Flying and nesting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 in books

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

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

Favorite fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Year of Ambler and Powers

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

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

First, beginning with Tim Powers:

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

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

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

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

Favorite Powers of the year: Last Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now for Eric Ambler:

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite Ambler of the year: Epitaph for a Spy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special mention: The Mysteries

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

Favorite non-fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite of the year: Rembrandt is in the Wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite children’s books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Buchan June and Chestertober

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

• Castle Gay (1930)

• Salute to Adventurers (1915)

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

• The Free Fishers (1934)

• The Island of Sheep (1936)

• The House of the Four Winds (1935)

• Memory Hold-the-Door (1940)

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

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

• Manalive (1912)

• Magic (1913)

• The Flying Inn (1914)

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

Rereads

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

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

• Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

• The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman

• Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis*

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

• Grendel, by John Gardner

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Looking ahead

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

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

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Chestertober, my informal, monthlong exploration of GK Chesterton’s fiction, concludes with his best novel and the one that has always been my favorite: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Where to begin? I think with a favorite line from Flannery O’Connor, who once wrote that “A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.” Any time I reflect on that line, this is one of the few books that comes to mind, vividly and specifically.

The Man Who Was Thursday is Gabriel Syme, an English poet who, when the novel begins, is at a garden party in a fashionable London suburb. There he finds himself in conversation with the beautiful Rosamund and her testy brother Lucian, who, like Syme, is a poet. He takes himself dreadfully seriously and the puckish Syme can’t resist goading him. Finally, dared to prove that he really means what he says in his nihilistic modernist poetry, Lucian reveals that he is an anarchist. He invites Syme to a meeting of his anarchist terrorist cell that very night.

“Your offer,” Syme says, “is too idiotic to refuse.”

Syme and Lucian arrive early and, just before the others enter, Syme repays Lucian for his dangerous revelation with one of his own—he is an undercover cop.

In a masterfully suspenseful scene, Lucian, who is nominated for a position on the supreme anarchist council under the codename Thursday, attempts to downplay the violence of their group. Syme denounces him—the path to success among radicals—and is elected the new Thursday, at which point he is whisked downriver to Westminster. There, at a luxurious breakfast on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square, Syme meets the five other members of the council and the man behind them all, Sunday.

The other members—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—are all grotesques. One is a cadaverous German professor named de Worms, another a crooked French aristocrat, another, one Dr Bull, a man who grins ominously from behind opaque sunglasses. But their leader is the most frightening of all. Sunday, an enormous man, a giant who fills Syme’s senses with his overpowering presence, announces that he has uncovered a spy among their number. Syme thinks he has failed just as he’s begun, but it turns out to be one of the other members, a Pole named Gogol who tears off his wig and beard to reveal a Cockney policeman underneath. After threatening Gogol with death, Sunday sends him on his way.

Sunday then reveals the council’s plot: the Tsar is en route to Paris for a meeting with the President of France. Wednesday, the French marquis, is to blow them up with a bomb when they meet in three days. Syme’s goals at this point become clear: stop the assassination and bring down Sunday—the former because he is a policeman, the latter because Sunday terrifies him.

But as Syme leaves Leicester Square he discerns that he is being followed. After failing to elude his tail, he turns and confronts him. It is Friday, the elderly Professor de Worms, who insistently asks whether Syme is a policeman. When Syme finally denies it, the professor is crestfallen: “‘That’s a pity,’ he said, ‘because I am.’”

With astonishment and frustration, Syme and Professor de Worms realize that three of the seven anarchists at the council meeting were actually undercover detectives. Only their ignorance of the fact prevented them from moving against Sunday on the spot. They determine to stop Sunday’s plot together by forcing Saturday, Dr Bull, to reveal the marquis’s plans for carrying out the bombing. Once they find and interrogate the inscrutable Dr Bull, a scene in which the hapless Syme and Professor de Worms struggle to break through the man’s defenses, it turns out that he, too, is a policeman.

From this point on, the three race to cross the Channel and find and stop the marquis—who turns out to be a policeman.

One by one, every member of the supreme anarchist council, the organization working to overthrow the entire world, has been revealed to be an undercover agent of the forces of law and order. And one by one, each reveals that he was recruited by the same man—a Scotland Yard official who questioned them in a completely darkened room in which, despite their inability to see him, they felt awed and overpowered by his presence. Each has derived an extra measure of strength for his work from remembering that interview. Each wants to please their unseen boss by defeating Sunday.

