The Wendigo

Every Christmas we get the kids new calendars for their rooms. Typically we pick national parks or historic sites, but last year we thought the boys would enjoy a worldwide cryptids calendar—Bigfoot, Nessie, the Kraken, the Chupacabra, and the like. The boys greatly enjoyed it until this summer, when we turned to a new month and a new image: the Wendigo, giant, antlered, and skull-faced, lumbering through a dark forest on warped legs. One of the twins hated it so much we ended up turning to the next month weeks ahead of time (Fairies, for some reason assigned to Germany), meaning they had almost two months of August.

A silly thing, but it piqued my interest in the monster and I sought out the story that introduced this fixture of some Indian folklore to a mass audience, Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo.

Set among the dense forests and mazes of rivers and lakes in northwestern Ontario, The Wendigo is related secondhand, the unnamed narrator retelling a story told him by Dr Cathcart. A Scottish expert in the still-new field of psychology, Dr Cathcart has taken his nephew Simpson to Canada on a hunting trip. With two Canadian guides and an Indian cook the Scots work their way deep into the wilderness hunting moose only to be disappointed. The hunting is bad that year, and after considering their options, Dr Cathcart and Simpson decide to split up for a few days.

Leaving Punk, the Indian cook, at the camp, Dr Cathcart heads off in one direction with one of their guides. Simpson, fresh out of seminary and visiting Canada for the first time, travels with the other, the French Canadian Défago, an “imaginative and melancholy” man who knows the area, its hunting, and its lore well. They cross long lakes by canoe and travel inland through dense forest for days. Simpson is a novice woodsman and relies entirely on Défago, and so when they make camp one night and Défago, who senses and intuits far more than Simpson can perceive, catches a strange, foul scent on the breeze, his reaction terrifies Simpson.

Défago turns sullen and silent, refusing to discuss what the smell means or indicates to him. After the two bed down in their tent for the night, Simpson awakes to find Défago in a panic, trembling and muttering. Something is outside the tent, something enormous, something with an indescribable “singular odour,” something that bellows out a long, loud, terrible sound before calling Défago’s name.

Défago flees the tent. Simpson, barely resisting his panic, follows his tracks until the oppressive darkness and the gigantic, unidentifiable tracks alongside Défago’s send him back to the tent in terror. Unfortunately for him, the night and his trials have just begun.

I don’t want to describe any more of the story, but it involves voices in the sky, deformed feet, a long vigil by the campfire, and a visit from someone who looks like a friend. Only when Simpson, using what little knowledge of camping and trailblazing Défago had imparted to him, returns to the group’s camp after trekking alone for days does Défago’s fate become clear.

Or does it? The Wendigo exploits to the fullest the ambiguity of both Simpson’s experiences and his uncle’s narration. Dr Cathcart, remember, is a psychologist, and the narrator pointedly mentions that he wrote a book on shared hallucinations. But Dr Cathcart, who saw fit to tell this story to our narrator, also left this story out of his book and confesses near the end, when Simpson is pressing him to explain what had happened to him, that smells are less commonly hallucinated than sights and sounds. What to make of that?

“I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself,” Dr Cathcart says, which our narrator follows with “He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations.” As in so many weird stories and gothic tales, the man of science rushes to the limit of his knowledge and is forced to stop.

This ambiguity and the frame tale—another gothic staple—are a key part of the story’s effect, but the real power of the story is in its atmosphere. Blackwood, who spent years in Canada before returning to Britain, evokes the loneliness and potential terror of a night in the remote northern woods exceptionally well. The sensory detail—that “singular odour” on a cold light wind, the sunlight on the vast lakes, the snow, the crashing of something huge through the branches of the trees and the thumping of its feet as it approaches through the night—build into a suffocating sense of danger made all the worse by the fact that, whatever is out there, Simpson never sees it. It’s wonderfully done, one of the creepiest stories I’ve read in a long while.

But this being the age of Themes, I have to refute something I saw on Wikipedia. The article on the wendigo cites a literary scholar’s argument that The Wendigo, through Blackwood’s “subtly-demonizing rhetoric[,] transforms the Wendigo from a native myth into a descriptive template for the Indian savage.” That is, The Wendigo is about the inferiority of Native Americans, and guilty of cultural appropriation to boot. This is stupid for three reasons: first, because the concept of cultural appropriation is ideological brainrot and inimical to all art and culture. Second, because Punk, the only Indian character in the story, is steady, capable, and also the only character with the good sense to leave when it becomes clear the Wendigo is nearby.

But finally and most importantly, the point of the story is to get a spook. It’s scary entertainment rooted in real places and folklore, and is “about” an ill-fated hunting trip. Expertly crafted and beautifully written, with a clear feel for the woods and how unsettling they can be, the story leaves the reader with enough questions to remain unsettled. Blackwood meant to entertain the reader and succeeded. Check your seminar table theory at the door—this story is for enjoyment.

