The Magic of Silence

As I’ve previously noted, since reading Rembrandt is in the Wind late last year I’ve been making an effort to learn about some of my favorite artists more deliberately. Having grown up with an artist grandmother, surrounded by her art and that of the artists who inspired her, and learning from an early age to love and appreciate it, I discovered through that book how much I’ve taken for granted through simple complacency.

This book by Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, came my way at exactly the right time. Recently translated from German, this is a study of the great German Romantic landscape artist.

A native of the Baltic port city of Greifswald, Friedrich was the son of a candlemaker and only slowly achieved success as a painter. He unsuccessfully sought the patronage of Goethe, who apparently found him annoying, but eventually sold paintings to the Prussian and Russian royal families. Quiet, deeply religious, and a staid creature of habit, he spent most of his life in Dresden, from which he traveled back and forth to his hometown on the Baltic coast and such islands as Rügen, and married late. By the time he died in 1840 he left behind a widow and three children as well as hundreds of sketches and canvases.

Friedrich was then, for over sixty years, almost totally forgotten.

Illies approaches Friedrich’s life and work thematically, through the four classical elements: fire, earth, water, and air. This proves a stimulating and surprising approach. “Fire,” quite movingly, opens with the loss of hundreds of German Romantic paintings in a gallery fire in Munich, and Illies provides numerous other examples of Friedrich works lost to fire, whether an accidental housefire at his family’s tallow rendering shop back home in Greifswald or in the RAF bombing of Dresden. “Water” examines this Baltic coast native’s use of the sea, especially at dusk—or is it morning?—and “Earth” the power of his landscapes, which pieced together landmarks from real places to create imaginary forests, ruins, and mountain ranges more real than their antecedents.

Certain themes recur: loss, faith, nature, the melancholy of Friedrich’s work, which features so many stark landscapes, cemeteries, and ruins, and his place in the nascent German nationalism of the time, for which he later, unwittingly, became the posterboy. The personal stories are especially moving, such as a childhood incident related in “Water”; one winter as a child, Friedrich fell through the ice on a frozen river. His brother jumped in to save him and, despite hauling Friedrich to safety, was himself drowned beneath the ice.

What can this have done to Friedrich the boy? How did it affect Friedrich the man? Illies speculates cautiously, but makes it always clear that there is much about the reticent, closed off Friedrich that we cannot know. But knowing about this incident affects us—read Illies’s account of Friedrich’s near-drowning and his brother’s death and then look at The Sea of Ice or a pensive later seascape like Stages of Life.

What also proves moving is the story, told piecemeal throughout the book, of how Friedrich’s work was rediscovered, which we can credit to the enthusiasm and hard work of a handful of art historians and collectors. Thanks to their efforts, within the first twenty years of the 20th century a forgotten artist had become a sought-after icon. The many stories of lost Friedrichs surfacing here and there—a gallery, a country house, the retirement home bedroom of an elderly noblewoman—many of them initially misidentified or simply anonymous, are an important part of the book’s appeal. Even recent history enriches the story, as in a years-long case involving stolen Friedrich canvases hidden in a stack of tires and a mafia lawyer’s legally dubious negotiations to return them.

While The Magic of Silence says much about Friedrich’s life, work, rediscovery, and legacy, it does not focus as much on composition or interpretation. Only a few major works like Friedrich’s early altarpiece Cross in the Mountains, which became surprisingly controversial on its exhibition, or The Monk by the Sea, which has been interpreted variously as a nihilistic image of a hopeless, godless world or the first great abstract painting, or the magnificent, justly famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog receive in-depth attention. Illies’s subject is Friedrich’s life and mind and the afterlife of his work, not the mechanics of how he executed them.

My only real complaints are that the thematic organization broke up Friedrich’s life story so totally and that only four of his paintings were included in the book. The former problem is not insurmountable, and reading the book quickly created a powerful cumulative effect that suggests the shape of Friedrich’s life without sticking to it chronologically.

The latter is a bigger problem. Illies names and describes many of Friedrich’s works—whether as he completed them or as they were rediscovered in the early 1900s—but most of them are not available to look at in the book itself. I ended up mentally noting a lot of titles and browsing Wikipedia’s impressive (if still incomplete) collection of articles on them later, as well as ordering this more thoroughly illustrated book. This does not detract from the value of Illies’s study, but it is a curious oversight in a book about art.

Those two quibbles aside, this was a strong place to start in my project to give more proper attention to art. The Magic of Silence is a deeply researched, engrossing, insightful, and beautiful read. I especially appreciated occasional insights into Friedrich’s theological view of his art as well as the picture of the artist’s personality that emerges over the course of the book. I’m glad to recommend it to anyone interested in Romanticism, German culture and history, or art generally.

Gabriel’s Moon

Gabriel Dax has two problems. The first is that, after a childhood incident in which his nightlight apparently burned down the family home, killing his mother, he cannot sleep. He drinks and medicates but these stopgap solutions bring their own problems. The second problem is that MI6 is after him. They want him to do a job. And then another.

Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd, begins in 1960, as English travel writer Dax gets a scoop. He’s researching his next book and has stopped in the newly independent Congo, where he is approached by an old college friend with the offer of an exclusive interview with Patrice Lumumba, the controversial president. Gabriel accepts, has a pleasant chat with Lumumba, who insinuates that somebody—he names three men unknown to Dax—is out to kill him. Gabriel packs up his tape recorder and his notes, flies home, and thinks little of it.