After repeatedly cheating death by fighting a duel against an expert swordsman and fleeing a zombie-like mob in northern France, Syme and his allies, eventually including Gogol and the menacing council secretary, who is second only to Sunday himself, decide to turn the tables on Sunday by returning to England and confronting him.

“This is more cheerful,” said Dr. Bull; “we are six men going to ask one man what he means.”

“I think it is a bit queerer than that,” said Syme. “I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.”

What they discover defies expectations or explanation.

“A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Likewise, The Man Who Was Thursday defies easy summary or explanation. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away, but I’ve tried to avoid spoiling important episodes, major plot points, and most especially the ending. It’s also hard to describe, period. See again that quotation from Flannery O’Connor.

A good place to begin is that subtitle: A Nightmare. The subtitle, as I noted earlier this month, is easy to overlook, especially once one has started reading, but important for both stylistic and thematic reasons.

Artistically, Chesterton’s most effective tool in establishing a nightmare feeling, and the one that sets The Man Who Was Thursday most clearly apart from all of his other fiction, is pacing. This novel maintains a breakneck speed that creates a sense of barely controlled panic as crisis flows into crisis and surprise piles upon surprise. There is no lag or dull spot and Chesterton metes out his surprises and twists expertly. Kingsley Amis, in a line commonly reprinted as a blurb on paperback copies, called The Man Who Was Thursday “the most thrilling book I have ever read.” High praise, and well earned.

The book’s atmosphere and tone are also crucial. Chesterton evokes better and more subtly than any other writer the feeling of being in a nightmare. Anyone who has dreamt of being chased will know the feeling. Over and over again, Syme is followed or chased by enemies of obscure purpose who always keep up with him no matter how hard he strives to get away. And, as in a dream, the familiar—Chesterton, a lifelong Cockney, sets the first half of the book in a believable and realistic London—mutates almost imperceptibly. Under the influence of this paranoia, which prefigures that of the political thrillers of John Buchan and his successors, home becomes a foreign battlefield, nothing appears quite right, and the human face and form both prove horrifyingly changeable.

But alongside the pursuit and paranoia of the nightmare is the reversal. Enemies turn out to be allies, being chased turns into chasing, disguises do not conceal, and, in the climax, the villain flees his accusers only to welcome them. The reversal, the inversion, the topsy-turvy turning of the world on its head—this is one of Chesterton’s recurring motifs and the great load-bearing structure of this novel.

It is also the key to Sunday, who is both a threat and the solution to the threat, both feared and trusted, both hated and loved, both a destroyer of the world and its creator and preserver.

I can say little more without revealing too much. The Man Who Was Thursday can be described, even spoiled, but must be read. It has to be dreamt.

When Chesterton published this book in 1908, he had taken a live issue, the waves of anarchist terrorism and assassination in both Europe and America at that time, and used it to explore doubt and despair and madness. The plot, in a way hard to explain but easy to describe, provides an answer by rejecting the question. On this read-through, as I read the novel’s concluding scenes, with Sunday and the six policemen of his council reunited, I thought of a passage from Chesterton’s “Introduction to the Book of Job” in which Chesterton describes how Job, after all his questions, finds himself

suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Chesterton’s message is all the more powerful because, unlike some of the other novels we’ve read this month, it is never made explicit, much less preached.

I’ve read elsewhere that readers wrote to Chesterton to tell him that The Man Who Was Thursday had saved them from despair. I can believe it. This time through, my fourth or fifth in about fifteen years, I finished it feeling steadied and content, something I had not expected to get out of this rereading. I finally understood. The Man Who Was Thursday is not just witty, surrealist fun and genuinely thrilling espionage action, it is an allegory that strikes to the heart through the imagination.

Our world is no more settled or peaceful than it was in Chesterton’s time. If you’re feeling that, especially if you’re feeling that right now because of the forces at work to destroy civilization—whichever forces you think they might be—The Man Who Was Thursday may be the nightmare you need. A paradox worthy of its author.

Saving the world from the reading nook

Writing at Front Porch Republic in response to several recent news stories—like this one—that suggest our civilizational decline is further along than even the pessimists thought, Nadya Williams argues that saving and restoring civilization begins at home:

In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

The right domestic tone is key. So is opportunity. Williams continues:

When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.

This combination—a mood at home that encourages reading and abundant opportunity to do so—reminded me of the early passages of Lewis’s spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy. Here he describes the home his family moved into when he was seven:

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Lewis’ father, you see, had the same bad habit I do: he “bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.” Feel free to consult my wife for more information on me, but for the young Lewis this was the happy result:

There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The results speak for themselves.