The Wendigo is an enjoyable novella that offers creepy atmosphere, a weighty sense of dread—always a more powerful emotion to me than horror or the gross-out—and an imaginative, surprising story. It’s a worthwhile Halloween read and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. I hope y’all will check it out. Our kids won’t be anytime soon.

Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is almost certainly Chesterton’s most famous book. The only other serious contenders may be fiction like The Man Who was Thursday or—just maybe, and mostly thanks to TV now—the Father Brown stories. But for many who come to know Chesterton as more than a source of pithy quotations, Orthodoxy serves as their introduction and guide. That is certainly true of me.

Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy as a follow-up to Heretics, which I covered here last week. Heretics offers a strong dose of Chesterton’s emerging worldview, albeit in diffuse form and somewhat less accessible a hundred and twenty years on. Orthodoxy, though a sequel, is better remembered thanks to offering a positively stated vision rather than responding to a string of false doctrines and—I think this is key—because of the form in which Chesterton wrote it.

Because Orthodoxy is highly personal. Those familiar with Chesterton’s discursive, topsy-turvy style and his use of metaphor, simile, and paradox will find that here, but—in a phrase from his later book The Everlasting Man—viewed from “the inside.” Rather than simply opining on a subject in his signature style, Orthodoxy more than any of Chesterton’s other books takes the reader directly into his mind. Though he wrote an Autobiography just before he died, Orthodoxy remains the definitive testament to his growth, conversion, and imagination. All it lacks to make it a memoir is names and dates.

Briefly, Orthodoxy tells the story of Chesterton’s growth away from a comfortable “paganism.” His journey is marked at every step by self-examination, examination of what others have told him, and a turn in another direction. His attitude is a cheerful version of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” refusing to comply with fashionable ideas or accept fashionable attitudes and rebelling against the complacent. Guided both by intuition and rigorous, complex questioning (“My own case for Christianity is rational;” he writes near the end, “but it is not simple”), he works his way into philosophical positions that he always finds preempted by Christianity: having tried “to found a heresy of my own,” he found, “when I had put the last touches to it, . . . that it was orthodoxy.”

Like all of Chesterton’s non-fiction, Orthodoxy reads smoothly but proves hard to summarize, the curlicues of Chesterton’s thinking always feeling right and leading to the right place but also surprising. Having slaved over this review more than any other Chestertober post, I can’t claim to do the book justice here. I’ll have to content myself with a illuminating a few connected points and suggesting the larger shape of the book.

Having begun as an uncatechized pagan or agnostic, he moves, through the process mentioned above, toward religious faith and finally to Christianity itself. Along the way Chesterton integrates the critiques of progressivism, materialism, scientism, sentimental humanism, racialism, rationalism, pessimism, cynicism, and other persistent -isms from Heretics into a coherent argument and makes his case for Christianity as the answer to all of them, the only complete picture of the world.

The rational part of Chesterton’s approach is strongly historical. Told that Christianity was responsible for the misery of the Dark Ages, Chesterton “read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.” He noticed contradictions, criticisms that Christianity was both unmanly and too warlike, denigrating to women but only of interest to women, forcing people into families and tearing families apart to put people in monasteries, emphasizing poverty and humility too much but also too full of “pomp” and “ritualism,” of being too sexually repressed and too reproductively fruitful, and on and on. Tempted to conclude that Christianity was more monstrous than he had at first assumed, he realized instead that “[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.” There is a dimension of apologetic work in which reason, fact, and study are appropriate, and this is it.

The other aspect of his approach, on the other hand, is observational, intuitive, and even aesthetic. In reviewing Heretics I noted Chesterton’s artistic background and sensibilities, and the gut feeling that something in the world is out of true, out of proportion, both begins his investigations and guides them. The truth of Christianity is encoded in the real world, perceptible to the senses and internalized both through doctrine and the prevailing Christian culture of his day—the starkest difference between his original audience and ourselves, to which we’ll return—as well as through impressions gained from fairy tales, observation, and inference and analogy. This is where Chesterton most often invokes common sense and tradition, “the democracy of the dead.” These are arguments, too, but not the kind amenable to the spreadsheet.

Taken together, these two “truth-detectors,” as Peter Kreeft has called them, give the honest seeker complementary pictures of the truth. The task is rightly perceiving, followed by synthesis. As Chesterton himself points out, the opportunities for mistakes are infinite. Only Christianity has avoided them all.

As I mentioned, Orthodoxy is an intensely personal and interior book, taking the reader through years of intellectual workings to reach Chesterton’s destination. The memoir-like format, the warm confessional tone—unlike the polemics of Heretics, which are jovial but still polemics—and especially the imaginative appeal of his reasoning unify the many threads of thought before they are brought together in the final chapters. These must also account for much of the book’s success, then and since.

