Theo of Golden

An elderly Portuguese man arrives in a picturesque Georgia college town. He is cultured, courteous, friendly but meditative, and clearly independently wealthy. Taken with the pencil portraits hanging in a coffee shop along the downtown thoroughfare, he buys them up in batches, finds the subjects one by one—janitors, accountants, musicians, a homeless woman—and gifts them to them, soliciting their life stories and changing a few lives along the way. And he has secrets, several of them.

The old man is Theo, the town, closely based on Columbus, is Golden, and his “bestowals” of the portraits to the people of the city are the story of Theo of Golden, the runaway word-of-mouth bestseller of the last year.

Theo of Golden the novel has, like some other famous books, become entangled with its publication history. Its author, Allen Levi, a musician and former judge from Georgia, self-published the book several years ago. Its reputation grew slowly thanks to the praise from readers who loved it and exponentially increasing word-of-mouth sales. I first heard of it last year at GJ Ford, our favorite local bookstore in St Simons Island, where the owner urged my wife to read it—and this was before it had been picked up by a traditional publisher. By the last time I checked a few weeks ago, it had sold millions of copies. Millions. This is one of the great self-publishing success stories, and I’m genuinely glad for Levi.

And I’m also glad to say it’s enjoyable. Theo is a well-drawn character and the story’s hook, the “bestowals” of local artist Asher Glissen’s portraits, is intriguing. Levi evokes the thriving New South town, with its shaded riverwalk, tree-lined main street, and seasonal rhythms built around tourism and college semesters with precision and affection. The story, with its emphasis on art, loss, family, faith, and redemption, aims to uplift and inspire.

That surely accounts for the book’s success. In a field crowded with trauma and grievance and general self-absorption, a book about living for others and bringing beauty into darkness has met a need the traditional publishers didn’t even know was there.

As soon as I finished reading it to my wife last week I set the book aside and, even through the drowsiness our bedtime reading is supposed to ease us into, we mulled over what we thought of it for probably twenty minutes. I’m thrilled for Levi’s success, did not mind reading it, and recognize why people love it, but it’s good, not great. Theo of Golden—enjoyable, uplifting, gentle to a fault—is fine. What my wife and I were trying to figure out is exactly why that is.

Whatever criticisms I have come from liking the book and seeing how it could have been better, not hating it. But even before finishing the book I saw a few savage negative reviews, perhaps the beginning of the kind of backlash all such successes provoke. I want to start with those, because I found the most negative reviews the most wrongheaded and oblivious to what keeps Theo of Golden from greatness.

First, Theo of Golden is not terribly written. I was prepared for that, self-publishing being what it is, but Levi’s straightforward, mostly unadorned style is perfectly clear and readable and better than plenty of traditionally published books I’ve read. There are none of the usual tells for amateur fiction: no bad strings of adverbs, clunky overreliance on participle phrases, embarrassing dialogue tags, or spatially incomprehensible descriptions of settings. Even the rare passages that strain themselves reaching toward lyricism fail not out of tastelessness but in overreach. He’s not Evelyn Waugh, but no one was asking him to be.

Then there’s hyperbole. Theo of Golden is not—cannot be—the worst book anyone has read in twenty years. (This writer also thinks there’s only one black character in Theo of Golden. I’m not sure why that would be a mark against it in the first place, but while Levi isn’t explicit about most of the characters’ races there are at least five black characters, including two of the core group that grows up around Theo. Pay attention, even to books you hate.)

Then there are matters of taste. I’ve seen reviews calling it predictable, its final revelations about Theo and his mission obvious. I didn’t find it so, though my wife guessed Theo’s identity about a quarter of the way through. Others objected to the novel’s Christian themes, but that is not an artistic critique and changing or omitting those themes would have gutted the book.

I hate to see a book criticized for bad reasons—or even praised for the wrong reasons—so I decided to review Theo of Golden out of a desire to defend it. But I also wanted to sort out exactly what I think doesn’t work in the book. Potential spoilers ahead.

The fairest criticisms I’ve seen are that Theo of Golden’s characters are too thin and the whole book is too sentimental. These two problems are linked, but one is more serious than the other.

I want to point out that not all of the characters are thin or flat. A number of the major characters who become Theo’s friends are well-realized, the best—or at least my favorite—being Tony, the bitter old Vietnam vet who owns the downtown bookstore. A wry skeptic, his talks with Theo deepen realistically from banter to heart-to-heart vulnerability, and he follows a subtle but believable arc prompted by their friendship. A late chapter in which Theo and Tony share a bottle of port may be the best in the book.

Other characters are less rounded, but that’s normal. Novels concentrate on a central set of major characters with side characters of diminishing importance and complexity. In all his cast, Levi only gives us one bad character: Pearce, Asher Glissen’s younger brother and the father of a young professional who receives one of Theo’s first gifts. Pearce is a caricature of a selfish businessman—loud, rude, constantly glued to his phone. He stands out among Levi’s cast because the others, if not complex, are believable and recognizable types.

No, Theo of Golden’s most serious fault is its sentimentalism. I don’t mind the sentimental myself, Lord knows, but sentimentalism weakens this novel in two interrelated ways.

First, by trying too hard to tug at the reader’s heartstrings. Another of Theo’s early bestowals goes to Kendrick. See if you can feel the point at which his situation starts to feel manipulative: Kendrick is a janitor at the local university and a young single father, his wife having been killed in a car accident that also injured their daughter, a faultless angel who is only ever sweet and who may be permanently disabled if she cannot get a necessary surgery soon. In case that’s not enough, we learn later that the car accident was caused by an illegal immigrant, and Kendrick, who must testify at the man’s sentencing, asks Theo for advice. It turns out the immigrant was only in Georgia illegally because his daughter in the US was in the hospital with cancer. Kendrick sees himself in the man and asks the judge for leniency.

Or consider Ellen, the middle aged homeless woman Theo befriends. She has a non-specific mental problem, sleeps under a bridge, and obsesses over her bicycle, which she refuses to let out of her sight, even in church. She is also a bookworm and—almost unconsciously—peppers her conversation with quotations and literary namedrops. Theo learns that, decades before, she had given birth in South Carolina and had her baby taken away by the state. You can probably guess what the end of her arc is.

Both of these situations present a lot of dramatic potential, only some of which is followed through on. In Kendrick’s case, the sentimentalism extends not only to himself but to the illegal immigrant who killed his wife. Of course Kendrick will forgive him. This is supposed to be a moment of grace, but Levi makes the man so sympathetic and pitiful that it becomes easy for Kendrick to forgive him. Imagine if, instead of an illegal immigrant with a cancer-stricken daughter, a local white trash boy high on meth had caused the accident. If grace means anything, it means forgiving the undeserving, but that’s not the situation Theo of Golden invites us into.

