Gladiator II trailer reaction

Naval combat in the Colosseum in Gladiator II

On Tuesday, the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II appeared on YouTube. I immediately watched it and opened up a draft post here on the blog. A few thoughts:

I’ve been skeptical of a sequel to Gladiator for as long as Scott and friends have been talking about it. Not only was Gladiator a great movie and a perfect standalone story, it was—like Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean—lightning in a bottle, a lucky product of the planned, the unforeseen, and the ability of imaginative craftsmen to adapt to unique circumstances. Recreating the magic of such a great movie for a sequel would not only be unnecessary, I thought, it would probably prove impossible. It hasn’t helped that some of the leaked proposals for a follow-up were insane. Add to this the aging Sir Ridley’s increasingly unconcealed indifference to history and Napoleon’s thudding arrival last year and I hope you’ll understand why I wasn’t excited to learn, in the middle of all that, that Gladiator II was finally shooting.

Well, now that a trailer has arrived I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

Gladiator II picks up the story of Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Commodus’s sister and Maximus’s love interest in the original, about twenty years later. When we last see him in Gladiator he’s leaving the sand of the arena where Maximus and Commodus have just killed each other. Now he is, per the trailer and scraps of information online, living in North Africa. Apparently he is captured in an amphibious raid by a Roman army under Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and sold into slavery as a gladiator, where he follows his hero Maximus’s example by taking the fight to Rome via the Colosseum.

Lucius’s owner and trainer is Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who appears to have a similarly intimidating semi-mentor role to that of Proximo in the original. Macrinus has designs on political power, which is currently wielded by brothers and co-emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). Bloodsport ensues.

What most surprised me about this trailer is the extent to which it recaptures the feel of the original. Gladiator had a look you could smell. The sharp, sun-drenched palettes, the sand and grit, the backlit smoke, the lavish textiles, the metal that looks hot to the touch, and the towering classical architecture are all present in Gladiator II. The seamless fit of this with the original’s style, more than anything else, made me excited for this movie.

This is, of course, playing to Scott’s strong suit. None of it means that the story will adequately support the visuals. (See again Napoleon.) Scope is guaranteed, but depth?

Other observations:

• I’m honestly thrilled to see more of the Colosseum, including its famous mock naval battles—complete with dolphins? sharks?—and a beast fight. When you learn about the Colosseum in school this is the stuff you really wish you could see. And this sample looks great.

• Speaking of the beast fight, the segments with the rhino reveal the starkest visual difference between this and the original: obvious CGI. Gladiator had some but here, nearly a quarter century later, it’s more apparent. The rhino looks pretty great but Lucius’s little tumble doesn’t.

• I like the nods to Maximus’s arms and armor. A proper Roman touch, and a nice callback to Maximus and Lucius’s scene in the original.

• Marcus Acacius’s amphibious attack looks rather too much like the climactic fight in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Potential unintentional comedy.

• Plotwise, this really looks like a rehash of Maximus’s story from the original. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I hate to see a great movie followed up twenty-four years later with the standard same-but-different sequel plot.

• Hans Zimmer has not returned to compose the score, which is a bummer. I’m curious to see whether Harry Gregson-Williams, a fine composer, repurposes some of Zimmer’s themes or writes entirely new music.

• “The greatest temple Rome ever built: the Colosseum.” Great line. I’m reminded of an observation my undergrad Rome professor made: you can learn a lot about a civilization by looking at the buildings it spends the most time and effort on and that dominate its skyline. In the Middle Ages it was the castle and the cathedral. Today it’s the skyscraper. In Rome it was the arena.

Okay, history stuff:

• I expect no attempt at accuracy. Like the original, I plan to enjoy this as a good movie and nothing more—provided it’s a good movie.

• Geta and Caracalla were real emperors who ruled together following the death of their father, Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211). Geta was assassinated, presumably at his older brother’s bidding, after less than a year of co-rule, so that places the events of this movie in AD 211. Caracalla ruled another six years, though, and has entered history as a byword for imperial cruelty and bloodthirstiness alongside Caligula and Nero. Presumably his fratricide will play some role in the film.

• Caracalla was eventually murdered while on campaign and succeeded by Macrinus, Denzel Washington’s character. The real Macrinus was Berber rather than black, a fact internet comment sections are already full of fulmination about, and reigned a little over a year. At least one production still of Washington sitting on what looks like a throne has been released. After being murdered in his turn, Macrinus was succeeded by Elegabalus, a notoriously perverted teenage tyrant who has been the subject of a recent move to spin him as a “transgender woman.” Gladiator II is probably already biting off more than it can chew, history-wise. Lord help us if the filmmakers go there.

• Geta and Caracalla get a stereotypical depraved Roman emperor look, with an uncanny resemblance to John Hurt’s Caligula in I, Claudius. They creeped my wife out when I showed her the trailer.

• Marcus Acacius has a rather presentist line about not wishing to “waste another generation of young men for their [Geta and Caracalla, presumably] vanity.” You’ll have to look hard to find someone outright defending Caracalla—who, in addition to his personal violence and cruelty, also debased the coinage and granted citizenship to nearly everyone in the Empire—but he didn’t campaign pointlessly. Scott’s modern posturing creeping in, as usual.

Verdict: cautiously optimistic.

