Sir Quixote of the Moors

The first John Buchan June ended with Buchan’s final novel and one of his masterpieces, Sick Heart River. In a pleasing bit of symmetry, this fifth John Buchan June concludes with his first published book—and the last novel I hadn’t read since beginning this event: 1895’s historical novella Sir Quixote of the Moors.

Ten chapters and barely eighty pages long, Sir Quixote of the Moors is a brisk historical romp designed to pose the hero an unsolvable dilemma. I usually avoid major spoilers in these posts, but since this is a brief story aimed inexorably at its climactic chapter, I will reveal the ending. Avoid spoilers if you choose. But it’s a good story and good stories are spoiler-proof, and I’ve tried to leave out some of the details that make reading it rich and enjoyable.

Set in the Scottish Borders in the 1680s, Sir Quixote is a story of “The Killing Time,” when the Scots Covenanters were subject to pursuit and slaughter by forces loyal to King Charles II. The narrator is an outsider: Jean de Rohaine, a French Catholic nobleman who has come to Scotland on the invitation of an old Scottish schoolmate, who had promised military adventure. After days of carousing, Jean departs with his host on their first assignment, which turns out to be burning Covenanter farms and killing women, children, and old people. Jean, his sense of chivalric honor outraged, leaves his host on the spot.

He has acted on principle but his choice proves foolishly imprudent—a dynamic that will return. He doesn’t know his way back to the port where he entered Scotland and gets hopelessly lost on the moors. He is betrayed by an innkeeper working as an informant for the authorities and only the honorable conduct of one of his pursuers allows him to escape. Lost, hungry, on the run, and exhausted by the wind, cold, and rain, he throws himself on the doorstep of the next house he comes to.

This proves providential. Jean has cast up at the manse of an aged minister of the persecuted Covenanter church, who lives there with his daughter Anne and her fiancé, a laird named Henry Semple. They care generously for him in his distress but no sooner has he begun to recover than the minister and Henry are forced to flee into the wilderness. They leave Jean to protect the house and Anne, trusting in the sense of honor that first brought him to them.

Jean is as good as his word, driving off a party of government thugs hunting for Henry in one scene and attempting, through his charm and skill in the courtly arts of music and dancing, to help Anne pass the time while she awaits Henry’s safe return. The latter has an unintended effect, though. In trying to help Anne cope with Henry’s absence, he wins her over, and he feels himself falling in love with her as well.

When Henry reappears, starving and crazed, on the run again after his hiding spot has been betrayed and with news that Anne’s father is nearing death, Jean reaches a crisis. He cannot honorably act on his feelings for Anne, and remaining with her will only deepen the affection and attraction growing between them. But leaving her orphaned, her likely future a marriage to a madman—if Henry even survives—seems to be a failure in his duty to take care of her. Memories of his own lost love arise to accuse him, and in the final pages he makes his terrible decision. He flees.

There is more to it than that, but that’s the main arc of the story. In her introduction to the edition I read, Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald interprets Sir Quixote as a story about religious extremism. I think that’s a necessary element of the setting but not Buchan’s point. Jean’s dilemma pits his passion against his honor, the opportunities his situation opens to him against his constancy and good faith, his feelings for Anne against promises made to the one she, in turn, had promised herself to.

If this story were told today—and it has been, over and over—it could only end, with utter, tired predictability, one way. Buchan does something more interesting, but without comforting platitudes. Jean’s honor runs deeper than slogans, and when he makes the hard and unsatisfying choice Buchan does not ignore or conceal the pain of his decision: “‘But honour is more than life or love,’ I said, as I set my teeth with stern purpose.” And, in the next paragraph: “though all my soul was steeled into resolution, there was no ray of hope in my heart—nothing but a dead, bleak outlook, a land of moors and rain, an empty purse and an aimless journey.”

Virtue may be its own reward, yes, but that reward is not gotten lightly. Buchan makes the reader feel it. This, as with so much else in Buchan’s work, was surprising and refreshing.

Sir Quixote of the Moors is clearly an early work. The twenty-year old Buchan’s style has not yet balanced the sturdy clarity, archaism, and dialect he so skillfully intermingled later, and the characterization is—unsurprisingly in a book of less than eighty pages—thin. The characters are believable but not deep. But Sir Quixote also foreshadows much of the mature Buchan’s strengths as a writer: fast pacing that doesn’t feel rushed, smoothly incorporated historical detail, the palpable “moral atmosphere” praised by Sir John Keegan, and, most especially, beautifully and vividly described settings. The Borders locations familiar from so many of his other novels have never felt colder, more miserably rainy, or less forgiving.

This is an enjoyable romp and a piece of juvenilia most writers could be proud of—or at least not embarrassed by. But Buchan himself consistently denigrated it, beginning with the pre-publication proofs, which he found unsatisfying to read. Thirty years later he attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent its being republished. Part of his attitude toward Sir Quixote may be the result of lessons learned. No good author looks back at early work without seeing tics and habits one is grateful to have grown out of. Buchan similarly dismissed his next book, his first full-length novel, John Burnet of Barns.

But another, more intriguing dimension of Buchan’s attitude toward this book may be the path it took to publication. Buchan, a young author (an “intimidatingly precocious” one, per Macdonald), had his title changed by the publisher. Originally called Sir Quixote, they added of the Moors and the cumbersome subtitle Being some Account of an Episode in the Life of the Sieur de Rohaine. Buchan also complained of the poor binding.

That’s bad enough, but then the American edition—which may have been pirated, though the details are still murky 130 years later—added two sentences to the final page. In this extra paragraph, Jean reverses himself and heads back for Anne.

This addition, apparently meant to give the book a happy ending, must have come from an illiterate editor because it completely undoes Jean’s story and misunderstands Buchan’s purpose behind it. At least one biographer has suggested that Buchan may have been asked to provide the extra lines, but it’s impossible to imagine Buchan accepting this change. With all this in mind his later attitude toward the book is suggestive.

