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.

Concepts and ideas in the novel

From critic and essayist Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? an apologia for the novel as a form:

“Create a concept and reality leaves the room.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

Concepts have their value, but they tend to explain more than they can justify. From Karl Marx’s class-struggle to Max Weber’s linking the rise of capitalism to the rise of Protestantism to Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex, conceptual thinking tends invariably to be both overly ambitious and sketchy, leaving out crucial aspects of human experience, and thereby necessarily highly simplifying. “Create a concept,” Ortega wrote, “and reality leaves the room.”

What Epstein calls “concepts” could also be called “theories” or, more precisely, “ideologies,” though the line between all of these is blurry. Epstein continues this paragraph with an observation on the similarly limiting effects of specialization:

Scientists, historians, politicians, economists, and poets all perceived the world, as Michael Oakeshott noted, through what he termed their separate “mode of experience,” but for him each of these modes was partial, incomplete, only part of the story. Oakeshott also felt that the whole story was not to be encompassed through any discrete mode of learning, even through philosophy, with its pretensions to be architectonic.

The novel, Epstein argues, has an important role in culture because of its ability to create comprehensive imaginative visions of human experience informed by the author’s understanding of human nature, something the arts and sciences tend to approach from only one angle.

Later, Epstein contrasts the ideological novel, the novel of “concepts,” with “the novel of ideas”:

“[W]hile all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas.”

— Joseph Epstein

Of the various forms the novel has taken-the family chronicle, the picaresque, the satire, the novel of ideas—the last, the novel of ideas, may seem a contradiction. I say a contradiction because, first, while all serious novels are ultimately about ideas, the best novels always put facts before ideas. . . . When ideas are at the forefront in fiction, when ideas dictate fact, characters seem diminished, plot suffers, and reality leaves not only the room but the novel.

That is, ideas and theory have to be expressed in “facts,” as characters, places, events, deeds, and choices. Epstein quotes the critic Northrop Frye: “An interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.”

Which is not to say that ideas have no place in fiction, just that they must take concrete form if they are to work as fiction. Epstein praises Dostoevsky and other 19th century Russian novelists as the masters of this form of philosophical storytelling. Certainly there have been many poor attempts to write novels of ideas, and the more the ideas veer into “concepts” or a systematized ideology—whether of the Dalton Trumbo or Ayn Rand varieties, though we are of course afflicted with a lot of strongly ideological fiction today—the more the storytelling suffers.

Food for thought. I’m enjoying The Novel, Who Needs It? and if I’m able I’ll have a full review when I’m done.

2023 in books

This turned out to be big year for our family. We welcomed twins in the late summer and between that, some travel earlier in the year when my wife was still mobile, and a lot of extra work in the fall, things have only just begun to slow down. Despite it all, there was plenty of good reading to be had, so without further ado, here are my favorites of 2023 in my two usual broad categories:

Favorite fiction of the year

This was an unusually strong year for my fiction reading, especially in the latter half, when I had little time and my concentration was strained. I’d recommend most of the novels I read this year but here, in no particular order, are my dozen favorites, with one singled out—after great difficulty choosing—as my favorite of the year:

The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham—A genuinely creepy slow-burn thriller in which a small English village, not noteworthy for much of anything, plays host to a brood of strange, emotionless, hive-minded children who were all mysteriously conceived on the same night. As the children grow—at twice the rate of normal children, by the way—and they manifest powers of mind-control, the people of Midwich are forced to consider what kind of threat the children pose to the village and the rest of the world. Vividly imagined and populated with interesting characters, this is the kind of sci-fi I think I most enjoy. For more Wyndham, see below.

With a Mind to Kill, by Anthony Horowitz—The last and most Ian Fleming-like of Horowitz’s three James Bond novels, this novel picks up threads from Fleming’s final two, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, and develops them into a compelling new story. Having faked M’s assassination, Bond returns to the Soviet Union in a bid to infiltrate and destroy the Russian network that captured, tortured, and attempted to brainwash him. Briskly paced, atmospheric, and suspenseful, with the interesting twist of Bond having to pretend to be the thing he most hates.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima—A story of romance and disillusionment that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. When an officer in Japan’s merchant marine service meets a young widow with an adolescent son, they fall for each other within a few days. The boy is smitten with the officer, too, admiring him as a man of action, adventure, and lofty independence—until the officer decides to give up a life at sea in favor of settling down and raising a family. When the boy relates his disappointment to the savage, cruel gang of schoolboys to which he belongs, they plot to bring the officer down. Briefly told in sensuously dreamlike prose, with a poignant love story and creepy parallel plot involving the boy, this novel totally absorbed me. I read it in a day, a rare feat for me these days.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A richly written, moving, bleak, and wholly engrossing novel in which a small family group of Neanderthals have a disastrous run-in with a band of Homo sapiens. Full review from late spring here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A tense, relentlessly paced thriller set in interwar Europe. When an English hunter sets himself the challenge of stalking and lining up a shot on an unnamed central European dictator—just to see if he can—he is caught, tortured by the secret police, and left for dead. Despite his injuries he manages to escape, but must elude pursuit by a dogged agent of the (again, unnamed) fascist regime, who trails him all the way to southern England. Relentless pacing, a mood of palpable paranoia, the irony of a claustrophobic final standoff in the idyllic English countryside, and the resourcefulness and toughness of the hero keep this book moving from beginning to end. One of my favorite reads from the spring.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel set in the near future, when England is ruled by a king selected at random. The current ruler, Auberon Quin, decides to make a joke of the institution by reintroducing heraldry, elaborate court etiquette, and the traditional subinfeudated privileges and freedoms of London’s separate neighborhoods. It’s all a lark to him until he meets a true believer, a young man named Adam Wayne, who determines to fight for his neighborhood and its people against the plans of the elite. A high-flying hoot, as much of Chesterton’s fiction tends to be, but deeply moving and meaningful.

Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—One doesn’t often associate the name Agatha Christie with historical fiction, and yet here’s an excellent, evocative mystery set in the country house of an ancient Egyptian mortuary priest. Christie constructs a realistic family drama involving the remarriage of the patriarch to a haughty young concubine who threatens the priest’s grown children with disinheritance. When she winds up dead, there is talk of curses, vengeful ghosts, and murder. The priest’s young widowed daughter and his elderly mother, sensing something is amiss, work together to determine who may be responsible for the disasters visiting their home. I’d guess this is one of Christie’s lesser-known books, but it’s now one of my favorites of hers.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger—An eerie and dreamlike fantasy of a peaceful seaside community thrust into bloodshed and destruction by the Head Forester, a violent warlord from the northern forests. Though Jünger insisted that On the Marble Cliffs, which was published as Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was not an allegory of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is certainly applicable to that situation—and to many others in which civilization declines into a scientistic and neopagan barbarism.

Declare, by Tim Powers—A genuinely one-of-a-kind novel: part espionage thriller in the mold of John le Carré, part cosmic horror, part straight historical fiction, part supernatural fantasy, this novel begins with Andrew Hale, an English sleeper agent, being unexpectedly reactivated as part of Operation Declare. He must flee immediately and seek instructions. As Hale returns to regions of the world he hasn’t seen in years and reflects on his career as a spy in Nazi-occupied Paris and the Berlin and the Middle East of the early Cold War, the reader gradually learns his mysterious history and that of the intelligence network of which he has been a part since childhood. The reader also gets to know Kim Philby, a real-life double agent who defected to the Soviets and who continuously and ominously reappears at crucial moments in Hale’s story. I read this on the strong recommendation of several trusted friends and loved it, though I made the fateful decision to begin reading shortly after the arrival of our twins in the late summer. The result was that it took me far longer to read Declare than it should have, and I do feel like I missed some of its cumulative effect. No problem, though—this is clearly worth a reread. It’s that rich.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog—An arresting short fictional portrait of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign for nearly thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Full review from late summer here.