Chesterton’s book is a personal story, so here’s mine, parts of which I have related previously. Like many others, I came to Chesterton by swimming upstream from CS Lewis’s work. I had heard Chesterton was an influence on Lewis, and when I stumbled upon a copy of Orthodoxy in Barnes & Noble one day, I bought it.

Orthodoxy surprised, challenged, and encouraged me. I was intensely interested in apologetics and debate at the time and was used to an icy logical approach. Chesterton’s combination of reasoning with art and instinct was surprising but spoke powerfully to me. Like Lewis, he didn’t just focus on splitting hairs and debating points of fact, but targeted the heart, the imagination, and all of existence. It spoke powerfully to me, and of course it was loaded from front to back with quotable lines. And this was at a time before you could encounter all the Chesterton quotations you could stand online.

As simple as parts of it are, it also suggested the need for frequent rereading—and that I would want to read more from Chesterton. I did. Scarcely a year has gone by over the last twenty when I haven’t read something by him, and this book in particular has grown with me. As a college student I appreciated the reinforcement as well as testing my assumptions about what faith and apologetics were. Rereads over the years have impressed me with his insight into human nature and his fierce arguments for joy and humor against melancholy and despair—a theme I’ve written on recently. During my most recent reading I noticed and appreciated Chesterton’s tireless refusal to accept fashionable consensus. Told about the Dark Ages, “I read a little history.” Told a lot of tall tales about Jesus, Jesus’s character, and what Jesus would do about this or that issue (remember that the man who first asked “What would Jesus do?” was a contemporary of Chesterton, and a socialist), “[i]nstead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.”

Chesterton is always suspicious of accepted polite opinion, always ready to look into a thing, and always ready to be surprised. His openness and intellectual honesty—agree with him or not—are winsome and have kept him appealing.

To return from the personal to more of a review, however, (“clos[ing],” as Chesterton says in the book’s final paragraph, “this chaotic volume”), I have to wonder about the strengths of Orthodoxy’s arguments in our own age. As people as diverse as David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, Richard Dawkins in various interviews, and especially Tom Holland in Dominion have pointed out, Christianity has invisibly undergirded our civilization for centuries. Our assumptions have been Christian assumptions. Chesterton could bank on that and argue from it.

But in the more than century since, those assumptions have been shaken—partly by complacency and Christian self-sabotage, partly by deliberate philosophical warfare by the descendants of Chesterton’s heretics, partly by the unintended consequences of the kind of amoral sentimental do-gooders Chesterton sought to expose. Just this year Carl Trueman ably outlined the changed assumptions in anthropology and their consequences. Could Orthodoxy, which assumes much of the worldview Chesterton shared even with his opponents, still make Chesterton’s case?

I think so. The cultural foundation of his Edwardian world has been fatally compromised but, just as with the worldviews attacked in Heretics, many of the problems are the same. Christianity is mocked, derided, and libeled in just the ways Chesterton outlines. Fashionable opinion still hews to notions of steady progress, materialist evolution, and, in ethics, an airy, inconsistent humanitarian impulse apparently rooted in nothing. Further, and more positively, apologists like Alister McGrath have argued that the strict logic-chopping arguments of the previous century will be inadequate for rising generations. An unintended consequence of postmodernism and other such schools of thought has been openness to the intuitive and imaginative as avenues of argument—just Chesterton’s specialty.

That leaves only superficial hurdles to encountering and arguing—but not quarreling—with Chesterton. As much as it pains me to say it, in the words of Matthew Lee Anderson, quoted in the foreword to a recent edition of Orthodoxy, “it is a dated work.” The language and structure may pose problems for readers who, we are constantly reminded now, have been so badly served by the educational system and a culture that militates against reading, attention, and thought. I don’t personally find Chesterton forbidding, but for those who do, Simon Vance’s audiobook recording is an easy entry point thanks to Chesterton’s conversational tone, and Broadman & Holman’s 2022 hardback of Orthodoxy edited by Trevin Wax has had the long paragraphs broken up, topical headers inserted to better illuminate the structure of the book, and unfamiliar names and terms annotated.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of formatting, but the goal is to ease modern readers into Chesterton’s thought and the words remain unchanged. If that means more people can meet Chesterton through Orthodoxy and be challenged and changed by his work, I can embrace that.

To return to that line from Anderson quoted above, though dated in some ways, Orthodoxy “comes nearer to timelessness than anything we have today.” A Chesterton-worthy paradox. Orthodoxy is still the best place to encounter Chesterton, the purest dose of his personality, and a challenging introduction to discovering the world as it has already been revealed.