Similarly, Ellen is only ever a lovable eccentric. Her bicycle and her quotations and her sudden lurches in conversational topic are the severest symptoms of her illness. Levi gives her none of the off-putting, difficult, even dangerous qualities of real homeless and mentally ill people; she is simply there to be funny and affecting and to jerk tears with her backstory.

On a number of occasions I called this “overegging the pudding” or “laying it on too thick,” and this is nowhere more obvious than in the novel’s Calvary moment. (Again, spoiler warning.) Theo, awake with insomnia after a triumphant concert by the young cellist he has taken under his wing, hears Ellen being attacked outside by drunk college students. They steal her kooky hat and try to throw her bicycle in the fountain where Theo has carried out his bestowals. The cellist comes to the rescue, but the college boys beat him, smash his cello, and break his hand. Theo, distraught, trying to get their attention from the balcony of his apartment, falls to his death.

It is both moving and simply too much. Just as Kendrick’s situation would be more compelling if it were harder for him to forgive—a scenario we’d all be more likely to encounter—Ellen’s victimization would be more moving if she had proven harder to love, if Theo and everyone else had had to struggle more to bring her into their lives, and if Simone the cellist weren’t so carefully, icily calculated a victim, too.

That’s my biggest problem with Theo of Golden. I’ve dwelt on these subtle but fundamental flaws, but it is a good read and worthy of its success. I do not begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it the way I would a book by Dan Brown or the latest scummy romantasy, and I’ll certainly read the next book Levi writes. This is a smooth and easy read, vividly imagined, peopled with mostly believable and recognizable characters, emotionally involving, and, as Nadya Williams argues here, beautifully dramatizes the way mere mortals can help each other grow in saintliness simply by loving God and each other. But, as I wrote above, it’s gentle to a fault, and if it were to challenge a bit more than it endears, it would make its point much more powerfully.

Summer reading 2026

The last few weeks have been maddeningly hot and busy, so the descriptions in the fully assembled reading list below may be a bit more laconic than usual, but I had a very good summer of reading and am excited to share the best of it. I hope y’all will find something good here to read this fall or winter.

For the purposes of this post, “summer” begins with my summer in-service in early May and ends today, Labor Day. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Inklings Detective Agency, by John R Kelly—The Inklings, an informal club of Christian literary scholars at Oxford including, most famously, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Owen Barfield but with many other, less appreciated members like Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Adam Fox, and Warren “Warnie” Lewis, are approached by a famous benefactor, a man long thought dead who asks them to solve a series of murders. A fun gothic mystery studded with literary stars like Dorothy Sayers and, in a cameo, GK Chesterton, the story is satisfying and the way Kelly evokes the world and personalities of the Inklings is wonderful. Full review on the blog here.

Watcher in the Shadows, by Geoffrey Household—An obscure zoologist living in rural England finds himself the target of an obsessive but careful murderer. Both have secrets. A gripping and surprising thriller, one of my favorites yet from Household. Full review here.

The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin—A fictionalized portrait of the great German film director GW Pabst who, after coming up in the early days of silent film and pioneering modern film editing, made acclaimed Weimar-era movies. When the novel begins, Pabst is working in Hollywood, misunderstood and frustrated. He ends up back in Germany just in time for the Second World War to begin, trapping him geographically. He also finds himself trapped artistically, convinced, through a combination of coaxing, flattery, and intimidation, to produce films under the Nazi aegis. Pabst, an anti-Nazi, tells himself is he not making propaganda for the regime, but his artistic singlemindedness rather than his ideology gradually compromises him. A brisk but rich novel with an incredibly dramatic climax—Pabst desperately shooting and cutting a movie in Prague as the Soviets take the city—and a complicated picture of a complicated situation. Likely my favorite novel this summer and one I had hoped to write a full review of here but, alas, I could not make time.

Bad Actors, by Mick Herron—Another solid entry in the Slough House series, with some nicely interwoven plots and good teamwork from a surprising pair of characters. The original protagonist, River Cartwright, is offstage for the entirety of this one but apparently returns in the most recent installment, which came out in paperback last month. Looking forward to it.

At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon—Portraits and incidents in the life of an aging smalltown priest. Not the kind of book I’d have ever picked up on my own, but when we finished our previous bedtime reading my wife asked me to read this: and it was wonderful. Fun, funny, peopled with charming and recognizable characters and set in a sharply observed Southern mountain town, it was also not infrequently moving. And in keeping with its main character’s vocation, the occasional meditations on Scripture and the faith were always surprisingly well-timed for me.

I, Ripper, by Stephen Hunter—A meticulously researched picture of late Victorian London and the events of the Whitechapel Murders, fused with an ably plotted and surprising thriller. Grim but engrossing. Full review on the blog here.

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway—A powerful novel, full of irony and pathos and regret, and a classic of modern literature. I hated A Farewell to Arms when I read it in high school but, over time, decided that I might have missed something. I finally revisited it this summer and found that, yes, the problem was me—namely seventeen-year old me. A reflection on revisiting the book after a quarter-century here.

Special mentions

Galahad and the Grail, by Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts—A birthday gift from my wife, who correctly intuited that it was right up my alley. This is the first (but chronologically third) volume in Merlin’s Isle, a four-book cycle of ballads based on King Arthur by Malcolm Guite. The story, which fuses and expands upon several medieval versions of the Grail quest, is epic-length but told in ballad stanzas that can be read silently or aloud to great effect, and the illustrations are magnificent. Guite follows more of the later Arthur traditions in reducing the role of Sir Perceval, in whose story the Grail first appeared, but the end result is still great. Beautiful through and through. Looking forward to the second book (chronologically the first), The Coming of Arthur, which is due out this fall and my wife preordered as part of my birthday.

The Odyssey, by Homer, a graphic novel adaptation by Gareth Hinds—Marvelous artwork and a respectful approach to Homer’s story distinguish Hinds’s adaptation from many other retellings. Even as a comic book, Homer’s power shows clearly.

Vita Nuova, by Dante, trans. Joseph Luzzi—A solid, readable new translation of Dante’s first book, beautifully designed and printed by Liveright. For whatever reason, despite loving the Comedy and reading and rereading it many times, I’ve always struggled with La Vita Nuova. I had no problem this time.

Favorite non-fiction

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan, designed by Quentin Fiore—Brisk, enjoyable, insightful, and prescient. McLuhan, extrapolating from his understanding of the mode of communication mattering more than what is communicated and from the history of such modes leading up to his time (1967), more or less predicts the re-barbarization of culture, the collapse of linear thinking and communication under the influence of interconnected information like the internet, and even self-publishing accessible to everyone. An important work that, given its loop-the-loop structure and sometimes jarring mid-century collage style (which, to be honest, hasn’t dated well), demands a reread soon.