But of course opportunities have to be seized, and the decline of reading, at least among the American populace, is not for lack of reading material. Books are plentiful and cheap. Where a private library used to be a ruinously expensive luxury, the most precious resource of a monastery or the hobby of an aristocrat, Williams argues that “in this day and age, with periodic public library sales and book giveaways, one doesn’t have to be rich to accumulate an impressive home library.”

But that word accumulate my put off the more Marie Kondo-ish among us. Williams suggests we embrace the stacks:

[S]peaking of luxuries, let’s forget aesthetics at least to some extent. Does my home feature many cheap mismatched bookcases? Yes, it does. Do we have too many books for our little space? Most definitely. Are there too many books piled up on every desk, side table, coffee table, and even hidden under the covers in the five-year-old’s bed? Yes. Is everyone in this home living with the joy of books as their primary companions each day? Yes, and that is the point.

Our home library is several thousand volumes, now. I stopped counting at over 3,000 a long time ago. We have a stuffed home office lined with the IKEA Billy bookcases I recently described, three tall bookcases in the master bedroom and large bookcases in our kids’ rooms, shelves on the landing, baskets of kids’ books in the living room, and you can always find stacks here and there that Sarah valiantly keeps under control. Clutter is the danger, but we’re creating opportunity.

Lewis’s memories of tone and opportunity resonate with me. In the little house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, my parents had one big white wooden bookcase in the foyer by the front door. It had a 1970s-era set of World Book, a big hardback book on the top shelf mysteriously emblazoned Josephus, and scads and scads of kids’ books: Value Tales, Childcraft, Berenstain Bears, Golden Books, etc. We were free to read any of it, any time. I certainly did.

As a high schooler with a taste for literature, I discovered that classics series were helpful. I started as cheaply as I could with Dover Thrift Editions, which at that time were mostly one or two dollars apiece. You got what you paid for, to an extent (when I took a bunch of these to college a friend started calling them “Dover Homeless Editions”), but they gave this hillbilly kid with little pocket change easy access to lots of great old books for very little money. From there, Signet Classics, mass market paperbacks that ranged from $5-$8 when I was in college, and finally the larger and marginally more expensive but better quality Penguin Classics beckoned. I have hundreds of the latter.

The rest of our library has grown up around these like an artificial reef. And I’m glad to say that our reef is now teeming with little fish, busily reading. It is sweet to see them nestled down somewhere with a book, even when they should be doing something like sleeping. For once, I am not so pessimistic about the future.

Read all of Williams’s essay here and be encouraged—and motivated. Relatedly, read this piece on moving a home library from my podcasting friend Michial Farmer, which posted at Front Porch Republic just a day or two after Williams’s. Cf. his thoughts on collecting and loving cheap paperbacks versus cultivating a perfectly matched room full of leatherbound hardbacks. And you can read more about Lewis’s bookish childhood here.

Bigfoot and the resurrection, a Frog Pond test case

A few weeks ago I wrote about Alan Jacobs’s three-strike system for determining whether a current book is worth reading. He laid out some of his system here back in April, writing specifically of new literary fiction. (Brooklynite, three strikes; Ivy Leaguer, two strikes; MFA, one strike, etc.) I brought it up in the context of elite cultural bubbles in general, Edgar Allan Poe’s hated Boston “Frogpondians” being a paradigmatic example.

This was already on my mind because of a trip to our local library with the kids during which I picked up a new book on a whim: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, by John O’Connor. Leafing through the book at home, I alighted on this paragraph:

Even demonstrably batshit belief—in headless cannibals, in Jesus rising from the dead, in the COVID-19 pandemic being a global hoax orchestrated by the CDC and Zoom to prevent the Tangerine Tornado from being reelected—can make you feel as if you’ve pierced the Baudrillardian veil to see the world as it truly is. Not so long ago, perfectly reasonable people thought exposure to moonlight could get a girl pregnant. Or that rainwater found on tombstones removed freckles. Or that 7,409,127 demons worked for Lucifer, overseen by seventy-nine devil princes and helped by countless witches who multiplied faster than they could be burned alive. “I believe because it is absurd,” went the credo of third-century Christian theologian Tertullian. In many ways, our lives remain influenced by beliefs that were set in place when we crucified people on the regular.

