Diagnosis of diagnosis

Earlier this week, Alan Jacobs offered up a new taxonomy of (non-fiction) writers: diagnostic, prescriptive, and therapeutic. (This is a riff on a post from a few years ago similarly categorizing thinkers.) Regarding the first category, he writes that

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? . . . Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

After describing the other two, he concludes by returning to this observation:

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you’ve looked through the non-fiction current events books on the tables and endcaps at Barnes & Noble, all of which seem to have been written within echo chambers for the purpose of affirming what is already held as unquestionable fact within those echo chambers. But I also wonder whether the present glut of this kind of “diagnostic” writing, especially when it repeats accepted pieties or tries to turn them into political cudgels, doesn’t have perverse effects.

If you actually read what the people who lionize Darryl Cooper, or who mock Douglas Murray for his rant on Joe Rogan about the necessity of expertise, or who get into flatly wicked things like Holocaust denial say online, you’ll find that they view themselves as fighting back against a false consensus. They reject what they perceive to be a politically imposed misdiagnosis that confers in-group status and prevails through ad nauseum repetition by bad-faith insiders and wish to assert their own diagnosis—one that provides the right enemies to blame. This is, as Jacobs points out, “something we very much want to know.”

That impression of monolithic consensus is reinforced by the kind of thousandfold repetition of old diagnoses that Jacobs mentions, but is almost always false. Any specialist in, say, the history of the Third Reich could immediately point you toward faultlines within the field and legitimate points of debate. Here’s one. That false impression is usually born of ignorance, which is regrettable. But is also preventable. You only have to trust someone to teach you, not strike out on your own with nothing but suspicion to guide you.

To conclude, I feel like I should apologize for adding to the heap of diagnostic writing in the internet landfill, but I’m terrified to be prescriptive and you don’t want to read my therapeutic advice.

Listening is not reading

Last week on Substack the perennial argument over audiobooks flared up again: does listening to an audiobook count as reading, and is having listened to a book the same as having read it?

I mentioned the pedant in me in my recent post about The Last of the Mohicans. He is never far from the surface but must be kept in check with regard to colonial New York bridge architecture and whatnot. But on this topic I’m happy to let him off the chain.

No, listening is not the same as reading, and if you’ve listened to an audiobook you haven’t read the book.

This opinion probably provoked a kneejerk reaction in at least some of y’all. These arguments get passionate quickly. But here’s my pedantic take on the whole thing: they shouldn’t. Such passion is misplaced for two interrelated reasons.

The first is the basic semantic fact that listening and reading are different words describing different things. Saying “I read War and Peace last month” when I listened to it in my car is simply untrue. This seems pedantic but it’s an important distinction; we have different verbs for these things for a reason.

The second reason has to do with the reality of reading and listening in and of themselves. These are not the same activity. You are doing different things and different things are happening to you. You can get scientific and neurological about it—as my wife, who has a degree in literacy, can and does, having recently led a professional development based on Proust and the Squid at her school—but common sense proves this, too. I both assign readings to my students and lecture. If there were no difference I could assign only readings or only lectures.

Again, this is both a semantic distinction and an immovable truth, the most important fact in the debate. Everything else is epiphenomenal. And yet if you point out that reading and listening are not the same thing, fans of audiobooks will infer from that distinction a snobbish judgment of inferiority or outright condemnation. But that inference—not to mention the defensiveness that arises from it—does not follow.

So why does this debate keep coming up? I think two factors are at play:

First, the valorization of reading. This is the “Fight evil, read books” school of reading, in which reading is treated as virtuous in itself. What used to be the specialist skill of clerks and chroniclers is now a badge of honor and mark of moral rectitude. This is pure self-congratulatory sentimentalism and should be dismissed as such. Reading is important—you’ll find no dispute on that point on this blog—but it does not make anyone good and, in a society of democratized mass education, it doesn’t even make you special.

Second—and I think the real culprit behind the rage—is the Dominion of Content. Our culture is in the grip of the erroneous assumption that all stories, media, and information are undifferentiated and interchangeable. Note how often the word consume comes up in these arguments. This is a giveaway. Failing to differentiate between reading a story yourself and having it read to you reduces writers’ work to free-floating, gnostic content that can be delivered any old way so long as it gives you some kind of picture in your head. In this view, writers don’t write books, they “produce” “content” at one end of a supply chain and at the other the “content” is simply “consumed.”

Combine content culture with a culture that makes proud little warriors out of people who happen to know how to read and you get a popular incentive to consume books without distinguishing how one has consumed them.

Conversely, put reading in its right place as an important but value-neutral skill (so that readers won’t lord it over audiobook listeners) and stop treating art as mere content to be consumed (so that audiobook listeners distinguish what they’re doing from reading) and the difference between reading and listening ceases to be pointlessly inflammatory.

Which is what I’d hope for. There’s nothing wrong with audiobooks. There’s no reason to be defensive about listening to a book and no reason to bridle at what should be a boring factual distinction. I prefer and always will prefer reading—and from a physical book, not a screen—but I have trained myself to follow and enjoy audiobooks, too. I listen to books that are hard to find and to books I’ve read before but want to enjoy in a new way. I have relatives who listen to books to pass the time on morning walks or while working a long nighttime shift in a patrol car. These are all legitimate and enjoyable—but they’re not reading.

To end on a positive note, everyone litigating this on Substack over the last several days made exactly one point I agree with wholeheartedly: listening to a book is better than just about any other activity you could be filling your time with at present. That’s why I’m always thrilled to recommend audiobooks to those relatives and friends I mentioned, why I’m glad Audible exists, and why I’m mad that AI is trying to conquer audiobooks, too.

Magua appreciation

Wes Studi as Magua in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

A few days ago Alan Jacobs posted a short appreciation of Michael Mann’s 1992 The Last of the Mohicans on his microblog. His first observation (of three) and his highest praise: “The best actor in the movie, by miles, is Wes Studi.”

Agreed. And recall that this movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis.