American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, by HW Brands—A solid new biography making extensive use of primary source quotations. Perhaps too much—there were a few times I wished Brands would simply summarize and comment upon events. But getting the words of the participants themselves is always valuable, and Brands’s approach to his subjects is largely descriptive, allowing the reader to see the people of Washington’s world as they saw and talked about themselves—a charitable and all too rare approach. The one thing that has most consistently challenged my Tory attitude toward the Revolution is Washington’s personal character, which Brands allows to shine. I find I admire Washington most before his presidency, when he allowed the baleful influence of Hamilton to warp the entire forward trajectory of the country. Brands’s brief conclusion, in which he sums Washington up as a man of a lost age who, through his peculiar strength of character and old-world virtues, ushered in a new world, is surprising but certainly right. Washington, for better or worse, helped create a country that would eventually prove unable to create men like him.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, by Jim Corbett*—My favorite non-fiction of the summer. Corbett, a big game hunter and conservationist who lived most of his life in British India, retells the stories of man-eating tigers and leopards and what it took to stop them. Moving, dramatic, and exciting. Full review on the blog here.

Chaucer, by Peter Ackroyd*—One of a series of short biographies by Ackroyd (another is his Poe: A Life Cut Short, which is excellent), Chaucer offers a good portrait of the poet’s life and work. Ackroyd pays particular attention to Chaucer’s connections to London (including the detail, which I somehow didn’t know, that Wat Tyler’s rebels entered London through the gate above which Chaucer and his family were living in 1381) and the strengths and influence of his work. I listened to this on a long drive and would very much like to revisit it in print soon.

Thomas More: A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Marshall—A readable succinct overview of More’s life and work—as lawyer, philosopher, writer, and politician. Marshall is especially helpful on Utopia, a book whose meaning and seriousness I’ve never been able to settle on, and the more controversial episodes of More’s career. And as much as I love A Man for All Seasons, Marshall also quite rightly pushes back on Robert Bolt’s admirable but foreshortened version of More, aiming to present more of the man rather than the seasons. With Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, which I read back at the beginning of the year, that’s two excellent little books on principled but doomed lawyers this year.

Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sort of prequel to Goldsworthy’s Philip and Alexander, this book begins in the Mycenaean Era, tracing the development Athens and Sparta both as poleis with distinct cultures and institutions and as rivals in prestige and military power. Goldsworthy notes that most of what we know about Sparta comes from outsiders and is correspondingly careful in his analysis and judgments but without chucking all of the evidence as fiction the way some postmodern classicists do. The chapters on Athenian politics, the Persian Wars, and especially the two stages of the Peloponnesian War—which Goldsworthy, contra Thucydides, presents as the result of a two-way contest in status and prestige, all Greeks being keen to be seen as excellent—are clear, vivid, and appropriately dramatic. I especially appreciated Goldsworthy’s emphasis on contingency and the role of culture—nothing in this book was inevitable, and what finally drove Athens and Sparta into a destructive cycle of warring was not actually how different they were from each other but what they had in common.

Tame Your Thoughts: Three Tools to Transform Your Mind and Renew Your Life, by Max Lucado*—A simple book about worry, intrusive thoughts, and other problems. Lucado’s emphasis on rebutting untruth with truth and recognizing how the worrier gets caught up in false narratives of his own creation is especially helpful. The second half’s thematic chapters offer more more focused guidance on specific problems.

Nemesis: Medieval England’s Greatest Enemy, by Catherine Hanley—A biography of Philip II Augustus, King of France for forty-three years, as seen through his decades of conflict with four Plantagenet kings of England—Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, John, and Henry III. The focus is primarily political and strategic, though Hanley does a good job of bringing personality and culture into her pictures of all the major players. An extremely helpful book; though I have been long familiar with most of this story I had always learned and studied it from the Plantagenet perspective, and Hanley’s portrait of Philip as both a cunning and politically adept manipulator—a well-established image—and a king willing to master the hard work of siegecraft and take the field with the army was a revelation.

John Buchan June

With this fifth John Buchan June, I’ve finally exhausted the supply of Buchan novels and dipped a little further into his body of biography. A solid set of more obscure works. John Buchan June will return next year, but in what form I’m not yet sure. In the meantime, all reviews are linked below:

• Augustus (1937)

• The Half-Hearted (1900)

• The Magic Walking Stick (1932)

• A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906)

• The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

• The Long Traverse (1941)

• Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895)

It’s hard to name overall favorites with such an eclectic batch. The Half-Hearted represents some good early Buchan adventuring and Buchan’s two children’s novels, The Magic Walking Stick and the unfinished, posthumously published The Long Traverse, were both imaginative and fun. Probably the best book—considered as a book—was Augustus, an excellent and insightful biography that’s still worthwhile almost ninety years later, but I think I enjoyed The Magic Walking Stick most. Check out the reviews above!

Favorite kids’ books

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame—I read this aloud to the kids before bed over several weeks. I may have read excerpts in high school Lit but, if so, I didn’t remember a thing. The hype is real. The Wind in the Willows is a pure delight: beautifully written, strange and surprising, and funny throughout. I hesitated to class this under “kids’ books” but if there’s a children’s literature canon this would certainly be an important part of it, and rightly so. Brief reflection on how Grahame uses his fun, well-realized characters to introduce what in a lesser book might be called a plot contrivance here.

The Cow in the Dark at Night, by Jess Hannigan—An oblivious cow decides to stay awake all night to see what all the fuss is about and meets some interesting “night people” on her adventure. I can’t give anything else away—go into this book as cold as you can. It’s a hoot. A fun read-aloud for both adults and kids; I read this first to my wife after I picked it up at the library, then to our two older boys, and finally to our daughter, and all of them laughed out loud more than once.

Rereads

• La Vita Nuova, by Dante, trans. Joseph Luzzi

• A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

• Vincent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky, by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary GrandPré—Brief personal reflection on what this book has meant to me after a terrible bout of insomnia earlier this year here.

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan—Reread for the first time since the first John Buchan June for an interview on The Wade Show with Wade, available here.

• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury—Short reflection on the book’s most accurate and realistic “prediction” here.

Looking ahead

Having reread a couple books from high school—one I hated, one I loved—to see how they’ve held up, I’m doing the same with The Guns of Navarone, the basis of one of my favorite movies but a novel I found disappointing twenty-five years ago. After deliberately trying to read some of the good history I’ve had on standby near the end of the summer I plan to read more this fall, and hope to take a crack at a second Chestertober after a year without. And of course I will read fiction. I plan to leaven the last couple years’ steady diet of spy novels and classic thrillers with some bookish novels—literature about literature.

I have big plans. I hope y’all will be here for it. In the meantime, thanks as always for reading!

