, which is where he meets and falls in love with Janet.

Blenkiron also appears and others are namedropped, but Archie and Sandy, so often side characters, did not disappoint. Archie and Janet turn out to have a much more eventful honeymoon than they could have imagined, with their devotion to each other as well as their courage tested, and Sandy again proves himself a master of disguise, of irregular warfare, and—for the first time—of a woman’s heart. He also faces a challenge he has never faced before: the allure of earthly power.

The Courts of the Morning has its flaws, but it is an engrossing adventure with enough suspenseful set pieces to satisfy any Buchan fan. It may not be top-tier Buchan, but it is entertaining, and it offers a rare glimpse of two favorite characters on their own, embracing danger, and emerging triumphant and beloved.

A Prince of the Captivity

John Buchan June enters its second half today with one of Buchan’s lesser known works, a sprawling tale of a man’s spiritual journey through shame, prison, war, espionage, and politics, ending with a final showdown between himself alone and the agents of a group clearly meant to be the Nazis. This is the 1933 novel A Prince of the Captivity.

The story begins just before the First World War. Adam Melfort, an honorable officer whose life is devoted to the army, is drummed out of the military and tried and imprisoned for forgery. It is clear to those in the know that he has taken the fall for his wife, a fashionable spendthrift who tried to extract more than her usual allowance from a wealthy uncle. Their imprudent marriage ends when his wife, as a final thank you for covering for her, divorces Adam during his prison sentence.

Adam’s loss of his commission and his imprisonment rob him not only of time but purpose. In prison, he ruminates. He retreats into memories of his son Nigel, he and his wife’s only child, who died of a fever at age five. He imagines Nigel and himself on a favorite island off the west coast of Scotland—visions that will grow more vivid and more powerful over the next years.

After prison, war comes. Adam, adrift, desperately wishes to be of service but cannot return to the army. A friend connects him to the intelligence service, and after being tested in both body and mind by eccentric figures like the elderly Mr Scrope or Macandrew, a man with a Scottish name who is clearly a European Jew, he is sent to Belgium, behind German lines, as a spy. He excels at his job and by the time of his hairsbreadth escape from German counterintelligence he has established a vast network feeding vital information to the British.

The end of the war casts Adam adrift again. When Jim Falconet, an American millionaire with an interest in exploration, goes missing in Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle, Adam sets himself the task of finding and rescuing him. He does so at enormous risk and through massive, arduous effort, with the two men—eventually all that is left of either Falconet’s original expedition and Adam’s rescue team—alternately nursing one another back to health through the long march southward.

Falconet, once returned to civilization, agrees to Adam’s request to downplay his role in the rescue. He will prove valuable ally to Adam in what lies ahead.

After this first third of the book, A Prince of the Captivity settles into politlcal and business intrigue. Adam’s experiences in the war and the near-death of his Arctic rescue mission convince him that what the world needs is strong, principled leadership to save it from the barbarism left in the wake of the war. When friends suggest that he is the one most suited to the leadership role he so wishes to see filled, he disagrees. His job, as he sees it, is to midwife the man or men who will help save civilization.

He sets his sights on three—Kenneth Armine, a young aristocrat and old friend, a people-person whose wife, Jackie, comes to love and respect Adam; Joe Utlaw, an up-and-coming Labour politician; and Frank Alban, Jackie’s brother, a young Anglican churchman with a powerful gift for speaking and persuading. All three, representatives of the aristocracy, the workers, and the Church, with their natural gifts, good character, and connection to the people have enormous potential to become exactly the leader Adam hopes to see set the world right.

And yet Adam, despite enormous efforts on their behalf, finds himself stymied at every time. His plans and hopes for all three, through various circumstances, come to nothing. Present in each failure and intimately involved at some crucial point is a man Adam has known about for years, Warren Creevey.

An admired and much-sought-after public intellectual and a well-connected and fantastically successful businessman, Creevey has interests everywhere, travels widely, and seems to know everything. Scrope, Adam’s mentor from his intelligence days, predicts early in the novel that Adam and Creevey will find themselves on opposite sides of some great contest and will be forced into confrontation. Adam, who naturally enough dislikes Creevey—and the feeling is mutual—tries to avoid and ignore him. By the final act of the novel, that strategy has become impossible.