Heretics

Critics and even some fans of Chesterton have tried to fault him with many defects in the ninety years since he died, but I’ve never seen anyone call him a coward. The early nonfiction work with which this abbreviated Chestertober continues today, Heretics, published when he was only thirty-one, offers an excellent sample of his willingness to disagree, to argue, and to name names.

Heretics is a bold title. The Edwardian world, Chesterton thought, was beset with harmful doctrines embraced by the powerful and influential. These are not merely differences of opinion but heresies, partial apprehensions of the truth that prove more damaging than indifference to it. Chesterton attacks many of these by focusing on the work and views of their most prominent spokesmen or on their manifestations in popular culture like painting and novels.

There are twenty essays, and they range widely. Among the heretics are names that remain famous like Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw, and many more that have been forgotten to most of us: George Moore, Joseph McCabe, Olive Schreiner, Lowes Dickinson. Among their heresies: a deracinating globalism, a Nietzschean worship of power and will, journalism that substitutes cheap sensationalism for the real sensationalism of telling the truth, praising the metaphorical “youth” of “young nations” that already show signs of decay, the prideful assumptions of anthropology, novelists toadying to the rich, novelists presuming to represent the poor, scientific reductivism, pragmatism, militarism, nationalism, neopaganism, atheism, lack of a sense of humor, pride.

Heretics is much too complex and diffuse to summarize easily. A chapter-by-chapter breakdown, especially if including asides and subordinate arguments, would run to thousands of words. But what all of Chesterton’s critiques have in common regardless of target is an objection to the simplifying tendency of ideologies. Each view, whether the scientism of Wells or the art-for-art’s-sake amorality of Whistler, offers to make sense of the world according to some easy-to-use heuristic, and each fails either because it is founded on a misapprehension of the truth that warps one’s entire perception, or because it forces fragments of the truth to stand in for the whole.

And so those trying, in Chesterton’s day, to revive a pagan ethic do so out of a belief that ancient pagans were unencumbered with the guilt imposed by Christianity and “were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state.” Actual paganism was diffuse, devoted to inscrutable gods, and sad, the pagans ironically being “praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue—civic obedience” and “envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin—despair.” Remove religion and ethics from the question and focus on genetics and race, and one has the jingoist ethno-nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “that silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings.”

Sometimes the heresies seem to be opposites—a point Chesterton does not draw attention to, but which would go on to be an important part of his argument in the sequel to Heretics, Orthodoxy. In two interesting chapters on the fiction of his day, Chesterton criticizes novelists who flatter the pretentions of millionaires and aristocrats by making them sharp, witty, and urbane and their seeming opposites, novelists who explore the plight of the lower classes and depict them as degraded, helpless, even monstrous. Chesterton will abide neither obsequiousness to the rich nor condescension to the poor, neither of which is democratic in the sense of men conceiving of themselves as equals or brothers. Even “hereditary despotism” is to be preferred to managerialism under such types, “because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all.”

In addition to being untrue, these heresies also—as the above examples demonstrate—tend to make their adherents pretentious. This comes across clearly in perhaps the most entertaining and purely Chestertonian essay, “On Mr McCabe and the Divine Frivolity.” Former Catholic priest turned freethinking gadabout Joseph McCabe had, in an aside in one book, reproached Chesterton for writing about serious subjects lightheartedly. Chesterton’s opening salvo is still laugh-out-loud funny:

It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. . . . It is not I; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics.

Tellingly, it is humorlessness and pride that provoke Chesterton’s sharpest jabs. He respects all the other heretics in this book—and names them because he respects them as sincere men—but the puffed up, he implies, lack the honesty and humility to argue with him, or be saved.

First published in the summer of 1905, Heretics was assembled from some of Chesterton’s columns for the London Daily News. They vary greatly in length and detail and the subject changes sometimes dramatically from chapter to chapter. What keeps them from becoming a hodgepodge, a mere collection of essays, is Chesterton’s inimitable cheery tone, consistent conceptual overlap and recurring themes between chapters, and his already coherent worldview.

Chesterton’s highest formal schooling before becoming a journalist was the Slade School of Art, which is worth remembering because his sensibilities are above all artistic. He knew the marriage of hard work and pure enjoyment that sets the artist apart from the dabbler (“[t]he artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs”) and hates the squandering of natural talent on self-serious intellectual projects—as when he praises the “violent vision” of Wells’s early science fiction novels before tracing his descent into drab works of “scientific” history and social theory—and the blinkered imagination of the ideologue. Where Chesterton critiques the abstractly rational, the scientific, and the calculated, he favors the humble and common sense and argues for the organic, traditional, and intuitive, all of which are neighbors to the mystical.

Again, these points prefigure key elements of Orthodoxy.