The book’s background is interesting, and it also reveals a young author with enough tenacity to weather a bad first experience in publishing and keep going, but Sir Quixote of the Moors is still worth reading for its own sake. Simple, short, not especially deep but emotionally involving, and with many of the virtues of its author’s later work, it is more than a curiosity. It’s a fun and moving short story and, knowing as we do what treasures its author would gift us over the next forty-five years, an invitation and a preview. Sir Quixote is a worthy final read in this five-year journey.

* * * * *

Thanks again for another great John Buchan June. It’s both fun and a little melancholy to read the last unread Buchan novel after five years. As I said recently in a podcast interview about this project, if I had planned to read and write about all of them I never could have done it. But this has been a wonderful five years and, with all of the novels read and a handful of the non-fiction, I need to decide how to continue.

Likely I will read Buchan’s major biographies. As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, I had intended to read Oliver Cromwell but daily life impinged and I didn’t have time. That may be a good place to start for next year. I may also revisit the small handful of books I found underwhelming—Mr Standfast, The Courts of the Morning, The House of the Four Winds—and give them another shot.

But be assured, John Buchan June will return. Thanks for joining me. Your readership, notes, and e-mails have meant a great deal. I hope y’all have a good July and can enjoy at least one of the books I read this year!

A Lodge in the Wilderness

Last week I reviewed a unique entry in John Buchan’s bibliography—the only children’s book he published in his lifetime. This week John Buchan June continues with another unique item, this one more a curiosity than anything: part novel, part philosophical dialogue, part political treatise, the 1906 book A Lodge in the Wilderness.

The book first introduces us to eccentric multi-millionaire Francis Carey, who after making his fortune in various business and government concerns throughout the British Empire, has established himself in a lavish country house in Kenya called Musuru. Every summer Carey invites eighteen people—nine men and nine women—to join him at Musuru for dinners, hunting, and intellectual conversation about the pressing issues of the day. A Lodge in the Wilderness is an account of one of these events.

Buchan briefly describes all eighteen of Carey’s guests, including a Conservative lord, a big game hunter, an ex-soldier with long experience of the Empire, a journalist, a Jewish financier, and a representative of the intelligence service. The female characters are mostly the wives of influential men but show themselves politically well-connected and informed and, as both Buchan biographers Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan point out, their contributions to Carey’s conversations are taken seriously. Nevertheless, most of the characters are ciphers and, after a chapter or two, become hard to distinguish. They are, as Lownie puts it, “merely mouthpieces for the book’s ideas.”

The two that give the story personality are Hugh Somerville and Lady Flora Brune, apparently based on Buchan himself and Susie Grosvenor, whom he would marry a year after the book’s publication. Hugh and Lady Flora become friends and the first hints of a romance kindle between the two, and their flirtations and conversations, which serve as interstitial episodes between the long dinner-time discussions, provide the most story A Lodge in the Wilderness has to offer.

Over the course of a month or so, Carey treats his guests to lion hunts, tours of his beautiful and seemingly endless mountainside gardens, field trips to missions and other colonial points of interest, and many intensely academic discussions of Empire.

And that’s about all there is to it. Though A Lodge in the Wilderness makes concessions to the novelistic form, especially small episodes of excitement like Hugh’s near-miss during the lion hunt, nothing resolves. I was prepared for this in the philosophical dimension of the book—which can only raise questions and suggest ways forward, and to which I’ll return shortly—but it was disappointing that, having developed Hugh and Lady Flora’s young romance so successfully, they do not get any kind of last-chapter send-off suggesting what will become of their relationship. A rare loose end for Buchan.

This is a reminder that the entire purpose of the book is philosophical and political. Written in Buchan’s early thirties after his return from the Transvaal in South Africa, where he had served as private secretary to colonial governor Lord Milner, A Lodge in the Wilderness is a response to changing policy and cultural attitudes toward the Empire back home. Better attuned critics than I, especially those who were alive at the time, have seen in the book’s characters stand-ins for real-life political figures, not least Cecil Rhodes. Buchan’s goal in the book is to lay out and examine the problems facing the British Empire as it stood during the Edwardian period, charitably work through opposing ideas, and suggest an ideal to strive toward—an ideal both of form and function.

Among the topics of discussion are the political basis of the Empire, its potential future structure and the role subject peoples will play democratically, and even—perhaps most interestingly—the aesthetic effects of imperialism on British culture. All of this is examined in excruciating detail. I wrote above that A Lodge in the Wilderness is “part philosophical dialogue,” and Hugh even reads Plato in the garden at one point, but there is really very little back-and-forth at dinner. The characters mostly make speeches, sometimes reading long poems or newspaper articles aloud to the whole party, with occasional pushback from someone else and an eventual attempt at synthesis. (Hegel is invoked more than once, an infallible sign one is in danger of being bored.)

Buchan seems to have known that not everyone would enjoy this. Halfway through, Lady Flora tells Hugh, “I do so wish . . . that they wouldn't all talk in paragraphs.” One sympathizes, as well as appreciating the self-aware laugh.

Some recent readers, to judge by reviews on sites like Goodreads, take some of the characters’ viewpoints as Buchan’s own and object to what they see as promotion of eugenics or a lust for conquest. Buchan, charitable to a fault, allows his characters to have opinions he disagreed with in order to offer a better alternative. His own views are sometimes difficult to parse but a number of important points show through clearly.

The view of the Empire that Buchan presents is benevolent and idealistic but hard to understand in the specifics. Negatively, he explicitly rules out conquest for its own sake, the equation of largeness and territorial size with goodness, the suppression and subordination of subject peoples, and the exploitation of the Empire for profit. Violence in an empire is inevitable but not to be sought out, enjoyed, or glorified. He also makes it clear that any backwardness or primitivism among non-European peoples is due not to race but to culture and opportunity, and he cautions against both denigrating native peoples and exaggerating their primitiveness as unspoiled goodness. He is neither jingo nor Social Darwinist.