The final portion of the story involves German politics, which one need not be reminded were unstable during the 1920s. Hermann Loeffler, the intelligence officer who came closest to capturing Adam during the war, has slowly emerged as a leading moderate and unifier but is opposed by the Communists on one side and, on the other, a group called the Iron Hands. Both desire “short cuts,” but the Iron Hands develop a special reputation for unscrupulous tactics and violence. When they become a clear danger both to Loeffler and to Creevey, Adam lays plans to intervene.

The climax of the novel, taking place at a high Alpine retreat to which Creevey has been kidnapped and smuggled for his own safety, brings the two rivals together for their long-anticipated confrontation. Present also is Jackie, who will turn out to have an important role to play, and slowly closing in from all directions are the henchmen of the Iron Hands.

A Prince of the Captivity is one of Buchan’s longer novels, with a plot playing out over about a decade and sprawling across wartime espionage, Arctic survival, practical politics, and social commentary on the dislocated world of 1920s Britain. Each component part is well done. The sections on Adam’s recruitment into the world of espionage—more grounded, unglamorous, and harder-edged than the seat-of-the-pants amateur adventures of Richard Hannay—feels very much like a precursor to John le Carré and are especially good. Adam’s rescue mission to the Arctic is perhaps my favorite section of the novel, and one of the most dramatic and compelling in any of Buchan’s novels. And the climactic struggle in the mountains, in which Adam’s story is brought full-circle and the longings created by his deep wounding at the start of the story are finally fulfilled, is powerfully moving.

But between these episodes, the middle sections, in which Adam very deliberately works his way through the social fabric of Britain in search of his new leaders, felt not just like a change of pace but a bit of a letdown. Most of Buchan’s contemporaneously-set novels of the 1920s and 30s, when he was serving as an MP, involve the nitty-gritty of practical politics at some point, but seldom does it dominate their plots the way it dominates A Prince of the Captivity. While all of the characters are finely drawn—especially Jackie and Utlaw—and the story intricately and believably plotted, it drags.

This is probably intentional. Adam’s work is laborious and Buchan conveys this vividly. But it is not as fun or compelling as the earlier chapters. Only as Adam’s plans begin to unravel and he is once again placed on the backfoot does the pace revive.

That is the only criticism I can level against A Prince of the Captivity. The plot, after all, is secondary to Adam’s character. The language I used in the introduction, of Adam undertaking a “spiritual journey,” comes from biographer Andrew Lownie. What Adam is searching for, in a metaphor introduced by Macandrew, a staunch Zionist who hopes the war will provide an opportunity for his people to reestablish their homeland, is a personal Jerusalem. The story is therefore one of pilgrimage.

Having honorably taken the blame for his wife’s crime and lost everything, Adam spends these years searching for purpose and belonging, taking on bigger and bigger tasks—from simply being useful in the murky, disreputable world of spies to saving a man’s life to saving civilization. Only in the final pages, in developments I don’t want to spoil, does he find the peace that has eluded him and everyone around him for the entire story.

Even as I read A Prince of the Captivity I was aware that Buchan was doing a lot more with this story than was immediately detectable on the surface. Though I’m not confident I grasped everything in Adam’s rivalry and final contest with Creevey, it moved me and has stayed with me. I see more and more in it and it continues to escape me. A Prince of the Captivity is not my favorite of Buchan’s novels, but it has several episodes as gripping as anything in his best novels and is the one I feel most compelled to revisit, and soon.

Keep reading, stupid

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts for the audiobook of Mr Majestyk, one of Elmore Leonard’s leanest, grittiest thrillers from his early days of crime writing. Having wrapped that up yesterday, I caught up on a promising-looking episode of The Charles CW Cooke Podcast posted on my birthday earlier this month, in which Cooke interviews Christopher Scalia about his new book 13 Novels Conservatives will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).

They have a fun, wide-ranging discussion, but late in the episode they turn to the question of why so many people don’t read now, in the course of which they talk about Silas Marner. Cooke wonders whether he didn’t enjoy it because it was assigned in school. Scalia agrees:

“That’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it.”

I think that’s what it was for me. I have no memory of it. It’s possible—I know I was assigned it—and I know what it was about but I don’t have memories of a specific passage or anything like that. And I think that’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it. Novels don’t change, but your reactions to novels change because you learn more, you have more experience and, yeah, novels that went over my head when I was younger mean much more to me now. Of course, I can’t think of a single example at the moment, but I’m sure that’s the case. Even novels you’ve always loved you love for different reasons when you go back to them.

