The Levanter

Among his many skills, Eric Ambler excelled at two of the basic varieties of thriller: the breakneck and the slow burn. In one, the pace picks up quickly and puts the characters through an unrelenting series of escalating obstacles. In the other, a single obstacle may steadily build in threat and intensity until a final catastrophe. Both rely on a mastery of pacing. Ambler had it, and The Levanter offers a good example of the latter, the slow burn.

A later work in Ambler’s long career, The Levanter takes place over about two months in 1970. Three different characters narrate portions of the story: Lewis Prescott, an American reporter who has stumbled into the events after the fact; Teresa Malandra, the secretary and mistress of an English industrialist; and Michael Howell, the industrialist himself, third-generation heir of Agence Howell, a manufacturing and shipping firm with connections all over the Mediterranean and Middle East.

When the story begins, Howell has successfully navigated several of the perils of decolonization in Syria, working with the emerging socialist government to avoid losing his family’s business to various nationalization schemes. This involves working closely with corrupt government officials, including Syrian military intelligence and a government go-between with connections to Second-World powers: Maoist China, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

Busy enough keeping the family business afloat and its reputation untarnished following a series of failed production schemes imposed by the government, Howell is surprised to discover, thanks to Teresa, large unexplained orders of chemicals buried in the company accounts. With government pressure and hostility building, he decides to investigate the moment he finds out. This means a late night trip with Teresa to one of the plants dedicated to producing consumer batteries.

Howell finds the factory, which is supposed to be closed, open, brightly lit, and with teams of men working on producing fulminate of mercury—explosives. Armed men accost him and Teresa, and when the night watchman arrives he reveals himself as Salah Ghaled, the notorious leader of a hardline Palestinian terrorist organization too extreme even for Arafat and the PLO.

Ghaled and his men need Howell alive. His men are making detonators for bombs and trying to get incomplete Soviet rockets into a usable condition. Howell will be useful for them. Ghaled forces him and Teresa to swear their allegiance to his organization and to sign confessions of complicity in the murder of a former member—an internal hit Ghaled publicly blames on the Israelis. He then has Howell order the manufacture of missing parts and arrange shipping aboard a company cargo ship. Thrust deeper into Ghaled’s plot, little by little Howell pieces together what Ghaled is planning.

On Herzl Day, an upcoming Israeli national holiday, Ghaled aims to detonate dozens of remotely armed bombs hidden in Tel Aviv. Hence the detonators. He plans to coordinate the bombing with his rockets, launched from offshore and aimed at the coast, a strip of popular beach lined with hotels, restaurants, and homes. The Agence Howell ship will carry him on to Egypt the same day, where he will hold a press conference claiming responsibility and making the usual Palestinian talking points. Howell is horrified.

He also realizes that, since not only Ghaled but other key members of his organization all got jobs at Agence Howell through government influence, his government contacts are in on the plot. He cannot turn to the authorities. In desperation he uses a business trip to inform Israeli intelligence, but his contact is skeptical and offers little help unless Howell can provide more information than he has. If Ghaled is to be stopped, it may be up to Howell himself.

The other Ambler slow-burn thriller that The Levanter resembles most is Cause for Alarm, in which an English engineer working in Mussolini’s Italy just before the outbreak of World War II slowly uncovers sinister goings-on within the tidy order of his factory. In both novels, Ambler puts a lot of effort into making the industrial and commercial setting feel believable well before introducing espionage and terrorism. There’s a lot of looking through ledgers and blueprints, making sure products are up to spec, and arranging shipping and payments. This would be dull in any other writer’s hands. Ambler, through a careful, steady drip of foreshadowing and underestimated threats, instead uses such workaday details to build suspense.

Where The Levanter bests Cause for Alarm, though, is in its use of setting. Ambler exceled at evoking the real-life cosmopolitan, polyglot worlds of international crossroads, from the Aegean and the Balkans in The Mask of Dimitrios to postwar Malaysia and Indonesia in Passage of Arms. The Levanter, with ties to both the Cold War and the unending multidirectional conflicts of the Middle East, is no exception. Ghaled, one of Ambler’s most vivid and believable villains, is a European-educated Palestinian Islamist who is as resentful toward the PLO, the Baathists, and the Jordanian monarchy as he is hostile toward Israel. His education and Marxist ideology are European and his weapons Russian, Chinese, and East German. The Agence Howell has dealings all over the Eastern Mediterranean and its ships and factories have multiethnic crews and captains. Teresa is Italian and Howell himself, despite his seemingly English name and business sense, is mostly Armenian and Cypriot. He and Ghaled are, in dramatically different senses, both men without a country, the one a businessman and the other a zealot.