What Buchan envisions instead is an ennobling enterprise that will make high moral, spiritual, and even physical demands of the imperialists, who will set an example for the complacent bourgeoisie at home. (Buchan’s critique of the middle class as apathetic and compromised is surprisingly sharp.) The purpose of the Empire is the spread of improvement—technologically, economically, and morally—and the eventual advancement and participation of all the peoples within its reach.

This view is essentially globalist, undergirded by a whiggish view of history. What sets Britain’s apart from other imperial projects, he suggests, is its long accidental development of the rule of law and the importance accorded to liberty. Having come into world power without plan or direction, the Empire is Britain’s opportunity deliberately to spread the good of liberty through order. In a phrase of Chesterton’s—who, no imperialist, would probably disapprove of me using it—the Empire at its best would “make room for good things to run wild.”

All of this should suggest to you that A Lodge in the Wilderness is now almost entirely of historical significance. It’s the only Buchan book I’ve read that I’d call a slog. (It doesn’t help that the cheap paperback I read has numerous text-recognition errors and formatting problems. If you do check this book out, avoid the edition whose cover I used above.) A Lodge in the Wilderness is informative as the dream of empire held by one principled, hopeful, well-intentioned man, and interesting as a strange outlier among Buchan’s fiction, but it is unsatisfying as a novel and will be unrewarding for the casual reader. I’m glad I read it but I very much doubt that I will ever revisit it.

The Magic Walking Stick

The fifth John Buchan June continues with a true outlier in Buchan’s vast and varied body of work. In the more than one hundred books published in his lifetime, Buchan wrote history, thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, and short stories—including weird fiction and supernatural horror—but only one children’s novel. That novel is 1932’s The Magic Walking Stick.

Thirteen-year old Bill is home from his boarding school and eager to go hunting. On the eventful day narrated in the first chapter, he sets off from his family’s country home with one of the gamekeepers. A storm is brewing up and they’re in a hurry, but Bill falls behind when he can’t find his walking stick. The gamekeeper and dogs leave without him and Bill, giving up on finding the stick, hurries to catch up.

In a wonderfully atmospheric opening, signs and portents appear suggesting something uncanny is about to happen, but Bill is too rushed to pay proper attention. He is stopped, however, by the sight of a old man sitting under a hornbeam. The old man is curiously dressed and has a strange, high-pitched voice, but offers to sell Bill a new walking stick from the bundle of sticks he carries. He offers a peculiar one—of a reddish wood with a white, crescent-shaped handle at the top. Bill accepts and pays a farthing.

When Bill catches up to the gamekeeper and tells him about the old man, they turn back to look but the man—hornbeam tree and all—is gone.

What Bill discovers that day is that the stick, if set in the ground and twirled while one wishes to be in another location, will transport him there instantly. He learns this by accident during their hunt: to his great delight when he lands in the middle of a flock of ducks and to his gratitude and relief when he is saved from a flash flood.

This begins the most fun and adventurous part of the story, as Bill experiments with the stick and discovers more of what it can do. He visits exotic places in the Pacific and Africa and plays a bold trick on his family’s obnoxious neighbors. He also learns more about the stick itself. By happenstance, his father is reading a medieval chronicle and relates one of those curious side-stories so many medieval scribes included without elaborating on the details we’d love to know now. Two ancient staves named Beauty and Bands had made their way to Charlemagne’s court. They could, if used properly, transport their owners anywhere, but each observed certain limits: one could be used only for serious work, the other for amusement. Misuse them and they would, somehow, disappear—as, indeed, they had later in the Middle Ages.

Bill decides his stick must be one of these but, not knowing which it is, disciplines his use. He doesn’t want to transport himself to the Solomon Islands on a lark only to be abandoned there by the stick. As in so many good stories of magic and fantasy, his exploration of what precisely he can do is a lot of the fun.

I won’t go into all of Bill’s adventures, but by the middle of the book he has learned how to honor the purposes of both sticks and work within their limits, first by saving an uncle who had disappeared why flying over the Sahara and finally, in the novel’s longest and most consequential series of adventures, by helping young Crown Prince Anatole, the heir to the throne of a troubled eastern European kingdom called Gracia, escape his anti-monarchical enemies and claim his throne.

This second half is pure Ruritanian romance and, as noted by Buchan biographer Andrew Lownie, thematically meshes with other Buchan novels of the time, especially the Dickson McCunn books, which entangle the retired Scottish grocer in the dynastic disputes and revolutionary upheavals of Evallonia. But where The House of the Four Winds, especially, falls apart as a novel, The Magic Walking Stick captures the lightness and swashbuckling high spirits of books like the original Ruritanian romance, The Prisoner of Zenda. Gracia’s political situation is not over-elaborated, Bill’s pluck as well as his friendship with Anatole make their escapades fun and engaging, and Buchan throws in enough twists and reversals to keep it suspenseful.

I think it’s safe to call The Magic Walking Stick a minor Buchan work. The two biographies I have, those of Lownie and Ursula Buchan, each mention the book only two or three times, and only Lownie explains anything about its story and reception. In trying to run down a copy for John Buchan June, even the cash-grab print-on-demand versions available on Amazon were few, and I ended up reading it in e-book form through our local library. A Buchan book being hard to find was a new one for me. (I’ll note that the entire thing is available from Project Gutenberg.)

This is too bad, because The Magic Walking Stick has the lightness of touch, the brisk pace, and the winsome young hero common to much classic children’s fantasy. The situations Bill gets himself into are varied and cleverly executed, and the many settings—including tropical places continents away, the moors and forests of Buchan’s beloved Scotland, and the fields and hills of southern England, which are clearly based on the Oxfordshire landscapes around Elsfield, where Buchan lived with his family at the time—are simply but beautifully described. Buchan makes Bill’s leaps from the thorny scrub of Africa back to the cold and damp of England palpable.

I also enjoyed the glimpse this book provides into the world of a well-to-do English boy of the early 1930s. Bill goes hunting and angling with the family keeper, knows his way around the servants’ quarters and back passages and can use them for mischief, and can visit London where, at the age of thirteen, he buys his friend a rifle for £25. A totally lost world. If Buchan’s original readers could thrill to imagining themselves traveling anywhere instantly, a modern reader of any age might just relish imagining having the kind of freedom Bill enjoys.