It’s hard to know where to start with a specimen like this: the flippant tone (flippancy being the devil’s preferred form of humor), the cloying in-group signaling in which the author invokes meme culture and internet slang and Baudrillard at the same time, the cheap dunk on a bad-faith misquotation of Tertullian—all are worth attention. When Strunk and White condemned what they called “a breezy manner” (elsewhere O’Connor refers to Beowulf as “Mr Big Dick himself,” and Leviathan as “God’s way of reminding Job . . . that He is not to be fucked with”) they had good reason.*

No, what stuck out immediately was the lumping together of COVID conspiracy theories, superstitions, creatures reported in Herodotus, early modern amateur demonology, folklore, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ as “batshit.” (Presumably he means “batshit crazy,” though he chooses to economize his words here, of all places.) And not just “batshit,” but “demonstrably batshit.”

Someone should alert the press.

I decided to find out more about the author, and what do you know? Ivy League MFA, has written for The New Yorker, teaches at Boston College,** and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him an actual Frogpondian. Using Jacobs’s system, the Columbia MFA is three strikes by itself. At this point the knowing, dismissive tone is self-explaining.

Jacobs’s strike system is a simple heuristic meant to weed out works produced within and for intellectual bubbles. The passages I read—many more than the paragraph I quoted—and the author’s credentials suggest just such a bubble pedigree. So who is O’Connor’s Secret History of Bigfoot written for? As with all bubble writing, the likeminded. NPR, voice of the Frog Pond, called it

a smart, engaging, incredibly informative, hilarious, and wonderfully immersive journey not only into the history of Bigfoot in North America and the culture around but also a deep, honest, heartfelt look at the people who obsess about, the meaning of its myth's lingering appeal, and the psychology behind it.

But ordinary readers aren’t so sure. Here’s a well-put sample from a reader review on Goodreads, where the book has three out of five stars—a vigorously middling score:

I’m really confused as to what the purpose of this book was. As a person who’s uninitiated into Bigfoot lore I didn’t learn hardly anything about the phenomena. The same could be said for the commentary on psychology and delusion. I also don’t think this book is designed with Bigfoot enthusiasts in mind (nobody wants to be casually shrunk and mocked), or skeptics, who wouldn’t have much to take away from this book.

In a bit of serendipity, Jacobs wrote a short, one-paragraph post on his blog that I missed during the hurricane. It’s called “Parochialism,” and is a response to a New Yorker essay by Manvir Singh (Brown undergrad, Harvard PhD, UC Davis anthropology faculty). Jacobs notes simply that “the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing” and that, for a writer of Singh or O’Connor’s ilk, “ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist.”

Point (a) is especially important there. Living in a bubble leads the people in the bubble to think that the cocksure, mocking tone characteristic of work like this is just wit. The author can assume that everyone who matters agrees with him, and that anyone who disagrees doesn’t matter.*** We used to call this “preaching to the choir.” And the thing about preaching to the choir is that it’s unnecessary, and no one pays attention.

If you’d like a quick demonstration of just why it’s, well, batshit crazy to lump the resurrection of Jesus in with conspiracy theories and folk medicine, you can start with Richard Bauckham’s Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, a short work by a careful, earnest scholar for Oxford UP. Pages 104-9, which you can start reading here, offer an excellent précis for just why billions of people have believed something like this for two thousand years.

* “The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric.”

** I find it curious, albeit not terribly surprising, that someone who teaches at a Catholic college can blithely describe the resurrection of Christ as a “demonstrably batshit” idea.

*** A different Goodreads user counted 28 mentions of Donald Trump—by name, with more through brilliant nicknames like “the Tangerine Tornado,” which is, bizarrely, indexed—in O’Connor’s book. What writer who is not a well-submerged Frogpondian would risk alienating half of his potential readership to make puerile political digs in a book about Bigfoot?

Homer and His Iliad at Miller's Book Review

I’m excited to say I have another guest post at Miller’s Book Review on Substack. Today I review classicist and historian Robin Lane Fox’s excellent recent book Homer and His Iliad, which I read this summer and briefly noted in my summer reading post here.

A short sample:

The poem’s style suggests that Homer was illiterate, master of a strictly oral tradition, but with important differences from the bodies of modern oral epic so often used to understand him. These epics from Albania, Finland, and the central Asian steppes are transmitted communally, mutate from telling to telling, and have a loose-limbed, gangling structure of “and then . . . and then,” stretching across their heroes’ entire lives.

The Iliad, on the other hand, is a tightly focused and artistically unified whole that minutely dramatizes one major incident over the course of a few weeks. Its characters, themes, and setting remain consistent throughout. Even minor details which Lane Fox calls “signposts”—a hero’s armor, horses taken as booty—are established early in the poem so that, when they reappear sometimes thousands of verses later, they do not seem a contrivance.

All of which indicate a single creative mind behind the work, a mind capacious enough to keep an entire war’s worth of characters and plot lines straight without reference to writing. If the style is indicative of oral poetry, the content—in its control, economy, and subtlety—suggests one poet.