Fahrenheit 451’s most accurate prediction

Having just read a book I hated in high school and found it, as an adult, a masterpiece, I decided to revisit a book I loved in high school but certainly haven’t read in more than twenty years: Fahrenheit 451. To be brief, it holds up.

Not to be brief, it is a commonplace of literary conversation to pit rival dystopias against each other. The two most frequent combatants are Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Questions of literary quality aside, people debate which of the two better predicted the present. Leaving aside as well that “the present” is a moving target and neither author really intended to predict anything, Orwell is usually praised for imagining the modern surveillance state and its dog-eat-dog culture of denunciation and ideological purity and Huxley for his vision of a technocratic, efficiency-obsessed state that placates the masses with entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and hedonism and—in starkest contrast to Orwell—for depicting the oppression of his dystopia as self-imposed, even embraced.

I happen to agree that Huxley’s insight into the willingness of the masses to be oppressed as long as they can enjoy themselves marks Brave New World as more likely than Nineteen Eighty-Four, if not a better novel. But I think even Huxley misses a piece of the dystopian picture that Bradbury nails in Fahrenheit 451.

First, note that Fahrenheit 451, per Bradbury himself, is “not about censorship” but “the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens.”

Bradbury’s book aligns with Orwell’s in the mobilization of the masses as part of a program of surveillance—the scene in which a news program orders everyone in a neighborhood to look outside at the same time in an attempt to catch Montag and the people robotically obey is chilling, one of the most memorable in the novel—and with Huxley’s in the self-imposed nature of that surveillance. Rather than monitor everyone, all the time, the unseen, unnamed authorities who dispatch the firemen rely on informers. Why would people go along with that, especially as enthusiastically as the informants in the novel do?

Because they don’t want to be bothered, upset, or offended. Bradbury makes this point several times. Literature goes away because it’s too challenging, people are too likely to read things that upset them, and when they drift instead to easy, bland, mass-produced visual entertainment the government doesn’t even have to ban books, the people simply stop reading them—all except a few weirdos whom it is easy to crush as dangers to placid minds of the compliant.

But the most accurate, realistic detail of the entire Fahrenheit 451 scenario is not the surveillance or the ease with which the public can be offended or even how easily they can be manipulated, but just how embarrassingly tawdry the people’s entertainment is. Huxley imagines a world in which people have given up freedom—even the freedom to make their own families—for drugs and orgies. Bradbury correctly intuits that people will sell their freedom much more cheaply. The people of Fahrenheit 451 want interactive daytime TV, nonstop music piped directly into their ears, constant affirmation, and the biggest, brightest, most immersive screens possible. Then they sit there, existing.

If you want an eerily accurate prediction from one of these books, the zoned-out, enervated, and completely empty minds of Mildred and her friends—who even, based on the question “Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night?” enjoy short-form video content!—should meet all requirements.

Montag’s wife Mildred is pathetic not because she is unfree and infuriating not because she rats Montag out, but because she has bargained away her soul for a mess of pottage. Less than that, actually—pottage would at least be nourishing.

Sandbrook and Syrett sing Buchan’s praises

I’ve greatly enjoyed The Rest is History’s spinoff show, The Book Club, and the fun but in-depth discussions of its hosts, Dominic Sandbrook and Tabby Syrett, ever since it launched with a great discussion of The Hobbit. I wrote about that here. I haven’t caught every episode, skipping some, like The Secret History, to avoid even the possibility of spoilers for books I hope to read soon, but the quality of their conversation has not diminished in the ten months since it began.

A few weeks ago they mentioned that The Thirty-Nine Steps was coming up in their schedule. This caught my attention for obvious reasons. I was excited to hear their discussion, but also a bit hesitant. Three years ago Sandbrook’s narrative of interwar Britain, in which he had used Buchan as a byword for anti-Semitic conspiracism, had provoked what has been a consistently popular post, “Was John Buchan an anti-Semite?”

I have no idea if anyone at The Rest is History has ever seen that post but thousands of other people with the same question have found it through Google. I also had it firsthand from a connection in the UK that someone with much more authority in the subject than I had talked to Sandbrook about the anti-Semitism accusation in person. Would this old slander come up on The Book Club? How would they address it? Would they clear Buchan’s name?

Yes. The episode dropped last night, and I’m thrilled to say it’s one of their best. Dominic and Tabby’s conversation about The Thirty-Nine Steps is wonderful and fair, noting its narrative strengths, especially its breathless pacing and beautiful nature writing, and its innovative model, emulated by everything from James Bond to Jason Bourne—one of the examples of the “high-tech pursuit” I used in my recent discussion of the same with Wade Stotts. They justifiably point out its few minor flaws, such as the rushed, last-page climactic action. (I well remember rereading the final paragraphs the first time I read it, trying to divine precisely what had happened.)

As usual, Dominic and Tabby also do a great job putting the book in its historical context, explaining what The Thirty-Nine Steps has in common with the detective story and invasion literature as well as the ways it diverged from these and what has kept it popular, exciting, and influential when ever since.

But their discussion of Buchan the man is also stellar, paying proper tribute to one of the rare genuinely good men among popular authors. It’s a great quick overview of his life up to the First World War, his amazingly varied career, his views on writing, war, and the Empire, and his personal virtues, not least his fairmindedness and generosity.

Crucially, Dominic acknowledges twice that he was wrong about Buchan and corrects the record on Buchan’s supposed anti-Semitism. He points out that Scudder, the ill-fated journalist whose death kicks off The Thirty-Nine Steps’ chase, turns out to be wrong about his Jewish conspiracy, that this was a great narrative trick Buchan pulls on the reader, as well as the fact that Buchan himself was a Zionist and friend to Jews at a time it wasn’t advantageous to be. (The more things change…)

As my wife pointed out, it’s refreshing to hear of someone correcting themselves and owning up to it. I’ve always liked Sandbrook anyway but this speaks especially well of him.

A great episode on a great book. Tabby mentioned her love of Witch Wood, another of my favorite Buchan novels. Maybe we’ll get an episode on that somewhere down the road. I’d love to hear that. In the meantime, definitely check out The Book Club—I’ve embedded this week’s episode in its YouTube format above—as well as the new Book Club Notes newsletter they announced at the end of the episode.

Watcher in the Shadows

As I noted when reviewing Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot back in the early spring, Household knew how to open a thriller. In Watcher in the Shadows, another Cold War-era shocker, he sends a postman to Charles Dennim’s front door on page one and blows him in half on page two. The novel barely slows down from there.