The Magic Walking Stick was a welcome surprise. As children’s fantasy, it is not of the same rank as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia but, as both Tolkien and Lewis were fans of Buchan, it is difficult to imagine those books existing without books like this one. It is not deep, but it is fun and exciting, and still worth a read for both adults and kids.

The Half-Hearted

This fifth John Buchan June continues with The Half-Hearted, Buchan’s earliest novel with a contemporary setting, a story that ranges from Scotland to the mountains of northern India and concerns politics, espionage, love, and the tragedy of missed opportunities.

The Half-Hearted, appropriately, takes place in two parts. In the first, a young Scottish laird named Lewis Haystoun returns to his homeland after years abroad. He is beloved on his estate and among the locals and famous throughout the British Empire for his recently published travel book about the uncharted mountains of Kashmir. While fishing one day he meets Alice Wishart, the daughter of a successful merchant who has moved to the area. Alice had read Lewis’s book before moving to Scotland and has heard great things of him from his family and friends. Lewis and Alice are both smart, adventurous, and independent, and their attraction to each other is immediate.

And yet they never quite synchronize their attraction. Every time they meet some awkwardness intrudes—a misstep in manners, or Lewis, not wanting to appear too forward, erring on the side of formality, which suggests indifference to Alice, or some other misunderstanding. Their interest in each other survives, but only barely, and each missed opportunity further damages their shared hopes and Alice’s high regard for Lewis.

Further complicating matters, Lewis has a rival, Albert Stocks. Alice meets Stocks when she first arrives in Scotland and he shows immediate interest in her, but Stocks, a Radical politician, is a dull, unimaginative plodder. He is unattractive without being repellant, boring without being rude, and, above all, persistent.

Worse, Stocks defeats Lewis in an election. Lewis had only been convinced to run as a candidate by his more political friends, who appealed to his sense of duty. His obvious unwillingness to run and poor performance while campaigning almost convince Alice of his lack of courage and commitment—what she refers to as half-heartedness.

The story of Alice, Lewis, and Stocks reaches its climax during a picturesque country outing. While climbing a headland above a moorland pool, Alice and Lewis begin to connect at last, but the bank gives way beneath Alice and she falls into the river. Lewis, startled, does not react in time. Stocks does. Plunging instantly into the river, he hauls Alice to safety. Lewis, though thankful for Alice’s rescue, resents Stocks and blames himself intensely for that moment of unpreparedness and hesitation. Perhaps he is a coward, one of the half-hearted.

It’s this event—and that moment—that drive the first half of the novel to its conclusion and lead Lewis into the second.

In Part II, some of the geopolitical problems Lewis’s friends discuss offhandedly in Part I bring Lewis back to Kashmir. Thanks to his previous travels and familiarity with the area, he has been recruited for an intelligence-gathering mission. The authorities have already heard rumors of tribal disturbances and potential frontier uprisings and the Russians on the other side of the impassable, as yet unmapped interior mountains are reportedly massing troops. With the British army spread thin and consisting mostly of sepoy troops in small, vulnerable outposts, the imperial authorities need to know what precisely is going on, and need to know soon.

Forlorn and hopeless, as Lewis and Alice were only able, at last, to speak plainly to each other about their love once it was too late, Lewis hopes to redeem himself here, to show himself driven and courageous and capable of the unhesitating self-sacrifice required of the full-hearted man. Kashmir, where he made his name, will give him ample opportunity. This time he will not miss it.

The Half-Hearted was published in 1900, when Buchan was twenty-five and recently graduated from Oxford. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than his two previous books, the historical adventures John Burnet of Barns and A Lost Lady of Old Years, and is unusually psychologically acute. Buchan’s characters were always believable but seldom presented with such scrutiny of their thoughts. The vicissitudes of Alice and Lewis’s failed courtship, especially the reversals of Alice’s feelings with each new obstacle and misunderstanding, are realistically painful. These two people would be perfect for each other—would be.

The first half of the novel, though well-plotted, moves slowly, while the second half blazes past. Neither of these observations is a criticism—I enjoyed The Half-Hearted at a leisurely pace (which is why there was an uncharacteristic delay between this month’s first review and this one). Buchan’s nature writing is especially beautiful and the comedy of manners playing out in the upper class drawing rooms and moorland picnics of Scotland was enjoyable to imagine. There is even some humor, as when a nouveau riche visitor proves herself a bigger snob than the actual aristocrats. Fans of Richard Hannay will also appreciate the brief appearance of a Lady Clanroyden, whom one must assume is Sandy Arbuthnot’s mother.

That said, Buchan’s abilities as an adventure and thriller writer are apparent in the shift from Part I to Part II. Once Lewis has returned to Kashmir and received his mission, the novel steadily intensifies right up until the moving final pages. The intricacies of frontier espionage, the grueling nature of long-distance travel, the hazards of mountaineering, and the heroism of the desperate last stand all factor in, and all are thrilling.

It’s striking how much of Buchan’s later work is prefigured in The Half-Hearted. With a brave, noble character who willingly takes a loss for the sake of a woman and enters into realistically dangerous espionage work, I was reminded of Buchan’s underappreciated interwar novel A Prince of the Captivity. Its emphasis on the role of the lone, capable, honorable man racing against time is familiar from any number of other novels, from Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Midwinter and even Buchan’s more literary work like Witch Wood. Most resonantly, its plot of a man seeking redemption from his failings on a selfless task in a far-off rugged land bring to mind Buchan’s final and most moving novel, Sir Edward Leithen’s swansong, Sick Heart River.

The Half-Hearted is not as good as any of those later books but still has unique qualities that recommend it, not least its doomed romance. It is impossible to read about Alice and Lewis without feeling the agony of their near miss. While not rising to the level of Buchan’s best work, The Half-Hearted is an enjoyable read and an interesting early meditation on themes Buchan would elaborate and improve upon for the next forty years.