In addition to a realistic and authentically complicated setting, The Levanter is also cleverly written. I mentioned above that it is narrated by Howell, Teresa, and Prescott, an American reporter who otherwise plays no role in the events of the story. The muddle of Howell’s predicament, the leverage Ghaled and the Syrian government use against him, and the outcome of the story lead to media controversy, a controversy fully exploited by Palestinian activists. The novel is Howell’s attempt, with Prescott’s encouragement, to set the record straight. His testy, finger-wagging narration proves both fun to read and disturbing—how would I, or any of us, were we forced into a bind like this, ever hope to exonerate ourselves?

The Levanter is not Ambler’s best or most exciting thriller, but it is one of his most involving and, above all, one of the most plausible. The overwhelming feeling it imparts throughout is that if something like this were to happen, this is exactly how it would happen. Its emphasis is not on action and gadgetry, though both play a role, but on cunning, desperation, bloodlust, and the weakness of human nature. Though set in 1970, the world it takes place in and the characters who people it still feel recognizable and all too real.

A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

I’m excited to have a review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three historical horror novels—A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice—published online at Catholic World Report this weekend. These books concern Fr Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a Dominican vampire hunter, and the various scrapes he gets into with vampires, werewolves, and, most recently, leprechauns—and worse. A sample from my review:

Those who enjoy Gothic atmosphere—gaslit streets, full moons, windswept moorlands, big dark houses, old families with terrible secrets—will find something to love in all three novels. Nicholson creates and maintains palpably tense and moody settings, and the mysteries at the heart of each story unfold with maximum dread and suspense. That the stories take place in painstakingly realized historical periods provides yet another pleasure.

But the stories prove especially powerful because of the well-drawn, lifelike, and likable characters with which Nicholson has peopled them. Father Thomas Edmund, the only character to recur in all three books, is the best example, but each has a strong cast, all of whom have their own goals and worldviews, all of which clash and compete. This is compelling in all three novels, not only because pitting rival philosophies against each other works so well in horror fiction but because Nicholson has the rare gift of being able to make goodness attractive.

I’ve mentioned Eleanor’s novels here on the blog several times before, including here and here, and A Bloody Habit was my favorite fictional read of the year in 2019. They’re a lot of fun and counterbalance their unromanticized depiction of sin and evil with an appealing and theologically sound vision of the good. Give my review a read and check these fine novels books out!

Black Bag

Transparent barriers—Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

My spring break last week didn’t go as expected, but fortunately I got a break from my break Friday evening when I met a friend for Black Bag, a new spy thriller written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Black Bag concerns George Woodhouse, a British intelligence officer who specializes in interrogation and polygraph testing. He is happily and faithfully married to Kathryn, a fellow intelligence operative. When the film opens, he’s meeting a fellow agent who gives him a list of five names within the intelligence service who could be the party responsible for the leak of a secret program called Severus. All five are known to George.

One, Freddie, is an old friend, a chummy but loutish and borderline alcoholic lad. Freddie’s much younger girlfriend Clarissa works in signals intelligence and likes to play the innocent and aggrieved ingenue but is much more canny and manipulative than she lets on. Colonel Stokes is an upright, physically fit, perfectly composed agent in a relationship with Zoe, a service psychologist who regularly evaluates all of them. The fifth and last suspect, to George’s dismay, is Kathryn, his wife.

George invites the other four to a dinner party where he mildly drugs them and sets them up in a game designed to provoke uncomfortable conversations through which the four will reveal themselves. Tempers flair. George forms hunches. He also discovers a discarded movie ticket in his wife’s bathroom trash. The same night, the agent who provided him the list dies, poisoned in his own home.

By his late comrade’s reckoning, George had only a week to uncover the traitor and stop the leak of Severus, an act that could kill thousands. Now, with a few days already elapsed in feeling out the others and with new suspicions surrounding Kathryn’s sudden trip to Zürich, George, a meticulous, precise man, must act fast, improvising and bringing pressure to bear on the other agents, playing them against each other, bending the rules, and exploiting gaps in service procedure in an attempt to draw the traitor out without revealing what he’s up to. In doing so, and especially in trying to discover if Kathryn specifically is guilty, he makes a potentially catastrophic mistake.

I’m being vague on purpose. What Severus is, why it can’t be released, and what will happen if it does—these are secrets Black Bag only slowly reveals. The story’s steady escalation as George unwinds more and more of what is going on within the service is one of its joys.

Another is Black Bag’s emphasis on character, which is also where it shows its unusual place among recent spy stories. With the exceptions of George and Kathryn, the spies of Black Bag lead loose, dissipated, unfulfilling lives: drinking too much, taking drugs, putting up with too much from their significant others, cheating behind their backs. These are not just personal flaws—what used to be called sins—but security risks. George’s conspicuously faithful monogamy, which baffles his fellow agents, turns out to be the only reliable thing in their chaotic world.