Comparison with Day-Lewis is instructive. As Hawkeye, Day-Lewis is impressive and believable. His preparation for the role—living in the woods doing the things an 18th-century frontiersman would do—is legendary. But his job as the hero is less complicated than Studi’s as the villain. Hawkeye must be believably tough, tenacious, and capable, not to mention charismatic enough for us to believe that this buckskin-clad wildman can get the girl, and Day-Lewis pulls this off handily. But Hawkeye, though a compelling character, is not deep. His openness is part of what makes him a hero.

Studi’s Magua, on the other hand, is all hidden depth. A French-allied Huron pursuing his own war of revenge against a specific British family for reasons he mostly keeps to himself, when we meet him at the beginning of the movie he is posing as a friendly Mohawk. He has somehow insinuated himself into British employ as a scout and guide and comes within a hairsbreadth of exacting his long-sought revenge, and even in the moment of his near-triumph he is cool and controlled. The only clue that he may not be what he seems is hidden in the subtitles. His behavior reveals nothing.

Studi takes a role that could have been merely inscrutable and imbues him with calculation. Watch any scene in which Magua appears—especially scenes in which he silently watches, like the British-French parley at Fort William Henry—and you can see Magua assessing and planning. His stillness is not passivity, and self-control is both his most admirable and his most dangerous trait. Compare Gary Oldman’s George Smiley in the more recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

I think Studi’s finest scene may, in fact, be entirely wordless. In the climactic mountainside showdown, Hawkeye’s adoptive brother Uncas ambushes and attempts to stop Magua in order to save Alice Munro, who has been sent into captivity/marriage by a Huron chieftain. Magua kills Uncas and Alice, distraught, despairing, throws herself from the cliff. Watch this interlude, a pause in the musket and tomahawk action, and pay attention to the range of emotion in Studi’s Magua as he fights and kills Uncas, tries to coax Alice away from the edge, and, puzzled, moves on.

The long closeups Mann gives him as he tries to understand Alice are powerful. The one shot of him lowering his knife tells an entire internal story. This is, notably, one of only two instances in the movie in which Magua shows any kind of vulnerability. I always leave that scene moved, and more for Magua than for Alice.

I could say more. Studi is terrific, one of the great screen villains in one of my favorite movies. Watch it if you haven’t.

Studi, by the way, is a Vietnam veteran. He talks a little about how that experience has influenced his career in this great GQ interview about his most famous roles. A great watch. In 2018 he paid tribute to veterans at the Oscars, speaking Cherokee—supposedly the first time a Native American language was used in an Oscar speech. The next year he received an honorary Oscar and thanked, among others, Michael Mann.

Jacobs’s final point in his brief post: “Michael Mann is such a ‘city’ director that it’s constantly surprising to see how beautifully he films forests and streams—and, in one memorable case, people crossing a bridge.” No argument. Jacobs includes a screenshot of this scene:

That’s the bridge over the Bass Pond in the grounds of the Biltmore Estate outside Asheville. It was designed, along with the rest of the gardens and grounds, by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park.

The Last of the Mohicans is set in upstate New York in 1757, and the question of whether there was anything like this in Albany when it was a frontier town nags at the pedant in me. But it’s a beautiful shot of a beautiful place, and nicely sets up a contrast with the untamed wilderness into which Mann’s civilized British characters are about to follow Magua.

On Richard Adams’s Traveller

Wednesday was the 160th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yesterday was the anniversary of Lee’s General Order No. 9, his farewell to his army. To commemorate these events, one of the Civil War history Instagram accounts that I follow shared Soldier’s Tribute, a painting of Lee’s farewell to his troops by the incomparable Don Troiani. 

The painting shows Lee, mounted, surrounded by his exhausted men who reach out to him, as they so often did, for succor. Lee turns to his right to shake the hands of his soldiers; in his left he loosely holds Traveller’s reins. If Lee is still, already statuesque, Traveller, his head pulled slightly back, shows subtle movement, either slowly edging through the gathering crowd or coming finally to rest in the face of it. If Lee is calm and resigned, Traveller’s eyes show, if not anxiety, puzzlement.

Seeing Traveller in that painting, especially with the subtle motion and emotion with which Troiani always packs his work, brought Richard Adams’s novel Traveller to mind again. It’s an unusual book, even for the author of Watership Down, and in it Adams does something remarkable.

The novel is narrated by Traveller, in the first person, in thick phonetically-rendered dialect. It can be hard to understand at first, and the danger of such narration is that it will come across as silly. But you get used to it, and the “accent” of Traveller’s speech is never used to mock him. Traveller has a distinctive voice, and Adams, an Englishman, captures the tone and style of Southern yarn-spinning with remarkable accuracy.

That’s one area in which such a book could have misstopped but didn’t. There’s also a running gag of sorts in that Traveller, a simple animal unquestioningly loyal to his master, always interprets every event in the most optimistic way possible. At first it’s ha-ha funny and we chuckle in amused sympathy, but gradually, as the novel nears its end, this use of irony creates a profound sense of pathos. Traveller ends the novel thinking he and Lee won, that Lee is leaving Appomattox not downcast and defeated but relieved at having forced “the blue men” into submission, and instead of a punchline it’s powerfully moving.

I don't know of any other novel quite like it. Dramatic irony is so often used for reasons other than pity.

It also achieves its most powerful effects if you know the Civil War and the Eastern Theatre and its colorful cast of characters—well-known generals like Jackson, Longstreet, Hill (AP and DH), and Stuart as well as more obscure figures like Prussian cavalryman Heros von Borcke—and even their horses well. Jackson’s horse Little Sorrel, in particular, a pensive horse full of dark forebodings, is an especially powerful presence. I have to wonder what someone ignorant of all that would make of it. The animal characters are so well-drawn and memorable and their skewed understandings of the human world so well conveyed that I imagine even someone with only passing knowledge of the Civil War would get it, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, Traveller is criminally underappreciated. Its concept sounds like a cute gimmick and I’m sure a lot of people have written it off as kitsch or a mere curiosity as a result. But as I’ve written here before, it’s artfully done, a marvelous, inventive angle on a familiar story. And the goal of retelling a familiar story, as I often tell me students when approaching a subject they might actually already know about, should be to make it strange again. Check it out.