Berlin Game, by Len Deighton—A close contender for my favorite read of the year, this is the first novel in Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, which follows British intelligence agent Bernard Samson as he tries both to help a valuable but endangered asset escape East Berlin and, when that is complicated by the discovery of a double agent in Samson’s own organization, to root out the traitor, whom he may be closer to than he’d like to think. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, and witty. Very much looking forward to Mexico Set and London Match.

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

A man wakes up in a hospital to discover that the world has ended while he was unconscious. I’ve seen at least two zombie versions of this scene—both 28 Days Later and “The Walking Dead” begin this way—but this device originated in the early 1950s in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic survival story The Day of the Triffids.

Two events give rise to the plot of this novel: first, a massive meteor shower, visible worldwide, that blinds everyone who looks at it and, years earlier, the accidental discovery of triffids, walking carnivorous plants apparently developed in a lab (ahem) in Soviet Russia. Having been dispersed all over the world, scientists find uses for the oils produced by triffids and factory farms arise to cultivate them. Others acquire triffids as exotic garden specimens and remove their lethal stingers for safety. Gradually, triffids become part of the landscape, and Bill Masen, a biologist and the novel’s narrator, is partly responsible for their proliferation. Then the meteor shower comes.

Masen, heavily bandaged as he recovers from eye surgery, is one of a handful of people not to be blinded by the meteor shower, and he emerges from the hospital to find London almost silent and filled with the groping, helpless blind. But what begins merely as a grim survival story takes a turn into horror when the triffids appear, preying on the helpless people roaming the streets.

The rest of the novel follows Masen in his attempts to survive and to join others for greater protection. Different groups pursue different survival strategies—the blindness and the triffids offer many a chance to test out their ideal societies—and Masen bounces from one to the other. And all the while, the triffids are learning.

The Day of the Triffids is low-key sci-fi and its emphasis lies squarely on both the practical considerations of escaping and protecting oneself and one’s group from the triffids and on the ethical dilemmas such a catastrophe would produce. Masen witnesses the organization of many—one based on the guidance of academic experts, another based on charity and altruism, and another, the most menacing, based on autocratic paramilitary rule—as well as their failures. There’s an element of social commentary there, but it’s realistically done, not preachy, and also not the point. The point is the nightmare scenario created by the rapidly proliferating triffids and the question of how to survive, find love, and start over in a world ruled by sentient plants.

The Day of the Triffids totally absorbed me and I read it in just a few days. It’s a brilliantly written, vividly imagined, and engaging adventure that also manages to have satisfying depth.

After reading The Day of the Triffids I moved on quickly to Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (see above) and I have The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes on standby for this year. Wyndham’s fiction is my favorite discovery in quite some time and I look forward to reading these in 2024. If you check any of these out, make it The Day of the Triffids, but definitely seek some of Wyndham’s work out.

Favorite non-fiction

If 2023 was a good year for fiction my non-fiction and history reading flagged somewhat, especially after the twins were born (I read only three of the books below after that point). Nevertheless, there were some clear highlights, and what follows, in no particular order, are my thirteen favorites—a baker’s dozen this time, with one favorite of the year:

Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, trans. by Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Ed.—A readable new translation of Beowulf by a master scholar of early medieval Germanic literature with a detailed and insightful commentary on everything from word choice and textual problems to characterization and theme. An ideal text for students who want to dig deeper into this great poem.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A very good short biography from Yale UP’s new Ancient Lives series. Crassus is a difficult figure to understand because he is simultaneously involved in seemingly everything going on in the late Republic and is poorly attested in our surviving sources. Even Plutarch focuses primarily on Crassus’s failed campaign against Parthia. A full portrait is probably impossible to reconstruct, but Stothard does an excellent job of piecing together what we can know about him, his career, his wealth, how he used it, and his disastrous end in the Syrian desert.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—An excellent account of the First World War’s mostly forgotten Italian Front, where mountainous terrain, terrible weather, and the politics and mismanagement of the Italian army resulted in protracted and needlessly bloody campaigns. Focuses far more on the Italians than the Austro-Hungarians, but still offers a good overall picture.

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk—Trenchant observations on the American political, cultural, and educational scene from the early 1980s. Owing to its context, some of the examples Kirk uses are quaintly dated (e.g. complaints about the show “Dallas”) but the substance of his arguments is sound and quite prescient.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—Exactly what it says on the cover: a good brief history of a fascinating place and its people. Clements takes the reader from the Finns’ first mentions by the Romans—who were aware they were out there but probably never traveled to Finland—through conversion to Christianity, the Reformation, life under Swedish and Russian hegemony, and finally through both world wars to a hard-won independence and an important place in the modern world. A timely read considering the surprising Finnish decision to join NATO, and I recommend it in conjunction with Clements’s excellent biography of Marshal Mannerheim, which was my favorite non-fiction read of 2021.

The First Total War, by David A Bell—My closest runner-up for my favorite non-fiction read of the year, this is an excellent history of how European warfare changed in the 18th century. From wars fought by small professional armies for limited objectives, often ended through negotiation, and governed by an aristocratic code of honor, the French Revolution—which was partly rationalized, ironically, by the supposed pointless brutality of the old regime—ushered in an age of mass mobilization, unattainable ideological objectives, and an embrace of pragmatic and amoral brutality, especially against fellow citizens who have declined to join the new order. Bell’s chapters on the shockingly violent war in the Vendée and on Napoleon are especially good, and I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in how warfare and its conduct have evolved—or perhaps devolved—in the modern era.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A dual biography of two Georgians whose friendship, despite sometimes major political differences, proved crucial to both their homestate and the Confederacy. Through his portrait of Stephens and Toombs Davis also offers a good glimpse of the inner workings of secession and the dysfunction of the Confederate government as well as the course of the Civil War mostly away from the frontlines.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—A fun little book that works both as a paradoxical self-help guide focusing both on Poe’s strengths and his self-destructive weaknesses and as an approachable mini-biography of a great writer.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—I finally got around to reading this short biography from the Penguin Lives series following Johnson’s death in January. I’m glad I did. This is a bracingly unromantic look at the first great dictator of the modern world, a remedy to longer, more detailed, but worshipful accounts like that of Andrew Roberts. Johnson, a master of the character sketch, the elegant and razor-edged summary, and the telling detail, brings all his skills to bear on Bonaparte and crafts a convincing account of him as an ingenious brute. Not only did I like Johnson’s perspective on Old Boney, this little book was a joy to read. I strongly recommend it if Ridley Scott’s mess of a cinematic portrait got you interested in its subject at all. You can read a memorial post I wrote for Johnson last January here.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another in the Penguin Lives series, this one by an eminent Jacksonian era scholar. Remini does an excellent job not only narrating what we can know of Smith’s life, hedged about as it is by pious Mormon legend, but also contextualizing him in a world of fevered religious emotionalism, private revelations, and even mystical treasure hunting. I was most surprised by the chapters on Nauvoo, having had no idea that Smith had such a powerful private army at his disposal near the end of his life. An excellent read that I’ve already recommended to students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson—The biggest surprise of my reading year, I looked at the first chapter of this book on a table at Barnes & Noble and was hooked. Part naturalist study of a familiar but strange animal, part history, part memoir, Svensson’s account of what we know—and, more intriguingly, all that we don’t know—about the European eel was informative and enjoyable.

Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan—A posthumously published memoir by a great novelist and good man, this book is full of warm remembrances of places Buchan loved and elegies for the many, many men of his generation who were lost in the First World War. Expect a full review for this year’s John Buchan June. In the meantime, here are my extensive Kindle highlights and notes, courtesy of Goodreads.

Best of the year:

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.

This was a tough choice, but in the end I just enjoyed this new volume of Tolkien’s work more than any of the other excellent non-fiction I read this year. Since reading it and blogging about it a few times this summer, I’ve also continued to reflect on it.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragment of several hundred lines of an Old English epic composed to commemorate a disastrous fight against Vikings in the year 991. During the battle, the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, was killed when he allowed the Vikings to come ashore and form for battle, a decision the wisdom of which has been debated ever since. The poem relates the story with great drama and sympathy, and with moving vignettes of Beorhtnoth’s doomed hearth-companions as they commit themselves to avenging their lord or dying in the attempt.

This book collects a large miscellany of Tolkien’s writings on the poem, including his own translation in prose, an alliterative verse dialogue designed as a sequel called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, multiple earlier drafts of the same showing how the poem evolved both formally and thematically as Tolkien considered and revised it, an essay on Beorhtnoth’s famous pride, and—best of all—extensive notes and commentary from Tolkien that provide a lot of insight into the poem, its context, and broader topics like history, legend, warfare, and human nature.

Anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England or the literature of the period knows The Battle of Maldon, and it unsurprisingly occupied a large space in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. This book—given my own interest in the poem, the event it describes (which was one case study in my master’s thesis), and Tolkien himself—is a most welcome addition to my Tolkien shelf and my favorite non-fiction read of the year. I highly recommend it.

I posted about this book twice during the summer, first on the topic of tradition and the transmission of poetry and culture, and second on the false modern assumption that anything literary in history is necessarily fictitious.

Kids’ books

Here, in no particular order, are the ten best of the kids’ novels and picture books that we read this year, many of which were excellent family read-alouds:

• The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A novelistic adaptation of legends surrounding Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion, told from the perspective of a lesser-known character from Greek myth: Helen’s young son Nicostratus.

• The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A fun historical kids’ adventure set among the trappers of French Canada and the Great Lakes.

• You Are Special, by Max Lucado—A beautifully illustrated and moving picture book about how it is our creator’s stamp, rather than any aspect of ourselves, that gives us worth.

• The Easter Storybook and The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Two nicely illustrated Bible picture books, one for the Lenten and Easter season and the other based on the Book of Acts.

• Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—Probably my favorite kids’ read of the year, this is a charming simplified adaptation with illustrations showing the characters as anthropomorphic animals. Though simple and kid-friendly, it hit hard—I ended up crying several times while reading it to my kids.

• A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David A Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A good short life of Crockett told accessibly but with commendable attention to the details and complexities of his life.

• The Phantom of the Colosseum and A Lion for the Emperor, by Sophie de Mullenheim—The first two volumes of a fun historical series about three young friends and their adventures in the Roman Empire. My kids adored these and I look forward to reading more.

• War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo—A simply written but powerfully moving look at the First World War from an unusual perspective.

Rereads

Everything I reread this year. My favorites were certainly my revisits with Charles Portis, especially Gringos, which I read for the third time while on a trip to Mexico in the spring. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

• The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, by Patrick F McManus*

• Never Sniff a Gift Fish, by Patrick F McManus*

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

• The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

One of my own

Of course, another big event for the year was the publication of a new book of my own, my World War II action novella The Snipers.

Set during the ferocious Battle of Aachen in the fall of 1944, months after D-day and the breakout from Normandy but still long months away from victory over Germany, The Snipers is the story of one bad day in the life of Sergeant JL Justus. A scout and sharpshooter in the 1st Infantry Division, Justus is tasked by his battalion commander with finding and eliminating a German sniper who has bedeviled the division’s advance into the city. Justus thinks finding the sniper will be tough enough, but the men he joins up with to enter the combat zone assure him that there is more than one. Discovering the truth and completing his mission will test Justus and his buddies severely, and give him a shock that will last years after the war’s end.

I wrote The Snipers in a three rapid weeks this spring and revised it in the early summer. The climactic action and its surprising revelation came to me first. After a vivid and disturbing dream of World War II combat, a dream the dark mood of which I couldn’t shake off, I decided to sit down and turn it into a short novel or novella. The rest came together very quickly.

I’ve been pleased with this book’s reception but, most of all, I’m pleased with the book itself. Every time I give a friend a copy I end up sitting down and rereading long sections of it. It’s always satisfying to find enjoyment not only in the work of writing but in the finished product, and The Snipers ranks with Griswoldville in those terms.

I’m grateful to those of y’all who’ve read it, either in draft form or since its publication, and I hope those of y’all who haven’t will check it out and let me know what you think.

Looking ahead

After a busy and chaotic fall things mercifully slowed down, albeit only briefly, for Christmas, and then revved right back up again with surgery and sickness in the family and prep for a new semester at work. But all is well, and I’m hoping for even more good reading in 2024. Right now I’m partway through an excellent study of Eastern Native American warfare and a short biography of Ramesses II, and there are so many novels jostling at the top of my to-read stack I don’t even know how to choose.

Whatever I end up reading, you can count on hearing about it here. And in the meantime, I hope y’all will find something good to read in this list, and that y’all have had a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for reading!

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.

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!

On the appeal of Southern grotesquery to outsiders

The film adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing came out this weekend. I’ve been curious about the book since I heard it described as Southern gothic, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. My wife did, though, and mostly enjoyed it, so she was curious about the film and yet more curious when its wave of negative reviews washed in ahead of opening day. The opening line of Kyle Smith’s (paywalled) review in the Wall Street Journal especially piqued her interest, and so she shared it with me:

“Ten years ago, the Southern-Gothic film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” swept up four Academy Award nominations by pandering to the affinity of Northern intellectuals toward Romantic portrayals of poor folks living in a kind of fascinating harmony with cruel nature.”

Smith’s not so implicit critique here, about the favoritism awarded “Southern” stories that flatter the ineradicable preconceived notions of Yankee audiences, naturally brought to mind this favorite passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:

“Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Both of these lines deal with Southern stereotypes, with Smith connecting them to a kind of noble savage trope and O’Connor noting especially astutely their persistence and flexibility. Her own work is a case in point, often taken literally as a representation of the bigotry and violence of the South when O’Connor was making broader, explicitly theological points in as bold a fashion as she could. In her own words, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Deliverance. The movie is a searing piece of survival drama but James Dickey’s novel, a brilliant, intense, exhausting masterpiece, goes even deeper—into the psychological, the spiritual, the fundamental good and evil secreted in the ignorant deeps of even civilized man. There’s a lot going on there. But its grotesquery, its “large and startling figures,” has been received superficially as meme-worthy objects of prurience or titillation by an audience too satisfied with its assumptions about hillbillies to hear its message. Look at what those people are like, a lot of otherwise smart people have said in response. Paddle faster! I hear banjos.