So we’ll see. I don’t precisely have high hopes for Gladiator II but the trailer looks good and I’ll certainly be there when the film opens in November.

The Free Fishers

Today John Buchan June continues with Buchan’s final work of historical fiction, the 1934 novel The Free Fishers.

Set in Scotland and the North Sea coast of Norfolk, during the Regency and at the height of Napoleon’s powers over the Continent, The Free Fishers begins with Anthony “Nanty” Lammas leaving a meeting of a secret society. Despite his position as professor of rhetoric and logic at St Andrews, Lammas grew up among the fishermen and sailors of the Fife coast and is an initiate of the Free Fishers, their underground fraternity, a network connecting its members to thousands of others all over Britain. This evening, Lammas learns that one of his former students, Jock Kinloch, has also joined the group.

Kinloch complains to Lammas that his attentions to a young lady named Kirsty Evandale are not being reciprocated. Miss Evandale only has eyes for Harry Belses—another of Lammas’s former students—and Harry, in his turn, has an apparently unhealthy interest in a mysterious Mrs Cranmer. This lady, whose husband is a wealthy aristocrat, lives on a remote moorland estate called Hungrygrain. She is also rumored to have outspoken Jacobin sympathies. All of which frustrates the volatile Jock and bewilders Lammas.

Shortly thereafter Lammas receives a special assignment from the college: under cover of traveling to London to beg funds from one of the school’s benefactors, Lord Snowdoun, he must save Snowdoun’s son from an impending duel concerning a lady. The son is Harry Belses. Harry’s challenger is the terrifying Sir Turnour Wyse, an excellent shot with a pistol. The lady is Mrs Cranmer.

Lammas, disconcerted to be sent on such a mission, consults the leader of the Free Fishers, Eben Garnock. In addition to smuggling and the usual duties of a guild or secret society, the Fishers occasionally conduct deniable intelligence work on behalf of the crown. Mrs Cranmer, Lammas learns, is rumored to be a Jacobin spy working on behalf of Napoleon. Already Lammas’s task has taken on more serious dimensions than sorting out a young man’s love life.

Lammas sets out for London and almost immediately meets Sir Turnour, a handsome, physically powerful, and arrogant man obsessed with matters of honor who is also a master horseman. Lammas also learns during one stop on his route that Harry, who had been locked up by his own family in London until Sir Turnour could be placated, has escaped and headed north, presumably homing in on Mrs Cranmer. Lammas changes his plans. He must stop Harry and keep him away from Sir Turnour.

As The Free Fishers nears its midway point, Lammas and Jock, with the aid of Eben Garnock and the Fishers, as well as Harry and Sir Turnour independently, all converge upon Hungrygrain and Mrs Cranmer. There they will encounter hostile locals, a suspiciously empty public house with an unhelpful landlord, and a small army of henchmen patrolling the grounds of Hungrygrain. They will also discover the truth about Mrs Cranmer and her husband, and that a plot is in motion to assassinate the Prime Minister.

I can’t summarize much more of The Free Fishers without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that its plot falls into two halves.

In the first half, Lammas leaves St Andrews on his mission and encounters person after person whom he regards, largely on the basis of hearsay, as an antagonist only to find that, not only do they have good qualities, they are ultimately on the same side. This half charmingly reminded me of The Man Who was Thursday, Chesterton’s breakneck thriller in which, one by one, the hero discovers that all of his enemies are actually friends. The second half of The Free Fishers is a suspenseful cross-country race by an unlikely team to stop the assassination and protect an innocent person from being framed.

I mentioned above that The Free Fishers was Buchan’s last historical novel. It is neither his best nor his most famous story but it shows all of his skills and experience as a writer in peak form. Comparison with an earlier historical novel like Salute to Adventurers is instructive. There, an extended prologue gives way to a sprawling, convoluted plot taking place over years, and though the mystery steadily builds in tension, the reader will win no prizes for guessing the identity of the villain. The Free Fishers, on the other hand, is light, high-spirited, and wittily written, unfolding at a fast, steady, expert pace over just a few days and revealing new surprises in every chapter. I greatly enjoyed both books but The Free Fishers is formally superior and, most importantly, more exciting.

Much more. The climactic action of The Free Fishers is suspenseful and the conclusion to Lammas’s story thoroughly satisfying. Though its plot and themes echo many of Buchan’s earlier historical novels—especially the call of a bookish minister to action and danger in Witch Wood and the benevolent workings of an ancient secret society in Midwinter—this is Buchan’s best executed exploration of them. If it has any shortcoming, it is that preventing the assassination of a now lesser-known Prime Minister gives the book lower stakes. The Napoleonic threat does not feel quite as eminent as it perhaps should. Still, The Free Fishers is a wonderful adventure, and I’d rate it just below Buchan’s historical masterpiece, the rich, eerie, and oppressive Witch Wood.

I could say more. The characters are strongly developed and surprising. Buchan proves especially adept at manipulating the reader’s sympathies, the best example being the haughty Sir Turnour Wyse. And Buchan evokes the world of royal roads, mail coaches, and wayside inns—whether in the hills of the Borders or the fens of Norfolk—with effortless vividness. This is the bustling highway world just out of sight of Jane Austen’s Regency.