You can view Soldier’s Tribute with some extensive explanatory notes at Don Troiani’s Facebook page here. The dust jacket art of my first-edition hardback of Traveller is Summer, one of four memorial murals by Charles Hoffbauer at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond. And if you’re ever in Lexington, VA, visit Traveller’s grave right outside the crypt of Lee Chapel, where his master is entombed.

I swear we are not making this up

Anglo-Saxon infantry vs Norman cavalry at Hastings in the Bayeux tapestry

The Rest is History, after a short series on the reigns of Æthelred, Cnut, and Edward the Confessor and a side trip through the life of Harald Hardrada, released a four-part series on 1066 this week. I finished the third episode, on the Battle of Hastings, on my commute this morning. The series is very good, so naturally I’m going to gripe a little about historiography.

The less-well remembered battle of the three in England during the fall of 1066 is Fulford Gate outside York. Here, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, with Tostig Godwinson—a deposed and exiled eorl and brother of the King of England—landed with his fleet and fought with the fyrd of Mercia and Northumbria under Eorls Edwin and Morcar. Our sources on Fulford Gate are pretty thin, and include the much later and heavily embellished King Harald’s Saga of Snorri Sturluson.

Sandbrook introduces the battle by noting that “the saga’s descriptions of this battle are exceedingly confusing, and historians who claim they know what happened are obviously talking balderdash.” Fair enough. Snorri is a colorful but late and problematic source. Sandbrook goes on:

What seems to have happened is this. Basically, at first, Harald Hardrada’s men are going slightly uphill through all this mud, the Saxons are throwing spears and firing arrows at them, bodies pile up, people are stumbling in the ditch and whatnot. The right hand side, the right wing of Hardrada’s force where Tostig’s mercenaries are, they start to waver we’re told. Now it may be—is that because everyone hates Tostig? Or is this the saga just trying to buttress Harald Hardrada’s reputation dissing Tostig? Who can say.

Sandbrook, who is not typically given to deconstructing sources at this level, excludes an important alternative: Maybe this is simply what happened?

Later, Sandbrook and Holland suggest that Snorri’s account of Harald Hardrada’s death at Stamford Bridge, having been shot in the throat with an arrow, may have been “modeled on” Harold Godwinson’s supposed death at Hastings a month later (as they also suggest stories of bad omens being wittily spun by Harald and William the Conqueror were “modeled on” Caesar in Suetonius). I’d suggest deaths by arrow wound are more easily explicable in unusually large all-day battles like Stamford Bridge and Hastings. As The Battle of Maldon reminds us, “bows were busy.”

Much more sensible is a point Holland makes in the Hastings episode about two very early Norman sources: William of Poitiers’s Gesta Guillelmi and the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a Latin verse epic attributed to Guy of Amiens and written probably within a year of the battle. After Sandbrook jokes that a few of the Carmen’s laudatory details about William the Conqueror sound like heroic formulae of the kind Snorri used of Harald Hardrada, Holland avers:

I think it’s unlikely that they would just make up details that everyone would have been able to scoff at. The details may be slightly spiced up. I think that probably the details we’re getting from the Carmen and from William of Poitiers in the main are fairly accurate because there are so many people who’d be reading them that they would know if they weren’t.

Sharp, and broadly applicable. In their postmodern focus on ancient and medieval sources as instruments of control over narratives, modern historians often lose sight of the fact that sources don’t appear in a vacuum, that their authors had contemporaries who could contest self-serving accounts and outright fabrication.

As I’ve written here before, I think ancient and medieval sources simply recorded what happened more often than we, hairsplitters and tweet-parsers, are inclined to believe. Cf. my notes on the modern habit of pooh-poohing anything interesting in a source, on whether the term “propaganda” is really appropriate in the ancient and medieval worlds, and on Tolkien’s observation that an event need not be fake because it feels literary.

Again, a very good series. The greatest praise I can give it is to say that Holland, in narrating King Harold’s death at Hastings—the mystery of which was the subject of my undergraduate thesis—convinced me that some version of the story in the Carmen, with Harold hacked down by Norman cavalry and possibly William the Conqueror himself, is more likely true than the arrow in the eye mentioned in later sources. And on that bombshell…

Hoopla’s AI problems

Hoopla is a handy multimedia library app. If your local library participates, as ours does, you can sign up for free access to ebooks, audiobooks, movies, and music with a certain limited number of downloads per month. I’ve used it for audiobooks for several years now. It’s got a good selection of Alistair MacLean and other good commute listens, and is especially good for books that are hard to find, like Souls in the Twilight, a handful of short stories by Sir Roger Scruton that I read in 2020. Last year for John Buchan June I couldn’t get ahold of a copy of Salute to Adventurers, and Hoopla stepped into that gap with a good audiobook version.

Recently, with another John Buchan June in mind, I checked to see if Hoopla had any new Buchan. Its inventory changes fairly regularly and you can get good surprises. I certainly got a surprise when I saw this:

What? I thought. And then: Ugh. That’s obviously AI-generated cover art. What’s up with Hannay’s uniform? Are those buttons or badges? What’s wrong with those airplanes? AI can give you a Jamie Dornan lookalike as General Richard Hannay if you ask for it but it’s guaranteed to mess that stuff up.

This made me curious. The listed publisher of this audiobook is Interactive Media. No narrator is named on the image above—not exactly a red flag, but not typical for good audiobooks—but Hoopla listed one James Harrington as narrator. I clicked on the narrator to see what else he’s done and got over 250 results: all from Interactive Media, all added to Hoopla in the last year, all public domain books, and all with covers like this:

Who, exactly, are these people? Where are we and when does this take place? Is that supposed to be Father Brown in the middle? Who’s the gent in the background wearing half of two sets of clothes? Look at the visible portions of the red car and try to piece together its outline. Is that a Richard Scarry vehicle? Why is the roof pointing a different direction from the rear fender? Where’s the hood? Did it hit the blonde girl? Is that why she looks cross-eyed?