I suppose in the end you can only write with St John’s injunction in mind: “He that hath an ear, let him hear.” Write for the ones who have ears to hear.

I can’t read much more of Smith’s review, but from the subtitle’s use of the word “charmless” and the headline “Unfevered Swamps” I think I can guess its overall tenor. I have no idea if it’s fair to the film or not. You can read O’Connor’s essay in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, which is a must-read for fiction writers and anyone interested in writing or the South. It is perhaps her most quotable work of non-fiction, and includes this other magnificent zinger:

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

God help us if we ever lose that.

Midwinter

This penultimate entry in John Buchan June concerns the second of Buchan’s novels to be set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, a novel that in many ways mirrors aspects of 1899’s A Lost Lady of Old Years but with lessons learned from more than two decades of fiction writing since, including several immense successes. The novel is 1923’s Midwinter.

Midwinter tells the story of Alastair Maclean, a Scots mercenary who has previously fought for the French and been wounded at Fontenoy. Having recovered, he has returned to Britain to work for Bonnie Prince Charlie as the Jacobites prepare an invasion of England aimed at gaining the throne for the prince’s father. When Midwinter begins, it is late fall and Maclean is traveling through England as a spy and courier, delivering messages and assessing the preparedness of the prince’s English supporters.

In the midst of his travels, Maclean has a strange run-in with a gamekeeper and a boy poacher. Through Maclean’s intervention in the beating the gamekeeper is administering, the boy escapes and introduces Maclean to a band of seeming outlaws. Dwellers in swamps, woods, and byways, relicts of what they call “Old England,” they call themselves the Spoonbills, and their leader is an ungainly but charismatic old man named Midwinter. Midwinter tells Maclean about “Old England” and the Spoonbills’ secret network of allies and how to summon their aid. Having sheltered and fed him, Midwinter and his men help Maclean on his way.

Maclean’s next stop brings him into contact with both Whig and Jacobite nobles, as well as another ungainly figure, an awkward middle-aged tutor who searching for a runaway student, Claudia, a teenaged girl who has eloped with one of Maclean’s aristocratic contacts. The tutor is a loud, twitchy, ill-dressed, but loquacious and wise man named Samuel Johnson.

From here, Maclean travels northward. But his work becomes more dangerous—he senses he is being followed, he escapes traps and capture by men with an uncanny knowledge of his movements, and he learns that there are traitors among the prince’s men in England. In the terms of a modern spy novel, he uncovers a mole. Two, in fact.

Meeting Johnson’s student Claudia, now married to one of the prince’s English supporters, complicates matters further. A convinced Jacobite, she befriends Maclean and wholeheartedly offers her support. Maclean is smitten. Unfortunately for him, as he discovers with harrowing and near fatal consequences, one of the moles is most likely someone in her circle.

Time is short. The invasion is coming, the King of England’s army is moving north to meet it, and Maclean knows not only the identity of the mole but also what the mole has done to sabotage the invasion. Maclean also feels a sense of personal betrayal and the need to satisfy his and others’ honor by confronting and killing the traitor.

Go to the prince and let the traitors escape? Or catch and punish the traitors and risk the success of the revolt? As the armies close in on Derby in early December, Maclean—with Midwinter and the Spoonbills as hard-to-find help and Johnson in tow as friend, mentor, and little-heeded counselor—must choose.

I don’t want to reveal much more of the plot. Midwinter is a sprawling high adventure across beautiful and dangerous landscapes, with all the familiar aspects of the spy thriller thrown in and made fresh by the novel’s well-realized historical setting. Like A Lost Lady of Old Years, the Jacobite Uprising adventure Buchan wrote during college, Midwinter wears its research lightly and is strongly written. Unlike A Lost Lady of Old Years, this novel is excellently paced, with Maclean’s mission and backstory carefully doled out bit by bit as he continues on his dangerous work, and—as I hint in the paragraph above—Maclean himself is an active, engaged, canny character whose decisions matter.

Midwinter is also peopled with well-realized characters, not least two real historical figures. I chose Midwinter for this project when I learned that one of the real people in this novel is General James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia and a personal hero of mine. At the time Midwinter takes place, Oglethorpe had only recently returned from fighting the Spanish in Georgia and he appears in the novel as a noble English officer mustering troops to repel the coming Jacobite invasion. He only appears in a handful of scenes, but those scenes are crucial, vibrantly written, and capture a great deal of the energy, rectitude, and guts of the man. Pitting the fictional Maclean against him heightens the tension, especially as the two men, though divided by politics and the war, come to like and admire one another.

But the standout in the novel is Samuel Johnson. This Johnson is not yet Dr Johnson, being a tutor in his mid-30s with great knowledge but humble prospects. He cannot even afford to live with his wife, he tells Maclean near the end, and is treated as a figure of fun by some of the other characters in the early going. (And Johnson does offer genuine comic relief; his attempt to start a fistfight near the beginning is hilarious.) But Johnson’s intelligence, wit, insight, staunch belief in virtue, and insistence on doing right make him stand out even among his more polished aristocratic betters. He proves both a frustration and a boon to his friend Maclean. Witness this exchange as Johnson presses Maclean toward self-knowledge about his mixed motives:

Alastair had a sudden flame of wrath. “Do you accuse me of lying?” he asked angrily.

Johnson's face did not change. “Sir, all men are liars,” he said. “I strive to make you speak truth to your own soul.”

Johnson is not merely a real person stuck into a fictional story, but the heart and conscience of the novel.

All of this makes Midwinter both the best kind of adventure and the best kind of thoughtful novel. Only as I have worked on this review have I begun to understand the novel’s parallel secret networks—the political network of Jacobites and the traditionalist network of Spoonbills—and its deep themes of divided loyalties and undivided truth. It is, as so much of Buchan’s fiction is, seemingly effortless, but rewarding not only to read but to reflect upon.

Midwinter is neither Buchan’s best nor most famous novel, but it is a rich and well-paced historical adventure with good characters and two striking historical portraits, and for those reasons it is well worth reading. For myself, I plan to return to this one soon.

The Power-House

We have entered the last week of John Buchan June. Today I’m writing about a lesser-known “shocker,” one first serialized the year before Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that is in many ways a precursor to that most famous of Buchan thrillers, and that introduced the world to Sir Edward Leithen—The Power-House.

Let me begin with this: The Power-House defies easy summary. One can describe this novel, but only in the broadest genre terms. It is a thriller, certainly, and its hero, Sir Edward Leithen, unravels a vast conspiracy and exposes a criminal mastermind just like Bulldog Drummond, James Bond, George Smiley, Jack Ryan, and untold others would later do. The difficulty comes with the novel’s form.

The story is a frame tale in which Sir Edward Leithen recounts how he once had an exotic and dangerous adventure without ever leaving London. (This limit, as he later admits, has one important exception.) The novel begins with Leithen learning of the disappearance of an old acquaintance, Charles Pitt-Heron, who has “bolted” with no warning and no word of his intentions or destination. Leithen takes an interest, and as others investigate and put together a search party that will eventually pursue the man into central Asia, he digs at the mysterious root of the man’s disappearance. Leithen does this through his intuition, sharpened by his work as a barrister, his dogged willingness to investigate, his courage to face the unknown, and through a remarkable series of coincidences that give him the pieces necessary to begin his work.