This, along with some of the real-world implications of the Severus plot, gives Black Bag a moral dimension that, it not unique in latter-day Hollywood, is as unusual as George and Kathryn’s marriage.

George’s name, his chilly interiority, his hunt for a traitor, and even his eyeglasses might call John le Carré’s greatest character to mind, but Black Bag’s interest in personal relationships and the ways they are compromised by weakness feels much more like Len Deighton. In Deighton’s novels, tradecraft and technology play an important role but the personalities and beliefs of the characters are prior to and motivate the spy activity. Knowing a person’s true character proves as important as drones, satellites, code words, dead drops, and secret documents—a refreshing change from the tech- and action-heavy spy films that have proliferated in the twenty-odd years since The Bourne Identity.

Another nice change: Black Bag is lean and well-plotted, coming in at just over an hour and a half with not a wasted moment in it. The performances are excellent across the board, especially Michael Fassbender as George. Fassbender has been my choice for the next Bond ever since seeing him don a tuxedo for another tight, well-paced Soderbergh spy thriller, Haywire. He may never get to play Bond but his performance here is a classic. Tom Burke as the boorish Freddie, Marisa Abela as Clarissa, and Naomie Harris as Zoe, a lapsed Catholic who still acts on her beliefs, are further standouts, as is Pierce Brosnan in a small role as an intimidating and inscrutable intelligence chief.

With a smart, intense, and often funny script, good pacing and plotting, and excellent acting, Black Bag was a welcome surprise. If you enjoy spy drama as much as spy action and are looking for a thoughtful, suspenseful film that doesn’t overstay its welcome, this is well worth your time. And as the big-budget studio movies and superhero series show steadily diminishing returns, I hope to see more like Black Bag.

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.

Further notes on Nosferatu

Willem Dafoe as Prof von Franz in Nosferatu (2024)

I’ve been thinking about Nosferatu a lot since I first watched it. I managed to get a short summary of my thoughts down in my “2024 in movies” year-in-review, but here are some more oddments and reflections I’ve had since.

Outside reading

Writing at National Review, Jack Butler, whose opinions I respect, “expected to be wowed but was merely entertained.” This is almost the opposite of my reaction, not least since I found Nosferatu too spiritually oppressive, too uncompromising in its presentation of the twisted, predatory, consuming nature of sin and evil, to be entertaining.

Nevertheless, Butler makes a good point earlier in his short review: “one character literally invites the demonic into her life,” he notes, followed by the pointed parenthetical “(Be careful what you ‘manifest,’ kids!)”

At his UnTaking Substack, my friend Danny Anderson contends with two misreadings of Nosferatu, and along the way makes this incisive point about Eggers’s meticulous quest not merely to capture the fashions and hairstyles of past times—those are the easy parts—but the inside of people:

In the end, I do think that Holmes is correct in his focus on Eggers’ attraction to the past and the metanarratives that once inscribed meaning onto life. This is what I admire most about his work, in fact. His films create worlds that shouldn’t still exist. They are anachronisms. He re-creates the mind of the past, not just images. The confrontation with that mind, which is alien and beyond our modern comprehension, is part of what makes his art valuable.

Agreed. We need to be confronted with past minds more often than we are. This is one of the things old books are good for, but since fewer and fewer people read, the need for such movies is growing. May Eggers’s tribe increase.

A few other points that I’ve been mulling, especially points that have proven controversial:

Nosferatu and Christianity

One line of criticism against Eggers’s Nosferatu has accused it of watering down or eliminating Christian elements present in Stoker’s original. I’m not as familiar with Dracula—the fons et origo of all this vampire stuff—as I should be, but I thought the evidence of Nosferatu itself is ambiguous. Crosses and crucifixes are both prominent and subtle throughout, but it’s not clear, as I’ve seen several critics online point out, that they do much to repel or impede Count Orlok. It’s possible that he only appears in rooms in, say, the Harding house where there are no religious decorations, but I didn’t pay close enough attention to be sure.

More pointedly, I’ve seen Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz accused of being a paganized Van Helsing. I don’t think so. The doctor who introduces von Franz name-drops at least one Christian occultist (in the early modern sense of someone who studies hidden forces, like magic and magnetism), and late in the film von Franz instinctively makes the sign of the cross.

Von Franz is also from Switzerland, from the southerly and more predominantly Catholic regions of German-speaking Europe. In this way he’s a contrast to the other characters, the Hutters and Hardings and Dr Sievers, who come from the fictional Wisburg, which is clearly a North Sea or Baltic port city—the Germany of Luther and Kant. Prof von Franz is coded from the get-go as more attuned to the eminent but hidden and the power of the liturgical. A nice touch by Eggers.