Then, as Dax tries to get his interview into publishable form for a magazine, the magazine kills the project. Old news, his editor tells him. Lumumba has been overthrown and imprisoned. Dax should move on.

Not long after, Dax is approached by Faith Green. He recognizes her as a woman who had been reading one of his books on the flight back from Congo, and is flattered. Only gradually does he realize that she’s an intelligence agent. She’s trying to root out a “termite,” a Soviet agent in the service, and has something small for him to do. She has approached him because his older brother, a functionary in the Foreign Office, has used him as a private courier before, and this job will not be much different—fly to Spain, meet an aging modernist painter, purchase a sketch, return it to England.

Simple enough, but one job leads to another and Dax finds himself thrust deeper and deeper into espionage work. He makes new contacts—a veteran diplomat, the editor of a radical leftwing journal, an American who makes dark threats—suspects his house is being searched while he travels, and learns from Faith that Lumumba has been assassinated. This she lets slip long before the press makes it public. Who are these people? How do they know what they know? What are they using him for? And why does everyone want the tapes of his interview with Lumumba?

And on top of all this lie Dax’s personal struggles: his slumming relationship with a Cockney waitress, his psychoanalysis sessions, his personal investigation into the fire that claimed his mother, and his slowly dawning attraction to Faith, his handler.

This might sound like a whole lot of novel, all brooding interiority and intricate, cynical conniving, but the book comes in at just over 260 pages. As I mentioned several weeks ago, the review that brought this book to my attention compared it favorably to the best of John Buchan. That is certainly true in terms of pacing and structure. Gabriel’s Moon develops its many interwoven strands of story—Congo, MI6, Dax’s past, Dax’s personal life, Dax’s anxieties—with great subtlety and an effortlessly brisk pace. The story engages the reader from the opening pages and never lets up. It’s rich and complex but neither sluggish nor over-engineered. It’s masterfully done.

But the classic thriller author that Gabriel’s Moon reminded me of even more than Buchan was Eric Ambler. Both were masters of plotting and pacing, but where Buchan’s heroes were often principled adventurers who, if not seeking it out, embraced danger when a threat arose, Ambler’s were ordinary men of no great distinction who stumbled into danger. Already unwilling participants in whatever nefarious activities they uncover, they are often manipulated by more canny parties and bridle at being used, making foolish mistakes as a result. Gabriel Dax fits the Ambler mold perfectly.

The result, a Cold War novel with Buchanesque pacing and suspense and Ambleresque characters, evokes a feeling of paranoia better than any other spy thriller I’ve read. Alongside Dax, the reader feels Faith’s hooks sinking in deeper, dragging him further and faster into the world of espionage than he expected. Who is a friend? Who an enemy? Dax comes to suspect everything.

The only previous William Boyd novel I’ve read is Solo, a James Bond novel taking place in the late 1960s, after The Man With the Golden Gun. I don’t remember caring for it but I’m going to take another look at it soon, and I plan to check out Boyd’s other spy novels. In an interview about Gabriel’s Moon Boyd said that he intends to write two more Gabriel Dax books, rounding this story out into a trilogy. I look forward to those, and in the meantime can recommend Gabriel’s Moon highly to anyone who likes both a fast-paced globetrotting spy yarn and good character drama.

The illusion of insight

A quick follow up from last week’s post about the overemphasis on “themes” as part of English education.

People may rebel against their middle- and high-school English classes out of frustration with things like themes and symbols, but the same oversimplifying impulses are alive and well in pop culture. Where the wannabe intellectual discussing his favorite books online might still talk about themes, the more populist, mystical type will gravitate toward “archetypes” and, the thing that has introduced legions of precocious readers to this kind of talk, the Hero’s Journey.

I don’t know enough about Jung qua Jung to judge the validity of his ideas as an approach to psychology, but I abhor the Jungian “archetypal” approach to literature, and for the same reasons I abhor overemphasizing themes.

An example, and one of the things that alerted me to and turned me against archetypal readings:

Years ago I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, a book on “the masculine archetypes” recommended in a blog series at The Art of Manliness. The authors, Jungian analysts, use the four titular archetypes to develop a taxonomy of the male personality and to examine the ways deficiencies and excesses—to put it in Aristotelian terms—warp it. Where the “mature masculine” balances all four, too little or too much of any of the archetypes result in various forms of bad character. The king, if insufficiently strong, becomes a weak puppet; if too strong, a tyrant. The warrior must use the wisdom of the magician to balance his propensity for violence, lest he become either a cruel sadist or a passive masochist. And so on.

All well and good. What has always been most interesting and appealing to me about Jungian archetypes is their usefulness in taxonomy—in sorting and categorizing. (There’s the Aristotelian in me again.) But the authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, in their effort to support their thesis, plunder history and world mythology for examples and badly misuse the ones that aren’t flatly wrong or made up.

Thus, in discussing the “generative,” fertility-related traits of the lover archetype, they give us Abraham and… Zeus. The father of two nations and the ravisher of mortal women and, in at least some traditions, little boys. Sure, both fathered children, but focusing on that similarity and ignoring the differences between these two “generative” archetypes is morally incoherent.