Straight talk, and certainly true. Having not read The Great Gatsby until my late thirties, for instance, I had to wonder upon finishing it what a high schooler was supposed to get out of such a story. I gather the usual focus is on obvious symbols—the eyeglass billboard, the green light—and, of course, Themes. But the heart of the novel, a story of hidden pasts, severed roots, lust, and mountains of regret, depends for its resonance on similarly long, difficult experience—precisely the thing high schoolers don’t have.

The novels typically assigned in high school are likely chosen 1) because of the perception that they’ll meet teenagers where they are and 2) because they’re easily teachable and testable. Books subjected to this are diminished in one way or another, whittled and sorted and oversimplified. I haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye in many years, but I suspect Salinger’s work in Holden Caulfield’s narration is much more ironic than usually understood. Ditto Grendel, which is usually presented as a straightforward deconstruction of heroism when it is really a stripping away of the self-serving illusions of nihilism. A high schooler would get none of that.

Going in the opposite direction—and it gives me no pleasure to say this—having revisited All Quiet on the Western Front many times since high school, I’ve gradually recognized more and more its essentially juvenile perspective on war, politics, and suffering. And yet it is often the last word on the matter for high schoolers who, again, have no other perspective on the subject.

That doesn’t mean that challenging books shouldn’t be assigned in school. Students need that challenge in order to grow. Per Tolkien, “A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one’s age group. It comes from reading books above one.” How much more so for intellectual and spiritual preparation? But we should be alive to the unintended consequences of assigning books and the inevitable consequences of dumbing down their interpretation.

As for Scalia’s last point, that even novels you love mean more and mean them differently the more you read them, that’s indisputably the case, and one of the only tried and true methods of determining whether a book is good. Even a thriller with no literary pretensions, simply a good story written at the height of its author’s craft, like Mr Majestyk, changes and reveals more of itself upon a second reading—or a third or a fourth or…

A few other books with which I’ve had that experience:

• No Country for Old Men and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• The Great Divorce and That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

• True Grit and Gringos, by Charles Portis

• The Iliad

• Beowulf and, as mentioned above, John Gardner’s Grendel

• The Divine Comedy, by Dante

The Road stands out particularly strongly in this regard. This harsh, minimalistic survivalist tale from the master of the unflinching stare into darkness became a completely different book after I had children. I wasn’t stupid anymore. At least not completely. I wrote a little about that experience here.

Check out the episode of Cooke’s podcast and Scalia’s book at the links above. The discussion is fun and worthwhile, and the novels Scalia selected for his book are nicely varied, ranging from Dr Johnson and Scott to Waugh and PD James. And, to Scalia’s last point, keep reading!

Made of words

A strange kerfuffle I recently witnessed on Substack (I still don’t know how Substack chooses what to show me and I suspect I never will):

A Catholic philosopher whom I’ll call Magus recently published a book exploring, as far as I can tell, ways to counter the disenchantment and rationalistic, reductivist worldview of scientific materialism afflicting the modern world. All well and good. This book only came to my attention, though, when Magus published a detailed defense of his work rebutting a review by someone I’ll call Simplicio, a former occultist turned wannabe Chesterton Catholic turned bearded Orthodox firebrand.

Simplicio took issue with one of the book’s later chapters, in which Magus gestures toward the esoteric tradition of hermeticism as a possible model for Christians trying to approach the world through its non-material, eternal valence. In the course of his arguments, Magus used the word magic.

These debates spanned several point-counterpoint essays on Substack and magic was the pole around which all the rest of the furor rotated. Specific points of evidence aside—and this post is not a comment on Magus’s book or Simplicio’s laundry list of nitpicks and criticisms thereof—Simplicio would not let go of the word magic, which he equated with Satanism and devil-worship. Christians are forbidden that and Magus is, therefore, a heretic, a serious word Simplicio was very free with.

Magus countered that this was a straw-man argument and that magic is not a univocal word. It can and does and always has meant many more things than Satanism. He invoked specifically the “deep magic” of Aslan which is, in the same book, placed in opposition to the White Witch’s magic. Simiplicio called this evasive—we all know what magic means.

And round and round we went, with Simplicio insisting on a single, narrow, unambiguous meaning of this word and Magus countering hopelessly that not only is Satanism not what he meant, it should have been clear in context that he used magic as a metaphor anyway.