Shortly after the publication of The Free Fishers, Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada, a position in which he served until his death. This appointment, his move from Elsfield in southern England, illness, and affairs of state slowed his writing of fiction, and he produced only three more thrillers—the final adventures of Dickson McCunn, Richard Hannay, and, most movingly, Sir Edward Leithen—before he died in 1940. But if he produced no more historical novels, at least this part of his writing career ended on a note of adventure, brotherhood, and swashbuckling fun.

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work

Today marks a first for this blog’s observance of John Buchan June: the review of one of Buchan’s non-fiction books. Though now primarily remembered for thrillers like The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan also wrote many, many works of non-fiction, including biographies, legal analysis, literary criticism, memoir, and a history of the First World War begun while the war was still in progress and eventually totaling 24 volumes. Take a look at his bibliography sometime to get a clearer sense of the breadth of his literary career.

Following the end of the war and through the 1930s, Buchan wrote several biographies of figures he admired—Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, Montrose—as a way to recuperate from both the strain of his duties during the war as well as recurrent illness. Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is the first and shorter of two that Buchan wrote about Scott (1771-1832). Originally published in 1925 as The Man and the Book: Sir Walter Scott, part of a series of short authors’ lives from his publisher, Thomas Nelson, this book is more an introduction to Scott’s life and a brief critical appraisal of his work than a full biography.

Buchan begins with a capsule overview of Scott’s background, ancestry, childhood in Scotland, and education, covering as well Scott’s career in law, through which he gained a position that made his literary work possible. After this introduction Buchan closely examines Scott’s writing, beginning with his poetry. Scott started off as the author of long narrative verse and an anthologizer of Scots border ballads, two activities that established Scott’s reputation as a poet and national folklorist and raised interest in Scots poetry and culture more generally.

Scott’s turn from verse to fiction—and his virtual invention of the genre of historical fiction—marks the most important event of his career, and Buchan spends the greater part of the book on Scott’s novels. Appropriately so, as these are the works for which Scott is still read and remembered. Visit a bookstore of your choice and, if they have Scott in stock, it will almost certainly not be Glenfinlas or The Lay of the Last Minstrel but Waverley or Ivanhoe or Rob Roy.

It is easy to see why Buchan admired Scott. Both were of Scottish extraction, deeply educated, and naturally gifted storytellers; both rose from relative obscurity through talent and hard work and moved among the great names of their day; and both produced exciting fictions marked by an idealistic but fundamentally patriotic traditionalist vision of the world. Buchan is no hero-worshiper, however. He bluntly acknowledges deficiencies in Scott’s work—pacing problems in Waverley, for example, or unnecessarily melodramatic speeches in Rob Roy or “the weak and careless ending” of Heart of Midlothian. But Buchan also makes it clear that these flaws are only flaws, that they count little against the craft, insight, and delight of the best of Scott’s work. I’ve written here before about Buchan’s assessment of Scott’s basic tools as a novelist, but he also praises Scott for his skill at describing landscapes, his ability to evoke the spirit of long-gone times, and for his characterization of familiar Scots types, including, amusingly, “the greatest alewife in literature.”

Following his overview of Scott’s long and successful career as a novelist, Buchan turns from “The Sunshine of Success,” the period following the 1819 publication of Ivanhoe, “which had a more clamorous welcome across the Borders than any other of the novels” and “marked the high-water point of Sir Walter’s popularity,” through the prolific output of the 1820s to “The Dark Days,” Scott’s final years—years of decline and near financial ruin.

Given how thin this book is on the details of Scott’s life, I found this penultimate chapter especially interesting. Having invested heavily in his publisher but not taken care to oversee how the business was run, Scott was left responsible for enormous debts upon the firm’s collapse. Rather than declare bankruptcy, which Scott viewed as cheating his creditors, he worked like mad despite his failing health to see that they were all paid in full. Buchan presents this as the admirable action of a principled and honest man, but he notes that not all of Scott’s contemporaries saw it this way. The historian Thomas Carlyle described Scott’s refusal to accept bankruptcy as desperate pride: “Refuge did lie elsewhere,” he wrote, “but it was not Scott’s course or habit of mind to seek it there.”

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is a short book and much of the middle is taken up with long quotations from Scott’s novels—many of them twenty pages long, with one coming in at thirty pages—but in the interstitial critical commentary and chapters of straight biography Buchan offers a concise, vivid, well-rounded portrait of the man. Much of the finer detail of traditional biography is missing, but by the time Scott meets his end, on September 21, 1832, “breath[ing] his last in the presence of all his children,” the reader still feels he knows him and is sorry to see him go. He is also—if I can speak for myself—eager to revisit Scott’s novels, or to read the many he has never gotten around to.

As mentioned above, this was only the first of Buchan’s books on Scott. The second, Sir Walter Scott, a full biography praised for its research and readability, arrived in 1932. I hope to read that sometime in the future. In the meantime, Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work, offers a good introduction to both the man and the poetry and fiction he left behind, as well as a good glimpse of Buchan himself through this sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of one of his literary heroes.