Which brings me to Jungian archetypes in literature and to the Hero’s Journey specifically. (Somewhere inside me I have a 5,000-word essay called “Against the Hero’s Journey,” but until I find the time and patience to write that, a post like this one will have to suffice.) There are plenty of problems with the Hero’s Journey—not least its artificiality, oversimplification or misinterpretation of other myths, and its rarity in the wild—but my primary objection to it is the temptation to treat an observation about structure as some kind of insight into content. Time and time again, I’ve seen stories dissected as examples of the Hero’s Journey and its characters labeled with various archetypes as if this says anything at all about them beyond pointing out the shape of their plots.

I can provide a very direct example. A few years ago I was surprised to see a new review on Goodreads for my first novel, No Snakes in Iceland. The review was fairly positive but what stunned me about it was seeing the author label No Snakes in Iceland an example of the Hero’s Journey. Is that actually true? I wondered. I had a good, long think about it and had to conclude that, yes, it mostly fits the shape proposed by Campbell.

But does that actually say anything about the story? No.

Borrowing from John Gardner and others, I’ve emphasized over and over and over particularity—the preeminence of concrete specifics—as a creative principle. It seems to me to be a good interpretive principle as well. So, to look at just one element of the Hero’s Journey with that in mind, the hero himself, what is this comparison ignoring that matters to the story?

The hero of No Snakes in Iceland is Edgar, a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon nobleman and close associate of King Æthelred, who has served the king for years as gofer and chronicler. Edgar is educated, intelligent, dutiful, and brave, if self-effacing and preferring to work behind the scenes. He is also bitter in the extreme at the loss of his only child to an accident and the loss of his wife in a Viking raid a few years before. He is in Iceland by the order of an archbishop as an act of penance and longs for home. Edgar’s story then—if you’re looking for a theme or character arc—is one of repentance.

Compare him to the specifics of a few other purportedly Campbellian heroes:

• Luke Skywalker—a young single man in an out-of-the-way place with no prospects and apparently undistinguished background. He is brave but petulant and ignorant of the world and mostly wants to get away from the family farm and make something of himself.

• Harry Potter—a child of exalted background who has been orphaned, deprived of his inheritance, and kept in total ignorance of who he is. Longsuffering and not ambitious, he is rescued from his predicament rather than escaping from it and placed in a situation where his natural goodwill can develop.

• Bilbo Baggins—a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor who enjoys a quiet, undistinguished rural life in his ancestral home. Unambitious to a fault and utterly unaccustomed to danger and hardship.

• Neo—a twenty-something cubicle drone by day and computer hacker by night, who lives in total isolation and with no apparent drive and no prospects of improvement. He is ignorant and apathetic and important mostly by dint of being “chosen.”

• Hamlet/Simba—an actual prince who is deprived of his inheritance by his uncle and actively and knowingly avoids his calling until confronted by his father’s spirit.

Are there points of similarity? Yes! But focusing on these obscures more than it reveals. The dissimilarities matter immensely, not only in terms of the specifics of each story but for message, moral import, and, yes, theme. Does it actually mean something that these heroes’ stories play out in a similar structure? No, I don’t think so. Does it mean something that Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are young and undistinguished while Bilbo and Edgar are older, successful, and well-connected? Yes. So why don’t we focus on that instead? Similarities might draw your attention but you’ll get more understanding from looking at dissimilarity.

As I hope I’ve suggested above, there’s a place for archetype talk in the discussion and study of good stories, but more often than not, without a counterbalancing focus on the particulars of a given story, it offers only the illusion of insight.

Stories or themes?

Eric Ambler (1909-98)

I’ve wondered for some time whether stories are studied and taught the right way. I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve read a lot of critiques of the modern literary establishment and English education, especially at the college level, and I’ve come back again and again to an approach that has bothered me for years: the emphasis on “themes” in fiction.

A few years ago, in reflecting on my first reading of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I quoted a PBS documentary’s summary of the story: “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

“Well,” I wrote, “that is kind of what happens.” Kind of. But not really. Not if you’ve read the story Poe actually wrote, all the complexity and horror of which is here reduced to a talking point.

I had a similar experience this week as I looked for articles on the great spy novelist Eric Ambler. One that I turned up, an introductory guide to Ambler’s life and work, should prove genuinely helpful to the newcomer, but when it recommends six “key” novels it includes the following “themes” for five of them:

• Epitaph for a Spy: “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world.”

• Cause for Alarm: “The dangers of apolitical individuals in a politically charged world.”

• The Mask of Dimitrios: “The intersection of crime and politics, and the corrupting power of ambition.”

• Journey into Fear: “The thin line between courage and fear, and the impact of war on individuals.”

• The Intercom Conspiracy: “The futility of espionage in an increasingly chaotic world.”

Well… that is kind of what those are about. Kind of.

You’ll have noticed a few things about these themes. First, they are formulaic. Three of the five fall into a “the _____ of _____ in a _____ world” pattern, like a Mad Lib. These are all rich, complex, intricately constructed novels that place their characters in crises that admit of no easy answers. Boiling these stories—or any stories—down to something as simplistic and digestible as these themes should arouse our suspicions. Already particularity and nuance are being sanded off and forgotten as we prepare to slot each story into a pre-prepared box.