The joy of his personality is key in a book like this, which in other hands would be twenty chapters of invective. Chesterton is charitable toward his “heretics” throughout, even to the humorless, and does not attribute base motives to them or suggest they are part of a conspiracy to bring down Western Civilization. A true happy warrior, he weighs them case-by-case, praises them where they deserve it and criticizes in a spirit of friendly correction. Their errors have helped him see the truth, and he wants to share.

Heretics is a lively critique and a perceptive survey of informed, fashionable opinion in Chesterton’s time. Though not straightforwardly an apologetic work, its arguments against the heretics and their heresies suggest the outline of an alternative, which he names in the introductory and concluding chapters: orthodoxy.

Heretics was well-received in its time even if, 120 years later, we agree with Chesterton biographer Ian Ker that it is a “major, if not great work.” What keeps it from being among the shortlist of Chesterton’s greatest hits and what poses the book’s biggest obstacle for the latter-day reader is precisely his strength as a journalist and a critic of his peers—his topicality. Kipling, Shaw, and Wells may still be familiar names to modern readers, but their social and philosophical ideas are likely to be less well-known. Lesser lights like McCabe or Moore or Dickinson, the politicians Chesterton namedrops (of whom probably only Arthur Balfour may now ring a bell, and likely not for good reasons), or those, like Whistler, known purely for images, are mostly forgotten.

I last read Heretics during grad school at Clemson sixteen or seventeen years ago. Many of the names were unfamiliar then but I got the gist. Rereading it now I know much more about Chesterton’s world, but there were still many names that sent me to Google for more detail. To get the most out of Heretics, one needs an annotated edition—with the disruption to the flow of Chesterton’s argument that that potentially entails—or preexisting knowledge of the period.

And yet—no matter what, Chesterton’s wit and fundamental arguments shine through. A modern reader may not know or remember much about Teutonism or Celticism now, but they’ll recognize the simplifying impulse of racial or class or gender essentialism of all kinds and all political stripes. A modern reader may not recognize the trend of novels about witty aristocrats, but they’ll know movies and books that flatter a certain kind of knowing irony or cynical, unsmiling flippancy, especially among our present elites—office drones, politicians, techbros. Try to read the following without thinking of Aaron Sorkin’s characters:

This new frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh.

The heretics have changed but the heresies haven’t. As Michael Ffinch argues in his biography of Chesterton, the book is “at its best . . . not so much when he was attacking the ideas of men like Shaw,” whom readers may or may not know much about, “but more when he was attacking some of the fads of the time, and in as much as some of these have remained fads until our time, Chesterton’s comments are still relevant.”

Heretics seems an unlikely book to remain relevant, but it’s true. It is also, like all of Chesterton’s books, immensely quotable. I’ve tried to avoid quoting the most famous passages here, but one in particular suggests itself for the end of this review:

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. . . . For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

A paradox worth remembering both in Chesterton’s age of heretics and ours.

Death Comes as the End

Last night I finished reading Agatha Christie’s only historical novel, Death Comes as the End, to my wife. This was my second reading of the novel and, although I had picked it as our bedtime read because I remembered enjoying it, I was pleasantly surprised just how much I enjoyed it the second time through. A shortish sick-day review: 

Death Comes as the End takes place on the country estate of Imhotep, a ka-priest who lives near Thebes in Upper Egypt during the 11th Dynasty, over 3,000 years ago. As a ka-priest Imhotep is responsible for the maintenance and regular offerings and rites performed at a nearby tomb, where he also has an office managed by Hori, his trusted scribe. Thanks to the endowment of the tomb and the prestige of his position, Imhotep, now entering old age, enjoys authority and wealth—including estates downriver, in Lower Egypt near the mouth of the Nile. 

Not that his wealth has brought him happiness or stability. His household includes three sons: the slow, dutiful Yahmose, the hard-partying and womanizing Sobek, and Ipy, the teenaged son of Imhotep’s old age. The two older sons have wives—shrewish, domineering Satipy and slow, plain, child-obsessed Kait, who tolerates Sobek’s philandering because of the benefit their marriage guarantees to her children—and Imhotep’s aged mother, Esa, the rarely-heeded brains of the family. Also skulking around the house is Henet, an old servant and companion of Imhotep’s long-dead wife. Henet is a Wormtongue-like flatterer who prides herself on gathering and using information. Her obsequious fawning just barely conceals her resentments.

The last member of the household, and the novel’s main character, is Imhotep’s only daughter, Renisenb. Newly widowed with one child, Renisenb has returned after eight years away with her husband and is still mourning—though, despite the freshness of her grief, she is bothered to find herself already forgetting her husband’s face, and has turned to the old rhythms and routines of her childhood home as a comfort. But it is precisely these that Renisenb will see demolished, and be forced to reckon with why. 