Read the whole thing at Miller’s Book Review and be sure to subscribe for twice-weekly reviews and essays. I’m grateful to Joel for inviting me to contribute again.

Being shelfish

Alan Jacobs recently recounted the bookshelf woes that have afflicted him since the reopening of the Baylor Honors College following a remodel. During the wait, he learned that he had been allotted two bookcases: “When I pointed out that my then-current office had eight bookcases, all of which were full, I was told that, okay, I could have three in my new space.” And that was all the new office had room for.

The whole situation, while faintly comic, leads Jacobs to some wry and disturbing conclusions about the fate of books in modern academia, so be sure to read the whole post. But I couldn’t help noticing one detail in particular:

I don’t mind moving into a smaller office. My former one was bigger than I needed, and the new one is better situated and is a pleasant, comfortable space—I’ll be happy there. But when I moved in I was a bit surprised to find that the bookcases—and yeah, it would’ve been hard to fit in any more than three—are thin-industrial-steel things instead of the well-made cherrywood ones I had had in my former office. 

When I started my full-time job at my college seven years ago my office had one bookcase of precisely the industrial steel kind shown in Jacobs’s photo. I learned quickly that these bookcases are not only ugly but terrible for the books themselves. The finish of the steel creates friction when one slides a book in or out of place, and unless the shelf is packed full the books will lean and warp in ways I haven’t seen on traditional wooden shelves. I even had the covers of multiple paperback books delaminate in strange patterns suggestive of unaccustomed structural stress.

And did I mention that the steel shelves are ugly?

Fortunately I was able to request an extra bookcase, which was delivered promptly. I was glad to see it was a more traditional—if cheaply made—wooden case. I eventually moved two of my own IKEA Billy bookcases to my office. This gave me a total of four, which was almost enough. For a while.

When our department shifted one hall over a few years ago, the wooden shelf and my two Billy bookcases and an additional waist-high case from Walmart came with me and I ditched the steel one. I managed to requisition a second wooden bookcase as a replacement. This is the most satisfactory office library arrangement I’ve had so far, even with books stacked on top of all of them and a couple of boxes full on the floor by my filing cabinet and more waiting at home.

The unbending, unbeautiful, ultimately damaging utility of the steel bookcase is a pretty good accidental metaphor, especially when the scholar and the lover of literature doesn’t have enough.

The Novel, Who Needs It? and The Decline of the Novel

Speaking of the good old days and present decline, this summer I read two books about novels. Or rather, The Novel, in the abstract. The first was The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein and the second The Decline of the Novel, by Joseph Bottum. Though starting from a similar point and assuming both the embattlement and the necessity of The Novel, they are quite different books.

Epstein’s book, which is more of a loosely structured long-form essay on a series of interrelated topics, defends the traditional novel as an essential medium for the exercise of the imagination and the cultivation of moral character. It is quite good, though with its discursive structure and a few other limitations, about which more below, I felt it never cohered into a single compelling argument. So while I may agree with some of the points in The Novel, Who Needs It? more, it was Bottum’s Decline of the Novel that I found more thought-provoking and insightful.

Bottum builds on a thesis from his earlier book An Anxious Age, which looked at the cultural and psychological effects of the collapse of the shared mainline Protestant culture of the US, but narrows his view here to fiction. The novel, Bottum argues, is a fundamentally Protestant form given its interiority, individualism, and concern with personal transformation. Long fictional narratives served to playact the sanctification of souls in individual imaginations. They were a form through which “we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.”

As such, the novel became the preeminent artistic medium for meaning and self-understanding in the modern world and enjoyed a three hundred-year reign, from the early picaresques and moralistic epistolary novels of Defoe and Richardson to the 800-page potboilers of the 1970s.

But no more. With the decline of a shared culture has come a decline of the narrative form that once fed and shaped its imaginations. Novelists today do not occupy the taste-maker or thought-leader status a John Updike or Norman Mailer once did, nor do the educated need to have read any recent novels to be in the know—what Bottum calls “the Cocktail Party Test.”