Buchan’s Augustus

To my surprise and joy, today marks the beginning of my fifth John Buchan June here on the blog. When I began this project five years ago it was a bit of a lark, a way to reclaim my birth month from other, more obnoxious themed celebrations. Since then it’s become a major part of my reading and intellectual life, has put me in touch with some wonderful people, and has become one of my favorite seasons of the writing year.

As I’ve run short on Buchan’s novels—I hope to cover the last few I haven’t read this month—I’ve branched out into his short stories and non-fiction. In the last couple years I’ve read two of his short biographies: a literary-critical introduction to Sir Walter Scott and a pithy, elegant little life of Julius Caesar. Today I start John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s best full-size biographies: Augustus.

I won’t recapitulate Augustus’ life in detail here. Buchan begins with the boy Octavian, whose background of an unassuming equestrian ancestry and close relation to the most charismatic and powerful man of the day would prove surprisingly advantageous in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. Named his adopted son and heir in Caesar’s will, Octavian seemingly came from nowhere but was well-connected enough—thanks to those family ties to Caesar—and sober enough—thanks to that middle-class upbringing—to step into the role and navigate its numerous immediate hazards.

Among these were the courting of his favor and largesse by numerous people with ulterior motives and the rivalry created with Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s most trusted subordinates, the moment he was named as heir. Caesar’s assassins were still at large and fellow-travelers like Cicero, respected by the senatorial partisans and implacably hostile to Antony, hoped to use moral suasion and appeals to tradition to bring young Octavian to their side. But Octavian and Antony reconciled, revoked the amnesty given to the assassins, and proscribed political enemies they had formerly shielded from each other. A bloodbath ensued, “the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record.” Cicero was murdered, Brutus and Cassius killed themselves following military defeat, and Rome passed beyond the possibility of restoring the Republic.

Perhaps, anyway. That’s a what-if game that Buchan doesn’t really play, which is appropriate to his subject. He presents the future Augustus as canny and cautious, a man whose lack of imagination served him well in a situation too complicated and treacherous to treat with romance or fantasy.

This becomes most apparent in the latter half of Augustus, after civil war has again broken out, Octavian has defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and offered to relinquish his dictatorial power only to have it reaffirmed and expanded by the Senate. Now the Princeps, first citizen, he begins what to Buchan is his true work—rebuilding, restructuring, shoring up, and strengthening for the long haul.

Two things distinguish Augustus as both a biography and a work of literature. The first is Buchan’s scholarship. Those who rate Buchan as a mere entertainer and skilled craftsman of adventure stories miss an important aspect of the man. Deeply educated in and passionate about the classics, his knowledge of Greek and Roman literature informed his entire life and undergirds even his fiction—most obviously in novels about relict paganism like The Dancing Floor or Witch Wood but also in the education, moral framework, and long historical perspective shared by his heroic characters.

But his love of the classics was not limited ready quotations or the encyclopedic familiarity of the amateur. He had a sharp understanding of historiography. In the preface of Augustus he explains his use of the available sources, their biases and limitations, and makes his judgments clear throughout. He uses them critically, carefully dissecting and comparing in order to construct as a true a picture of events as possible—not with the intense ideological skepticism to which we have grown accustomed in many of our classicists—and complements the literary sources with the latest findings from the still-growing fields of archaeology and papyrology. Augustus, as a work of history, is meticulously constructed and judicious in its use of evidence. It holds up, and would pair well with a more recent biography by a scholar of similar sensibility, like Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus: First Emperor of Rome.

Buchan’s scholarship, like his writing, is excellent but not showy. Several chapters late in the book offer thematic looks at the Empire under Augustus. One examines Augustus’s family and friendships, another the social and religious reforms Augustus, with limited success, attempted to institute, but the most interesting is an imaginary tour of the Empire from east to west. Buchan impresses upon the reader not only the geography of the Augustan world but the immense variety encompassed by it—ancient, thriving, desirable Egypt; the slightly past-prime glories of Greece; the villages and smithies of Gaul; rugged, fragmented Spain; the difficulties and dangers of travel by sea; and rumors of other faraway places like Britain and future troubles among the Germans beyond the Rhine and, much more subtly and of an entirely unprecedented kind, Judaea.

The second great strength of Buchan’s Augustus, and one of the traits that most distinguishes it from modern histories of the same period, is its pervasive emphasis on character. Personality, virtues, and vices matter to Buchan, as do the cultures that produce them. People are not ciphers moved about by sociological forces and statistical trends beyond anyone’s understanding. Choices are not an illusion, but reveal character and have consequences.

Augustus therefore abounds in incisive character sketches. I wrote last month about Buchan’s final assessment of Cicero, but his portraits of other key players like Brutus, Agrippa, Cleopatra—whom he rightly takes down a peg—the poets Virgil and Horace, Augustus’s wife Livia, his ne’er-do-well daughter Julia, the brutish, shortsighted Antony, and, late in the story, Varus enliven the story and drive its events.

Perhaps the two best are of Augustus’s lifelong friend, ally, and lieutenant, Agrippa, and of Augustus himself. Upon Agrippa’s death, Buchan sums him up not only as a skilled combat leader but an able logistician and administrator whose friendship with Augustus made everything the latter achieved possible and yet nursed no resentments or private ambitions. Indeed, Buchan notes that even “gossiping Roman annalists, who found specks on every other sun, never suggested scandal or criticism about his public or private life,” living simply and honestly even after victory over Antony and the rise of Augustus to undisputed preeminence. That Augustus could enjoy the friendship and loyalty of a man like Agrippa, Buchan writes, reflects well on both.

“Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid, he is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

As for Augustus, the book is his, and Buchan’s most compelling character sketch is that which emerges over the course of the entire book. The contrast with Julius Caesar, whose late career and death drive the early chapters and first bring Octavian to prominence, is striking. Where Caesar was stirring, robust, magnetic, and driven by almost visible flashes of genius, Augustus was physically brittle, cagey, cautious, and lacked imagination in the way one might enjoy poetry while never being carried away by a daydream. Crucially, this son of the workaday equestrian class was always ready for the long, arduous work of building and lacked the aristocratic Caesar’s ego and destructive simplifying impulse. The difference between the uncle and adopted heir was that between boldness and prudence. Buchan explicitly invokes Aristotle’s phronesis. “Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid,” he writes, Augustus “is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

Buchan published Augustus in 1937, shortly after being appointed Governor-General of Canada by King George V. Buchan’s long concern for the fragility of civilization and the hard work of governing, unblurred by any illusions about human nature, are at the forefront of this work. Having reluctantly accepted his new position but dutifully embraced its burdens, it is easy to see why the principled, nose-to-the-grindstone character of Augustus appealed to him. (I will also not be the first to point out that, like Augustus, Buchan suffered immensely from recurrent lifelong illnesses, another point of kinship.) The result is one of Buchan’s best non-fiction books. Augustus was both critically well-received, even being adopted as a classroom text by one of the classicists he consulted, and commercially successful.

Last year I took some issue with Buchan’s presentation of Julius Caesar. I think his portrait of Augustus, which is sympathetic and admiring but by no means uncritical, especially with regard to the compromises Octavian made to survive early on, is impeccable. Where Caesar manipulated and destroyed, Octavian inherited a mess and, as Augustus, made the best of it. Buchan’s assessment that it was only because of Augustus that something of Rome remained to be destroyed by the barbarians centuries later is traditional but surely correct.

Buchan avoids making Augustus about his own time—“History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels,” a point I wholeheartedly endorse—but he does pause over the present in the final paragraphs. “Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin,” he writes, in words that will be familiar from early in his fiction career, “and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires.” The problems of Buchan’s day were not new; Augustus had faced them before in different form. But what troubled Buchan was the willingness of many moderns to cast off the hard work of self-governance, to “experiment with unknown forces” like shameless wars of aggression as a means of strengthening society and the hitherto undiscovered science of racial purity, and to embrace mob politics and dictatorship.

Imagining a resurrected Augustus surveying the world in 1937, Buchan concludes on a chilling note: “when this expert in mechanism observed the craving of great peoples to enslave themselves and to exult hysterically in their bonds, bewilderment would harden to disdain in his masterful eyes.”

The same must certainly be true—with variations—ninety years later. This is reason enough to read Augustus, but that it is also a fine work of history, an insightful study of human character, and a brilliantly readable narrative from a great author are the chief reasons to seek it out, enjoy it, and learn from it.

* * * * *

As mentioned previously, I read Augustus in a reprint by House of Stratus, a publisher that seems to be defunct, but the entirety of Buchan’s book is available in a carefully presented online version from the University of Chicago, with helpful additional commentary and footnotes by the scholars who transcribed it, here. This by itself is a testament to the virtues of Buchan’s book.

I hope to read another of Buchan’s major biographies—likely Oliver Cromwell, which will make even tougher demands on my sympathies than Julius Caesar—before the end of the month. Stay tuned, and thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June.

The Inklings Detective Agency

A couple weeks ago I was grateful to receive a copy of John R Kelly’s debut novel The Inklings Detective Agency. We follow each other on Instagram and he had referred me to his publisher as someone who might enjoy the book. He was right.

The novel takes place across three weeks in December 1936. Michaelmas Term has ended and Oxford is preparing for the Christmas holiday. In the opening chapter, Pembroke College don JRR Tolkien is late for the weekly meeting of the Inklings at the Eagle and Child pub. When he arrives the Lewis brothers, CS “Jack” and Warren “Warnie” Lewis, are absent, down with a mild cold at their house outside town, but other members including Adam Fox and Hugo Dyson are there to introduce Tolkien to a special guest. The stocky older man who slips into the room where they usually meet has heard of the Inklings through some unnamed source and believes they can help him solve a mystery. Not just any mystery—though the Inklings, before the events of his novel, have dabbled in solving minor local crimes—but a murder.

Multiple murders, in fact. Two British lords have died under curious circumstances in the last few months. The causes of death were written off as accident or suicide but the Inklings’ guest is certain both were murdered. Both died on a full moon and both were members of a small secret society dedicated to the occult and made up of other members of the British elite. The other members fear for themselves now, especially with another full moon approaching.

The request is impressive enough, but the man offering the work is a yet greater surprise: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes himself, who is supposed to have died six years before.

The Inklings take the case and, once Tolkien visits Jack Lewis at home and fills him in on the details, their investigation begins. Learning more about the murders and, even more importantly, the victims and their connections through the secret society will take the Inklings to the theaters and working class flats of London, to the depths of the Bodleian Library, to a Christmas party hosted by the famed Detection Club, to a stately country house in the Cotswolds, and to a cold, gloomy castle on the banks of Loch Ness. Along the way they meet Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, and the sinister Aleister Crowley.

These historical and literary cameos and the place afforded even to obscure members of the Inklings like Fox, Dyson, Nevill Coghill, and Lord David Cecil give The Inklings Detective Club the feel of an Argonautica for 1930s British mystery fiction. Like Apollonius of Rhodes, Kelly assembles an all-star team of characters and enjoys bouncing them off each other. The plot is almost beside the point—but it’s still good, engaging and genuinely mysterious, only slowly revealing itself—as, like Jason and his Argonauts, one of the book’s joys is simply to imagine hanging out with this crowd.

Kelly also opens the book with an author’s note explaining that he has fudged the timeline. He gives Chesterton, who died before the story takes place, six extra months to live and Charles Williams, who had corresponded with Lewis during the 1930s, joins the Inklings in person a few years early. This lies within the bounds of dramatic license, I think, but also serves a plot purpose. Without spoiling anything, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reveals that he had faked his own death in 1930, it prepares us for other, more dramatic returns from the grave.