Buchan and Sabatini (and Freeman)

Something that piqued my interest while reading Salute to Adventurers but that I couldn’t work into my John Buchan June review, which I posted yesterday:

Early in Salute to Adventurers, which begins in Scotland in 1685, the narrator encounters a heretical preacher with revolutionary burn-it-all-down politics named John Gib. Gib is arrested and deported as penal slave labor “to the plantations” in the colonies, specifically Virginia. This punishment, taking place in this period, and the later involvement of pirates in the plot reminded me of Rafael Sabatini’s great swashbuckler Captain Blood, which I read once many years ago. At the beginning of that novel, Dr Peter Blood is unjustly arrested and transported to the colonies in penal servitude, in this case to Barbados. I looked Captain Blood up to refresh myself on the details and this also takes place in 1685, during the Monmouth Rebellion.

I read Captain Blood about the same time as The Curse of Capistrano (1919) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and associated it with those, so I had only a vague sense of when Sabatini lived, but it turns out that he and Buchan were exact contemporaries, born just four months apart in 1875. Both started publishing fiction around the turn of the century, though Buchan found success much earlier, Sabatini’s career in fiction only really taking off with the back-to-back successes of Scaramouche and Captain Blood in 1921 and 22. Sabatini outlived Buchan by almost exactly a decade, dying in February 1950—two days after the tenth anniversary of Buchan’s death.

There’s an interesting comparison of the two men’s lives and careers waiting to be made here, but unfortunately I have only read Captain Blood. I remember enjoying it. I’ll have to make time for more Sabatini down the road.

Salute to Adventurers’ Virginia setting also reminded me of Buchan’s broader interest in Virginia history. I’ve briefly mentioned this story here before, but in the 1920s Buchan made a trip to Virginia during which he made a fascinating literary acquaintance. Here’s Ursula Buchan’s account in Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps:

It was a thrilling ten days for [Buchan], especially as he had long had in mind writing a biography of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader for whose generalship he had the greatest admiration. But when at Richmond, he met the journalist and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who guided them over the country of the so-called ‘Seven Days Battles’, from the [Chickahominy] River to Malvern Hill, he backed off, because Freeman had already begun his magisterial four-volume study of Lee.

Andrew Lownie, in his biography, quotes Buchan as saying that he “would rather write that life than do any other piece of literary work I can think of.” Lownie goes further, writing that it was Buchan who first suggested the Lee project to Freeman, but Freeman had already been approached about it by a publisher long before the two met.

One imagines Buchan and Freeman would have gotten along well, both being devout, high-minded patriots with a keen historical sense and a frankly unbelievable work ethic. (Here’s a summary of Freeman’s daily routine.) Freeman’s four-volume RE Lee is a classic, but I would certainly have appreciated Buchan’s perspective in a shorter life of Lee.

Salute to Adventurers

This year’s John Buchan June continues with an earlier Buchan story, his first novel after the success of his colonial South African thriller Prester John in 1910 and one that sees him in his finest Robert Louis Stevenson historical high adventure mode: the fittingly titled Salute to Adventurers.

The narrator of Salute to Adventurers is young Andrew Garvald, the descendant of a once-prominent aristocratic Scots family that, by the 1680s, has fallen on hard times. When the novel begins in 1685, Garvald is a young student at Edinburgh on his way back to the city from his home in the hills nearby. After first getting lost and being helped on his way by a beautiful young woman and then happening upon an ecstatic outdoor prayer service led by a crank preacher, the massive and frightening Muckle John Gib, Garvald finds himself unjustly thrown into jail with Gib and his followers. The girl he had earlier met, whose name, he learns, is Elspeth Blair, helps secure his release. Gib will be transported to the colonies in penal servitude. Garvald returns to his life.

Following this prologue, some years go by in which Garvald joins his uncle’s trading business in the city and agrees to make a trip to the colonies on his behalf. Not long after arriving in Tidewater Virginia he realizes he must go into business for himself, and his hard work and rapid success pose a threat to the mercantilist concerns that have monopolized Virginia trade. Garvald finds himself commercially indispensable to the merchants and planters of the colony but socially shunned and even threatened. He catches arsonists at work on his property and, mysteriously, the pirates that prowl the coast consistently target not only his ships but his merchandise specifically.

Garvald consults the colonial governor but, finding a friendly ear but little help there, seeks out a man he had once run into in Edinburgh—one Ninian Campbell, who Garvald now learns is the notorious pirate Red Ringan. On the basis of their brief connection in the old country, Ringan agrees to help Garvald. He also confirms Garvald’s suspicions that the colony, a thinly populated agricultural region hugging the coast and still clutching its lifeline to Britain, is vulnerable to Indian attack. Garvald, acting on his own initiative and with the advice and contacts of Ringan, travels the settlements of the colonial backcountry constructing a private militia network for the colony’s defense.

Meanwhile, Garvald also reconnects with Elspeth, who now lives on a plantation with a wealthy uncle of her own. More ominously, he catches one brief glimpse of John Gib, now working a tobacco field dressed in rags. But the man recognizes Garvald and slips away.

Busy with trade and business, working against his unpopularity with the snobs of the planter class, striving to build a network of protection along the frontier, shyly trying to prove himself to Elspeth, and less shyly defending himself from aristocratic challengers for her hand, Garvald is already preoccupied when he learns of a serious threat on the frontier. But this turns out not to be the aggressive bands of Cherokee raiders that he initially suspects and fights with, but a much larger, more formidable, more terrifying and bloodthirsty force no one has seen or heard of before. And, as these circumstances unexpectedly converge, Garvald realizes that only he knows about the danger.