“It is understood and accepted,” one essayist has written, “that a Buchan plot relies absolutely on a level of coincidence that Dickens would have dismissed as improbable.” This is not fair to all of Buchan’s work, but it not only fits The Power-House but may even be a bit of an understatement. The chief events of the book, in which Leithen stumbles upon clues and into the lair of the villain, are all coincidental. The rest of the “action,” so to speak, is interior—Leithen mulling, putting together information, having epiphanies. And always just in the nick of time.

In her introduction to the edition I read, former MI5 chief and novelist Stella Rimington refers to The Power-House as “a tale without a plot.” The plot, as she goes on to suggest, is not the main attraction the way it is with later novels about Hannay or Leithen. Instead, The Power-House is “pure essence of Buchan.” It relies entirely on pacing, atmosphere, a charming and tenacious main character, and a strong villain to succeed.

The Power-House is the shortest of the Buchan novels I’ve read and moves briskly. I read it in a matter of a few hours across several leisurely vacation days. It is also the first instance in my reading of Buchan’s use of in media res to kick off the action, a technique you can see repeated in thriller after thriller from this point on. (The very first line of both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle sets the tone, gets the plot moving, prepares both the reader and the hero for adventure.)

From the moment one of Leithen’s colleagues tells him about Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, Buchan spreads a series of seemingly disconnected incidents before us and stitches them together with Leithen’s straightforward and thoughtful narration. Not only does Leithen’s voice and intellect hold the novel together, it also draws the reader downward with Leithen into a more and more oppressively paranoid mood. By the midpoint of the novel Leithen sees dangers everywhere—in shops, in his own neighborhood, among the anonymous crowd jostling him in the streets of London—another technique that, as I wrote a few weeks ago, would be exploited to even greater effect in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If The Power-House is not plot-driven but moved along by pure pacing and atmosphere, the main draw must be the central conflict between Leithen and the villain. In this case, the villain is Andrew Lumley, a wealthy, well-connected man of immense intellect—and a strong vision of the future of Europe and the human race. Leithen happens upon him during a drive in the country following Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, and Lumley opens up to him. In expressing his vision, Lumley produces one of the most famous passages in Buchan’s fiction:

“Did you ever reflect, Mr Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?”

“I should have thought it fairly substantial,” I said, “and the foundations grow daily firmer.”

He laughed. “That is the lawyer’s view, but, believe me, you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

Lumley is an anarchist of the kind found in the uppermost echelons of society—an elite educated into arrogant oikophobia, a Nietzschean with an appetite for the will to power. But what makes Lumley dangerous is that he is not just an armchair radical fulminating against the establishment from inside it, but the quiet head of an entire organization dedicated to undermining Western civilization in secret. This organization is called the Power-House.

Only later do we realize that Lumley’s explanation of his perspective was not just a monologue but a seduction, an attempt to recruit Leithen. And that others—like Pitt-Heron—who have resisted Lumley and the Power-House have disappeared or met untimely or embarrassing ends.

Fortunately Leithen proves himself a capable opponent to Lumley. He is also his perfect foil—where Lumley is a wealthy and respected elite, Leithen is a workaday lawyer and politician known mainly to friends. Where Lumley uses a network of likeminded and similarly-placed anarchists to foment the collapse of civilization, Leithen must work. Where Lumley is an arch-rationalist ideologue committed to chaos, Leithen works intuitively within tradition and custom on behalf of order. And, perhaps most fundamentally, where Lumley is ambitious, Leithen is content.

While this confrontation lends to The Power-House a curious excitement and distinctive flavor, it is not my favorite of the Buchan novels I’ve read so far. Though well paced, the framing narrative erases most of the doubts you might otherwise entertain about whether Leithen will succeed. The conclusion, in which Leithen wraps up his story of rooting out conspiracy without leaving London by explicitly contrasting it with his friends who chased Pitt-Heron halfway across Eurasia, ends the story on a witty punchline but also draws attention to the fact that a potentially more interesting and exhilarating story has played out entirely in the background. And while Lumley is a compelling and even frightening antagonist, what he’s actually planning to do is never made clear. This is not necessarily a problem—as long as the reader doesn’t stop to think about it.

Though I enjoyed The Power-House a great deal, it does have its weaknesses and is perhaps more interesting as a trial run of techniques and themes—especially the fragility of the good things civilization has bequeathed us—that would make Richard Hannay’s first adventure such a smashing success. Nevertheless, in introducing Sir Edward Leithen Buchan gave his readers one of his best and most important characters, a more thoughtful and methodical hero who would return in the magnificent John Macnab. The Power-House is worth reading just to make his acquaintance.

Greenmantle

Today for John Buchan June, we look at the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that expands upon everything that made that rousing, fast-paced, and timely thriller successful into a tale that is part spy novel, part man-on-the-run thriller, part travelogue, and part war story—Greenmantle.

Greenmantle begins with hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay, resting and recuperating back home in England. It is December of 1915, Hannay is now Major Hannay, and he has been wounded leading an attack on the Western Front. Hannay receives an urgent invitation to meet Sir Walter Bullivant, the man with whom, in the previous story, he had finally been able to find refuge and to confide in after weeks on the run from German spies.

Bullivant tells Hannay that a British agent, staggering wounded into a British outpost in the Middle East, had delivered a message consisting of only three words before he died, three words that Bullivant believes may be clues to German strategic intentions in the east. The agent, Bullivant reveals, was his son, and Bullivant asks Hannay to use the same skills that had helped him unravel the Black Stone’s plot against Britain a few years earlier to infiltrate German intelligence and uncover their plans. Hannay hesitates but, duty-bound and not one to shrink from task just because it’s impossible, agrees.

Bullivant pairs Hannay with John S Blenkiron, an eccentric but brilliant intelligence operative—and an American, and so theoretically neutral. Hannay also asks his brother officer Sandy Arbuthnot, also recuperating from wounds received on the Western Front, to join them. Arbuthnot has years of experience in the Balkans and Middle East gained before the war and is a master of languages and local customs. He will prove a crucial part of operation, though not in any way they could have predicted.

Hannay, Blenkiron, and Arbuthnot agree to split up, infiltrate enemy territory, and reconnect in Istanbul in the new year. Hannay takes ship for Portugal, where he runs into his old friend Peter Pienaar, a Boer hunter and outdoorsman, and together they pass themselves off as German sympathizing South Africans seeking revenge against the British. Clandestinely sent to Germany, they are interrogated by Colonel von Stumm, a brutish intelligence officer tasked with assessing their usefulness. He separates Hannay from Pienaar, and, following a brawl at Stumm’s secluded home in Bavaria, Hannay flees. He is a hunted man once more.

Hannay’s situation is desperate, but he has already begun to decipher the first of the clues Bullivant’s son had revealed—the identity of a dangerous female operative in the Middle East, Hilda von Einem.

At the midpoint of the novel, Hannay, Blenkiron, Arbuthnot, and even Pienaar manage to link up pool the information gathered in their travels. What emerges from their observations and disparate bits of intelligence is the outline of a German plot: Hilda von Einem, acting as handler, has cultivated a prominent Muslim cleric called Greenmantle, a figure prophesied in old mystical poetry and whom the Germans intend to use. The Germans hope that, fired by the simplifying and purifying spirit of revival and following the banner of Greenmantle, Muslims will make a potent insurgent force in the region and decisively shift the balance against Britain, France, Russia, and their allies. In short, they hope to provoke jihad.