It’s not explicit, but I think von Franz is meaningfully Christian, albeit a Christian steeped in esoterica—but not of the Faustian variety.

But the strongest showing for Christianity belongs to two groups—the Romanian peasantry and the Orthodox nuns who nurse Thomas Hutter back to health. Out of all the characters in the film, they are the ones who most clearly understand what Orlok is and what it takes to resist him. Further, their explicit affiliation of Orlok with Satan is allowed to stand unchallenged. They, like Prof von Franz, know what they’re talking about and suffer no illusions.

Orlok, by moving from Transylvania to northern Germany is escaping the “superstitious” who know what he is to live among the “enlightened” who are easy pickings. A pretty powerful statement by itself.

Ellen’s sacrifice

The final act, in which Ellen makes herself available to her predator as carnal bait, luring him to their deaths, didn’t quite land for me. As I put it in my year-in-review, “I thought the ending stumbled a bit.” That’s the best I could put it at the time, but I’ve read and talked to other viewers who had the same sense of unease about it. As I put it in e-mail conversation with one of y’all, is Ellen’s final action a Christ-like self-sacrifice or an act of pagan expiation?

I think it has to be the latter. It was Ellen, after all, who first transgressed by summoning Orlok as a child. (See Butler above.) She was lonely and ignorant, but circumstances play no role in the pagan understanding of transgression. Whole mythologies have grown out of this conception of sin as crossing a line. By giving in to Orlok Ellen allows his appetite to consume him—and her. There is no eucatastrophe, only the methodical, inevitable outworking of the process she initiated years before. She has not received grace so much as restored balance.

This undercuts whatever is going on with the Orthodox nuns or the Catholic von Franz. However subtly and powerfully Nosferatu evokes their pre-Enlightenment liturgical Christianity, grace in this story ultimately has nothing to do with defeating evil. There’s an unfulfilled yearning for grace here. Eggers ends up framing Orlok’s defeat as an act of independent will, but under the influence of Orlok, how independent can Ellen be, really?

As clearly as Eggers can perceive and expose evil—and there’s no one else in Hollywood today who sees it this clearly—he seems to lack a countervailing sense of the good. Something to think and pray about.

Minutiae

• As I’ve said to a couple of y’all, I’ve been amazed at how totally my tolerance for bad things happening to children in movies has evaporated over the last several years.

• Relatedly, the role of the Harding family as mere cannon fodder for Orlok and the utter lack of redemption for Friedrich felt like a misstep into gratuitous shock.

• An uncharacteristic bit of internet nit-picking for me: If both Thomas Hutter and Prof von Franz know that Orlok sleeps in his coffin during the day—which Thomas knows because he came within a hair’s breadth of killing him and ending the nightmare earlier—why do they wait until night to go to his house outside Wisburg? Why not go directly there and stake him in the middle of the day? Perhaps I’m forgetting something.

• Finally, I can’t saw enough good things about the cast, but let me specifically point out Ralph Ineson as the unfortunate Dr Sievers. A lesser actor would have made him an unthinking period quack. Ineson makes him a thoughtful student of medical science who is doing his best against something impervious to his tools. This is his third role in an Eggers film and I hope the two keep working together.

Concluding unscientific postscript

I’m grateful to Chet for the e-mail correspondence that helped me give a shape to some of these thoughts, observations, and intuitions.

Nosferatu is a great movie but, again, not mere entertainment. It’s much more, but that doesn’t make it fun. I hope to watch it again someday, and to see more in it. But that will probably be a while.

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.

2024 in movies

2024 turned out to be a good year for forces of nature. From tornados to sandworms, vampires, and giant radioactive lizards, the movies I liked most showed a welcome return of the genuinely monstrous. The misunderstood villain, whose wickedness is explained away as the result of marginalization—or whatever—has had its moment for several years and seems to be going strong, but I’m hoping a new recognition of evil and our need to resist it will take firmer root and let us dramatize and celebrate goodness again.

So much for my hopes for the future. In the meantime, I often start these movie recaps lamenting how little there is to be excited about at the movies, but the truth is that this year I was so busy, pulled in so many different directions, that I barely had time to think about the movies and was lucky to catch even a handful in theatres. 2024 was, therefore, short on good new movies for me but with plenty of good older movies to discover, as we’ll see.