Or how about this American classic:

Laughable. Again, AI is not going to get uniforms right. Most living breathing flesh-and-blood people can’t. These Union soldiers appear to have a mixture of Mexican War, modern police, and military academy cadet uniforms, and yellow rank insignia mean cavalry, by the way, not infantry. Don’t even get me started on that cannon. Or perhaps I should say those cannon, as the AI seems to have fused three into one with a steampunk’s quota of rivets. Don’t be nearby when they try to fire the trench mortar round in the breech of that cannon out of the small-caliber field gun barrel. Maybe that’s why all the infantry are running?

Enough of that. The point is that if you get into Interactive Media’s or James Harrington’s listings on Hoopla, you can scroll forever and never stop seeing stuff like this:

Again, “James Harrington” has over 250 listings on Hoopla, and he is not Interactive Media’s only narrator. But I put his name in quotation marks because I can’t determine that he actually exists.

Downloading his version of The Thirty-Nine Steps made me almost certain it is AI-generated audio. “Harrington” reads in a flat American accent that comes across as fairly natural for about a minute. After that it sounds distinctly robotic. There is no indication of understanding what “he” is “reading,” no change of pace or volume, and no modulation of tone or inflection to suggest mood or a change of speaker within the story. Idioms trip up his delivery—or rather, don’t trip it up. When Richard Hannay says, in the first chapter, “I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce of a row at the smoking-room door,” “Harrington” doesn’t indicate that he understands what “my man” means and pronounces “row” like “row-row-row your boat.”

Perhaps a real narrator could make these mistakes, but I doubt it. And if a real narrator made them, I doubt he’d be asked to record 250 of Project Gutenberg’s greatest hits in the span of a year.

It’s pretty clear that Hoopla has taken on a load of slop.

In searching for answers, including information about the supposed “James Harrington” who “narrated” these “audiobooks,” I discovered that this is not Hoopla’s first problem with AI-generated material. Earlier this year Hoopla was called out for hosting AI-generated ebooks and had to make special efforts to “cull” them from their listings.

This led me to wonder what Hoopla’s vetting process is. My books are at our local library but not available on Hoopla in any form. Based on that Lit Hub piece, it seems Hoopla depends on librarians to do the vetting themselves. How can the people at even a well-staffed, well-funded library contend with machines that produce hundreds of low-quality audiobooks at a time? To quote Lit Hub:

What worries me is the scale of bad actors’ new tech-fueled abilities to flood the world with this garbage, which will only bloat and overwhelm already strained systems. Library shelves will never exclusively be filled with AI, but what if the firehouse is so overwhelming that it affects the ability of libraries to function properly? Not to mention the reputational damage to the institution if borrowers can no longer trust a library’s collection, or a librarian’s ability to connect them with information or entertainment that they want.

And while the author of that piece suggests that AI art is “a fad we can wait out,” he’s writing of AI-generated text, which is, to a newsworthy degree, not good: “This tech has not proved that it’s capable of making anything good or interesting: the writing is nonsense and the art looks terrible.” AI-generated audiobooks are a downstream problem but closely related in terms of poor quality and the ethical and philosophical problems of outsourcing art to robots.

But what’s this? I’ve been thinking about Hoopla’s glut of AI slop all week and today I learn that Amazon is experimenting with AI audiobook technology, too. From my inbox:

Whomever Interactive Media and “James Harrington” are, they don’t have the reach or ability to shape and control markets that Amazon does. I hope Hoopla will move against AI slop in audio form the way it did against AI text, but even if they do, Amazon’s rollout of AI audiobooks means this is far from over. And far from “solving itself,” the problem might be prolonged by this explosion, because even if people should care about the quality of the narration in an audiobook, they often don’t.

A final note, and a hint of what’s at stake: I’m not actually a great fan of listening to books. My mind wanders. But I’ve trained myself to pay attention to and enjoy audiobooks if only to make my commute bearable—especially during semesters when I teach on three campuses, which Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, and others have helped me get through—and as a result I’ve come to appreciate the art of good audiobook narration.

A few gold standards for me: Derek Perkins’s performance of The Everlasting Man, Bill Nighy’s performance of Moonraker, Norman Dietz’s performance of The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, the multi-narrator audiobook of Shelby Foote’s Shiloh (hard to find now), and Barrett Whitener’s performance of A Confederacy of Dunces. Check any of these out, and enjoy. No AI bot could do what these narrators did.

The written equivalent of slow motion

A common but tricky technique in writing action is to pause the action for a detailed description of something fast, minute, but important that is happening faster than the characters can react to it, then resuming the action—the written equivalent of slow motion. This technique, a frequent feature of virtually any thriller published in the last thirty years or so, is so common that it’s easy to miss how tricky it is to pull off.

One reason it might be easy to forget is that this technique is often executed clumsily in books that are already written clumsily. It’d be easy to pull examples from Brad Thor, Jack Carr, and especially Dan Brown. Instead, note the way this is done in a good book by a good author: The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout.

Here’s how the novel’s climactic saloon shootout begins:

Rising at his table in the left rear corner, tipping his chair over backward, Jay Cobb drew the Colt’s on his right thigh and fanned and fired three times at J. B. Books.

His first round missed its mark. It hit the cash register, slicing the first column of keys from the machine, then ricocheted upward and off the ceiling.

His movement triggered another. Serrano on the instant pulled his Peacemaker from beneath the table, turning in his chair. In the interval between Cobb’s first and second rounds, Cross-eye shot the youth through the chest.

Cobb fired a second round at Books while falling across a table, and a third while writhing in agony to the floor.

His second round struck the mirror behind the bar. A split of quicksilver spread from end to end.