Christie expertly introduces the reader to this family and its foibles—weak, status-conscious father, henpecked eldest son, pompous younger brothers, jostling and jealous daughters-in-law, wry grandmother—before injecting the element that will explode it and start the novel’s mystery: Nofret, the concubine Imhotep brings home from a trip to the richer, more glamorous north.

Nofret is beautiful, manipulative, and spurned in love. The details emerge slowly, but it is clear from the moment she arrives that she views becoming Imhotep’s concubine as settling. She heaps scorn on the family members, probes for weaknesses and disagreement between them, and exploits them for maximum discord. She forces Hori to send letters to Imhotep with false complaints against his sons, and—in a fatal decision—moves to have them disinherited. It is not long before Nofret is dead.

As so often in a Christie story, everyone had good reason to want her dead. Renisenb, without ever consciously thinking of herself as a detective, discusses the situation with Hori and her grandmother Esa, the two people she most trusts and who are least blinded by greed, envy, and foolishness.

Unlike many other Christie stories, the body count climbs. Whoever killed Nofret does not stop with her, killing off other family members and even a servant. Rumor that a vengeful Nofret is cursing the family from her chamber in the tomb run rampant, aggravated by missing jewelry turning up and at least one sighting of a woman in Nofret’s clothing just before someone else drops dead. Hori and Esa assure Renisenb that, based on her standing within the family and her attempts to be kind to Nofret, she cannot be a target. But as more and more die, Renisenb worries both for her family and friends and for herself.

I mentioned that I’ve jotted this review down during a sick day. In a nice coincidence, I first read Death Comes as the End three years ago, when I was sick and quarantined to protect our newborn twins and just in time to make the 2023 year-in-review. I’ve remembered it fondly, recommending it as a good short mystery read last year, and it didn’t disappoint on a reread. In fact, it passed that most difficult of hurdles for a mystery: upon rereading it, I couldn’t remember the solution to the mystery, who the murderer was and why they were doing it. All of the characters still seemed likely suspects, and the atmosphere of dread and suspense were just as palpable and enjoyable.

And Death Comes as the End is not only a satisfying mystery, it is a good historical novel. Christie, whose second husband was an archaeologist, based the novel on his research and her visits to Egypt as well as the extant letters of a similar Egyptian family. It has been a long time since my grad school Egypt course—which mostly focused on the 18th Dynasty anyway—so I can’t vouch for every detail, but Christie authentically evokes the mood and mental atmosphere of ancient Egypt. The story flows with the Egyptian calendar and the rhythms of the Nile and farm work, and the ordinary routines and worries of a well-off but not elite Egyptian priestly family is well imagined. One especially nice note, and a good spot of Christie’s wry dark humor, was Imhotep’s escalating concern about the cost of embalming.

Even in her English country house mysteries Christie was always adept at conveying the workaday concerns of the people who lived there, and without modernizing them or treating them as if nothing has changed in the 3,000 years between Renisenb’s time and ours, she makes these characters’ lives and concerns recognizable. This is a challenge for any historical novelist, and Christie, in her first and only foray outside the twentieth century, did it brilliantly. I was impressed, on that first reading three years ago, both with how well she created Egypt in the fictive dream of her story and with how economically she did so. There are no laborious explanations, no info dumps, no tedious piling on of detail. I’ll be returning to it for lessons in craft.

Death Comes as the End has much more going on in it than I can lay out here. I haven’t even nodded toward Renisenb’s interest in Kameni, an envoy from Lower Egypt who may offer her a better life away from the striving, petty jealousy, and death of her home, or the way their attraction eventually forces Renisenb into a dilemma. The plot is engaging, the characters well imagined and surprising—especially as the deaths begin to reveal more of what each has suppressed in their lives so far—and the historical setting effortlessly realized. This is not Christie’s most famous novel, but it is one of ones I have most enjoyed.

Theo of Golden

An elderly Portuguese man arrives in a picturesque Georgia college town. He is cultured, courteous, friendly but meditative, and clearly independently wealthy. Taken with the pencil portraits hanging in a coffee shop along the downtown thoroughfare, he buys them up in batches, finds the subjects one by one—janitors, accountants, musicians, a homeless woman—and gifts them to them, soliciting their life stories and changing a few lives along the way. And he has secrets, several of them.

The old man is Theo, the town, closely based on Columbus, is Golden, and his “bestowals” of the portraits to the people of the city are the story of Theo of Golden, the runaway word-of-mouth bestseller of the last year.

Theo of Golden the novel has, like some other famous books, become entangled with its publication history. Its author, Allen Levi, a musician and former judge from Georgia, self-published the book several years ago. Its reputation grew slowly thanks to the praise from readers who loved it and exponentially increasing word-of-mouth sales. I first heard of it last year at GJ Ford, our favorite local bookstore in St Simons Island, where the owner urged my wife to read it—and this was before it had been picked up by a traditional publisher. By the last time I checked a few weeks ago, it had sold millions of copies. Millions. This is one of the great self-publishing success stories, and I’m genuinely glad for Levi.