Unfortunately for Hilda von Einem, Greenmantle has terminal cancer. His time is short—and so the Germans are moving quickly. This was the information Sir Walter Bullivant’s son gave his life to get to the British.

Hannay and his team travel eastwards, into the heart of the Ottoman Empire and to the headwaters of the Euphrates in the mountains north of Mesopotamia. They travel under cover, with Hannay as a member of Hilda von Einem’s entourage, but are identified and pursued by Rasta Bey, an arrogant and powerful Young Turk whom Hannay has crossed and humiliated several times en route to Istanbul. And as an added threat, the dreaded Colonel von Stumm reappears. This section of the novel is a tightrope walk of aliases and concealed identities, cross-country chases, captures and escapes, and, finally, the brutality of modern trench warfare. Here individual initiative, resourcefulness, and guts confront the overwhelming, indiscriminate destructive power of artillery.

By the end, Hannay and the others have blown their cover and are on the run for a final time, hopelessly outnumbered and desperately trying to deliver details of a forthcoming German and Ottoman attack to the Russians so that they can break the siege, push the Ottomans back, stop Hilda von Einem, and, just possibly, win the war.

Greenmantle has all the strengths of The Thirty-Nine Steps that I wrote about a few weeks ago—strong writing, excellent pacing, interesting characters, thrilling episodes (the conclusion is one of the best last stands I’ve read in fiction), as well as all the genre-defining features that that novel pioneered, especially the plot tied to plausible real-life politics and world events. TE Lawrence, who was in a position to know, later wrote that “Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth.” But it also broadens and deepens what The Thirty-Nine Steps accomplished so masterfully. In this respect it is a true sequel, both building upon and improving upon all the best elements of its predecessor.

And like all good sequels, it is also different enough to avoid retreading the same ground. In his introduction to the authorized edition, Buchan biographer and literary critic Allan Massie writes that where The Thirty-Nine Steps is a “chase” novel, Greenmantle is a “quest” novel. I think that’s just about right. Greenmantle is much longer than The Thirty-Nine Steps but maintains the same excitement and brisk momentum. In the first half, Hannay ends up on the run first from Stumm and then from Rasta Bey. He faces personal dangers at every turn and his courage and resourcefulness are sorely tested. In the second, Hannay and his team end up on the run from pretty much everyone. What holds this pattern of infiltration, exposure, and flight together, though, is Hannay’s mission, his quest—to divine German intentions.

But Hannay’s work is not done once they have discovered Hilda von Einem and Greenmantle; the stakes are even higher than in the first half, and Hannay and the others, in true quest fashion, confront their dangers not individually but as a team: Hannay the principled leader and jack of all trades, Pienaar the unflinching survivalist genius, Blenkiron the brains of the operation, and Arbuthnot the heart and soul. They would not succeed without all of them, and all of them is what their mission will require.

John Buchan in uniform, May 1917

Greenmantle is also a more sweeping story than its predecessor. Hannay begins the story in England before traveling to Lisbon and traversing the whole breadth of Europe by rail, on foot, and by river barge before arriving in Mesopotamia. Buchan successfully conveys the scope and intensity of the First World War and not a little of its complexity and pathos.

This pathos is only possible because of Greenmantle’s scope—it is both a panorama of the entire war in Europe and the Middle East and a series of strikingly intimate episodes informed by the experiences of not only of spies but of ordinary soldiers, civilians, tribesmen, sailors, bandits, and the leaders of nations. Buchan’s immense powers of sympathy, which I wrote about when I reviewed Prester John, are on full display. Regardless of which side they are on, almost all of Greenmantle’s characters have admirable qualities, and almost none is presented as irredeemably evil. Even the Kaiser, whom Hannay meets in one of the most surprising and interesting incidents in the novel, is presented sympathetically. (It is worth recalling that Buchan wrote this novel at a time when all Germans, but the Kaiser especially, were quite literally demonized.) Only those like Stumm and Rasta Bey, functionaries so compromised by ideological nationalism and pragmatism and personal cruelty, seem to be beyond hope, but it is they who have given the war the exceptional prolonged savagery that Hannay and his fellows must navigate.

The sympathy with which Buchan writes allows Hannay staunch loyalties while seasoning and softening them. The most striking example comes during Hannay’s flight across Bavaria to the Danube. On foot in the snow, he falls ill and risks capture to ask for help from a German woman living in an isolated hut. She takes him in despite having to care for her three children alone. One night after Christmas, he learns more about her:

As we sat there in the firelight, with the three white-headed children staring at me with saucer eyes, and smiling when I looked their way, the woman talked. Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front, and the last she had heard from him he was in a Polish bog and longing for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children fatherless. . . . She was a decent soul, with no bitterness against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

To be “better than the beasts”—for the sake of people like this woman and her children, for the personal honor and character of men like Hannay, and for civilization itself despite temptations to domination, cruelty, and ruthless pragmatism—would work as the guiding principle of all of Buchan’s heroes. And it is ultimately what’s at stake in Hannay’s mission.

I could say much more—alongside its artistic merits, Greenmantle has been credited with predicting the rise of Islamist extremism—but I think what gives this novel its peculiar staying power is the excitement of its plot and action, the involving multidimensional characters and their varying skillsets, and, again, its pathos. Greenmantle takes all that made Richard Hannay’s first adventure thrilling and deepens it. It is not just an adventure of murder, espionage, and the threat of war, but of the testing of the soul.

Bloody big ship

Bond looking at JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012)

One of the underappreciated aspects of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels is their elegiac tone—a rich vein of reflection and melancholy, a sense of the passing of things, that runs through all of them but thickens considerably in the final few.

Consider this seemingly minor passage from the tenth full-length novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I just finished for the second time this morning. The scene is not M’s office at the beginning of the story but M’s private home on Christmas day:

They had coffee in M.’s study and smoked the thin black cheroots of which M. allowed himself two a day. Bond burnt his tongue on his. M. continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.

The comfortable personal setting, the father-son, veteran-rookie dynamic, the Christmas at a Regency manor house—this is a world rooted strongly in the past, a vanishing world. The note of mourning in the final sentence is palpable.

And this is in a novel that begins with Bond seriously considering—and not for the first time—resignation and retirement and, most famously, ends with his half-day marriage to Tracy, who, after a drive-by shooting on the final page of the book, lies dead in his arms. In the penultimate paragraph Bond, concussed and in shock, says to a young German patrolman who has stopped to help:

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see—’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair—‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’

This note of elegy, of ubi sunt, is perhaps the most English thing about Bond, and is both personal and professional. As Jeremy Black outlines in his book The Politics of James Bond, Bond’s experience as a veteran of World War II, of the British Empire at the height of its powers fighting its coldest, most dastardly, and most obvious enemy, colors all of his subsequent adventures—that is, makes them look gray and tedious by comparison. Throughout, as the Empire declines in both geographic terms and reputation, Bond and others speculate grimly about what will happen to both Britain and her colonies as they come unmoored from one another, and many, many of Bond’s nemeses go out of their way to mock the diminution and meaninglessness of the Empire. For Bond, whose worth is bound up in his work in defense of Her Majesty’s realm, this decline is also his own, and he spends at least half the series nearly buckling under the weight of his job, struggling to find a purpose in it, deciding to quit and then finding himself unable to shirk his duty. The Royal Navy proves a profoundly meaningful symbol for all of this. Recall that Bond is officially Commander James Bond.