His third blew three shelves of glassware into a phenomenon of light. A cascade of shards tinkled brilliantly to the floor and bar top.

The effects of low-velocity slugs fired at close range from weapons of heavy caliber, .38s and .45s, are massive. Serrano had sent a bullet through Jay Cobb's rib cage from the right side at a distance of nine feet. After encountering bone, entering the chest cavity anteriorly, the slug tumbled through the lower lobe of the left lung, macerating it, before exiting posteriorly through the rib cage on the left side, tearing an exit wound the size of a fist. With such force was the round driven into and through and out of the body that bits and pieces of bone and shirt were found adhering to the rear-wall mural the following day, together with gobbets of lung tissue, pink and gray in color.

Jay Cobb lay still upon the floor. He was not, however, dead.

The beginning and end work well—they are direct and hard-hitting. But in that long penultimate paragraph we back away from what is happening to these characters for a lesson in ballistics followed by an explanation of things that could only be known from a postmortem. Shortly afterward, Books finishes a drink, leans over the bar, and finishes off Cobb:

He died instantly. The bullet was fired from above and from the rear, an oblique trajectory, at a range of seven feet. It penetrated the temporal bone above and forward of the ear, exposing the brain, passed through the brain, carrying with it segments of skull, and exited through the right orbit, or eye socket, taking off the ethmoid plate and the bridge of the nose. On the tile floor under what remained of Jay Cobb’s face lay an eyeball and the brain matter which housed the accumulated knowledge of his twenty years, a grayish, adhesive slop of girls and kings and arithmetic and cows and prayer and mountains but primarily of how to fire a revolver accurately and hate himself and deliver milk and cream and butter.

Later, as the gunfight develops and more men are killed and wounded, we pause mid-action over and over, about half a dozen times in a few pages, for such descriptions. A sample:

Pulford’s soft-lead slug, fired from sixteen feet, had passed completely through his left shoulder, missing fortunately the subclavian artery but cracking the clavicle and tearing the deltoid muscle and the upper margin of the trapezius. His left arm was stunned and useless.

And:

The bullet struck Jack Pulford in the heart.

He was staggered by the impact, driven against the wall, and slumping down it, continued to fire randomly at Books, emptying the Smith & Wesson into the bar instead. This firing was reflexive, an act of tendon spasm rather than conceived assault. The gambler was dead before he attained a seated position, back to the wall. Books had fired from sixteen feet. His round had entered Jack Pulford's white silk shirt near a diamond stud slightly to the left of the sternum, or breastplate, and torn through the antrioventricular groove. The heart was literally cleaved in two.

And:

The round was well placed. It entered in the intercostal space between the ribs, missing the spine but mangling the paravertebral muscles, and exited by breaking out a wide swatch of the sternum, or breastbone. Koopmann dropped the Colt’s, hugged his chest, and staggered several more steps toward the doors. But the aortic root had been transected, severed by the bullet.

Note that I’ve cut all of these descriptions down, sometimes by several sentences before and after.

It’s fair to ask why a writer might bother with this technique at all. A long answer would involve giving the reader specific information when it’s needed, provoking a response in the reader through some carefully chosen detail, heightening a particular emotion, managing the rhythm of a scene—or just about anything else. The short answer is that any tool at the writer’s disposal may prove useful, depending on what he’s trying to do.

Swarthout’s point, not just in this scene but throughout the book, which concerns the more and physical consequences of a long life filled with violence and the danger of a new generation choosing to live the same way, is to horrify.

With that in mind, this technique works, but only through the blunt expedient Stephen King calls “going for the gross-out.” I remember thinking even at the time that I first read The Shootist that this was a technical misstep. Having considered it a lot over the years, I see three things wrong with it:

1. First, it’s overwritten. One of the dangers of overwriting is unintentional humor. The final passage quoted above runs several more lines and ends with “he was practically exsanguinated.” As opposed to only partially exsanguinated, I guess.

2. Closely related, the language is inappropriately clinical. The characters, in the moment, don’t know what precisely is happening to their subclavian arteries and ethmoid plates and paravertebral muscles. Notice how much more forceful “The bullet struck Jack Pulford in the heart” and “His left arm was stunned and useless.” This is all the characters know and all we need.

3. Third, and the point I began with, it stops the action dead and, given my first two points, it does so without a good reason. By this point in the novel Swarthout has created tense, unbearable suspense, but then he repeatedly interrupts the explosion of violence that should bring catharsis.

As a result, this frequent freeze-framing proves self-defeating. The interrupted momentum of the action and the cold medical language have a distancing effect that undermines the intense personal and moral horror Swarthout has striven to create in the reader. Instead of feeling the tragic cycle of destruction, a cycle that will begin again rather than end in this saloon, the reader simply thinks “Ew.”

Again, The Shootist is a good book. If it were as thoroughly clumsy as anything by Dan Brown I wouldn’t have noticed and wouldn’t have cared. But I can’t think of this book without thinking of the herky-jerky rhythm and tonal inconsistency of what should have been a short, brutal conclusion.

Two thoughts on how this technique might have been used differently in this instance:

1. First, avoid it. Don’t pause the action at all. Technical information, e.g. a weapon’s destructive power, is better set up before it’s ever threatening a character. My novella The Snipers has an excursus or two about the effects of bullets on the human body similar to that first passage of The Shootist, but not while the characters are in the middle of being shot at. When the danger arrives, the reader already understands what the danger is.

2. Or, given the power of this technique if used well, it could be improved by using blunter, less clinical language, excising all the technical explanations of how the bullets are blasting these men apart and focusing instead on their shock or pain. This is one of the few times when less precision would be better.

This has been on my mind this week because I’ve been reading Len Deighton’s Bomber. The story of a single day during World War II, Bomber follows RAF bomber crews, German fighter pilots, and German civilians in a small town on the (accidental) receiving end of a bombing raid, and Deighton uses this technique over and over again: for a bomber torn apart by a German fighter’s cannon fire, for a plane brought down by a bird strike, for a target marker dropped in the wrong place. My reaction every time has been a feeling of dread or a sickening “Oh no!” rather than frustration.