Dennim lives a quiet life in a rural English village. He’s an expert zoologist specializing in squirrels and shares the house—now missing most of its windows—with his widowed aunt. What presumably only he, a friend in British intelligence, and the unknown person who sent him a mailbomb know is that he is actually Charles von Dennim, scion of an aristocratic Austrian family and, during the Second World War, a double agent working undercover as part of the SS staff at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Now, ten years on from the war and in his early forties, Dennim prefers not to think about all this. He carries on his research into small mammals and enjoys his leisurely outdoor pursuits, including hunting and horseback riding with Aunt Georgina, an accomplished riding instructor. The abortive mail bomb gives him pause. Perhaps it was meant for someone else, though none of his neighbors strike him as the likely targets of assassination. But a few days later he receives a postcard—a photo of Buchenwald with a X marked over one building, the officers’ mess.

His past is known to someone, somewhere, albeit not in full. Dennim had successfully fed intelligence to the British during his time at Buchenwald and arranged the escapes of several important female political prisoners. He risked his life and his sanity—the moral damage done not only to his mind but to his sense of honor by the secrecy of his role comes up several times—in order to undermine the Nazis, though the nature of his work means neither he nor the British government can acknowledge it.

Dennim investigates and finds that several other men associated with Buchenwald—two officers and a truck driver—had recently been murdered in mysterious circumstances. One was tortured for days, hinting that the killings are motivated by something highly personal. Dennim, not least because he is not guilty of the crimes his enemy apparently seeks to avenge, determines not to be next.

This leads into the bulk of the novel, a series of removes from place to place in the English countryside as Dennim tries to lure the killer into a trap. Thinking of himself as a goat staked out for a hidden tiger, Dennim learns quickly that his enemy is smart, observant, and supremely cautious. A misstep on his own part might send the assassin into hiding for months, long enough to drive Dennim mad or render him complacent, an easy target. He must proceed carefully if he wants to force a confrontation.

Along the way Dennim finds allies in unlikely places—a retired admiral, a pub landlord, a sharply observant working class laborer—as well as, for the first time in his life as a bachelor spy-cum-zoologist, love. Benita, the admiral’s daughter, is no merely obligatory love interest but proves especially important, as by the time Dennim confronts his enemy one-on-one at a remote Cotswolds barn, he has much more at stake in his life than when the hunt began.

Watcher in the Shadows has many of the hallmarks and strengths of the other Household novels I’ve read so far: strong, lean prose, energetic pacing, continuously building tension and suspense, and beautifully realized outdoor settings. But a number of other factors set it apart and make it unusually rich and thought-provoking.

The first is Dennim’s romance with Benita. Household, as I’ve noted about Buchan before him and Ambler, his close contemporary, is not an author one would normally associate with a romantic subplot, but like both he can evoke newly kindled love simply and poignantly, in ways that both enrich the characters and matter to the plot.

The next is the depth of Dennim’s prior experiences undercover. Without giving too much away, Dennim’s secret is known to more people than himself, his enemy, and his few contacts in British Intelligence, and his postwar history is more complicated than his simple career studying squirrels may at first suggest. Buchenwald and secrecy damaged him, and coming to understand this both reveals hidden depths in other characters and plays an important role in learning how to defeat his enemy.

The last is the enemy himself. Again, I want to avoid spoiling the book, but the man trying to kill Dennim has a surprising connection to Buchenwald and to Dennim—that is, to the von Dennim family, now reduced to a widowed aunt and a bachelor squirrel expert but once a powerful noble dynasty. This connection and the mostly vanished world it evokes leads Dennim and his enemy backward in time, past genocide and the amorality of the nation state to the chivalric code of honor shared by those of noble blood. It is blood, in fact, that helps save Dennim’s life at the end.

Plenty of spy novels acknowledge or ruminate on the damage done by the secrecy, deceit, and pragmatism of espionage, but few offer an alternative, much less an alternative rooted in the past. By the end of Watcher in the Shadows, honor and honesty have given two irreconcilable enemies common ground in which to resolve their differences. Dennim’s duel with the enemy moves from the metaphorical—chess, cat and mouse, tiger and goat—to the literal. Their long fight at the barn is a sustained masterpiece of suspense and, thanks to the contrast between old world honor and modern technocratic nihilism running through the book, a challenging moral contest.

I read Watcher in the Shadows for the thrills and suspense and Household, true to form, didn’t disappoint. But the novel reaches a moral and cultural depth I found surprising—and inspiring. This is as good a thriller as any Buchan, Ambler, or Ian Fleming produced, and is well worth reading.

Gordon Wood, RIP

I was sorry to learn of the death of the great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, two days ago, and even sorrier to learn of the circumstances. Aged 92, he deserved a better ending, but none can doubt he leaves behind a great scholarly legacy. Since his death I’ve seen lots of tributes and recommendations of his most famous books—the kind large enough to be called tomes, influential enough to be called monumental, magisterial, definitive—but I’d like to acknowledge a small personal debt and recommend a less celebrated book.

When I graduated from Clemson sixteen years ago I received an MA in European History. I had taken Dr Edwin Moïse’s class on Vietnam as part of my focus on military history, Dr Rod Andrew’s seminar on American historiography as an elective, and read the late Sir John Keegan’s then-new The American Civil War: A Military History but otherwise didn’t touch US history—and hadn’t since my sophomore year of college. But at my very first teaching job as an adjunct at Greenville Tech my department head plopped a US History I course in my lap.

If you’ve heard that the best way to learn something is to teach it, it’s true. Completely. I learned more about American history over that first year or so than in all my studies up to that point. For the first time I began to form a coherent overall picture of everything from Columbus and Jamestown to Appomattox. Part of the joy I discovered in teaching—which I never could have predicted I would end up doing for a living—was the feeling of suddenly getting it, of the material clicking for me. A large part of my work since then has been communicating that joy to my students.

But I had a healthy self-doubt and didn’t want to fall prey to Dunning-Kruger. I knew enough to know how little I knew, and spent a lot of time checking myself, probing for gaps and holes in the narrative I was perceiving and presenting, and wanting to make sure I was getting things right.

This is where Gordon Wood comes in. I have a lot of those famous books that I’ve read or dipped into as needed—The Radicalism of the American Revolution (c. 450 pages), Empire of Liberty (c. 780 pages), and The Purpose of the Past (300 pages on historiography)—but as I taught the Revolution for the first time I picked up his little 200+ page survey for the Modern Library Chronicles series, The American Revolution: A History.

This book was a godsend—short, well-written, approachable, and measured. The great test of the historian is to be both comprehensive and brief, and Wood demonstrated that favorite insight of Herbert Butterfield, that “The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.” I still recommend it to students who want a good scholar’s take on the Revolution but don’t want to tackle the 800-page behemoths popular among buffs.

But most importantly, it reassured me. Over and over I read in Wood what I had arrived at and presented to students. I was not comforted that Wood agreed with me, but that I had worked my way into a position that accorded with a great authority. I was doing something right. I hadn’t lost my way among the details as I scrambled to form a big-picture interpretation. Wood settled my anxiety that, having been forced to return to American history, I could and understand and teach it. His work gave me confidence and made me a better teacher. For that I’m still grateful.