Nevertheless, let me start with the handful of standout new films, presented in no particular order:

Dune: Part Two

A worthy follow-up to Villeneuve’s first Dune, further developing the characters and the world of Arrakis and taking the plunge into the weirder aspects of Herbert’s fiction. The highlight, for me, was the gnarly climactic attack involving sandworms. I think the first part is still the better movie overall, as I thought a few of the performances here faltered under the weight of the story, but that’s the difference between an A+ and an A-. Dune: Part Two still shows more craft and care for the story than the majority of movies coming out right now. Full review from back in the spring here.

The Wild Robot

My kids love Peter Brown’s Wild Robot novels, and having finally gotten around to reading the first one myself—I finished it using a flashlight during the Hurricane Helene power outage—I shared their excitement for the movie. The Wild Robot is beautifully animated, and while it departed from Brown’s novel too much for my taste, enough of the spirit and tone of the book was there to be really enjoyable. Fun, funny, moving, and exciting, this is a genuine family movie in that it worked both for me and my kids.

Twisters

This movie generated some weird hostility online, which I have to credit to the derangement of internet bubbles. Twisters is good straightforward entertainment, with a simple story executed well, good performances, and good special effects. And, as I noted when I finally saw it, while not a message movie by any means—and by design—Twisters sincerely explores a few themes that are worthwhile for their very rarity in mainstream movies.

As for comparisons between Twister and Twisters, my wife and I rewatched the original ahead of seeing the sequel and, with it fresh on our minds, concluded that Twisters actually improved on it in a number of ways, not least in its less cartoonish supporting characters and in giving its villain a more obviously wicked goal than corporate sponsorship. This isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s engaging, exciting, and economically told, which, again, is more than you can say for a lot of other movies right now.

Nosferatu

Another incredible work by Robert Eggers, whose The Witch and The Northman are still two of the best historical films I’ve ever seen, Nosferatu nonetheless places me in the unusual position of praising a movie and saying I probably wouldn’t ever recommend it.

Nosferatu, a remake of the silent German horror movie which was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, is both artistically and technically brilliant, with fantastic costumes and sets and cinematography and sound design that create a precisely staged atmosphere of moody, oppressive cold and darkness which deepens until the very last moment. It is also brilliantly acted. Lily-Rose Depp as the demonically tormented Ellen Hutter and Willem Dafoe as Professor von Franz, the film’s Van Helsing character, were the standouts, but this is also the best I’ve ever seen from Nicholas Hoult. Bill Skarsgård, as Count Orlok, is genuinely terrifying.

Eggers, true to form, not only works hard to get into the minds of past people but also wrestles with some serious ideas, including the tendency of post-Enlightenment man to be blinded to evil. Professor von Franz gives a stirring speech on this point about halfway through. In order to fight the darkness, he argues, one must not only know something about it but admit that it is real.

And Nosferatu dramatizes that reality clearly and starkly. Eggers’s vampire is not tragic or misunderstood or some superhuman marginalized for his transhumanist beauty; he is gross, predatory, and parasitic, preying on the weak and wanting only to possess, enslave, and consume. “I am an appetite,” he says. “Nothing more.” Stripping the allure from evil and refusing to psychologize or pathologize it, as other characters more “rational” than Professor von Franz do, is a fatal mistake.

But it’s precisely that clear-sighted, even theologically inflected motif that makes me hesitate to recommend Nosferatu. The mood is so oppressive and some of its third-act horrors are so horrifying that I think it would be wrong of me to direct someone looking for entertainment to Nosferatu. Because as brilliant as this movie is, and as seriously as Eggers treats these themes, I would not call this movie entertainment. A hard, much-needed look at evil, but not fun and not one to be taken lightly.

There are other, more minor problems. It is perhaps too slow in some parts and I thought that the ending stumbled a bit, not quite resolving some of what Eggers so carefully set up earlier. But Nosferatu is, overall, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just not one I’d recommend for the even mildly faint of heart, and not one I’ll watch again any time soon.

Two near misses

Gladiator II—Slickly entertaining and substance-free. Gladiator II didn’t drive me to performative outrage the way it did some online movie reviewers, but I also wasn’t moved by it. Full review from November here.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare—My wife and I saw this for a date night late in the spring and we both enjoyed it. It’s light, frothy, World War II-flavored action-comedy with a unique setting and fun characters. And yet the very levity of the movie bothered me. After trying and failing to review it here on the blog a few times, I finally realized that I’m sick of gleeful killing in historical movies.

“But they’re Nazis!” All of them? The more common that excuse has become the more I’ve started to question it—and worry about it. Oddly, the movie actually acknowledges, just once, that the scores and scores of enemies Henry Cavill and company effortlessly wipe out are ordinary people when Cavill, about to kill yet another German sailor, sees how young the sailor is and lets him go. The rest of the movie is a numbing sub-Tarantino shooting gallery. It’s entertaining, yes, but its winky approach to slaughter—with never a single jam or misfire in hundreds of rounds fired from Sten guns, by the way—downplays the soul-damage wrought not only on participants in this kind of killing but on the audience as well.