And I’m also glad to say it’s enjoyable. Theo is a well-drawn character and the story’s hook, the “bestowals” of local artist Asher Glissen’s portraits, is intriguing. Levi evokes the thriving New South town, with its shaded riverwalk, tree-lined main street, and seasonal rhythms built around tourism and college semesters with precision and affection. The story, with its emphasis on art, loss, family, faith, and redemption, aims to uplift and inspire.

That surely accounts for the book’s success. In a field crowded with trauma and grievance and general self-absorption, a book about living for others and bringing beauty into darkness has met a need the traditional publishers didn’t even know was there.

As soon as I finished reading it to my wife last week I set the book aside and, even through the drowsiness our bedtime reading is supposed to ease us into, we mulled over what we thought of it for probably twenty minutes. I’m thrilled for Levi’s success, did not mind reading it, and recognize why people love it, but it’s good, not great. Theo of Golden—enjoyable, uplifting, gentle to a fault—is fine. What my wife and I were trying to figure out is exactly why that is.

Whatever criticisms I have come from liking the book and seeing how it could have been better, not hating it. But even before finishing the book I saw a few savage negative reviews, perhaps the beginning of the kind of backlash all such successes provoke. I want to start with those, because I found the most negative reviews the most wrongheaded and oblivious to what keeps Theo of Golden from greatness.

First, Theo of Golden is not terribly written. I was prepared for that, self-publishing being what it is, but Levi’s straightforward, mostly unadorned style is perfectly clear and readable and better than plenty of traditionally published books I’ve read. There are none of the usual tells for amateur fiction: no bad strings of adverbs, clunky overreliance on participle phrases, embarrassing dialogue tags, or spatially incomprehensible descriptions of settings. Even the rare passages that strain themselves reaching toward lyricism fail not out of tastelessness but in overreach. He’s not Evelyn Waugh, but no one was asking him to be.

Then there’s hyperbole. Theo of Golden is not—cannot be—the worst book anyone has read in twenty years. (This writer also thinks there’s only one black character in Theo of Golden. I’m not sure why that would be a mark against it in the first place, but while Levi isn’t explicit about most of the characters’ races there are at least five black characters, including two of the core group that grows up around Theo. Pay attention, even to books you hate.)

Then there are matters of taste. I’ve seen reviews calling it predictable, its final revelations about Theo and his mission obvious. I didn’t find it so, though my wife guessed Theo’s identity about a quarter of the way through. Others objected to the novel’s Christian themes, but that is not an artistic critique and changing or omitting those themes would have gutted the book.

I hate to see a book criticized for bad reasons—or even praised for the wrong reasons—so I decided to review Theo of Golden out of a desire to defend it. But I also wanted to sort out exactly what I think doesn’t work in the book. Potential spoilers ahead.

The fairest criticisms I’ve seen are that Theo of Golden’s characters are too thin and the whole book is too sentimental. These two problems are linked, but one is more serious than the other.

I want to point out that not all of the characters are thin or flat. A number of the major characters who become Theo’s friends are well-realized, the best—or at least my favorite—being Tony, the bitter old Vietnam vet who owns the downtown bookstore. A wry skeptic, his talks with Theo deepen realistically from banter to heart-to-heart vulnerability, and he follows a subtle but believable arc prompted by their friendship. A late chapter in which Theo and Tony share a bottle of port may be the best in the book.

Other characters are less rounded, but that’s normal. Novels concentrate on a central set of major characters with side characters of diminishing importance and complexity. In all his cast, Levi only gives us one bad character: Pearce, Asher Glissen’s younger brother and the father of a young professional who receives one of Theo’s first gifts. Pearce is a caricature of a selfish businessman—loud, rude, constantly glued to his phone. He stands out among Levi’s cast because the others, if not complex, are believable and recognizable types.

No, Theo of Golden’s most serious fault is its sentimentalism. I don’t mind the sentimental myself, Lord knows, but sentimentalism weakens this novel in two interrelated ways.

First, by trying too hard to tug at the reader’s heartstrings. Another of Theo’s early bestowals goes to Kendrick. See if you can feel the point at which his situation starts to feel manipulative: Kendrick is a janitor at the local university and a young single father, his wife having been killed in a car accident that also injured their daughter, a faultless angel who is only ever sweet and who may be permanently disabled if she cannot get a necessary surgery soon. In case that’s not enough, we learn later that the car accident was caused by an illegal immigrant, and Kendrick, who must testify at the man’s sentencing, asks Theo for advice. It turns out the immigrant was only in Georgia illegally because his daughter in the US was in the hospital with cancer. Kendrick sees himself in the man and asks the judge for leniency.