As it happens, Simplicio is the only one of these people I had heard of. I’ve read his previous books and essays with some enjoyment but, the more I’ve read of him, the more I’ve begun to suspect he isn’t very bright. Hence the pseudonym. But I don’t follow or subscribe to either Magus or Simplicio (again, Substack), so discovering this back-and-forth gave me the bystander effect of the proverbial car crash.

But the moment that stood out to me in all the sound and fury was a joke Simplicio made at Magus’s expense. When Magus, insisting on clarifying definitions of this notoriously vague word, wrote that “it depends on what one means by magic,” Simplicio called this a “Petersonian rejoinder.” As in, the once sharp but increasingly confused and confusing Jordan Peterson.

Peterson has always, as a Jungian, been prone to wandering into what Mark Twain called the “luminous intellectual fog” of German thinkers. Sadly, this has only become more the case as he’s made interpreting religion more and more of his brand, a task for which Jung has badly equipped him. His equivocation and hair-splitting in answer to questions as simple as “Do you believe in God?” reached the point of self-parody a while ago.

But the problem there is not Peterson’s ever more convoluted and recursive search for fine distinctions. The problem, probably, is somewhere within Peterson himself. What made him so powerful and refreshing a decade ago was his insistence that definitions matter, that words matter, that precision is a crucial guide toward the truth. All of that is still true regardless of where he ended up.

What came to mind when I read Simplicio’s little dig was a scene in A Man for All Seasons. When Sir Thomas More, who has resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, learns that Henry VIII plans to require an oath of loyalty with regard to his remarriage to Anne Boleyn, we have this exchange:

More: But what is the wording?

Meg [More’s daughter]: What do the words matter? We know what it will mean.

More: Tell me what the words say. An oath is made of words. It may be possible to take it.

A Man for All Seasons is full of argument of various kinds and qualities, with More’s opponents constantly working to entrap him, catch him in contradictions, or simply embarrass him. Here’s a great sample. The movie is very much about words, and as long as More insists that words tell the truth, precisely and accurately, he is unbeatable.

But he also exceptional, as the movie makes clear and as reality continues to reflect.

The Watcher by the Threshold

Today John Buchan June continues with our second short story collection of the month, Buchan’s early anthology of weird fiction set in Scotland, The Watcher by the Threshold.

Buchan published these five short stories and novellas in magazines—four of them in Blackwood’s—between 1899 and 1902, as he was developing his greatest strengths as a writer. I called the stories “weird fiction” above, but they are hard to categorize. Buchan’s dedication perhaps best expresses what unites them. Addressing the stories to fellow Scot Stair Agnew Gillon, Buchan invokes a Scotland they know well that lies behind the stereotype of “kirk and marketplace,” of a land of hard, business-minded Calvinists: “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

Literal remoteness and inaccessibility are crucial elements of the first story, “No-Man’s-Land.” In this novella, an Oxford linguist named Graves, a specialist in the ancient and medieval languages of the Celts and Norse, embarks on a long hike through rough and desolate sheep country in search of good fishing. He decides on a small mountain loch as his destination but, when he tells the old shepherd who hosts him, the shepherd warns him off of that area. Graves presses for details but the shepherd refuses to explain why he should stay away.

Superstition, the educated Graves concludes. The old shepherd and the sister who lives with him are in the grip of old beliefs about brownies, small creatures that harass the locals and occasionally spirit children away. This would also explain to Graves’s satisfaction the strange recent killings of some of the shepherd’s lambs. They were found “lying deid wi’ a hole in their throat.” The shepherd superstitiously blames this one demons and, Graves notes, refuses to believe it was sheep thieves.

Despite the recent events and the shepherd’s dire warnings, Graves sets off for his fishing hole. Before long he is lost in the rugged terrain and the dense mountain fog, where, slowly, he realizes that something is in the fog with him. He gets one glimpse—a short, man-like figure covered in hair—before he is captured by a mob of the creatures and taken to the cave where they live. There, in the midst of a throng of small, squat, hairy, powerful creatures, he has the second great shock of the day: he can understand some of what they’re saying to each other. Far from fairytale brownies, these are the last remnant of the Picts who lived in Scotland before the Scots.

He learns some of their terrible story. Driven underground centuries before, they have survived through theft and murder and have reproduced by kidnapping women and girls from nearby settlements. Horrified, Graves seizes his first opportunity to escape. He barely makes it to the shepherd’s hut. Afterward, back at Oxford, but can’t make use of his discovery and can’t shake the feeling that he has left something undone back in the hills. He returns to Scotland to discover that the old shepherd has abandoned his cottage following the disappearance of his sister in the night. Graves, the only man who understands what has actually happened to her and knows where she has gone, decides that it is up to him to rescue her.