Second, these themes are vague. As it happens, I’ve read three of these five novels and started one of the others yesterday, and just about any of these “themes” could be applied to any of the novels.

Granted, all of this comes from one internet guide to a single author’s work, but based on my own experience and reading they are broadly representative of the way theme is extracted from story in textbook after textbook, class after class, essay after essay. The complex, diffuse, and imaginative is reduced to the simple, comprehensible, and ready-made. The narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” disturbs us, but we know what to do with “fear” or “guilt” or even “insanity.” Treasure Island is a rollicking adventure, but that’s not enough to make it an important book, so it becomes primarily a depiction of the danger of greed. This is also simpler, easier to understand, and—not insignificantly—to test.

More perniciously yet, at the college level the hunt for themes tends to mean subjecting stories to ideological scrutiny in order—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—to extract political messaging from them via liposuction without anesthesia. Thus assertions like this, which I once saw online: “The Last of the Mohicans is about the taboo on sex between whites and Native Americans.” Most of the time this comes from an overtly left-wing “tenured radical” perspective, but there is a right-wing version of it, too. Just this week a random stranger on Substack, commenting on something I had shared, wrote that Blood Meridian “depicts the southwest as irredeemably corrupt” and is therefore “a wokester wankfest.”

Again—is that really what The Last of the Mohicans or Blood Meridian are “about”? These books aren’t adventures set in particular times and places and happening to specific characters? Is all that matters the barely hidden pathologies or the political messaging?

It seems to me that the dangers of overemphasizing theme in the study of literature are:

• Gnosticism, by which I mean the suggestion that the “real” meaning of the story is hidden behind the words and events of the story, which leads students to either ignore the particulars or be frustrated with literature in toto.

• Didacticism, especially through the implication that good stories must have some broad meaning that should impart a lesson, describe life, or otherwise be useful to the student. If they cannot detect such, it must not be a good story.

• Political hijacking, which is easily the most high-profile, outrageous, and abominable form of this but is therefore also the easiest to identify and resist.

• The aesthetic smoothie, in which students are taught to look for big themes so thoroughly that all literature eventually loses its particularity and runs together into a bland abstraction puree. Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian are apposite here; one could say that both are “about” something like “the violence of whites and Native Americans on the frontier,” but are these books really as similar as this suggests?

This is by no means exhaustive, just the things that occur immediately to me and that I have found most frustrating.

But the final result of all of these is boredom. This is a boring, dull way to study fiction, especially when you’re introducing the young to great stories, and risks leading them away from simply enjoying reading. Great storytellers and their stories are powerful because they are specific. “Themes” are not.

Note that we don’t recommend books to each other this way. To return to one of my original examples, Epitaph for a Spy, would you rather read a book about “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world,” something that could as easily be said of Kafka, Max Barry, or a one-star Google review of the local DMV, or a book about “A teacher on vacation who is mistaken for a spy by the police and forced to help catch the real spy”?

None of this is to say one shouldn’t look for, study, or teach themes in stories. Sensing and understanding a story’s theme is an important part of interpreting it, but themes should arise from the specific, concrete, particular details of the story, and placing as much emphasis on theme as we tend to do inverts that, elevating broad, big picture abstractions above the particulars that make a story what it is. Until we can treat stories as stories first again—and until we can just enjoy them—I think we should downplay theme.

Ironies and reversals

I came down with something over the weekend that has contrived to keep me home mostly immobile today. I have, however, been able to read a little bit, and to reflect on several striking ironies in two of the books I’m reading right now.

First, a pair of reversals. From Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, in a chapter discussing Fleming’s career hopping—diplomacy, reporting, stock trading—during the early 1930s, a seemingly aimless trajectory that looked especially unimpressive next to his older brother Peter, who was already a daring and accomplished travel writer:

As at Eton, Peter’s literary success thrust Ian back into the shade; only now, Peter’s shadow stretched in pretty well every direction.

For the next twenty years, Ian had to steel himself to be called the brother of writer Peter Fleming, as a decade before Evelyn Waugh had been the brother of Alec Waugh, after Alec’s controversial, best-selling novel The Loom of Youth (1917), written when he was still a schoolboy, had sent shudders of horror down many respectable British spines.

Like Ian, Evelyn had grown up in the slipstream of a successful elder brother. Then in the 1950s both Alec and Peter were to experience a dramatic reversal.

By the time of lan’s death in August 1964, it would be Evelyn Waugh and not Alec who had grounds to be considered England’s most eminent living writer—and Ian Fleming and not Peter, England's most popular.

Interestingly, Peter Fleming and Alec Waugh were both the older brother, and both outlived their (eventually) more famous sibling.

Second, cruel ironies. I’m also reading The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, a thematic, somewhat impressionistic study of Friedrich organized according to the four classical elements—fire, water, earth, air. Author Florian Illies includes numerous ironic incidents from the artist’s afterlife. Among them is this anecdote regarding Two Men Contemplating the Moon, which was narrowly saved from destruction and looting at the end of World War II:

Those Two Men Contemplating the Moon leave Dresden only very rarely. Once, early in the twenty-first century, they flew to New York because the Metropolitan Museum proposed to hang them, for the first time in almost two centuries, beside another Two Men Contemplating the Moon that Friedrich had painted about the same time, but for his doctor, who had been so enamoured of the original version that he accepted a copy of it as payment for his services. But, when the two paintings were finally reunited for the first time, no one could see them. Just on the day the ‘Moonwatchers’ exhibition was to open—11 September 2001—a handful of Islamist terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center. The age of Romanticism was over just when it was about to be reopened. On the evening of 11 September, no one in downtown Manhattan was able to contemplate the moon: dust and ash clouded the sky, and fear obscured the view heavenward.