My only complaints: The Inklings, for a gang of academics and bourgeois professionals, seem to leap a little too easily into their roles as private eyes, and I could not accept Tolkien as the bad cop of the group, deceiving and leveraging evidence against a potentially useful witness. There were also a few too many anachronisms. A minor but revealing one: throughout, women are always referred to as Ms. regardless of marital status. (I first noticed this with Janie Moore, the woman who lived with Jack and Warnie Lewis until her death in 1951 and who was always “Mrs Moore” in writing.) I don’t know that the author can be blamed for this specific problem; it seems like the kind of thing an overzealous copyeditor might goof up. But the handful of little distractions like that distract precisely because the book is otherwise so thoroughly and vividly imagined—the locations, the travel (by car or, more charmingly, by train), the clothes, the wintry 1930s atmosphere.

And the most vivid and enjoyable part is certainly the characters. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Hugo Dyson seemed to me the best-realized of the Inklings, but two supporting characters steal every scene in which they appear. The first is Crowley, whom Kelly positions as a dark counterpart to Lewis and company. Crowley, an occultist notorious in his lifetime for his satanism and perverse lifestyle, is not as well known today but Kelly imbues him with an authentic air of degraded but intelligent wickedness. In what might be a sequel hook near the end, another character compares Crowley to Holmes’s Moriarty. I’d be up for just such a sequel.

The other standout supporting character is Dorothy Sayers, whose wry humor and puckish personality enliven the plot significantly through the middle of the book. If Tolkien and Lewis are the lead detectives in this case, Sayers is the worldly-wise informant who wants to help but also wants something in return. She’s great fun, and has more of a role to play in the story than one might immediately suspect.

The Inklings Detective Agency is a risky sort of book but enormously enjoyable to read. It’s a strong debut for Kelly and I hope he gets the chance to write many more such novels.

Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

The Desecration of Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bones and Berserkers

I mentioned in my recent review of Chloe Bristol’s picture book of The Raven that the Poe fan is chronically short of material making Poe accessible to kids. Her book was a welcome exception. Here’s another.

One of our family’s great favorites right now is Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, a series of historical graphic novels aimed at eight- to twelve-year olds. Nathan Hale is both the author and artist behind the series and—in the form of tragically terrible spy Nathan Hale—the narrator of most of the books. Each book begins with Hale on the gallows with two other characters, the Hangman and the Provost, the British officer in charge of his execution. Hale, in order to buy time before his date with the noose, entertains the others with stories from history past and future.

It’s a fun concept and Hale—both of them—executes it brilliantly. All the stories I’ve looked at so far have been well-researched and beautifully designed and illustrated, and the Hale, Hangman, and Provost characters work as a kid-friendly chorus, popping into the scenes to comment on the action, ask questions, and provide comic relief from the frequently grim subject matter. Hale (the author) presents the stories faithfully, with charity and nuance but without blunting the truth. Since discovering them at our local library I’ve encouraged the kids to read them, and they’ve happily gobbled them up.

Favorite so far include Raid of No Return (Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid), Alamo All-Stars (the Texas Revolution), Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood (World War I), Above the Trenches (World War I aviation), Lafayette! (the Marquis de Lafayette in the American Revolution) and Donner Dinner Party (self-explanatory). The kids not only enjoy them, they’ve learned a lot. Touring Patriots Point in Charleston over the weekend, my daughter recognized a life-size cutout of Jimmy Doolittle in the USS Yorktown’s hangar and demanded I take her picture with him. A proud dad moment.

Bones and Berserkers is the thirteenth in the series, and to mark the occasion Hale offers an anthology of thirteen short stories. A storm rolls in on Hale, Hangman, Provost, and Bill Richmond (a fourth narrator who becomes more prominent as the series goes on), who shelter under the gallows and build a fire to stay warm. This frame tale sets up an exchange of campfire stories—horror tales.

The stories range wonderfully. We get folklore like the Jersey Devil, the “demon cat” haunting the US Capitol, and the Gullah Geechee story of the boo hag, a woman who sloughs off her skin at night to drink blood from the living. The book includes true stories like Abraham Lincoln’s dream of his own funeral in the White House; Eben Byers, a golfer whose excessive use of radium-infused patent medicine disintegrated his jaw and left his corpse radioactive a century on; and the axe murder at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Taliesin, which left Wright’s mistress, both of her children, and four employees dead and the house burned to the ground. Then there are uncertain blends of fact and fiction, like the well full of Confederate dead at South Mountain and the career of California bandito Joaquín Murrieta, both of which are true stories so heavily embellished that it remains impossible to say which details are accurate.

But the stories that first drew my attention are purely literary. The only story narrated by the Provost—who wants to prove he can tell a scary story—is an adaptation of the underappreciated Edgar Allan Poe tale “Hop-Frog.” Every word of the story in comic form comes verbatim from Poe, a wonderful touch, and the cruelty of the king’s court and Hop-Frog’s deliciously grotesque revenge are vividly realized. The other is a portion of The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, an Icelandic legendary saga about a king reclaiming his stolen inheritance with a band of warriors, his chance encounters with Odin, and his eventual doom at the hands of his sorceress half-sister. Marvelous stuff, and a great kids’ introduction to both lesser-known Poe and the sagas.

All of the stories are excellent. The drawings are beautifully done, and Hale experiments a bit from story to story. Most of them have the series’ clean, energetic signature look, but Lincoln’s dream, a simple two-page spread in a charcoal sketch-like style, and “The Butler Who Went Berserk,” about the tragedy at Wright’s Taliesin, drawn in a series of geometric panels mimicking Wright’s style, are standouts. The characters in “Hop-Frog” also look a bit like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoons, with exaggerated round features and shiny eyelids. A nice choice for the heightened tone of the story.

And the care put into research is evident throughout, both in the art and the storytelling. Historical costumes look good in every story, especially the semi-legendary story of Hrolf Kraki, which has evocative Viking Age design (with at least one nod to pre-Viking Norse art). Hale also makes sure the context and details necessary to the story are clear, whether through the chorus of characters chiming in to ask, in-story conversation, or dedicated explainers, like a succinct one-page explanation of the berserkr of Norse legend. At the end of the book, Hale includes a page detailing which stories are true, which are fiction, and which lie in some uncertain place in-between.