The movies mostly lose this sense of passing. It’s there a bit in the film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the faithful adaptation of the book’s downer ending doesn’t mesh well with the more carefree earlier portions, which lack the reflective tone of passages like the one in M’s study above. There’s a bit more in GoldenEye, in which Bond has to adjust to the post-Cold War world, and Daniel Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale captures a great deal of that novel’s sense of tragedy and loss at the end.

But so far the only film to fully mine that vein is Skyfall, which not only establishes and maintains a Fleming-esque tone of the long defeat from beginning to end but also makes the passing of things the overt subject of one of its quietest but greatest scenes.

Sitting in the National Gallery before JMW Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire, Bond has this exchange with Q:

Q: Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. [sighs] The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Perfect. And in keeping with Fleming’s Bond, the dismissive quip is a tell. It’s Bond reorienting, shaking off a melancholy he can do nothing about but put his nose back to the grindstone and work.

I don’t know whether No Time to Die, which concludes Craig’s run as Bond, will bring more of this to the fore—it’s certainly a good opportunity to do so—but I hope it will. Fleming’s Bond has always been a more fully rounded, complete and realistic man than even the best film versions (and I am a fan of the films), and I think a lot of that is down not only to grit of the stories, but to the melancholy that grows in him and that he wrestles with over those fourteen original novels—a sense of the loss of the good things to which one has dedicated one’s life, and the sense of the unknown approaching out of the murk.

What I read in quarantine

“Will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? Work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.”

— CS Lewis to his father, 1926

Having opened with that line from Lewis, which came back to me again and again as I quarantined with COVID a few weeks ago, let me offer two caveats: First, COVID was no joke. My throat burned, my head ached, I coughed until I threw out my back. (Oddly, I never lost my senses of taste or smell, the one symptom almost everyone experiences.) It was a small illness in the ultimate sense—I was never in danger of death or even hospitalization—but still painful and wearying. I’m still working against the fatigue from it. Second, I couldn’t read with a totally clear conscience. Unlike the thirty-year old Lewis who wrote this letter, I have a wife and three kids, and it was a struggle to listen to her feeding, keeping up with, and cleaning up after them in another part of the house and do nothing.

But I did read—and read and read. And that was a pleasure.

I read eleven books while I was in quarantine at home. I include here the nine works of fiction I read in hopes there will be something here to pique your interest if—God forbid—your quarantine time ever comes.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet

This novel dramatizes the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most evil and feared men in the SS, the man Hitler himself praised as “the man with the iron heart,” in Prague in 1942. HHhH is also a novel about the author’s interest in, research into, and despair over the story, and how he grapples to make it comprehensible as a novel. Compulsive, suspenseful, hypnotically written, and—for something so postmodern—sincerely and surprisingly moving. One of the best novels I’ve read so far this year. I wrote a full review on the blog here.

A Man at Arms, by Steven Pressfield

The latest from one of my favorite novelists, Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire. This novel revisits Telamon, a minor character who recurs across several of Pressfield’s other books regardless of time or place: Telamon shows up in the Peloponnesian War, in the campaigns of Alexander, and even in a speculative future in which an American Caesar returns from abroad to take over as dictator. Here, Telamon is an ex-legionary at large as a mercenary in first century Judaea, where he finds himself pulled into a mission to track down and stop a messenger sent by the notorious Paul. The messenger carries a letter with subversive contents, and Telamon’s pursuit, capture, and his dramatic change of attitude toward his mission clips along at a very fast pace.

There is vintage Pressfield here—the blunt violence, the evocation of a faraway time and place, the vivid sensory quality of his descriptions of heat, exhaustion, and pain—but in its pacing, its spareness, and its willingness to keep the characters mysterious to us it also reads like late Cormac McCarthy. This is a good thing. I enjoyed A Man at Arms immensely, and if a cross between Ben Hur, Gates of Fire, and No Country For Old Men sounds good to you, you probably will, too.

52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard

Harry Mitchell, a prosperous factory owner, a veteran who worked his way to the top, cheats on his wife once and suffers the consequences—blackmail. And it gets worse from there. The blackmailers have film, they have the girl, and they make it clear that they have no qualms about killing. But they’ve also underestimated Harry and how hard he’ll fight back.

The setup doesn’t sound terribly original, but Leonard’s execution is impeccable. This is one of the best and most suspenseful of his crime novels that I’ve read. It’s also the sleaziest, as it takes its hero into the underbelly of 1970s Detroit in his search for the blackmailers. These are a uniformly wicked lot—stoners and pornographers and murderers-for-hire—who, like so many of Leonard’s teams of bad guys, eventually fall foul of each other through jealousy, backbiting, and greed. Eventually, they start murdering each other. Only the most evil of them will remain, by that point a desperate and deadly threat to Harry and his wife. When the various strands of plot developed through the novel come together at the end, the tension is magnificent.

In the insightful University Bookman review that first convinced me to check Leonard’s work out, writer Will Hoyt notes Leonard’s focus on “moments of truth” in his fiction as well as the influence of Leonard’s Catholic upbringing on his work, an influence one can feel palpably in his Westerns, to be sure, but elsewhere once you’re attuned to it. Read 52 Pickup with the sacrament of confession in mind—and what is confession but a literal moment of truth?—look at the role that the confession of sin plays in the plot—not only for our compromised hero Harry but for the other characters as well—and you begin to understand why Leonard’s highly commercial crime fiction can also be so thematically rich.

This is a great work of genre fiction and, like all of Leonard’s best work, it’s elevated by his style—his sound—and the difficult proving that he puts his characters through.

Later, by Stephen King

A young boy who can see ghosts, a mother at her wits’ end, messages delivered from beyond the grave, and a crisis that must be resolved—to the possible detriment of the boy himself. Later is The Sixth Sense as told by Stephen King. This is not a put-down; it’s vividly imagined and the scenarios dreamed up by King are engaging, with the narrator’s gifts always employed or used in inventive ways.

But the story lagged or proved predictable in places, especially the climax, and I found myself most interested in the middle chunk of the plot, in which the narrator’s mother—a literary agent teetering on the brink of bankruptcy owing to the 2008 crash—recruits him to take dictation from a recently deceased author who died with the final book of his series left unfinished, a long episode that proved genuinely original and even funny. I was also annoyed by some of the inevitable Stephen King attitudes he just can’t help throwing into the mix: the too-breezy narration he’s relied on for the last twenty years, a galumphing structure, and especially the simplistic characters. For example, you know one character is bad because she owns a gun, once harbored suspicions about Obama’s birthplace, and likes John Boehner (has anyone ever liked John Boehner?). Further, the narrative voice, so often a strong suit in King’s first-person narration, slips from believability all too often; I just did not believe the narrator was a teenage boy of the early 2010s.

It also—and I doubled back to make sure I mentioned this—has an utterly atrocious surprise revelation at the end. It’s not really a twist as it’s not plot-related, but it’s so ludicrous and has implications so appalling that King’s casual handling of it, an “Oh, by the way” approach incommensurate with what he’s revealing, is the biggest surprise of all.

But Later was still a fast-paced and enjoyable read. I blitzed through it in two days and didn’t regret it, even with King’s annoying tics on display and that terrible final act surprise.