In the best chapters of the book, Bottum traces this decline through the careers of four novelists: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Tom Wolfe. Faced with a “thin” or disenchanted world, all four sought to infuse meaning into life through fiction, albeit in different ways. Scott sought meaning in stories of the past, inadvertently inventing—to all practical purposes—historical fiction. Dickens, a generation on, strove to make fiction meaningful as a vehicle for pursuing the truth, for uncovering and exposing evil. But both these ends proved inadequate, giving rise to the modernism exemplified, in Bottum’s argument, by Mann, who made the novel its own point—novels for novels’ sake. It may not provide meaning, but it’s all we’ve got—let’s fuss over the artistry. By the time of Tom Wolfe, who attempted the unblinking truth-telling of Dickens in the realistic modern mode of Zola, narrated with journalistic attention to detail and rendered in frenzied prose, neither he nor his characters had the old “vision of the good life” that could give his shambling novels power and his readers no longer believed in the novel enough to take him seriously. Indeed, Wolfe became an object of scorn among the literati, especially when he dared to tip the sacred cow of the sexual revolution in I am Charlotte Simmons.

Successive failed attempts to find meaning, maintenance of empty forms without belief, and finally disbelief and disavowal—this is a deconversion story, a loss of faith. A “failure of nerve,” as Bottum puts it, but ours, not that of the novel. “The novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”

There’s a lot to this argument, and Bottum argues it well. Certainly much of it jibes with my own observations, such as the way novels now tend to mean more to rabid subcultures than to any broadly shared culture—with one or two important exceptions. But I remain unconvinced by the overall thesis. Something is missing, or simply off. His narrative of disenchantment and decline is persuasive, but not because of the evidence brought forward through Scott, Dickens, Mann, and Wolfe. Since reading it a few weeks ago I’ve continued to puzzle over this.

Other reviewers have pointed to The Decline of the Novel’s narrow Anglophone focus, imprecision in how Bottum uses the word Protestant, or over-selective case studies as problems. This criticism has some merit. Here are two reviewers, Darren Dyck at Christianity Today and science fiction author Adam Roberts, who both sympathize with Bottum’s book while raising important questions about his thesis. Both reviews are worth your time for these lines of criticism.

“Ultimately,” Dyck writes in his review, “it all depends on how you define novel.” Whatever other points I could raise, I suspect this is the real problem. The Novel, capitalized, in the abstract, is probably too protean and slippery a form to describe in enough detail to prove a thesis like this.

This becomes especially clear in the book’s final chapter, about popular fiction, in which Bottum points out the way children’s fiction has taken the place of grownup novels as tools of imaginative instruction. Novels do, then, still form part of a broadly shared culture as theatres of moral drama and objects of debate and controversy—it’s just the novels of JK Rowling, not National Book Award or Booker Prize shortlisters, that matter now.

That last chapter works as an important caveat to the narrative that makes up the bulk of the book. It is also one of the several things that make The Decline of the Novel better than The Novel, Who Needs It? For Epstein, popular and genre fiction, which get barely a mention, mostly serve to prepare readers for the exquisite, lip-pursing pleasures of Henry James and Proust. Per Dyck, Epstein’s definition of novel doesn’t seem to include much beneath these delights. Blunter reviewers than I have accused Epstein of snobbery. Though Bottum doesn’t fully explore the implications of his observations in his final chapter, that he meditated on genre fiction at all makes his argument more serious and more open to emendation.

The survival of something of the novel’s function, as Bottum sees it, in however limited and compromised a form in children’s and popular fiction inevitably brought Chesterton to mind. In his early essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” Chesterton stuck up for the crude, sensationalistic popular fiction of his own time for precisely this reason:

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense . . . but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

Which means that however much The Novel has declined, as long as good stories set young imaginations on fire and keep them lit, there is reason for hope. The task is to preserve and, when possible, keep writing good stories.

Despite the limitations imposed on it by its author’s standards, The Novel, Who Needs It? offers serious, impassioned support to good fiction, and despite my minor misgivings about its overall argument, The Decline of the Novel is worthwhile as a thought-provoking, incisive look at fiction and the role it plays—or perhaps played—in our culture. I hope, alongside both Epstein and Bottum, for the novel’s return.

Bold old voices

This week’s episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast covers Casino Royale. An instant must-listen, as you can probably imagine. In answer to Miller’s standard opening question, “Why is X a great book?” guest Graham Hillard replies:

“1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as 21st-century American literary fiction.”

I think it’s great for two reasons: it inaugurates one of the iconic characters in post-war literature, without dispute, and it is surprisingly excellent in its literary virtues, and by that I mean pacing, characterization, even sentence construction. I think I joked with you in an e-mail that Casino Royale would win a National Book Award if it came out today—that’s a slight exaggeration, but there really is something to the idea that 1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as twenty-first-century American literary fiction. I absolutely think that if Casino Royale came out today, it would occasion massive coverage of the “bold new voice” variety.