Gordon Wood, scholar, writer, and teacher, RIP.

I highly recommend The American Revolution: A History if you’d like a short, readable introduction to the topic (something I’m always interested in for any subject in the hopes of recommending it to students). For a valuable recent service from Wood, here’s his critique of the 1619 Project. And for a more personal appreciation and reminiscence from a former PhD student, here’s Clemson’s C Bradley Thompson on how Wood, who was his dissertation advisor, shaped him as a scholar.

Tossed-off trifles and top one-hundreds

The Guardian’s recent “100 Best Novels of All Time” list caused quite an understandable hullaballoo, it being broadly agreed—and obvious—that the list is terrible. The Guardian’s explanation of the list’s rationale and method didn’t really help, either.

All of this occasioned a lot of talk about this list, any such list, and novels in general, and while I saw a lot of thoughtful observations and critiques—including the question, which I’ve raised before, of whether something as broad and protean as “the novel” can be meaningfully sorted and discussed this way. But the best response came from Joel J Miller, who crowdsourced a better list through an open thread on his Substack. Each commenter could submit five to seven novels for inclusion, with Joel tabulating and weighting the entries for a new top hundred. You can look at the finished list here. It’s much, much better.

I commented with my own seven at the last minute, and found myself contending with some of the questions occasioned by the Guardian’s list in the first place. The Guardian’s list was for English-language books but was open to literature translated into English from any language. Huh? Joel’s was for novels, and yet I saw multiple people nominating the Iliad and Odyssey—an elementary mistake.

I ended up limiting myself to a pretty strict definition of novel and only books originally written in English. But even within those parameters I faced a more fundamental question: what precisely does best mean? What do I think the best novels in English are?

To be more specific, I paused over the work of Charles Portis. I certainly wanted to include him in my seven and my gut said to nominate Gringos, but I had already seen a few other commenters nominate True Grit and the herd mentality of such things, the desire to bandwagon in order to game the process, intruded. Maybe Gringos is better—I’m still undecided—but True Grit had a better chance of making it into the top one-hundred. Having had the question occur to me at all made whatever choice I would make feel inauthentic.

Which brought to mind a line from Douglas Murray I quoted in the course of my very first John Buchan June:

There are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table. But one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.

True Grit is undoubtedly the Portis novel most people would be familiar with. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print but was quite literally something he dashed off while sick to entertain himself. Meanwhile, possibly greater novels like Witch Wood, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River, much beloved of the few of us who look beyond the first couple Hannay novels, are pretty much neglected by the wider public. Likewise with Gringos, the discovery of which almost seems a rite of passage for serious Portis fans.

I wouldn’t call True Grit or The Thirty-Nine Steps “trifles” by any means; Portis and Buchan were too brilliant to trifle, and even their lesser books—say Masters of Atlantis or The House of the Four Winds—are more interesting than the best books by lesser writers. The competition, I suppose, is between best-known, favorite, and the elusive best. I wound up just listing my favorites by a few favorite writers. I suspect most of the other commenters did the same.

Joel’s list has Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion well ahead of Emma, the book I’d rate Austen’s best, and, as I’ve mentioned before, Poe’s best-selling book in his own lifetime was a writer-for-hire textbook about seashells. It is strange to consider the vagaries of what a writer is remembered for.

For what it’s worth, my seven, in no particular order:

• The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

• Emma, Jane Austen

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

• True Grit, Charles Portis

• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

• Witch Wood, John Buchan

I had a hard time coming up even with these seven. This morning I woke up and realized I wanted to include Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, or perhaps Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday. Too late. I also felt guilty including no fiction by CS Lewis, and another part of me strongly wished to include at least one Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, or John Le Carré. Ask me on another day and I might come up with an entirely different seven—though Lord of the Rings and one of Portis’s will probably be on there.

I suppose the real takeaway—all controversy about such lists aside—is that we should be thankful there is so much good literature to choose from. Maybe I’ll just have to make my own top one-hundred.

The Desecration of Man

Midway through his documentary “Why Beauty Matters,” the late Sir Roger Scruton surveys the brutalist wrecks in the hollowed out town center of Reading, a formerly quaint Victorian town updated in mid-century and now derelict, and asks us to look past the broken windows and spray paint. “[W]e shouldn’t blame the vandals,” he says. “This place was built by vandals, and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

We clearly live in an age of vandals, with vandalism lauded as both high art and meaningful political protest, and that is before we even consider darker acts of defacement: the surgical mutilation of human bodies in pursuit of phantom identities, the buying and selling of sex through pornography, the devaluing and destruction of unborn, disabled, and elderly life. But like Scruton looking at Reading, Carl Trueman, in his new book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, presents us the obvious acts of profanation while asking us to consider the subtler, invisible acts that first made them possible—the graffiti artists as well as the architects who provided the already crumbling concrete walls.

Trueman’s project for some years now has been the basic historical task of explaining how we got here. Where his best-known book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and his more recent study of critical theory, To Change All Worlds, are big, sweeping books tracing multiple interrelated threads of philosophical and cultural development, The Desecration of Man is a short, brisk book concerned specifically with anthropology—the question What is man? If asking How did we get here? is the fundamental question of the historian, this is the fundamental question of the philosopher and theologian.

Everything else, Trueman demonstrates, is downstream of one’s answer to this question. Invoking Nietzsche’s Madman, Trueman argues that a shift in how both intellectuals and ordinary people answered that question began a long, slow rot that has only recently become obvious. The culture coasted for a long time on shared mores even as the anthropological assumptions that shaped them disintegrated. But the assumptions that man is not transcendent, that he is an atomized individual with no connection to others, that his interior life is his true self, that flesh is just flesh and sex is just stimulation, and that all of these are malleable have in the last century born fruit. A spirit of negation—a phrase borrowed from Goethe’s Mephistopheles—has led to a culture of desecration, the vandalization of mankind.

The surgeries, the “exuberant nastiness” of present day political rhetoric and online Holocaust denial, the public celebrations of aberrant sex, the industrial output and consumption of pornography, the epidemic of abortion or, in a seemingly opposite extreme, IVF, the push for infanticide and the rise of euthanasia regimes, the aims of Silicon Valley transhumanists, and even our consumerist obsession with youth and fitness—all of these treat man as a commodity to be bought, sold, upgraded, or disposed of as if man is just another product. These are desecrations, Trueman argues, and as often as not intentional. The frenzy with which, to choose one example, people are encouraged to take vocal public pride in having killed an unborn child betrays this spirit.