The ironies are especially terrible and saddening in the first part of the book, “Fire,” and this is the worst of all:

In Leipzig in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a legendary collector of art and music, an unprepossessing building society clerk called Manfred Gorke. He scrimped and saved to purchase art treasures, which he horded in his Leipzig home. . . . Gorke was originally from Hirschberg, Silesia, a mountain town Friedrich had particularly loved; hence he felt a special connection with [Friedrich]. . . . And while dire financial straits forced Gorke to part from his paintings by Carus and Runge in the early years of the war, he would never give up his Caspar David Friedrichs.

As the fighting came closer, and the air raids grew more frequent, Manfred Gorke decided to bring his Friedrichs, yet unknown to art history, to the University of Leipzig to be photographed and safely stored. On the afternoon of 3 December 1943, he personally handed them over to the university. But just the next day, in the early morning hours of 4 December 1943, 400 British aircraft bombed Leipzig, passing over the city centre in three waves between 3.50 and 4.25. They dropped countless explosive and incendiary bombs, enough to set the whole city centre ablaze. The university quarter was levelled; the Department of Art History was burned to the ground; Manfred Gorke’s Caspar David Friedrichs were reduced to ash just twelve hours after being stored away.

And, after listing some of what was lost in the blaze, Illies notes a final awful irony: “Gorke’s flat, where the Friedrichs had hung until the afternoon of 3 December 1943, survived the war unscathed.”

Sometimes it’s remarkable that anything old has survived at all.

Notes on the history of spy thrillers

This week, courtesy of Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack, I discovered Alexander Larman’s review of Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd. Larman has become one of my favorite critics and is always insightful, as in the first two paragraphs here, where he offers a very short précis of the history of the spy thriller and the pivotal place of John le Carré in that history:

Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a very great consumption of expensive food and wine, a MacGuffin that everyone wants to lay their hands on, and, last but not least, a love interest whose loyalties remain ambiguous right up until the final page.

Accurate, both specifically and generally. The boredom Larman notes, for example, is present in characters as different as Richard Hannay and James Bond, but for different reasons. The tone of the thriller changed between Buchan and Fleming even if some of the trappings remained, appropriately, unruffled. Larman continues:

Le Carré removed pretty much all of these elements, minus the mass duplicity and, in doing so, made the spy novel more intellectually respectable but (whisper it) just a tiny bit boring. If I was given the chance to read a rip-roaring page-turner in the vein of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its ilk, I should take it without hesitation.

This is a paragraph calculated to get my attention, The Thirty-Nine Steps being the old favorite that started the whole John Buchan June thing here on the blog and Rogue Male being one of the best pure thrillers I’ve read in the last several years. As much as I like le Carré—something I’ve been chatting with a couple of y’all about for a while—I have to agree.

The result of le Carré’s transformation of the genre? Larman:

But most contemporary espionage fiction follows in the le Carré vein, alas, rather than the Ian Fleming mold. Carefully worked-out social criticism is plentiful, genuine thrills, and intrigue either meanly rationed or nonexistent.

Larman is pointing to the two main thematic components of the spy thriller: moral or at least intellectual weight, and action. Prior to le Carré, these were typically joined in the spy thriller. As the late great Sir John Keegan noted of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan’s thrillers in particular had, in addition to chases, danger, and wild hair’s-breadth escapes, “moral atmosphere.” As different as all of them are from each other, Buchan, Ambler, Household, and Fleming all had some measure of both. The drama gave the action weight and the action sold the book.

Le Carré bifurcated these, aiming for subtle and intensely introspective, chilly, cerebral drama. An Ambler or Fleming hero sweats when he faces capture and torture; a le Carré character—one hesitates to call them “heroes”—sweats when he has a terrible epiphany while looking through old files.

As Larman notes, le Carré’s astounding skill and success at this means it has become the model ever since, with “serious” spy novels almost always adhering to the introspective dramatic mode. Action continued to flourish in pulps before eventually taking on a highly technical, suspense-oriented character in writers like Frederick Forsyth and—the god of this kind of thriller—Tom Clancy.

So the spy thriller today is apt to be all dingy rented rooms, cynicism, and (usually left-wing) social criticism or all gear, gadgets, technical specs, and three-page chapters that begin with military time. (Occasionally you get writers who do both, with mixed success. Mick Herron, whose Slough House books are great favorites of mine for their wit, pacing, and suspense, recently published a turgid, commentary-heavy parallel novel burdened with smothering introspection. I’ve kept all the Slough House books to reread later but that one went straight to the used book store.)

But it need not be this way. Buchan, Ambler, and Fleming are still good models, and I was glad to learn from Larman that Gabriel’s Moon “is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school,” balancing character drama and a fast pace. I’m looking forward to it. I picked up a copy Wednesday night and start it today. Here’s hoping it’s part of a reunification of the two halves of the spy thriller that, though they can succeed alone, work wonderfully together.