Like the first sentences of Casino Royale, which Miller and Hillard go on to unpack, this is a solid opening. I’ve written about Bond creator Ian Fleming’s craftsmanship as a writer before, including at the basic level of sentence structure back in May.

But what struck me in this introduction was Hillard’s point about the generally high quality of mid-century British genre fiction. Having read Fleming for years and a bunch of Eric Ambler (crime and espionage thrillers) and John Wyndham (science fiction) over the last year, I had noticed this as well—author after author turning out brilliantly structured, beautifully and strongly written novels in accessible genres. What was in the water back then? After finishing Epitaph for a Spy and The Kraken Wakes this summer I set each down and considered what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to have books like these coming out regularly. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Two things occur to me to complicate my nostalgia:

First, high literary quality in genre fiction was not new at the time. If anything, the Flemings and Amblers were carrying on the good work of the Buchans who came before. Good writing is good writing regardless of whether or not it appears in a highbrow form. Respect it wherever it appears. (If anything, I increasingly like good genre writing more because in addition to good writing the author of a thriller, for instance, has to excite the reader.)

Second, is there a form of survivorship bias at work here? If we read only the good stuff left over from a period, it’s not because no one wrote junk at the time. After all, I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. And yet…

And yet, the gap in quality between the good genre fiction of Fleming’s time and ours is, in my experience, vast. Insuperable. Whatever it was—a more demanding public, tougher editors, skilled authors willing to use their skills simply to entertain, deeper education on the part of writer and reader, a lack of pretension among both—something is missing now.

Mr Bennet’s library

I’m currently reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my wife every night before bed. Though I know the story well, this is the first time I’ve actually read it since college probably eighteen years ago. As much as you can appreciate Austen’s wit, goodness, and insight, there is nothing like actually reading her work to blow you away.

It’s also easy to forget, in a world full of imitators that feature the trappings of Austen’s world but not the wit, goodness, and insight—and are increasingly skanky, to boot—how fantastically funny Austen is. It’s hard for me to get through a chapter because I’m constantly laughing.

Last night we read some of the choicest early chapters featuring Mr Collins. After finding Mr Collins “as absurd as he had hoped,” Mr Bennet is stuck with a living, breathing, rapidly aging joke in his house. Specifically his library. This is bothersome to Mr Bennet, because, as Austen tells us:

“In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there.”

Sarah and I agreed to have that made into a nice sign for our own office/library door.

White whales and bleak houses

Napkin doodle by yours truly

Earlier this week, Jay Nordlinger at National Review wrote of an aging concert pianist who had “made peace” with never conquering some famously difficult classical pieces. Nordlinger continued:

This reminded me of Bleak House—Bleak House and me. I won’t retell my tale. (I wrote about this in an essay a few years ago, here.) But suffice it to say: Decades ago, Harold Bloom said that Bleak House is pretty much the best novel in English. I tried to read it for years and years. Just could not. Could not persevere in it. After a final push, I gave up.

I don’t say there is anything wrong with Bleak House, heaven knows. But there is something wrong with me—with me and Bleak House. And I have made my peace (sort of) with never reading it, or finishing it.

He solicited comparable stories and titles from readers, some of whose responses you can read here. A lot of readers concur on Bleak House, and Moby Dick and Middlemarch both come up several times. Readers also name The Sound and the Fury, Crime and Punishment, Les Misérables, and War and Peace, among others. Thematic headiness and sheer length seem to be recurring features of such books.

The one that immediately came to my mind is The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve started it at least three times, maybe four, at different periods of my life and in different circumstances, but I can never make it more than thirty or forty pages. I’ve made a game effort because I always try to finish what I start and one of my oldest friends is a huge Steinbeck fan, but somewhere just past the explicitly phallic farm equipment and the hypocritical preacher recounting his misdeeds I always set it down and never resume.

That’s the one that I thought of right away, but toward the end of Nordlinger’s post one of his readers mentions another book that I’ve worked even harder to finish and never have: Paradise Lost. Like the reader who mentioned this one, I love Dante’s Comedy and much other epic—at times I’ve read nothing but long narrative poems—but I just can’t hack Milton. I’ve written about that here before.

“The courage to put down a book,” Nordlinger writes. “It’s necessary.” And while I can own up to not liking or being able to finish certain books and recognize the value of resigning myself, setting them aside, and moving on, I can’t help but feel that each is an ancient hoard that will remain buried to me until I come back and, finally, read it.