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

I last read Animal Farm my freshman year of college, in the fall of 2002. I reread it in an evening. A masterpiece. This novella is richer and more meaningful, more deeply steeped in history and human nature than I could possibly grasp at the time, and is probably the best-conceived and executed allegory in modern English literature. Furthermore, Orwell’s message—and it is a message novel—is still relevant in our age of wannabe revolutionaries.

The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald

I somehow made it to the age of 37 without ever having read The Great Gatsby, which, if not the Great American Novel, is certainly the Great American High School Reading Assignment.

Do I need to summarize the plot? Probably not. But I approached it already knowing the broad outlines and was still drawn in thanks to the economy and power of Fitzgerald’s writing and especially thanks to the world he evokes, the tides of emotion and personal history flowing through each character as part of a larger scene. It’s evidence that a good story is essentially spoiler-proof.

In a way, I’m glad I didn’t read it until now, as Fitzgerald is doing things here that I’m not sure high schoolers can fully comprehend at their age and with their lack of experience. A friend on Instagram suggested that the best parts of Gatsby would be lost on them, and I suspect he’s right. This is a carefully crafted and powerful novel, beautifully and evocatively written, and I can understand now why it has become a classic.

The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB

The best surprise and perhaps most enjoyable read of my quarantine, The Eighth Arrow follows Odysseus in a last-chance bid to escape Hell. Yes, that Odysseus, and yes, that Hell.

The novel begins just after Dante and Virgil have passed by Odysseus and his old comrade Diomedes where they burn together in the circle of the frauds. A mysterious woman, a Parthenos but explicitly not Athena, responds to Odysseus’s cry for deliverance and the pair find themselves back at the gate of Hell, armed and armored. For food they have a bag of bread that the denizens of Hell—be they the damned or the demons guarding them—all react to violently. All they know, thanks to one fallen angel, is that “It isn’t just bread.” It also has the strange property of restoring to bodily form any of the shades who eat of it. And the Parthenos sends them on their way with one command: to prefer mercy over justice.

There’s a lot going on here.

The Eighth Arrow draws deeply on Homer, on Dante, and on Christian theology in this energetic and wildly inventive new story of grace and salvation. Odysseus barely knows what’s happening to him, why he has gotten this second chance and to what end he is being drawn, and he only slowly becomes aware of the transformation taking place in him as he climbs lower and lower, a man of violence and guile forced to work differently and slowly, through no power of his own, becoming able to.

This is one of the best fictional depictions of grace at work that I’ve ever come across. But it’s not just a theological treatise, a basket of Easter eggs for mythology nerds, or another iteration of a great Christian allegory. The Eighth Arrow is also a blast—a gripping adventure story, a brilliantly imagined fantasy, and a profoundly moving meditation on death, loss, and our relationships to each other. Odysseus’s reunion with Penelope moved me almost to tears, and the Odysseus and Diomedes of this novel are one of the best realized male friendships I’ve come across in fiction.

A great novel on many levels. I hope y’all will check it out.

Under the Lake, by Stuart Woods

This novel came recommended on the basis of its setting—an artificial lake in the northeast Georgia mountains, a setting with which I am intimately familiar. And I have heard rumors that the fictional Lake Sutherland in Woods’s novel was inspired specifically by Lake Burton in my home county. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Woods writes well enough that I could see his imagined lake and even smell the old cabin his protagonist retreats to at the beginning of the story.

The setting is well done, as is the setup. A Pulitzer-winning former newspaper reporter takes an unwanted commission to write the memoirs of a fried chicken restaurateur and heads to the lake to work on the project. As soon as he arrives, strange things happen. He is greeted brusquely by the grand old man of the town, who is no kind and gentle soul but seems unnecessarily hostile. He hears bits and pieces of rumor from various folks in town, none of which they are willing to elaborate upon. He recognizes a young secretary at the sheriff’s office as an up and coming Atlanta reporter. A friendly gas station employee lets slip that he wouldn’t be caught at that cabin after dark. A blind albino repairs the cabin’s piano, the boy’s mentally handicapped brother brings him firewood, and both speak mysteriously of their mama and her powers. And, late one night, he has a vision of a young girl standing in his cabin, staring out at the cove beyond the cabin’s dock.

This is a brisk page-turner, and though it transforms from a Southern Gothic tale—Woods really lays this on thick at the beginning, as you can probably tell—into a pretty standard detective story about midway through, there’s still enough of the eerie and uncanny to keep you reading. The characters are interesting but largely one-dimensional, and I didn’t for a minute believe that so many nubile and licentious young women would throw themselves at the balding middle-aged protagonist the way they did. And the final act goes totally off the rails, with twist upon twist coming one after the other and revelations so over-the-top that I just couldn’t believe it any more. At this point it becomes a melodramatic potboiler and doesn’t look back.

But even with its silly final act—including, oddly, a revelation with parallels to that in King’s Later above—Under the Lake was a fast and enjoyable read. I’ll probably check out more of Wood’s fiction one of these days.

The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner

One of the best for last. I’ve recommended Buechner’s fiction here before. His novels Godric and Brendan shaped my artistic sensibilities at a pivotal moment, and I got The Son of Laughter years ago meaning to read it. I’m sorry it took COVID to make me get around to it, but I’m not sorry to have read it when I did or to have ended my quarantine reading on such a high note.

The Son of Laughter retells the biblical story of Jacob. That’s all I’ll say about the plot. If you know Genesis you know Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. This is a multigenerational character study and an exploration of a family’s covenant with the Fear—which is how Buechner’s Jacob refers to God throughout. It’s incredibly powerful, and succeeds especially well at perhaps the most difficult challenge facing a novelist who dares retell such a familiar story—it makes the story strange, unexpected, and surprising again. It even made me admire Esau, something I never would have expected.

The strangeness especially is crucial. These characters are not flannelgraph cutouts or 1950s Hollywood types in bathrobes. These are flesh and blood people from an utterly alien time and place doing what people of that time and place must—fighting, sacrificing, making vows, marrying and procreating, and, especially, working—and all under the promises made to them by the Fear. Buechner brings this world to life in vivid detail, from the omnipresent idols to the startling way men seal their vows to one another, making this story real and powerful in a way I haven’t before experienced. Especially powerful is his emphasis on—to repeat myself—the flesh-and-blood lives of these people. A late section in which Jacob suddenly realizes that the rowdy brood he is raising, offspring of four women and begotten on the backside of the desert, is the Fear’s promise moved me to tears. Jacob’s three reunions—first with Esau, then with his father, and finally with Joseph—are equally moving.

This is only the third of Buechner’s novels that I’ve read, but it may be the best. I highly recommend it, especially if you’d like to see an old story in a new way or desire a vision of how God uses real people, flawed as they are.

Conclusion

So of the nine works of fiction I read during my two weeks of coughing, sleeping, and drinking Earl Grey, the following are the three best: HHhH, by Binet; The Eighth Arrow, by Wetta; and The Son of Laughter, by Buechner. Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby are classics that it feels pointless to judge against the others. 52 Pickup and A Man at Arms, in the middle tier, are solid entertainments that offer a bit more substance to them than you might expect. Under the Lake and Later stand at the bottom, though I enjoyed and read rapidly through both. Perhaps I should say you aren’t missing anything if you miss those, but you’d be foolish not to read the ones at the top.

Thanks for reading! I’m glad to be mostly recovered from that bout with the ‘rona and grateful to have been able to read so much. I hope y’all have enjoyed these short reviews and that you’ve found something here you’ll enjoy.