Salute to Adventurers is hard to summarize, partly because it is so uncommonly rich for an adventure story. It takes much of what worked in Prester John—the tough-minded but inexperienced Scottish youth, the faraway colonial setting, the dangerous environments, the fanatical hidden antagonist—and expands upon it, mingling in the high-flown dramatic sensibilities of stories like Kidnapped and Treasure Island—pirates, duels, Indians, colorful sidekicks, quests for buried objects, hopeless sieges in wilderness stockades, trial by combat, torture, and heroic sacrifice. The complicated plot uncoils smoothly and with a maximum of suspense, helped as always by Buchan’s sense of pacing. Salute to Adventurers was published the same year as The Thirty-Nine Steps, a much shorter book, and both are masterpieces of pacing in their respective genres.

Another of Buchan’s strengths, setting, also proves crucial. Buchan has been lauded by many readers and critics for his attention to geography and his ability to make imaginary landscapes visible and understandable to the reader, and that is especially true of this rare New World adventure. And, of course, the ways the land and its history shape its people matter, too. Here’s Garvald’s pen-portrait of Virginia as he knew it in the 1690s:

He who only knew James Town and the rich planters knew little of the true Virginia. There were old men who had long memories of Indian fights, and men in their prime who had risen with Bacon, and young men who had their eyes turned to the unknown West. There were new-comers from Scotland and North Ireland, and a stout band of French Protestants, most of them gently born, who had sought freedom for their faith beyond the sway of King Louis. You cannot picture a hardier or more spirited race than the fellows I thus recruited.

In Salute to Adventurers Buchan brings to life whole worlds: the thriving, striving, and rumbustious land of tobacco planters and merchants on the Tidewater; the hard-bitten frontier of small farmers, hunters, and fugitives; and the unimaginable wilds of Indian territory beyond.

This is not to say that Salute to Adventurers is historically perfect. Buchan introduces teepee-dwelling Sioux in a few places in Virginia and the Carolinas and Blackbeard plying the Atlantic about twenty years before his time. But what he realistically captures is the spirit of the age and every manner of person living in the chaotic social grab-bag of Virginia at the time. I’ve hardly mentioned it, but Salute to Adventurers even works as a comedy of manners or class drama in some early chapters.

But what holds the novel together is not just its plotting and pacing and beautifully realized setting, but its characters. Garvald, the narrator, is a solid example of a common Buchan narrator—young, driven, manly, and principled but self-reflective enough to doubt himself or wrestle with fear, not to mention honorable to a fault. Elspeth is less vivacious and outdoorsy than Buchan heroines like Janet Raden or Alison Westwater, but is tough, whip-smart, and as principled as Garvald, which makes her stand out from the striving Virginia elite and complicates their romance. Garvald’s allies Red Ringan and the mysterious Indian exile Shalah prove excellent allies, as does an initially antagonistic young planter named Charles Grey, who is jealous of Elspeth’s attentions. Grey in particular has a good character arc, passing from childish antagonism toward Garvald to principled loyalty in the face of danger.

And of course there is Muckle John Gib, the heretical preacher and would-be revolutionary. It should not be a spoiler to mention that, after Garvald’s two brief run-ins with him, Gib returns to the story in an important role. Gib is a case study in Buchan’s concern about fanaticism, but what Buchan presents in Gib—unlike, say, the ideological Laputa of Prester John or the German agents sowing religious violence in the Middle East in Greenmantle—is the fanatic as the man of principle run amok. In this way, Gib is a counterpart to Garvald rather than an opposite, and it is not through force of arms that Garvald eventually triumphs over Gib and his plot, which I don’t want to spoil, but through reason and moral suasion. Even if you can predict that Gib will return, you cannot predict the nature of their final confrontation, though it is suspenseful and thematically perfect.

Salute to Adventures proved a pleasant surprise for me. It is not readily available now (there is no John Buchan Society-authorized edition from Polygon, unlike so many I’ve read so far) and is not today one of Buchan’s better-remembered books. But it deserves a place among the best of his historical fiction and especially his early work, and was a most enjoyable adventure.

Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

A good visit with Bookish Questions

Last week I was honored to talk to Alan Cornett of the excellent Cultural Debris podcast about my latest book, The Snipers. This video interview is part of a new short-form author interview project called “Bookish Questions.” I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this ten-minute chat.

Among the topics of conversation were not only The Snipers but also some of my other work, what I’m reading, what I recommend, what I’m working on and planning ahead for right now, and why it is that I gravitate toward writing historical fiction.

Be sure to check out Cultural Debris on the podcast platform of you choice. If you want good episodes to start with, I’ve enjoyed Alan’s interviews with Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway, medievalist and CS Lewis scholar Jason M Baxter, author and literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, and CS Lewis scholar Michael Ward.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching!

The Twilight World

Filmmaker Werner Herzog and Japanese soldier HIroo Onoda (1922-2014) upon his surrender in 1974

Werner Herzog is a filmmaker famously drawn to the obsessive, the fanatical, and the single-mindedly self-destructive. He also, based on my limited engagement with his filmography, appreciates grim irony but can tell ironic stories with great sympathy. So the story of Hiroo Onoda—a man we’ve all heard of even if you don’t know his name—is a natural fit for Herzog’s fascinations as well as his set of storytelling skills.