As for Bleak House, I’ve owned a copy for years but have never even opened it. Whenever I hear the title, I always remember a conversation my best friend in high school had with his grandfather. I don’t remember why or under what circumstances, but for some reason his grandfather revealed that he had once read Bleak House. My friend asked him what he thought. After a long pause, his grandfather said, “It’s a bleak house.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having read and reread a lot of John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and Len Deighton—some of the great names in spy novel and thrillers—I noticed another name that often came up when, between their books, I would read about these authors: Eric Ambler. Ambler, an English novelist with a career stretching from the 1930s to the 90s, is often fitted into a crucial place in the history of the thriller between the more romantic adventure style of a Buchan, the hardened but still exciting sensibility of a Fleming, or the grey workaday espionage of a Le Carré or Deighton. Ambler’s name came up often enough, and with serious enough admiration, that it stuck in my mind, and when I ran across a copy of his 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios I eagerly seized the chance to read it.

A Coffin for Dimitrios begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic now subsisting on his surprisingly successful mystery novels, aimlessly whiling away a trip to Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. When he meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer, at a party and Haki expresses admiration for his novels, Latimer is given the chance to look into a real crime, to see the disorder of crime, violence, and death, the incompleteness of real mysteries.

Latimer, intrigued, agrees, and Haki takes him to the morgue. On the slab is the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek master of organized crime. The police had fished him out of the Bosporus that morning, stabbed and drowned.

Haki briefs Latimer on Dimitrios’s record: theft, blackmail, murder, espionage on behalf of parties unknown, conspiracy to assassinate the president of a fragile Balkan state, drug smuggling, sex trafficking. Dimitrios’s crimes, Haki makes clear, are not the equivalent of a tidy poisoning in an English country house, and Dimitrios himself was thoroughly nasty. Unredeemable. And terribly powerful.

After Haki’s tour of the morgue and reading of Dimitrios’s file Latimer tries to move on, to return to work on his next book, but Dimitrios’s true story nags at him—especially its incompleteness. Haki’s file had long gaps in it, with Dimitrios disappearing from Izmir or Athens only to appear again in Belgrade or Paris years later, working another racket. Latimer decides to find out the whole story. He tells himself it’s research for a book.

Latimer’s search takes him from Istanbul to Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally Paris. At first he doesn’t realize what he’s got himself into. Questions about Dimitrios provoke icy silence or outright hostility. Local authorities obligingly try to help, but it’s clear that they have only the thinnest understanding of Dimitrios’s career. Latimer gets his best information from Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster—but he must work to convince them to talk and only slowly realizes that they have angles of their own to play now that Dimitrios is dead.

There is much more to A Coffin for Dimitrios, but to explain more would be to reveal too much. One of the pleasures of Ambler’s sprawling detective tale is the manner in which it unfolds, with Latimer picking up clues, chasing leads, and often stumbling across information that is more meaningful to the criminals he meets than to himself. Simply understanding what he’s uncovered makes up a large part of his work, but his sense that he’s onto something important keeps him searching even as his research grows more dangerous and the surviving members of Dimitrios’s criminal network start to ensnare him in their own schemes.

The novel’s setting proves another of its strengths. This is eastern Europe twenty years after the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of new states like Yugoslavia out of the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Memory of the war and the violence and chaos that, rather than ceasing, grew worse in the aftermath haunt every place Latimer visits and every person he meets. Cops, customs officers, nightclub dancers, and even strangers on trains all have stories to tell. This is the bustling, seedy, multilingual, darkly cosmopolitan world of international crime—imagine Casablanca crossed with The Third Man—and Ambler evokes it brilliantly.

And, like all of the other writers I began this review with, Ambler is an excellent writer. Strong, direct prose and precisely observed descriptions immediately draw the reader in, and, despite the globetrotting plot, Ambler does not waste time on travelogue. In addition to The Third Man, which I enjoy just as much in Graham Greene’s novella as the noir film based on it, A Coffin for Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, another thriller whose plot bestrides Europe just before the Second World War and one of my favorite reads last year. This is a spare, tense story of obsession and revelation, of an ordinary man drawn by his own curiosity into a dark world standing just out of sight in the streets of Europe’s most important cities.

If A Coffin for Dimitrios has any flaw, it is that the pacing flags somewhat in the middle as several characters in a row retell their stories of falling in with Dimitrios, but these chapters are entertaining and interesting in their own right and set up a suspenseful and satisfying final confrontation between Latimer, one of the many crooks he has met along the way, and a figure he never expected to meet when he began his search.

If you like any of the other authors I’ve mentioned above—and if you follow this blog you must surely like a few of them—or if you simply enjoy solid, well-crafted, fast-paced, and suspenseful thrillers, check out A Coffin for Dimitrios. Having read this one, I’ll certainly read others by Eric Ambler.