Some of this will be familiar, at least if you’ve read Trueman’s essays or have simply been paying attention. Rousseau, Marx, Freud, and others appear, tearing down the old anthropology and replacing it with their functional, brutalist edifices—the individual unsullied by society, the economic man, the Id. This is succinct and pointed, and should prove enlightening to anyone who hasn’t considered the longer history of how we think about ourselves before. But what Trueman does best is illuminate the logical connection between a debased understanding of what we are and how these outcomes—the spraypaint on the office block and bus stop—naturally result.

At this point it is worth noting, in case this sounds like a straightforwardly conservative polemic, that Trueman is bipartisan in his criticisms. He credits neither side in our current political environment or culture wars with a correct anthropology; both of them embrace the commodification of man in only superficially different ways. The end result is the same.

If a diagnosis were all The Desecration of Man had to offer it would be a good book, but Trueman ends with his most surprising and challenging material: a pair of cautions and a vision of the only true solution to the desecration. He roots both in three inextricably interlocked Cs: creed, cult, and code. Creed he defines as a given set of beliefs; cult, in the technical sense of a body of ritual, as the trappings and practices of those adhering to a creed; and code as the ethics, mores, and courtesies of those believing the creed and practicing the cult.

Trueman offers two examples as cautions. The first, Richard Dawkins, enhanced his already exalted reputation as a biologist by becoming the voice of an aggressive, hostile new form of atheism in the early 2000s. Recently, with the best years of the New Atheists behind him, he began to describe himself as a “cultural Christian,” someone who wants the customs and ethical priorities of the West, which he treats as having emerged apparently ex nihilo and as still viable without the pesky need to believe in God. This, Trueman argues, is a dead end, because it wants only the code but not the cult that sustains it or the creed in which it originates.

It is hard to feel sorry for Dawkins, who has shown himself so clearly to be a man sawing off the limb he has spent his life sitting on. More difficult for me was Trueman’s second test case, the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton himself.

Even after reading more than a dozen of his many books, Scruton’s precise views of Christianity remain opaque, or at least unclear. There are some signs in interviews and reminiscences that he became more traditionally religious toward the end of his life and his arguments in favor of it clearly come from a deep, sincere place, but the usual tenor of his work is merely to treat Christianity as useful. This was not solely for the way it propped up modern niceties about equality and self-congratulatory do-gooder ethics, like Dawkins, but because it made manifest the transcendent, which is aesthetically and spiritually good for people. Scruton, then, in lauding the faith as a way to bring beauty and a sense of wonder into the world, embraced the code and participated eagerly in the cult, but it seemed not to matter to him one way or the other whether the creed was true.

Other examples could be supplied. Trueman mentions Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson. But this also, Trueman argues, is a dead end. It matters whether the creed is true or not because, if not, the anthropology derived from the creed will be a sham. Once this is discovered, as so many thinkers over the last centuries have so eagerly asserted they have, why maintain it? And so we end up right back where we are.

If the problem is desecration, Trueman writes in his conclusion, having “imagined ourselves as gods” only to “have ironically reduced ourselves to dust,” the solution is the long, slow task of consecration, of taking the thing we have vandalized and treating it as it deserves again. The only way forward is Christianity in accord with those three Cs: belief in God and his vision of what man is and what he is for, teleologically; acted out in community rather than as individuals, in embodied, physical liturgy; and lived out in real-life acts toward flesh-and-blood people: giving, hospitality, neighborliness, even acknowledging our shared mortal limits by attending funerals. These three things are inseparable, and only if taken together may restore our anthropology and begin to undo the vandalism, both the obvious and invisible kinds.

The Desecration of Man is a helpful intellectual history, cultural critique, and religious appeal in one short book, briefly and clearly explained for the widest possible readership. And far from affirming a reader inclined to agree with Trueman, he graciously but clearly points out the weaknesses in much modern rediscovery of the utility of faith. Picking up some of the themes CS Lewis presciently explored in The Abolition of Man eighty years ago, this is a worthy successor to that book, and one that I hope many will find challenging and helpful, not to mention hopeful.

Does it matter if the movie is faithful to the book?

Over the weekend Substack, in its mysterious way, showed me a month-old note by a literary critic I follow and respect. Since this is a month old and there was already some debate along these lines in the comments, I’ll share and gloss it anonymously:

It doesn’t matter if the film is faithful to the book.
It’s a film! Judge it as a film.
And anyway, you cannot faithfully turn prose into film.
It’s an affront to literary genius to think otherwise.

I’m not actually sure what the last line is supposed to mean. How does holding a filmmaker to a high standard when adapting a writer’s work degrade the writer? But I strenuously object to the rest of it.

To work backwards, the critic here is asserting that the difficulty of adaptation from one medium into another actually makes it impossible—“you cannot faithfully” adapt from book to film, he says. An appalling oversimplification. What does he mean by “prose,” here? When we talk about how a book is adapted into a film and the film isn’t faithful, we might mean it fails with regard to one or more of the following:

• The literal events of the book

• The overall story arc of the book

• Particular details of the settings and/or characters

• The narrative structure of the book

• The meaning or thematic import of the book

• The tone of the book

I’ve tried to arrange that list from simplest to most complex. The events narrated in a story are the easiest to get on screen. The meaning, what the author is apparently both getting out of the story and trying to share through it, and the tone of his storytelling are much harder. We’ve probably all seen movies that more or less adapted a book’s events without capturing the immaterial elements that give the book personality. A Handful of Dust, a quite literal adaptation of the great Waugh novel, comes to mind, as does the John Wayne True Grit. But other films might deviate here and there from the original while nailing its tone and moral register. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men and True Grit, both of which capture most of the events of their respective novels while, much more importantly, faithfully adapting their tones, are masterpieces in this regard.

All of this, according to our critic, is just “prose,” which “cannot faithfully” be made into a film. Cannot. This is not only oversimplified but wrong. Adaptation is difficult, but that we want to judge faithfulness at all indicates that it can be done, and can be done well.

Our critic is on firmer ground in asserting that films and books should be judged by different artistic standards, but this is common sense. Novels and movies tell stories in different ways and may or may not do so well, of course. But—still moving backwards—to assert a novel and its film adaptation are so separate that “it doesn’t matter” whether the adaptation is true to the book is foolishness.

Of course it matters. It matters because if a film adaptation of a book exists it exists because of the book. If a movie presumes to share a title with an author’s book, if it is meant to please readers of the book at all and not to be purely parasitic on the writer’s work and readership—we’re all familiar with the term cash-grab by now—the filmmakers owe it to the book to be faithful in at least some of the areas listed above. And having established that faithfulness is not, in fact, impossible, they owe it to the original to try.

I think it also matters because this kind of talk about the difficulty or impossibility of faithful adaptation has far too often served as an excuse for vandalism. Some vandalism originates with filmmakers contemptuous of their literary source material and wanting to drag it down to their level. Some comes from filmmakers who hubristically think they can improve on great literature. But perhaps the most common problem is the filmmaker with neither contempt nor reverence for the original, who sees it only as raw material to be reworked according to his preferences. It’s all content, after all.