Onoda, a junior officer in the Imperial Japanese Army stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines near the mouth of Manila Bay, took to the jungles after the American invasion began in late 1944. He had been specially detailed for acts of scorched earth sabotage—dynamiting a pier, rendering an airfield useless—and, having completed those objectives, to carry on the struggle against the enemy using “guerrilla tactics.” He had three other soldiers under his command. One turned himself in to Filipino forces in 1950, five years after the end of the war. The other two were killed, one in the mid-1950s and the other in 1972. Onoda held out alone until 1974, the next to last Japanese soldier to surrender.

Herzog met Onoda during a trip to Japan in 1997. This novel, The Twilight World, published in 2021, seven years after Onoda’s death at the age of 91, is the result of that meeting and Herzog’s enduring fascination.

Herzog explains, by way of prologue, the embarrassing circumstances that led to his meeting Onoda. He then begins Onoda’s story in 1974, with Norio Suzuki, a young adventurer whose stated goal was to find and see Hiroo Onoda, the yeti, and a giant panda, “in that order.” Suzuki camped out on Lubang until Onoda found him. Suzuki convinced Onoda to pose for a photograph and insisted that the war was over—long over. Onoda agreed to turn himself in if Suzuki could bring his commanding officer from thirty years before to Lubang and formally order him to stand down.

The novel then returns to the fall of 1944, the fateful days when a twenty-two-year old Onoda received his orders. Frustrated in his attempts to carry out his acts of sabotage, Onoda and his three subordinates move into the jungles and slowly figure out how to survive as guerrillas. They give up their tent, set up caches of ammunition, move repeatedly from place to place, crack coconuts, and attack isolated villages for food and supplies. Onoda broods. He lost his honor in failing to complete his objective, and the bravado of a final banzai charge would be absurd. What to do?

Herzog narrates this story dispassionately and without embellishment. His style is minimalistic but deeply absorbing. Michael Hofmann’s English translation reads like a cross between a screenplay—I wondered often while reading if this novel hadn’t begun life as a screenplay—and the stripped-down style of late Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men and, especially, The Road. Herzog evokes mood and character through small, telling details and sharply observed environments.

This simple, direct approach proves richly rewarding. Most interesting to me were the ways in which Onoda and his comrades try to make sense of their own situation as the years pass. Evidence that the war is still going on are, from their perspective, plentiful and obvious. The Filipinos are still trying to kill them, aren’t they? And Onoda and his men regularly spot squadrons of American warplanes—ever larger and more sophisticated as the years pass, but still headed northwest toward mainland Asia. Herzog is here able to use the dangerous tool of dramatic irony for maximum pathos.

Most interesting, to me, were Onoda and company’s wrestling with repeated rumors that the war had ended. The American and Philippine militaries dropped leaflets explaining that the war was over. Onoda and his men interpreted mistakes in the leaflets’ Japanese typography as evidence that they were fake—a ruse. The Filipinos left a newspaper in a plastic bag at one of Onoda’s known resting points as proof that the war was long over. This, too, Onoda interpreted as a fabrication—what newspaper would ever print so many advertisements? Thus also with news heard on a transistor radio. Even when relatives of the holdouts travel to Lubang and call to them to come out over loudspeakers, Onoda finds reasons to believe they are being lied to. The Twilight World is, in this regard, one of the best and most involving portraits of the insane logic of paranoia that I’ve read.

But Herzog is, thematically, most interested in the passage of time. The scale of Onoda’s tenacity is almost unimaginable—twenty-nine years in the jungle. Twenty-nine years of surviving on stolen rice, of annual visits to Onoda’s hidden samurai sword to clean and oil it, of eluding Filipino police and soldiers, of watching American aircraft fly north, of attacking villages and avoiding ambush. What is that like?

In Herzog’s version of this story, after his initial commitment to his guerrilla campaign Onoda settles into a routine in which the years pass like minutes. In the jungles of Lubang Island, Onoda comes into some kind of contact with eternity. One is tempted to call this contact purgatorial, but Onoda is neither purged nor purified by his experience. Neither does this timelessness offer the beatific vision or even an experience of hell—if it had, Onoda might have surrendered in 1950 like his most weak-willed soldier. Instead, this eternity is an impersonal, indifferent one of duty lovelessly and unimaginatively fulfilled, forever.

I’ve seen The Twilight World accused of making a hero out of Onoda or of reinforcing a preexisting impression of Onoda as a heroic romantic holdout—an absurd accusation. As with many of Herzog’s other subjects, whether the self-deluded Timothy Treadwell or the innocent Zishe Breitbart, Herzog relates this story out of pure interest. Herzog, laudably, wants to understand. That he presents Onoda sympathetically does not mean that he condones his actions. If anything, the intensity with which Herzog tries to evoke Onoda’s three decades in the jungle is an invitation to pity and reflection. That’s certainly how I received it.

I’ve also read reviewers who fault Herzog for either downplaying or refusing to acknowledge Onoda’s violence against the Filipinos of Lubang Island. Onoda and his men’s depredations have quite justifiably received more attention in the last few years, notably in this spring’s MHQ cover story, rather provocatively if misleadingly titled “Hiroo Onoda: Soldier or Serial Killer?”