What makes this literary slow-mo work so well in Bomber, as opposed to The Shootist:

• Deighton establishes from the first chapter omniscient narration that can shift at will, so such passages are not a surprise or interruption when they occur during, say, the climactic bombing mission, and

• Deighton’s pauses are technical when appropriate, sensory when appropriate, and whether technical or purely experiential, they always support the emotional tone of a scene.

• Deighton combines this technique with many others, especially foreshadowing and dramatic irony, meaning the pauses in his action connect meaningfully with other elements of the story in the reader’s mind.

I’ve focused on action in this post, but this technique is common across all fiction, and there’s much, much more that could probably be said about it. Seeing it done both poorly and well by good authors should be instructive.

The Levanter

Among his many skills, Eric Ambler excelled at two of the basic varieties of thriller: the breakneck and the slow burn. In one, the pace picks up quickly and puts the characters through an unrelenting series of escalating obstacles. In the other, a single obstacle may steadily build in threat and intensity until a final catastrophe. Both rely on a mastery of pacing. Ambler had it, and The Levanter offers a good example of the latter, the slow burn.

A later work in Ambler’s long career, The Levanter takes place over about two months in 1970. Three different characters narrate portions of the story: Lewis Prescott, an American reporter who has stumbled into the events after the fact; Teresa Malandra, the secretary and mistress of an English industrialist; and Michael Howell, the industrialist himself, third-generation heir of Agence Howell, a manufacturing and shipping firm with connections all over the Mediterranean and Middle East.

When the story begins, Howell has successfully navigated several of the perils of decolonization in Syria, working with the emerging socialist government to avoid losing his family’s business to various nationalization schemes. This involves working closely with corrupt government officials, including Syrian military intelligence and a government go-between with connections to Second-World powers: Maoist China, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

Busy enough keeping the family business afloat and its reputation untarnished following a series of failed production schemes imposed by the government, Howell is surprised to discover, thanks to Teresa, large unexplained orders of chemicals buried in the company accounts. With government pressure and hostility building, he decides to investigate the moment he finds out. This means a late night trip with Teresa to one of the plants dedicated to producing consumer batteries.

Howell finds the factory, which is supposed to be closed, open, brightly lit, and with teams of men working on producing fulminate of mercury—explosives. Armed men accost him and Teresa, and when the night watchman arrives he reveals himself as Salah Ghaled, the notorious leader of a hardline Palestinian terrorist organization too extreme even for Arafat and the PLO.

Ghaled and his men need Howell alive. His men are making detonators for bombs and trying to get incomplete Soviet rockets into a usable condition. Howell will be useful for them. Ghaled forces him and Teresa to swear their allegiance to his organization and to sign confessions of complicity in the murder of a former member—an internal hit Ghaled publicly blames on the Israelis. He then has Howell order the manufacture of missing parts and arrange shipping aboard a company cargo ship. Thrust deeper into Ghaled’s plot, little by little Howell pieces together what Ghaled is planning.

On Herzl Day, an upcoming Israeli national holiday, Ghaled aims to detonate dozens of remotely armed bombs hidden in Tel Aviv. Hence the detonators. He plans to coordinate the bombing with his rockets, launched from offshore and aimed at the coast, a strip of popular beach lined with hotels, restaurants, and homes. The Agence Howell ship will carry him on to Egypt the same day, where he will hold a press conference claiming responsibility and making the usual Palestinian talking points. Howell is horrified.

He also realizes that, since not only Ghaled but other key members of his organization all got jobs at Agence Howell through government influence, his government contacts are in on the plot. He cannot turn to the authorities. In desperation he uses a business trip to inform Israeli intelligence, but his contact is skeptical and offers little help unless Howell can provide more information than he has. If Ghaled is to be stopped, it may be up to Howell himself.

The other Ambler slow-burn thriller that The Levanter resembles most is Cause for Alarm, in which an English engineer working in Mussolini’s Italy just before the outbreak of World War II slowly uncovers sinister goings-on within the tidy order of his factory. In both novels, Ambler puts a lot of effort into making the industrial and commercial setting feel believable well before introducing espionage and terrorism. There’s a lot of looking through ledgers and blueprints, making sure products are up to spec, and arranging shipping and payments. This would be dull in any other writer’s hands. Ambler, through a careful, steady drip of foreshadowing and underestimated threats, instead uses such workaday details to build suspense.

Where The Levanter bests Cause for Alarm, though, is in its use of setting. Ambler exceled at evoking the real-life cosmopolitan, polyglot worlds of international crossroads, from the Aegean and the Balkans in The Mask of Dimitrios to postwar Malaysia and Indonesia in Passage of Arms. The Levanter, with ties to both the Cold War and the unending multidirectional conflicts of the Middle East, is no exception. Ghaled, one of Ambler’s most vivid and believable villains, is a European-educated Palestinian Islamist who is as resentful toward the PLO, the Baathists, and the Jordanian monarchy as he is hostile toward Israel. His education and Marxist ideology are European and his weapons Russian, Chinese, and East German. The Agence Howell has dealings all over the Eastern Mediterranean and its ships and factories have multiethnic crews and captains. Teresa is Italian and Howell himself, despite his seemingly English name and business sense, is mostly Armenian and Cypriot. He and Ghaled are, in dramatically different senses, both men without a country, the one a businessman and the other a zealot.

In addition to a realistic and authentically complicated setting, The Levanter is also cleverly written. I mentioned above that it is narrated by Howell, Teresa, and Prescott, an American reporter who otherwise plays no role in the events of the story. The muddle of Howell’s predicament, the leverage Ghaled and the Syrian government use against him, and the outcome of the story lead to media controversy, a controversy fully exploited by Palestinian activists. The novel is Howell’s attempt, with Prescott’s encouragement, to set the record straight. His testy, finger-wagging narration proves both fun to read and disturbing—how would I, or any of us, were we forced into a bind like this, ever hope to exonerate ourselves?