There’s likely a good movie in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, but it would have required a sweatier, more earnest approach than what Guy Ritchie gives us here.

Favorite of the year: Godzilla Minus One

I’m cheating a bit by choosing this as my favorite of the year rather than bumping it down to the “new to me” section, but it was only briefly in theatres here in 2023 and I missed my only opportunity to see it during that window owing to sickness. And—not insignificantly—Godzilla Minus One is far better than anything else I saw during 2024.

This is not simply a good Godzilla movie (I’ve only ever see one other, one of the so-so American movies made over the last decade), this is a well-acted, beautifully shot, thematically rich, exciting, terrifying, and moving drama that happens to have a giant radioactive lizard in it. It is, in fact, those human elements that make Godzilla’s arrival so powerfully effective. I’ve watched it several times now—on my own, with my wife, with my family over Christmas—and it’s impressive and moving every time.

Full review from November here.

New to me

They Live (1988)—Classic John Carpenter sci-fi, with a great concept presented in a subtle, low-key way that only enhances the big revelation about halfway through. Wonderfully creepy, funny, and entertaining. I blogged about a recurring conspiracy motif that appears in the film here.

The Arctic Convoy (2023)—An immediately involving Second World War action-drama about a fictional Norwegian cargo ship traveling with a convoy based on PQ 17, which was en route from Iceland to Murmansk when its naval escort was withdrawn and the convoy was ordered to disperse. U-boats and German bombers stationed in Norway did the rest, sinking all but 11 of the 35 ships in the group. This film, something like Greyhound aboard a merchant ship rather than a destroyer, puts the viewer in the shoes of the ship’s crew and vividly presents the dangers of such work. There are a few excellent action sequences, but the heart of the film is a drama pitting the stalwart captain against his first mate, a broken former captain who was one of the only survivors of his previous ship. Worth seeking out.

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)—A gritty, well-acted, suspenseful show-don’t-tell prison drama with a great central performance by Clint Eastwood. Economically told and engaging right from the get-go. I’ve known this story for years without ever having seen this dramatization, and I’m glad I finally did.

Radical Wolfe (2023)—A solid feature-length documentary on one of my favorite writers, with an appropriate zing-pow energy to the presentation and some good attention to Wolfe’s background as a fish-out-of-water Southerner in the northeast and his early days as a reporter.

Looking ahead

Ordinarily I include a list here of what I’m anticipating in the new year, but I’m afraid that list is exceptionally short this time, consisting of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (at last), with Black Bag, Tron: Ares, The Amateur, and the new Superman four movies I’m curious but not necessarily excited about. (The last time I got excited about a Superman movie it was Man of Steel, which my wife and I watched on our honeymoon.) And just yesterday I discovered the upcoming Warfare, a real-time war movie co-directed by Alex Garland and based on an incident involving Navy SEALs during the Iraq War. I’ll also be taking my kids to see Dog Man, my eldest son being a huge fan.

I hope there’ll be more to get excited about, or that I’ve forgotten something, but 2025 may turn out to be another good year for new-to-me viewings of classics.

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.

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?

Godzilla Minus One

A confession: When I watched Gladiator II Sunday afternoon and later sat down to review it, I struggled to view it on its own terms—not only because it was a middling sequel to one of my favorite movies but also because the night before I had watched one of the best movies I’ve seen in years: a moving historical drama with great characters, rich themes of fear, duty, and love, a fast-moving, exciting plot… and a radioactive monster. That movie is Godzilla Minus One.

The story begins in the final days of World War II, as Koichi Shikishima lands his rickety fighter plane on a small island airstrip. Shikishima is a kamikaze pilot and had been on his way to attack the American fleet when he developed engine trouble. The mechanics, the only personnel on the island, find nothing wrong with his plane. Before any uncomfortable conversations can occur or Shikishima can leave to complete his mission, a gigantic creature known to the locals as Godzilla rises out of the ocean and wipes out the airfield crew—all but Shikishima and the lead mechanic, who blames Shikishima, who was too terrified during the attack to jump into his plane and fire his guns at the monster, for his men’s deaths.

Back in Japan following the surrender, Shikishima finds his family home destroyed. A crochety neighbor, Sumiko, gives him the bad news—his parents were killed in the firebombing. When she realizes that he is a kamikaze pilot who came back from the war alive, she heaps him with shame. Shikishima is thus left living literally in the ruins of his former life.