But Herzog does acknowledge this side of Onoda’s story. An early incident in which Onoda and his men attack villagers and kill and butcher one of their precious water buffalo is especially vivid. By the end, Onoda is walking into villages and firing randomly in the air, just to remind them he’s around. None of this is presented as heroic or even necessary. When Filipino troops try to ambush and kill Onoda and his men, the reader understands why.

Perhaps all of this is why Herzog begins his novel with a curious—but quintessentially Herzog-esque—author’s note:

Most details and factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Seen in this light, and not forgetting that The Twilight World is a work of fiction—based on a true story—Hiroo Onoda’s bleak years in lonely touch with eternity are a fitting subject for a filmmaker who has spent his career teasing the mythic out of the real. The Twilight World is one of the most interesting and most involving books I’ve read this year, a testament not only to the strength of the dark and ironic story it tells but to the skill and cleareyed compassion of its storyteller.

The Blanket of the Dark

“[Peter] hated him, for he saw the cunning behind the frank smile, the ruthlessness in the small eyes; but he could not blind himself to his power.”

John Buchan June continues with one of Buchan’s late historical novels, a masterfully crafted story of intrigue, paranoia, religious upheaval, dynastic chicanery, and tyranny in Tudor England. The novel is The Blanket of the Dark.

The hero of The Blanket of the Dark is a classic Buchan “scholar called to action,” in this case quite literally. Peter Pentecost is a teenaged clerk at Oseney Abbey outside Oxford on the cusp of taking his vows to become a monk. The year is 1536. Peter, like his mentor, a priest named Tobias, is a faithful son of the Church and a “Grecian,” a humanist scholar of the classics like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who just a year earlier was beheaded for refusing to affirm King Henry VIII’s annulment, remarriage, and authority over the Church. For this, More had been branded a traitor. Peter has, so far, observed all of this passively and with little interest. But as the novel begins, the smothering darkness lying over England comes for him.

Peter learns that he is, in fact, the only surviving son of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a rival of Henry who was executed for treason fifteen years earlier. Peter’s earliest memories—of being raised by an old widow woman, of being handed off to monks at a rural abbey for his education—turn out to be memories of a life in hiding, the rightful heir being protected until the time is right to return. The disaffected noblemen who approach Peter and reveal his true identity to him believe that time is now. They mean to challenge “the Welshman’s” tyranny and offer Peter their support.

Peter finds himself swept from his well-ordered life of prayer and study to a life of clandestine travel among the men of “Old England,” commoners who sneak him from place to place in the shelter of the woods, and landed aristocrats who shelter him in their manor houses. He also begins a remedial course in kingship, learning to ride and wield weapons properly, and makes the acquaintance of the first noblewoman he has ever known—the beautiful niece of one of his supporters, Sabine Beauforest. As the anti-Tudor conspiracy slowly moves forward and Peter moves from hiding place to hiding place, his desires—for the treasure needed to fund his attempt at the throne, for the power that will come with possessing the crown, for Sabine—grow stronger and stronger.

At first Peter justifies himself. He views his power and position as a means to good ends and intends to use it wisely: to restore the Church and the ancestral rights of Englishmen. But Peter—a bookish student and erstwhile celibate—is also uncomfortable with the worldly rewards being paraded before him, and so his pursuit of the throne also becomes both a pilgrimage and a series of tests.

One by one the chance to fulfil his desires come to Peter and one by one he learns something new about both the world and himself, until the final, climactic temptation—the launch of the coup aimed at kidnapping the King and placing Peter on the throne, culminating in a deadly confrontation with King Henry VIII himself.

The Blanket of the Dark reminds me a great deal of Buchan’s earlier novel of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Midwinter. Both take place during an uprising against a monarch believed by the plotters to be an illegitimate tyrant; both take place largely on the margins of the plot, away from the fighting and seemingly decisive action; and both involve the men of “Old England,” a traditional and continuous community outside the rise and fall of dynasties and world powers. Both evoke their period and locations with great care and attention to detail and feature convincing cameos of real historical figures—in The Blanket of the Dark, Henry VIII and his dread agent Thomas Cromwell. Both are also excellent novels.

But in The Blanket of the Dark, through Buchan’s care for what is at stake spiritually, the danger of pursuing power even for good ends achieves an unusual weight, what Sir John Keegan in writing of The Thirty-Nine Steps called the “particularly elusive” quality of “moral atmosphere.” Buchan’s portrait of England after Henry’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Act of Supremacy, the execution of dissenters under the Act of Treason, and the elevation of Cromwell as Henry’s hatchet man, is pervaded by threat and paranoia. The great threat to ordinary people and their traditional loyalties is chicanery in high places. As one character, one of Peter’s rivals for Sabine’s attentions, puts it: “‘Tis a difficult time for a Christian. . . . If he have a liking for the Pope he may be hanged for treason, and if he like not the mass he may burn for heresy.”