The remote “back-world of Scotland” is even further away in the supernatural story “The Far Islands.” In this short story, young Colin Raden grows up in a family pulled inexorably westward. Ancestors who disappeared on voyages to the west are many and legendary.

Colin has, from his early days, dreamlike visions of being in a boat at sea, looking to the west, but with his view blocked by a wall of mist. This vision recurs throughout his life—at school, at university—with Colin always yearning to see beyond the mist but unable to approach it. Gradually new details intrude: the sound of waves on a beach just out of sight beyond the mist, the scent of apple blossoms. He learns from a friend of an old story in Geoffrey of Monmouth about an “Island of Apple-trees” far to the west, reserved for heroes to “live their second life.”

After university, Colin joins the army and is sent to the desert. There, his visions reveal more and more of the world beyond the mist, and reach their final, fateful consummation.

Buchan develops overtly supernatural moods in the title story, “The Watcher by the Threshold,” another novella that is less plot-driven than “No-Man’s Land” and more of a character study. Henry, the narrator, is called upon for help by Sybil, the wife of an old school friend named Ladlaw, and travels to their home on the Scottish moors. The wife, anxious and drawn, is obviously distressed, but Ladlaw must be drawn out. Gradually he reveals that he believes himself haunted by a devil. There is a shadowy figure, he says, always just out of sight on his left-hand side. He begs Ladlaw not to leave him alone, even for a moment.

Henry complies and notes the odd changes in Ladlaw from the man he knew at university, most notably an intense interest in esoteric scholarship and a fixation on Emperor Justinian. He comes to believe that Ladlaw is haunted by a “familiar” from the ancient world. His presence helps ease Ladlaw’s mind, but when Henry is called away on urgent business he recruits the local minister, Mr Oliphant, to look after him. Oliphant is the modern, openminded kind of minister who both balks at talking about the devil and also thinks his Christianity rules out the existence of the pagan supernatural (“Justinian was a Christian,” Henry reminds him) and wonders whether Ladlaw is simply a drunk. Ladlaw is not in the best of hands, but Henry must go and returns as quickly as he can.

When he does, he finds Ladlaw’s house empty. Oliphant, terrified of the man he was asked to help, has fled, and Ladlaw has taken to the moors, raving. Henry joins the search, which ends in a dramatic hilltop fight that doubles as an exorcism.

The next story, “The Outgoing of the Tide,” is a historical tale of forbidden romance and witchcraft set on the West coast of Scotland. Alison Hirpling is an old woman reputed to be a witch and a devil worshiper—a rumor that turns out to be true. By contrast, Ailie Sempill, a young girl who lives with her and is probably her daughter, is as devoted to Christ and the Kirk as she is beautiful.

One day the swaggering, ne’er-do-well laird Heriotside, in his regular ride through the countryside, sees Ailie and falls in love with her. He strives to woo her but she, knowing his reputation, is standoffish and hesitant. Gradually she falls for him, too, and Alison seeks to use their love to bring about their destruction and damnation. She sows doubt in both their minds but holds out the offer of magic as a way to seal their love. A midnight tryst on Beltane’s Eve, she tells each of them, at a particular spot along the coast where a river flows into a bay will bind them to each other forever.

Ailie and Heriotside find this hard to resist. What they don’t realize, however, is that for Alison this time and place are sources of immense satanic power as well as treacherous tides that have claimed more than one life. Whether Ailie and Heriotside will realize what Alison is up to and what kind of danger—both physical and spiritual—they have placed themselves in drives the suspenseful conclusion of the story.

“It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

— John Buchan

The final story, “Fountainblue,” has no supernatural elements but nevertheless depicts a haunted man. The main character, Maitland, comes of Scottish stock but has spent years in business in the south. Hard, distant, and ruthless in his dealings, he has achieved fame and immense wealth through his disciplined, machine-like work and has returned to his late aunt’s castle, Fountainblue, with one object in mind: pay court to the beautiful Claire Etheridge and convince her to marry him.

Despite his difficult personality—those who don’t immediately dislike him still can’t make up their minds whether they actually like him—Maitland nurses fond memories of his childhood on the coast, adventuring among the rocks and learning the ways of the sea. This deeply buried imaginative sense and yearning for the wild comes in handy as he attempts to woo Claire, though not for the reasons one might expect.