Things change when he runs into Noriko, a homeless young woman whom Shikishima first meets as she flees arrest for theft. As she runs through a crowded market she bumps into him, presses a baby girl into his arms, and runs on. Unsure of what to do, he waits, unable to leave the baby and uncertain of where to look. Noriko finds him as evening comes on and explains that the baby, Akiko, is not hers, but the child of a woman killed in the firebombing. Noriko swore to look after her little girl.

Shikishima takes them in and, slowly, over the next few years, the three build new lives for themselves, Noriko looking after Akiko and Shikishima taking whatever work he can find to provide for them. Purely through the habit of sharing a house, relationships form, albeit strictly in one direction. Akiko, as she learns to talk, calls Shikishima “daddy,” a title he reminds her does not belong to him. Noriko, clearly, loves Shikishima, and yet he remains closed off. When his coworkers learn that Shikishima and Noriko are not married and misunderstand the situation, demand that he marry her. But he cannot, he thinks, because his war never actually ended.

The best work that Shikishima finds is minesweeping, well-paying but dangerous work aboard a small, slow wooden fishing boat with a crew of eccentrics—old salt Akitsu, naval weapons expert Noda, and Mizushima, a young man drafted too late in the war to see action. It is here, with this group, that Shikishima encounters Godzilla again.

Atomic weapons testing in the Pacific—we are explicitly shown the Bikini Atoll test—has transformed the monster from a huge deep-sea lizard to a monster that towers over cities and can breathe a “heat ray” with the power of an atomic bomb. In the process of fighting the monster off as he approaches Japan, Shikishima and his crewmates also learn that Godzilla can also heal quickly from even severe wounds. Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo is genuinely terrifying—and tragic for Shikishima.

The rest of the film is concerned with the attempts of a freelance group of ex-Imperial Navy men to stop Godzilla. A demilitarized Japan has no official power to help and the American occupiers are more concerned with the Soviets, so it is up to Shikishima and others to take care of the problem themselves. Fortunately—or unfortunately, given Shikishima’s long-fermenting deathwish—they have found a way to use Shikishima’s peculiar wartime training to their advantage.

That’s more of a plot summary than I intended to write, but Godzilla Minus One is not just a monster movie, it’s a genuine, moving human drama with a well-realized historical setting and characters whose plights immediately involve us. Unlike a lot of similar disaster or monster movies, Godzilla Minus One has no unlikeable characters, no cheap comedy sidekicks, no hateful villains. All of them are worth spending time with and all of them matter. (This is, in fact, a thematic point.) This human dimension gives the monster attack scenes—whether aboard a fishing boat, in the heart of Tokyo, or racing across the countryside—weight, suspense, and excitement. I haven’t been this tense in a movie in a long time.

The story also proves surprisingly moving because, again, unlike a lot of similar recent movies, it dares to explore deep themes and treats them seriously. Most prominent among these is duty. Time and time again, when Shikishima is presented with something he must do—shoot at a monster, take care of a baby, marry the girl who loves him—he freezes. Shikishima’s arc is to move from fleeing duty, to passively accepting duty, to embracing it willingly. And yet without something else to temper it, his final, fearless embrace of duty could lead to precisely the kind of cold, bloodyminded sacrifice that got him into the cockpit of a flying bomb during the war. What that something is, what gives meaning to duty, I leave for y’all to discover.

When it came out last year, Godzilla Minus One was lauded for its special effects, and rightly so. The film looks amazing. The effects complement the story perfectly and are, for the most part, seamless. For long stretches I was so involved in the story that I forgot I was watching a computer-generated lizard chasing a boat or stomping around Tokyo. That this film did so much on a fraction of the budget of even the most modest Marvel movie should put Hollywood to shame—and remind us that it’s story and characters that make movies, not VFX.

I missed this one when it was briefly in theatres near me, but that made the sweet surprise of Godzilla Minus One all the more overwhelming when I finally watched it last weekend. If you’re looking for the perfect combination of sci-fi monster action and grounded, thematically rich drama, Godzilla Minus One is one of the rare films that will meet that need. And it does so brilliantly.

Gladiator II

Naval combat in the colosseum in Gladiator II

When a trailer for Gladiator II finally appeared back in the summer, I began watching it skeptical and ended it cautiously optimistic. As I laid out here afterward, a sequel to a genuinely great entertainment twenty-four years after the fact seems both unnecessary and ill-advised, and yet the seamless recreation of the original’s feel impressed me. The question, of course, would be whether the finished movie could live up to the promise of its trailer.

Gladiator II begins with Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) living under an assumed name in North Africa. Flashbacks reveal that his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) sent him into hiding immediately after the events of the first movie, and he now lives in a utopian multiracial coastal community where the men and women cinch up each other’s breastplates and resist the Empire side by side. Shades of Spartacus, perhaps. When the Romans attack with a fleet under the command of Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the city falls, Lucius’s wife is killed, and he is taken captive and sold as a gladiator to the wheeling-and-dealing Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Meanwhile, back in Rome, the disillusioned Acacius reunites with Lucilla, and the two move forward with a plot to overthrow the corrupt and hedonistic co-emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) during a ten-day sequence of games to be held in honor or Acacius’s victory.