Eight Hours from England

Anthony Quayle (1913-89) in Albania during World War II

If you grew up, as I did, on classic war movies, you might not know the name Anthony Quayle but you’ll probably know his face. Quayle appeared in many of the great war films of the 1950s and 60s, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Guns of Navarone, often playing earnest, well-intentioned officers frustrated by ugly reality. That is certainly the case in the two films I named, and to judge from Quayle’s 1945 war novel Eight Hours from England, which was based on his experiences with the Special Operations Executive in Albania, he didn’t have to strain his imagination to portray those characters.

Eight Hours from England covers a few months in the winter of 1943-44. Major John Overton, a decent man with several years of experience in the war, has returned to England on leave. The homefront bores him, and his unrequited love for Ann, the woman he has hoped for years to marry, convinces him to accept an offer of a new mission on a whim. He bids Ann good bye, struggling to express his yearning for her, and leaves.

His trip east is long and frustrating. He arrives in more than one staging area unannounced and has to wait for orders. When he is finally redirected to Albania, which was not the mission he initially agreed to, he goes along with it, a knight errant ready for any quest.

He arrives in Albania by boat in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and eager to get to work. The officer he is replacing has become standoffish, hiding in a cave and refusing to have anything to do with the Albanian guerrillas he was sent to help. Overton determines to make a better job of it. With a handful of other British commandos, a few American intelligence officers, and an Italian officer who, his country having lost and swapped sides following Mussolini’s ouster, is committed to helping the Allies, Overton sets out to connect with the locals as well as the two groups fighting both the Germans and each other: the Balli and the Partisans.

The Partisans are Communist guerrillas backed by the Soviets, and claim to have both huge numbers and an insatiable need for materiel—weapons, ammunition, clothing, food, medicine, even blankets. They also regularly attack the anti-Communist civilians. The Balli, on the other hand, are the local anti-Communist resistance who have made the grave mistake of partnering with the Germans in order to eradicate the Partisans.

Acting as a go-between, hiking back and forth across the mountains trying both to liaise with the locals—who care more about finding pretexts to demand British cash than anything else—and to convince the Balli and the Partisans to cooperate, Overton finds his earnestness fading. The Albanians, whom he regarded as colorful potential allies when he landed, come to look more and more thuggish and untrustworthy. His work grinds him down physically and mentally, especially after he receives word by radio of a major British operation in the Balkans that needs all the local help he can organize. And, lurking in the background, busy but hidden from view, are the Germans.

The impossibly rugged terrain, the remoteness from home and people making the decisions, the backwater hit-and-run fighting, the betrayals by local “allies,” the seeming fruitlessness of one’s efforts, and the bloody small-minded rivalries among the locals, whose backward customs and moneygrubbing pettiness and simple thievery Overton gradually grows fed up with—I have to wonder how much Eight Hours from England would resonate with veterans of Afghanistan.

This is an unusual war novel in that it is not action-oriented. Quayle’s story is a drama of logistics, organization, and diplomacy. The Germans appear only occasionally and at great distance, visible as lines of trucks on the other side of a valley or as gray dots setting up heavy weapons far below, but their threat is omnipresent. False alarms send Overton and his group scrambling to fallback positions and hideouts more than once. And the difficulty of communication—with headquarters, with each other—as well as bringing in supplies is clear. To charge their radio batteries they need petrol; to get petrol they must bring it in by boat; to request it on the next boat, they need the radio; and when it arrives they have to keep the Albanians from stealing it. Eight Hours from England is a novel of what goes on behind the scenes of special operations, and of just how unbearably frustrating and exhausting war can be even when—perhaps especially when—there is no fighting.

Quayle conveys all of this beautifully, with vivid descriptions of the people and landscapes. (The actual landscapes, by the way. The locations Quayle names are all real. Here’s the base where he entered and left Albania. Some of his equipment is still there.) Quayle captures the impossibility of Overton’s situation and makes the reader feel it, as well as making it clear that, whatever the outcome of the war of the Allies against the Axis, Albania will not enjoy a simple happy ending.

I read Eight Hours from England in the recent paperback edition published by the Imperial War Museum as part of its Wartime Classics series. There are sixteen books in the series and I already have several more lined up for this year. Eight Hours from England was a good place to start. Strongly and imaginatively written, it brings the reader into a complicated, often overlooked side of World War II and dramatizes it brilliantly.

Flying and nesting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 in books

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

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

Favorite fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Year of Ambler and Powers

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

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

First, beginning with Tim Powers:

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

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

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

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

Favorite Powers of the year: Last Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now for Eric Ambler:

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite Ambler of the year: Epitaph for a Spy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special mention: The Mysteries

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

Favorite non-fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite of the year: Rembrandt is in the Wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite children’s books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Buchan June and Chestertober

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

• Castle Gay (1930)

• Salute to Adventurers (1915)

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

• The Free Fishers (1934)

• The Island of Sheep (1936)

• The House of the Four Winds (1935)

• Memory Hold-the-Door (1940)

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

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

• Manalive (1912)

• Magic (1913)

• The Flying Inn (1914)

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

Rereads

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

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

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

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

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

• Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

• The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman

• Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis*

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

• Grendel, by John Gardner

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Looking ahead

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

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

Which is it?