It’s nice both to enjoy a book and appreciate the effort put into getting things right, but the stories and the dread and terror they offer are the main attraction. Hale promises spooks and horror and delivers. In the same way he doesn’t downplay or ignore difficult or uncomfortable details in his historical books, he doesn’t skimp on the atmosphere, the scares, or the gruesome details. It’s never gratuitous or excessive and Hale’s narrators offer expertly timed comic relief—including dashes of juvenile humor that I certainly enjoyed—but this book isn’t for the faint of heart, either. Really sensitive kids should probably skip it—something Hale’s characters themselves warn the reader about on the title page.

But if you think your kids can handle a good fright and want to expose them to a thrilling blend of legend, literature, and real spooky history, Bones and Berserkers is a fun and exciting read. I’d gladly recommend it alongside the other favorites in the series mentioned above.

Tron: Ares

Scientists at Disney generate a sequel to Tron and Tron: Legacy

I was one of the handful of people who saw Tron: Ares in theatres last fall. I love and enjoy Tron: Legacy beyond its merits and have shared it with my kids, who revere it, and if Tron: Ares had turned out to be good I planned to take them. I never did—not because it wasn’t good but because it was neither good nor bad enough for me to make up my mind about. I decided to give it another look at home when it came out on Blu-ray. That finally happened this month.

The plot, in brief: Tron: Legacy ended with the escape of a purely digital person into flesh-and-blood reality, and the new film’s very loose connection to that one is in the vast potential latent in the ability to transfer digital assets to reality. Kevin and Sam Flynn’s old company Encom is trying to develop this power to solve all the problems in the world. Old Encom rival Dillinger Systems wants to 3D-print weapons, vehicles, and expendable soldiers to sell to the military. Both are headed by Wunderkind CEOS: Encom by Eve Kim, who struggles to keep her idealistic sister’s dream of ending scarcity alive, and Dillinger by the ruthless Julian Dillinger, under the watchful but impotent eye of his mother Elisabeth.

Into this computer arms race steps the Ares of the title. Ares is a combat program created by Dillinger and trained on countless cycles of simulated combat, death, and regeneration. Dillinger shows him off to investors as the crowning achievement of his project. The problem is that Ares—and everything else generated from the system—only lasts twenty-nine minutes in the real world before disintegrating. This fact drives both Kim and Dillinger’s pursuit of “the permanence code.”

Through a little friendly corporate espionage, including the use of Ares to penetrate and exploit Encom’s servers in search of the code, Dillinger learns that Kim may have recovered it from old files hidden away by her sister. From this point forward it’s a race for Kim to bring the code safely back to Encom, for Dillinger to stop her and take it—through increasingly desperate means—and for Ares, who has begun questioning his programming, to decide what action to take.

Tron: Ares has a number of weaknesses, the chief of which is that the villain is much, much more interesting than either of the heroes. Eve Kim and friends are annoying do-gooders whom the screenwriters have worked too hard to make plucky and likeable, and Ares, as played by Jared Leto, is too convincingly robotic. Evan Peters’s Julian Dillinger, on the other hand, shows cunning and intelligence from his first scene and an amoral pragmatism barely restrained by the influence of his mother, played with chilly and ambiguous control by Gillian Anderson. The moment Julian has an opportunity to take decisive but irreversible action against his greatest rival, he struggles, but only so much. His lifetime of seizing every opportunity that will benefit himself has led to this, and even though he knows it’s wrong and we know that he’ll choose it, we see and feel the weight of the temptation crush him. Peters is likely the best thing in the movie.

This imbalance affects the entire film. It may be a cliche to point out how bad Jared Leto is since everyone online has been dogpiling him for months, but some cliches become cliches because they’re true. (My kids also insist I point out that he has weird hair. In a more artistic vein, my daughter noted that Ares, as a character, is more interesting in the first few minutes when he wears a mask. The moment Jared Leto’s vapid face is revealed, the mystery dissipates. A sharp observation, I’m proud to say.)

That said, the plot, which is simple but effective despite the banality of the movie’s heroes and escalates nicely heading into the final act, the production design and look of the film, the music, the special effects, and the action scenes make up for a lot. Despite the complexity of some of what the movie is offering, it’s intuitively presented—my kids had no trouble following it. I’ve seen director Joachim Rønning take some flak for Tron: Ares as an unimaginative hired gun, but I think the visual storytelling and style of the film serve the story well. I don’t find Nine Inch Nails’ electronic score as enjoyable by itself as I still do Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score, but it works well within the movie.

No one should go into a Tron movie looking for deep ideas. As much as I love Tron: Legacy, its Kevin Flynn is given to some silly opining about how much his video game world will challenge the foundational thought of all of civilization. Spoken like a true techbro. Kim and Dillinger, at least, are less prone to philosophizing. (There is an irony in how this movie asks us to root for the good AI overlords against the bad ones; I found myself wishing both could fail. A touch of tonedeafness on the part of the producers.)

But Tron: Legacy and now Tron: Ares do deliver some great action. My kids found the buildup to the climactic sequence, in which Dillinger, having lost control of his own programs, sees his facility print and dispatch lethal weapons tech into the city in pursuit of Kim and Ares, unbearably suspenseful. It’s well-set up and well-executed, and the Terminator-like indestructabilty of Dillinger’s chief henchman posed an intense added threat.

Tron: Ares does not measure up to Tron: Legacy, but it tries to develop one small element of the latter in interesting ways and has satisfying, enjoyable Tron-flavored action. One can’t help but wonder how much better it might have been with a few tweaks, including someone in the title role with more visible depth than Jared Leto (which wouldn’t have happened, as he produced the movie). Having waited several months to rewatch it with my kids, I found myself liking it much more the second time around, not least since they responded so strongly to it.

Impressing kids is not everything, but it’s not nothing, and—following on from The Fantastic Four: First Steps—I’m pleased to have shared it with them. If there are more flawed but enjoyable and workmanlike adventures out there, we’ll take them.