On a boat trip along the coast with Claire and Despencer, another young man he correctly views as a competitor, Maitland is caught in a terrible storm. Only his knowledge of the tides, currents, isles, and rocks can save them. But his heroism at the tiller of their boat and in the wreck afterward will not have the consequences Maitland hopes for.

Read about The Watcher by the Threshold in Buchan’s major critics and biographers and the recurring theme is that the stories, while entertaining, are mostly noteworthy for prefiguring his later themes and preoccupations. There is some truth to this. It’s hard, having read so many of Buchan’s later novels, not to be reminded of Witch Wood when reading “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or of The Dancing Floor or The Gap in the Curtain when reading of the intrusion of the supernatural into the chummy world of late Victorian England in “The Watcher by the Threshold,” or of A Prince of the Captivity, with its hero’s cherished dream of a peaceful island, when reading about Colin Raden’s visions in “The Far Islands.” Both Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan, in their biographies, note in “Fountainblue” the foreshadowing of Lumley’s speech about the fragility of civilization in The Power-House. Lownie further notes in the same story the theme of the emptiness of worldly success which, he reminds us, animates Buchan’s great final novel, Sick Heart River, almost forty years later.

But while it is interesting to note the way the stories provide early riffs on ideas and concerns that Buchan developed and explored more fully in his later work, the stories are also worth considering on their own terms.

These stories are early Buchan, and Buchan himself, when mailing a copy of The Watcher by the Threshold to Susie Grosvenor, the woman who would become his wife, described them as “pretty crude.” As with his embarrassed assessment of John Burnet of Barns, I think he’s underrating himself. Susie would agree. Writing to thank him for the book, she said that she had “just finished devouring” it: “I must tell you how awfully good I think the stories. They are so well sustained and interesting.”

This is certainly true. The later short stories in The Runagates Club may be more polished, but in The Watcher by the Threshold Buchan shows all the strengths of his later work and few of his earlier weaknesses. The Scottish settings are beautifully and evocatively described, presenting a picture not only of places but of their moral import—their atmosphere. One feels this most pointedly in the darker stories like “The Outgoing of the Sea” and especially “No-Man’s Land,” with their oppressive, desolate landscapes haunted by incomprehensible dangers.

The pacing of the stories is also good. Graves’s escape from the troglodyte Picts in “No-Man’s Land” is as suspenseful as anything in the Hannay novels, and “The Far Islands” flows with ethereal, dreamlike ease through an entire life. The stories are also, like Buchan’s entire body of work, wonderfully varied. What unites them is his intense interest in the relict, atavistic, and uncanny hidden just below the smooth polished surface of modern life—most obviously in “No-Man’s Land” but through the collection from beginning to end—and the palpable atmosphere he creates around the stories.

Where The Watcher by the Threshold’s stories differ most from his later work, I think, is in their interiority. All five take place largely inside a single character’s head, and hidden worlds that belong to or effect a single individual are a repeated motif. This is most extreme in “The Far Islands” and “Fountainblue,” which are entirely about the imaginations and ruminations of their main characters and whose plots turn on moments of revelation and self-knowledge—metanoia, in theological terms. These epiphanies lead, more or less directly, to Maitland’s and Colin Raden’s deaths, but also to the fulfilment of their longings. In the other stories, these hidden worlds are overtly threatening and the characters must be saved from them, whether the Picts of “No-Man’s Land,” the schemes of a devil-worshiping crone in “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or demonic possession in “The Watcher by the Threshold.”

My personal favorite from The Watcher by the Threshold was “No-Man’s-Land,” a genuinely scary and suspenseful story. Last night I started to summarize the story for my kids. My wife stopped me—it was too close to bedtime and even she was creeped out. My kids begged to know what happened. A useful test of a story’s power. (Reflecting on Buchan’s choice of The Watcher by the Threshold to send to Susie Grosvenor, Ursula Buchan writes, “Why he considered these stories suitable reading matter for a very sheltered young woman, it is hard to imagine.”)

The Watcher by the Threshold is a strong early sample of Buchan’s work that I found immensely enjoyable. Not only good entertainment, they are also well-written and richly imagined, with thematic depth as a wonderful bonus. For anyone wanting a small dose of Buchan or a glimpse of Buchan working in a decidedly different mode from his thrillers and much of his historical novels, this is an indispensable read.