The Levanter is not Ambler’s best or most exciting thriller, but it is one of his most involving and, above all, one of the most plausible. The overwhelming feeling it imparts throughout is that if something like this were to happen, this is exactly how it would happen. Its emphasis is not on action and gadgetry, though both play a role, but on cunning, desperation, bloodlust, and the weakness of human nature. Though set in 1970, the world it takes place in and the characters who people it still feel recognizable and all too real.

Len Deighton on writing to entertain

Apropos of my thoughts on the false divide between literary and genre fiction last week, here’s a great 1977 interview with Len Deighton that I happened across over the weekend. This interview takes place after the success of The IPCRESS File and its sequels as well as Bomber and Fighter but before the Bernie Samson novels I’ve recently mentioned here.

Asked whether or not his heroes are not less concerned with thoughts than with actions, Deighton replies:

Well, I think that’s true, and I think that people who write the sort of books I write are essentially in the entertainment business, and they will be judged according to how successful they are at entertaining the reader, and anything else that they want to do has to be done in a way that is subordinate to the main task of entertaining the reader. And I think that the sort of books I write are essentially action books, that people move, that they do think but that they don’t spend too many pages in thinking if you sell many and there has to be pace with it.

The literary-genre divide is nothing new, of course, as interviewer Melvyn Bragg’s followup question makes clear: “When you say ‘I’m in the entertainment business,’ you’re separating yourself from people you’d call ‘novelists,’ is that…?” Deighton:

Well, depends how you use the word novel. I mean, I think novelists at one time were people who wrote the sort of books that Victorian housemaids took to bed at night and read. Well, I’d be very happy to be identified as a novelist in that context. But I’m afraid that the way that the word is used nowadays, to mean profound and philosophical, well now I wouldn’t want to frighten anyone away from a good read by attaching a label like that to anything that I do.

Deighton gently but firmly disputes not the status of his own books but the artificiality and pretention built up around what it means to be a “novelist.” His happiness to align with the books that entertained even the lowly (Deighton’s parents both worked in service), the sort defended by Chesterton in “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” is of a piece with his insistence that messaging, argument, and “anything else” a writer might “want to do” with a book must come after entertaining the reader.

Proper priorities, I think.

I’m struck in this interview by Deighton’s confidence in sticking up for himself as an entertainer. Perhaps it’s born of his background. The posh and well-connected Ian Fleming, by comparison, right from the publication of his first Bond novel adopted a defensive crouch about his writing. This posture comes through in his 1963 essay “How to Write a Thriller.” A sample:

I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

Despite including some good advice, Fleming severely undersells himself throughout this essay. But read on for a story Fleming tells about a conversation with a young relative writing self-consciously literary novels, and note the way in which Fleming defines himself as “a writer” rather than “an author,” a difference only of connotation, and asserts that his only goal is “to get the reader to turn over the page.”

Both Fleming and Deighton aim to avoid pretention; both simply want to tell stories. Both ended up doing much more. Again—proper priorities.

Deighton, who is still with us at age 96, by the way, is always great in the old interviews I’ve been able to turn up on YouTube. (Here’s another one from 1983 that’s quite good albeit not as in-depth.) His interview style—open, straightforward, down-to-earth, making no fuss and creating no Oz-the-Great-and-Powerful mystery around his trade—reminds me of Elmore Leonard. Both are always refreshing to listen to. Check out the interview quoted above and give one of Deighton’s books a try if you haven’t yet.

A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

I’m excited to have a review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three historical horror novels—A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice—published online at Catholic World Report this weekend. These books concern Fr Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a Dominican vampire hunter, and the various scrapes he gets into with vampires, werewolves, and, most recently, leprechauns—and worse. A sample from my review:

Those who enjoy Gothic atmosphere—gaslit streets, full moons, windswept moorlands, big dark houses, old families with terrible secrets—will find something to love in all three novels. Nicholson creates and maintains palpably tense and moody settings, and the mysteries at the heart of each story unfold with maximum dread and suspense. That the stories take place in painstakingly realized historical periods provides yet another pleasure.

But the stories prove especially powerful because of the well-drawn, lifelike, and likable characters with which Nicholson has peopled them. Father Thomas Edmund, the only character to recur in all three books, is the best example, but each has a strong cast, all of whom have their own goals and worldviews, all of which clash and compete. This is compelling in all three novels, not only because pitting rival philosophies against each other works so well in horror fiction but because Nicholson has the rare gift of being able to make goodness attractive.

I’ve mentioned Eleanor’s novels here on the blog several times before, including here and here, and A Bloody Habit was my favorite fictional read of the year in 2019. They’re a lot of fun and counterbalance their unromanticized depiction of sin and evil with an appealing and theologically sound vision of the good. Give my review a read and check these fine novels books out!

Literary vs genre fiction, craft vs content

Item: This week at The Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas bids “Good riddance to literary fiction,” arguing that “it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.” Readers want stories, not beautiful but aimless style.

Item: This week 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back announced their next read, Colleen Hoover’s BookTok bestseller Ugly Love. In discussing their choice, Mike and Conor brought up this passage from a Texas Monthly article on Hoover’s success and recent writer’s block:

Hoover is often approached by readers who tell her that her books are the first they’ve finished in years, but her success has puzzled some fellow authors. “A lot of writers will read my books, and they’re like, ‘Why is this so popular?’ ” she says. “I don’t want to use big words. I don’t want to use flowery language. I hate description. Hate it. I’m a very ADD reader. I have ADD in my real life. And if I have to read more than two paragraphs without dialogue, I will skip it.”

That Spectator column celebrating the near-irrelevance of literary novels is odd and frustrating, not only because the magnificent work of popular art that awakened Thomas to the pointlessness of literary fiction was, ludicrously, The Da Vinci Code, but because the image he sets up of literary fiction is a straw man. Gorgeously written, navel-gazing novels on Important Themes in which nothing actually happens? This describes a recognizable prententious award-bait type but is not characteristic of all literary fiction. Certainly not the kind that has lasted.