One of the peculiar annoyances of medieval history is the license even good historians seem to give themselves to make sweeping generalizations, only to qualify them to the point of contradiction later.

Here’s Tore Skeie in his otherwise excellent book The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, in the middle of a discussion of the remarriage of Æthelred Unræd’s widow Emma of Normandy to his conqueror, Cnut the Great:

But despite her status and central position in this drama, it is more difficult to obtain a clear picture of Emma than of the men around her, for the simple reason that she was a woman. The men who recorded the course of history—mostly monks—almost never mentioned women other than when they were married off or acted on behalf of their husbands or sons. The kings’ wives, sisters, mothers and daughters—all of them remain almost invisible to us, even though they were often deeply involved in everything that went on and could be accomplished and independent political players in their own right.

And in the next paragraph we read:

Emma of Normandy (c. 1984-1052) in her Encomium receiving the manuscript from its authors

One of the most important sources from this period is the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a tribute to Emma and the people around her written at her request later in life, probably by a Flemish monk.

Typical! Nasty old patriarchy-loving sexist monks ignoring a powerful woman, erasing her from history... Right up until they write a dedicated biography of her at her command.

The truth is that it is “difficult to obtain a clear picture” of anyone for most of history, men and women, high and low. Even the more heavily documented men in this story seldom reveal much of a personality or motives behind what they do or the particular courses they take, and even the most important of them simply disappear from the record for years at a time. In his short biography of Cnut for the Penguin Monarchs series, Ryan Lavelle records the king’s death thus:

Cnut died in Shaftesbury in November 1035 at about forty years of age. We don’t know why he died there or what he was doing at the time.

That’s two short sentences, but go back over them and really consider just how much they indicate we cannot know about the most powerful man in northern Europe at the time of his death. Even his age is approximate. The rest of the book is full of such passages beginning with “maybe,” “probably,” “possibly,” and “we don’t know.” The “invisibility” of people in historical sources, especially the Early Middle Ages, has more to do with the purpose and built-in limitations of the sources than sexism.

The generalization in that first paragraph from The Wolf Age does not so much inform the reader about medieval culture and historiography than affirm a dearly held modern prejudice. And this prejudice, much like that passage’s imaginary chauvinist monks, renders the close-following contradiction invisible to the right-thinking modern person.

For two other examples of modern preconceptions blinding the historian and the reader to medieval minds, see here—an example coincidentally also involving Cnut—and here. Like the imputations of sexism in the example above, these faults—cynicism and a reductive “seeing through”—warp our perception of the past. For a better approach, Tolkien is always a good place to start, as here.

Hill 112

Men of the 8th Rifle Brigade in Normandy, June 29, 1944

In a passage from The Everlasting Man that I’ve referenced and quoted here many times, even way back at the very beginning of this blog, GK Chesterton argues that what fiction can evoke better than history is the feeling of living through an event. When historians neglect subjective experience—“the inside of history,” what it was like to live there and then and see those things—then “fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.”

But the historians and the novelists need not oppose one another. What was it like? has been one of my animating questions since I was a child, a question at the forefront of my mind as both an historian and a novelist. Combined correctly, the craft of the historian and the art of the novelist can, as Chesterton suggests, give the reader a powerfully truthful feel for the past. And I haven’t seen that done better recently than in Hill 112, the latest novel from the great historian of Ancient Rome and novelist Adrian Goldsworthy.

Hill 112 tells the story of three school friends serving in the British Army during the Second World War. Mark Crawford is a fresh new lieutenant in the infantry. Bill Judd, a working class contrarian, is a private and machine gunner in the same battalion is Mark. And James Taylor is a lieutenant in an armored reconnaissance unit with four Sherman tanks under his command.

When the novel begins on June 6, 1944, D-Day of Operation Overlord, James and his unit are waiting to go ashore on Gold Beach and Mark and Judd are encamped back in England, keeping up a mind-numbing regimen of training meant to prepare them to deploy to Normandy. As James and his tanks land and move into the hedgerow country in search of the Germans, Mark and Judd wait and wait, biding their time through route marches and lectures on venereal disease and handling personal drama. They are in love with the same girl, who doesn’t seem to have time for either of them, and they discover a terrible homefront secret when Evans, a young Welsh private, is caught deserting with Mark’s pistol.

Meanwhile, after a few days of traffic and confusion James’s unit meets the enemy. His first encounters with the Germans are surprising, exhilarating, and harrowing, and while he escapes these with his life, he has to replace both his tank and members of his crew. And not for the last time. After a few weeks of James’s motoring through the countryside—down narrow hedge-lined lanes, through the tight medieval streets of tiny villages, and across open fields of chest-high green wheat that German anti-tank shells part like the sea as they blast toward his tank—Mark and Judd’s unit takes ship for Normandy. Soon, both they in their infantry battalion and James in his tank squadron are fighting at the center of horrendous bloodletting in the battle for a piece of high ground just south of Caen: Hill 112.