Peter’s pilgrimage toward the throne occupied by Henry places him in the path of the worldly-wise and powerful, and through the testing of his own desires—lust, greed, pride—he comes to see the emptiness and ulterior motives of those who claim to be resisting Henry’s tyranny. Snatched from the cloister and the scriptorium in order to overthrow a heretical despot, he comes to see little difference between Henry and his own supporters. By the time of the attack on Henry, the choice Peter is presented with, both figuratively and, in the person of the King himself, literally, is whether to pursue power or the things his supporters ostensibly want him to use his power to protect.

Perhaps, rather than anything it is used for, the power is the danger. In making his final and greatest choice, Peter does not get everything he desires, but The Blanket of the Dark suggests that he gets something far better.

The Blanket of the Dark was well reviewed at the time Buchan published it in 1931, with praise from CS Lewis and the elderly Rudyard Kipling among others. More recently, the historian of Christianity and biographer of Thomas Cromwell Diarmaid MacCulloch, in a 2019 interview, said of it, “It’s chilling. Brilliant.” With its effortless plotting and pacing, its strong and often beautiful writing, its brilliantly-realized historical setting—with everything from the spoiling of the monasteries to the Pilgrimage of Grace informing the action from a distance—its vivid characters, and its surprising but satisfyingly poignant ending, I strongly agree.

Buchan’s storytelling and craftsmanship alone make The Blanket of the Dark still worth reading. But that this novel also touches on the threats to conscience, tradition, and faith posed by the self-serving and powerful, who may talk about protecting and restoring all of those things but only aim to use them for their own ends, makes it an exceptionally rewarding and still-relevant adventure.

The Snipers has arrived!

No, that’s not a subject-verb disagreement. The Snipers is my latest published work, a short novel set during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944. I’m pleased to announce that, after the final rounds of proofs and revisions, it is now available on Amazon!

I announced The Snipers and its subject here earlier this month. Last week I posted a recommendation of the three non-fiction books I acknowledge in the author’s note at the of The Snipers. Check those posts out if you’d like to know more or look at the book’s page here. In the meantime, here’s the description from the back cover:

October 1944—It has been four months since D-day and the Allies are pressing through Germany’s last defenses. As the US Army makes its first move against the historic German city of Aachen, one unit finds itself stymied by a tenacious German sniper. With losses climbing, the commander calls up sharpshooter Sergeant JL Justus. His job: find and kill the sniper.

Weary from four months of fighting, Justus wants little more than a good smoke and some hot chow. But the assignment bothers him for other reasons. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how does he shoot so accurately and quickly? Can Justus and his buddies find him before many more men are killed? And in a battle like the one for Aachen, is finding the sniper even possible?

The Snipers is an evocative, thrilling, and moving short war tale from Jordan M. Poss.

One certainly hopes, anyway.

You can add The Snipers to your Goodreads reading list here. And if you’d like to order a copy, either in paperback or Kindle format, please use the buttons below.

I’m quite excited about this short novel. My hope is that it will be an exciting, entertaining, and thought-provoking short read. Please give it a look and let me know what you think. Hope y’all enjoy!

Coming soon: The Snipers

I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest book, a World War II novella titled The Snipers.

The Snipers takes place during the Battle of Aachen in October of 1944. Four months on from D-day, the Allies are pressing into the western edges of Germany and slowly, laboriously penetrating the Siegfried Line. Aachen, the former chief residence of Charlemagne and one of Germany’s most prestigious and historical cities, is heavily defended, and as the US Army enters the outskirts of the city one unit comes under devastating sniper fire. Their battalion commander, unable to slow the offensive, instead calls up the leader of his reconnaissance squad, Sergeant JL Justus for a special assignment—find and kill the German sniper harrying the men of Charlie Company.

Justus has only two men left in his squad after the continuous slog from Normandy to Germany, and he has just settled down to some much-deserved rest in reserve as other units push into the city. But he has sharpshooting experience from the weeks following D-day and the boys under fire need him. And so he and his buddies Whittaker and Porter load up and enter the city.

Justus, a Georgia boy with an abiding interest in the Civil War and a wry sense of the absurd, has his doubts about the mission. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how is he supposed to find him? Can he do so before many more men are killed? And why is the commander of Charlie Company so certain that there is more than one sniper?

The rest of the story, which takes place across a single day of block-by-block, house-to-house fighting through the rubble of a once-beautiful city, will challenge and shock Justus in more ways than one. I hope it will do the same for the reader.

I’m quite excited about this one. I may related the genesis of the story here sometime soon, but for now I’ll say that once I had it in my head it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d gotten it down in writing. My hope is that it will prove a brisk but involving action story, both thought-provoking and poignant and with a dash of humor, ideal for reading in two or three sittings. At 35,000 words, it’s a little less than half the length of my previous World War II novel, Dark Full of Enemies.

The first paperback proofs of the novel arrived just this afternoon. I’ve included a gallery below that I hope y’all will accept as a preview. Pending tweaks and final corrections—which should be minimal thanks to the efforts of friends and beta readers who have already looked at the manuscript and provided helpful feedback—I hope to have The Snipers out and available on Amazon before the end of the month, just in time for the Independence Day holiday.

Last week I reorganized my website’s Books page to divide full-length novels like Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville from short fiction, and to add The Snipers. You can look at the dedicated page for The Snipers, with paperback and Kindle purchasing links (not yet activated), here.

Thanks for reading! This one came together unusually quickly and I hope y’all will check it out once it’s available. Stay tuned!

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.