But I agree entirely with Thomas at one point: stories are what matter. This is why, to me, the division of fiction into literary and genre fiction has always felt uncomfortable if not downright false. Good fiction is good fiction, as far as I’m concerned, and so my interest has steadily drifted toward care and craftsmanship and a compelling story wherever you may find it.

So I’d rather read a good literary novel than The Da Vinci Code, not because the latter is low-brow or too popular, but because it’s abominably written. And by the same token, I’d rather read a good crime or sci-fi novel than self-absorbed high-brow bilge—anything by the Bloomsbury group, for example, the prototype of what Thomas is condemning in his Spectator piece. What traditionally separates Evelyn Waugh from John Wyndham or Graham Greene from Ian Fleming is reputation, which is fickle and easy to manipulate. What these all have in common is that they’re excellent writers, which is all that should matter.

The real dividing line in modern fiction runs between stories and content, between craft and indiscriminate consumption, between good stories told well, with the mastery of all available creative tools, and mere utilitarian delivery systems for specific kinds of (increasingly pornographic) audience-demanded stimulation. As Mike, baffled, spoofed Hoover’s explanation of her approach, “You know, this whole writing thing—I’m not a fan of the prose, or…”

If the words don’t matter, you’re not writing.

My guess is that rumors of the death of literary fiction, like Mark Twain’s, will turn out to be greatly exaggerated. What will die will be pretension—MFA-in-crowd stories of the kind mocked by Thomas in his column. What will survive—what must survive—are good stories told with care in any genre. Only that will outlast fads and keep imaginations rather than appetites alive.

Black Bag

Transparent barriers—Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

My spring break last week didn’t go as expected, but fortunately I got a break from my break Friday evening when I met a friend for Black Bag, a new spy thriller written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Black Bag concerns George Woodhouse, a British intelligence officer who specializes in interrogation and polygraph testing. He is happily and faithfully married to Kathryn, a fellow intelligence operative. When the film opens, he’s meeting a fellow agent who gives him a list of five names within the intelligence service who could be the party responsible for the leak of a secret program called Severus. All five are known to George.

One, Freddie, is an old friend, a chummy but loutish and borderline alcoholic lad. Freddie’s much younger girlfriend Clarissa works in signals intelligence and likes to play the innocent and aggrieved ingenue but is much more canny and manipulative than she lets on. Colonel Stokes is an upright, physically fit, perfectly composed agent in a relationship with Zoe, a service psychologist who regularly evaluates all of them. The fifth and last suspect, to George’s dismay, is Kathryn, his wife.

George invites the other four to a dinner party where he mildly drugs them and sets them up in a game designed to provoke uncomfortable conversations through which the four will reveal themselves. Tempers flair. George forms hunches. He also discovers a discarded movie ticket in his wife’s bathroom trash. The same night, the agent who provided him the list dies, poisoned in his own home.

By his late comrade’s reckoning, George had only a week to uncover the traitor and stop the leak of Severus, an act that could kill thousands. Now, with a few days already elapsed in feeling out the others and with new suspicions surrounding Kathryn’s sudden trip to Zürich, George, a meticulous, precise man, must act fast, improvising and bringing pressure to bear on the other agents, playing them against each other, bending the rules, and exploiting gaps in service procedure in an attempt to draw the traitor out without revealing what he’s up to. In doing so, and especially in trying to discover if Kathryn specifically is guilty, he makes a potentially catastrophic mistake.

I’m being vague on purpose. What Severus is, why it can’t be released, and what will happen if it does—these are secrets Black Bag only slowly reveals. The story’s steady escalation as George unwinds more and more of what is going on within the service is one of its joys.

Another is Black Bag’s emphasis on character, which is also where it shows its unusual place among recent spy stories. With the exceptions of George and Kathryn, the spies of Black Bag lead loose, dissipated, unfulfilling lives: drinking too much, taking drugs, putting up with too much from their significant others, cheating behind their backs. These are not just personal flaws—what used to be called sins—but security risks. George’s conspicuously faithful monogamy, which baffles his fellow agents, turns out to be the only reliable thing in their chaotic world.

This, along with some of the real-world implications of the Severus plot, gives Black Bag a moral dimension that, it not unique in latter-day Hollywood, is as unusual as George and Kathryn’s marriage.

George’s name, his chilly interiority, his hunt for a traitor, and even his eyeglasses might call John le Carré’s greatest character to mind, but Black Bag’s interest in personal relationships and the ways they are compromised by weakness feels much more like Len Deighton. In Deighton’s novels, tradecraft and technology play an important role but the personalities and beliefs of the characters are prior to and motivate the spy activity. Knowing a person’s true character proves as important as drones, satellites, code words, dead drops, and secret documents—a refreshing change from the tech- and action-heavy spy films that have proliferated in the twenty-odd years since The Bourne Identity.

Another nice change: Black Bag is lean and well-plotted, coming in at just over an hour and a half with not a wasted moment in it. The performances are excellent across the board, especially Michael Fassbender as George. Fassbender has been my choice for the next Bond ever since seeing him don a tuxedo for another tight, well-paced Soderbergh spy thriller, Haywire. He may never get to play Bond but his performance here is a classic. Tom Burke as the boorish Freddie, Marisa Abela as Clarissa, and Naomie Harris as Zoe, a lapsed Catholic who still acts on her beliefs, are further standouts, as is Pierce Brosnan in a small role as an intimidating and inscrutable intelligence chief.

With a smart, intense, and often funny script, good pacing and plotting, and excellent acting, Black Bag was a welcome surprise. If you enjoy spy drama as much as spy action and are looking for a thoughtful, suspenseful film that doesn’t overstay its welcome, this is well worth your time. And as the big-budget studio movies and superhero series show steadily diminishing returns, I hope to see more like Black Bag.