In this novel, Goldsworthy does one of my favorite things in historical fiction: simply dropping the readers into a situation in medias res and inviting us to watch. It works brilliantly. The main action plays out over about about five weeks, from D-Day to July 11 (D+35). It begins immediately, as James waits to drive his Sherman ashore, and its forward momentum never lets up. Even the quiet moments of reflection, as when James thinks back on his recent engagement to the girlishly romantic Penny, who has given him a surprising good luck charm, or when Judd remembers his dalliance with leftwing politics, or when Mark broods over a terrible accident that occurs during his first assault, carry us onward into the hard work of the campaign. There is always more to do. Even the novel’s ending powerfully brings this home.

That feeling of neverending work is, after all, a crucial part of the experience of war. All three men come, at some point, to feel as though nothing else exists outside the war. For James especially, thinking ahead to “after the war,” when he and Penny will marry, begins to feel hopeless.

But the work is also dangerous, and Goldsworthy realistically captures the continuous danger of the war. Even on a mission to seek out and destroy the enemy, combat begins and ends suddenly and never goes according to plan. Men die not only of grisly wounds in combat—shot by rifle, pistol, or machine gun; shredded by shrapnel; burned up by incendiary grenades, blown apart by mines; decapitated or cut in half by artillery or killed outright by the concussion of an explosion—but unexpectedly and by accident. One of the lead reconnaissance tanks in James’s unit rolls over into an underwater crater immediately after landing on Gold Beach, and friendly fire happens on multiple occasions. The attrition and turnover in each unit is realistic and punishing. By the end, the three protagonists—and by extension we, the readers—are surrounded by new guys whose names they can’t even remember.

This is not to say that Hill 112 is a continuously grim slog. The darkness, as in real life, is lightened here and there with banter and gallows humor. James’s crew, with its mix of farmboys and Cockneys, is especially fun, and the novel’s many colorful side characters enrich the story: the fearless Captain Dorking-Jones, the Canadian Gary Cooper lookalike Buchanan, the serial deserter Reade, the veteran tanker Martin, who has two kids back home and tells James bluntly that he won’t take undue risks in combat, and O’Connor, a veteran not only of earlier theatres of the war but of Spain, who teaches Judd and his mates more practical soldiering than all their camp lecturers combined.

Goldsworthy writes in a lengthy and informative afterword that giving modern readers a sense of what it was like was one of his goals for Hill 112. He succeeded brilliantly. I’ve read many of Goldsworthy’s histories—one of my very first paid writing jobs was this review of his excellent book Pax Romana—and several of his other novels set on the Roman frontier during the reign of Trajan. I have enjoyed those novels, but Hill 112 is by far his finest fiction: immediately and continuously engaging, peopled with strong characters, exciting, horrifying, and profoundly moving. I heartily recommend it. Where were novels like this when I was a kid?

Hiss boom bah

Several weeks ago I wrote about the dangers of mismatching verbs with the action they’re meant to describe, like the needle of a syringe “digging” into an arm or a rocket propelled grenade “poking” through the door of a Humvee. This danger is especially pronounced with dialogue tags. 

Yesterday I started reading a new novel about a British tank crew in Normandy during World War II. It’s already very good—I hope to have more to say about it here at the end of the year—but this morning I read the following, the response of the tank commander to his crew’s nervous chatter as they prepare to attack a German position:

“Pipe down,” James hissed. “Driver, advance.”

It’s not too pedantic to point out that the phrase “Pipe down,” with its plosives and open-mouthed vowel sounds, is physically impossible to “hiss.” 

What the author is trying to capture here is a tone: the terse, tense order of a commander in a dangerous situation. James is just as nervy as his men. But the strongly onomatopoeic hiss suggests a sound other than what we, in our minds, have already heard him say. Hiss might have worked for “Shut up” or “Hush” or “Shhh!” but not this.

The author might have considered a verb that would have more closely matched the dialogue while still conveying the tone he wanted. Bark is the classic example—as in “barking orders”—but is also too close to a cliché to recommend itself. It also suggests shouting, which James is manifestly not doing. It hasn’t reached that point yet.

Elmore Leonard offers the simplest way out of this conundrum. Among the items in his personal decalogue of writing advice is:

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

I agree with this rule probably 98% of the time, because it works. Leonard always preferred to convey tone through what was said rather than describing, secondhand, how it was said. When a writer does this deliberately, it can help make his dialogue better. Relying solely on said removes a potential crutch that can lead to bad writing and gradually renders the dialogue tags invisible, concentrating the reader’s attention on the dialogue itself.

Some writers choose to drop dialogue tags entirely. I admire that kind of artistic constraint but think that’s going too far. Removing the tags means relying on description and stage directions to indicate the speaker in any conversation involving more than two people. Even a writer who is good at this, like Craig Johnson, who uses no dialogue tags in his Longmire mysteries, eventually strains for ways to indicate the speaker. He said is simple and almost invisible, and doesn’t break up the rhythm of the talk itself.

The irony is that said would have worked perfectly well in the above example. “Pipe down,” in the context in which it’s said and coming from the character who says it, conveys the right tone all by itself.

***

Looking forward to more of this novel. I’m getting new tires this afternoon, so I should have plenty of time with it. In the meantime, I’ve decided I should resurrect my old series of scholastic commentaries on Leonard’s rules. The last post I wrote concerned regional dialect. I think the next should concern dialogue tags—and adverbs, the subject of rule #4. For the complete list of Leonard’s rules, see this post from the early days of the blog, in which I compare his with similar rules from Orwell and CS Lewis.