With this relatively simple set of game pieces in place—Lucius wants revenge on Acacius, Acacius wants to overthrow Geta and Caracalla, and Macrinus has a separate agenda of his own—the plot unspools through the added complications of Lucilla’s recognition of Lucius and her and Acacius’s desire to save him from the arena. The increasing unrest in the city and the omnidirectional violence of its politics threaten everyone. Only a few will make it out alive.

Gladiator II is a rousing entertainment, with plenty of spectacle both inside and outside the arena. The action scenes are imaginative, engaging, and well-staged, with the film’s two beast fights—the first a genuinely disturbing bout against baboons in a minor-league arena and another, later, in the Colosseum against a rhinoceros owned by the emperors—being standouts. The scene of naval combat, something I’ve wanted to see ever since learning that the Colosseum could be flooded for that purpose, was another over-the-top highlight, with all the rowing, ramming, spearing, arrow shooting, and burning given just that extra dash of spice by including sharks. Woe to the wounded gladiator who falls overboard. Perhaps even more so than the original, Gladiator II brings you into the excess of Roman bloodsport and the lengths the desensitized will go to for the novel and exciting.

But that is also, notably, the only area in which Gladiator II even matches the original. So, since comparison is inevitable, is Gladiator II as good as Gladiator?

No. The story is more convoluted and takes longer to get into gear, and Paul Mescal’s Lucius, though gifted with genuinely classical features and physical intensity, lacks the instant charisma and quiet interiority of Russell Crowe’s Maximus. His motivation and objectives are also muddled, resulting in his longed-for confrontation with the well-intentioned Acacius feeling less like a tragic collision course and more like an unfortunate misunderstanding. The plot to dethrone the tyrants and restore the Republic feels like a by-the-numbers repeat of the first film’s plot, and the final machinations of Macrinus, in which he uses the jealously between Geta and Caracalla to pit them against each other and unrest in the city to pit the mob against both, though excellently performed by Washington, fizzle out in a final bloody duel outside the city as two armies look on.

I suspect this is what the planned original ending of Gladiator would have felt like had they not rewritten it on the fly after Oliver Reed died. Again, the original was lightning in a bottle, a movie saved by its performances and the improvisatory instincts of talented people. Gladiator II had no such pressures upon it, and though it mimics the scrappy, dusty, smoky look of the original, it lacks the inspired feel of a masterwork completed against the odds. Everything worked smoothly, and the result is less interesting.

As has become my custom with Ridley Scott movies, I have not factored in historical accuracy. No one should. What Scott doesn’t seem to realize is that when you make the conscious artistic decision to depart from the historical record, you should at least make up something good enough to justify the decision. But whenever Scott departs from history he veers immediately into cliche. His Geta and Caracalla are just Caligula knockoffs, and the film’s themes are just warmed-over liberal platitudes. This is Rome-flavored historical pastiche, nothing more. The flavoring makes it immensely enjoyable—speaking as an addict of anything Roman—but actual history has almost no bearing on the movie.

Just one ridiculous example to make my point: in his life under an alias, Lucius marries and settles down in Numidia, where he is close with the leader Jugurtha. It is this peaceful existence that is shattered when Acacius shows up with the Roman fleet and conquers Numidia. Jugurtha and Numidia were real and Jugurtha was defeated by the Romans, adding Numidia to the Empire—in 106 BC. Gladiator II takes place around AD 200. That’s like making something from Queen Anne’s War a plot point in a movie about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But I’m afraid I’ve been unduly harsh. Despite all this, I greatly enjoyed Gladiator II and can’t quite bring myself to fault it for not being the masterpiece that Gladiator is. In addition to the sheer spectacle of the fights and nice callbacks to Maximus, some fun performances help, most especially that by Denzel Washington as Macrinus. Washington plays him with a subtle combination of backslapping bonhomie and cold calculation that makes Macrinus a far more formidable enemy to Lucius and Rome than the dissipated Geta and Carcalla. Lucius is just engaging enough to make a passable hero, but if you see Gladiator II for a performance, see it for Macrinus.

Gladiator II may not have Gladiator’s unique combination of depth and scope, but it has scope in abundance and just enough depth to make it enjoyable, though not moving. As a sequel to the great modern sword-and-sandal epic, Gladiator II is a step down, but as pure entertainment it represents a good afternoon at the movies. I look forward to seeing it again.