This was my problem with two of the worst film adaptations I’ve seen in the last few years, The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which—if you look at my reviews—I tried to judge on their merits as films while also noting their utter failure as adaptations. They don’t adapt the events, characters, meaning, or tone of the originals even a little bit faithfully. Are we to give them a pass because they have nice cinematography? Because they try to flatter our present assumptions?

There are other reasons to demand faithfulness of a film adaptation—the movie may be the one and only time many viewers, especially students, encounter any version of an author’s story—but these, I think, are the strongest. There is room for debate, of course. Arguments about whether and how Peter Jackson succeeded in adapting The Lord of the Rings, for example, have been fruitful for an appreciation of both the film trilogy and the novel. But handwaving even the possibility of faithfully adapting a book is bad for both.

A film might be just a film, but a film based on a book exists in relation to that book. If an author cared enough to write it and readers cared enough to read it, filmmakers owe them something more than apathy, hubris, or contempt. So do critics.

State of Siege

In reviewing Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev last year, I noted that Ambler’s postwar novels, while focusing on polyglot, cosmopolitan, but out-of-the-way worlds unsettled by global events like his early classics, are marked by a broader scope and more mature perspective. Deltchev, his first postwar thriller, takes place in an unnamed Eastern European state faced with imminent Stalinist takeover. His next, The Schirmer Inheritance, follows an American lawyer tasked with settling an old lady’s estate on a journey through postwar West Germany, its scarcely buried past, and the lingering dangers of guerrilla warfare in Greece. Passage of Arms sprawls across British-controlled Malaya, newly independent and unsettled Indonesia, arms trafficking, Communist insurgency, Chinese organized crime, and American tourists.

These are tense and well-plotted but slower, statelier, with seemingly more at stake than the fates of their characters. State of Siege, published in 1956 between The Schirmer Inheritance and Passage of Arms, comes as a bit of a surprise then.

When the novel begins, British engineer Steve Fraser has finished a three-year assignment to build a dam on the island of Sunda, a former Dutch colony that has gained its independence from both the Dutch and Sukarno’s Indonesia. The dam is part of an international development scheme for southeast Asia. Fraser believes in the work but is happy to be leaving. Rampant local corruption and a succession of inept, unqualified native liaisons with the Sundanese government have left him disillusioned if not embittered. Only one local, Major Suparto, has proven tough, intelligent, competent, and genuinely involved with the project—suspiciously so.

Fraser flies to the capital, Selampang, and has only to wait a few days for the regularly scheduled cargo plane out. An Australian friend sets him up with female company, a half-Dutch, half-Sundanese girl named Rosalie van Linden, and his apartment on the town square by the radio station. Fraser is set for a pleasant few days before flying home but for one discordant note: while walking with Rosalie in the garden of a club, he overhears a voice he recognizes—Major Suparto.

The major has arrived by jeep from the dam, a strenuous daylong drive on seasonal roads through territory controlled by leftwing nationalist rebels under General Sanusi, who hopes to root out corruption and turn Sunda into an Islamic republic. That Suparto has arrived on the same day as Fraser, who flew, suggests that he is a part of the rebel movement, and his overheard conversation with “the general” seems to prove it.

Fraser puts it out of his mind. Whatever Suparto, the rebels, and local mobsters are up to, he’s leaving. He continues his preparations to return home, has a second date with Rosalie, and takes her back to his friend’s apartment.

That night, revolution breaks out.

The army having left Selampang on maneuvers, Sanusi’s rebels seize the opportunity to take over the capital and declare a regime change. His troops occupy the city and take over the radio station. Fraser and Rosalie, in their friend’s apartment nextdoor, find their building turned into the headquarters of Sanusi himself.

There they sit, trapped at the center of the revolution, watching and waiting through aerial and naval bombardment, street fighting, the revelation of competing loyalties and betrayal among the revolutionaries, and the growing pressure in Sanusi’s inner circle to eliminate any potential threat to the revolution, including Fraser and Rosalie: one a foreigner, the other a child of the former colonial oppressors.

I began by saying that State of Siege proved a bit of a surprise among Ambler’s postwar thrillers. Like the others I mentioned it has a sweeping, utterly realistic and plausible scope. Sunda is a fictitious island—one of several Ruritanias Ambler dreamed up for his stories, and likely the most vividly realized of them—but it feels of a piece with that part of the world at that time. Ambler never bludgeons the reader with explanation but allows the corruption and mismanagement of the national government, the idealism and brutality of the Islamic rebels, the broader political situation, the ethnic hodgepodge of Selampang, with its foreign engineers, Chinese business class and gangsters, and benighted native population, and even the geography of the conflict to emerge effortlessly, through Fraser simply telling his story.

That gives State of Siege a real-world believability and convinces the reader of the danger Fraser and Rosalie face, but Ambler combines this quality with the best of his pre-war thriller pacing. His typically skillful use of foreshadowing helps sets the story in motion from the first page and, once underway, the action and suspense build steadily right up to the end.

Fraser and Rosalie are also standouts among Ambler’s protagonists. His novels typically feature unadventurous, nose-to-the-grindstone types—often engineers, as Ambler had formal education in engineering—who find themselves embroiled in international intrigues not of their own making, and Steve Fraser seems at first to fit the standard Ambler type. But he proves unusually resourceful and plucky and, perhaps uniquely for Ambler’s put-upon main characters, keeps his cool in danger. A mid-story sequence in which Fraser is forced to work for the rebels in order to protect himself and Rosalie is arduous, tense, and makes his engineering an exciting and integral part of the plot.

And Rosalie may be Ambler’s best leading lady, not only working as a foil and romantic interest to Fraser but contributing, through her personal story growing up among the Dutch plantations in the back country, a strong sense of dread over the outcome of the revolution. Fraser is a tough, fundamentally honest man who wants to think well of people. Rosalie has no illusions whatsoever about what will happen to her if Sanusi’s side wins. Her perspective not only heightens the tension but adds to the realistic murk of Sunda. One’s sympathies may be pulled in one direction or the other—a tension maintained by the complicated and surprising rebel characters—but one cannot sensibly call either side in the revolution the “good guys.”

Finally, one of the unusual joys of State of Siege is watching Fraser and Rosalie’s casual, transactional relationship deepen through the danger they share. Ambler was not known for his romantic plots, but this works wonderfully, not least—without giving too much away—by adding a bittersweet note to the novel’s ending.

Short, briskly paced, but rich and surprising and centered on two of Ambler’s most sympathetic characters, State of Siege may well be my favorite of postwar Ambler. I hope to read it again soon.