Or consider Ellen, the middle aged homeless woman Theo befriends. She has a non-specific mental problem, sleeps under a bridge, and obsesses over her bicycle, which she refuses to let out of her sight, even in church. She is also a bookworm and—almost unconsciously—peppers her conversation with quotations and literary namedrops. Theo learns that, decades before, she had given birth in South Carolina and had her baby taken away by the state. You can probably guess what the end of her arc is.

Both of these situations present a lot of dramatic potential, only some of which is followed through on. In Kendrick’s case, the sentimentalism extends not only to himself but to the illegal immigrant who killed his wife. Of course Kendrick will forgive him. This is supposed to be a moment of grace, but Levi makes the man so sympathetic and pitiful that it becomes easy for Kendrick to forgive him. Imagine if, instead of an illegal immigrant with a cancer-stricken daughter, a local white trash boy high on meth had caused the accident. If grace means anything, it means forgiving the undeserving, but that’s not the situation Theo of Golden invites us into.

Similarly, Ellen is only ever a lovable eccentric. Her bicycle and her quotations and her sudden lurches in conversational topic are the severest symptoms of her illness. Levi gives her none of the off-putting, difficult, even dangerous qualities of real homeless and mentally ill people; she is simply there to be funny and affecting and to jerk tears with her backstory.

On a number of occasions I called this “overegging the pudding” or “laying it on too thick,” and this is nowhere more obvious than in the novel’s Calvary moment. (Again, spoiler warning.) Theo, awake with insomnia after a triumphant concert by the young cellist he has taken under his wing, hears Ellen being attacked outside by drunk college students. They steal her kooky hat and try to throw her bicycle in the fountain where Theo has carried out his bestowals. The cellist comes to the rescue, but the college boys beat him, smash his cello, and break his hand. Theo, distraught, trying to get their attention from the balcony of his apartment, falls to his death.

It is both moving and simply too much. Just as Kendrick’s situation would be more compelling if it were harder for him to forgive—a scenario we’d all be more likely to encounter—Ellen’s victimization would be more moving if she had proven harder to love, if Theo and everyone else had had to struggle more to bring her into their lives, and if Simone the cellist weren’t so carefully, icily calculated a victim, too.

That’s my biggest problem with Theo of Golden. I’ve dwelt on these subtle but fundamental flaws, but it is a good read and worthy of its success. I do not begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it the way I would a book by Dan Brown or the latest scummy romantasy, and I’ll certainly read the next book Levi writes. This is a smooth and easy read, vividly imagined, peopled with mostly believable and recognizable characters, emotionally involving, and, as Nadya Williams argues here, beautifully dramatizes the way mere mortals can help each other grow in saintliness simply by loving God and each other. But, as I wrote above, it’s gentle to a fault, and if it were to challenge a bit more than it endears, it would make its point much more powerfully.

Coyote vs Acme

Wile E Coyote and Will Forte in Coyote vs Acme

In the early days of the internet, when I was a kid, one staple of e-mail forwards and clean joke repositories was a short piece called “Coyote vs Acme.” Presented as the opening statement in a lawsuit filed against Acme by Wile E Coyote, the bone-dry humor derived from the unblinking lawyerly descriptions of Wile E Coyote’s slapstick mishaps and cartoon injuries. Even as a twelve-year old I found it hilarious. Wile E Coyote has always been my favorite Looney Tunes character.

It turns out “Coyote vs Acme,” like so many e-mail forwards from the mid-90s, was originally a copyrighted piece with a credited author, one Ian Frazier, published in The New Yorker in 1990. I’m glad to see Mr Frazier is still alive, because I hope he gets generous royalties for the film adaptation released last month: Coyote vs Acme.

The movie shouldn’t need much of a summary. Wile E Coyote contacts Kevin Avery (Will Forte), an unmotivated injury attorney who specializes in lawsuits against Acme’s cartoon products division. Kevin sues and settles, congratulating himself if he gets his clients a few hundred dollars from the corporation. Wile E, whom we intuit later is known to the suits at Acme as a “high usage user,” wants to sue for every Acme product that has ever failed him. That’s every product in the Acme catalog.

There’s more going on in the background involving corporate espionage, unethical and possibly illegal research projects, and whistleblowers, Kevin’s sense of failure compared to a law school classmate who is now the head of legal for Acme (Jon Cena), and Wile E himself, whose lawsuit is not straightforwardly about the money. Kevin and Wile E prepare their case, take it to court, attract the media, and eventually testify before the a Senate committee chaired by Elmer Fudd (a natural fit).

Coyote vs Acme offers two special joys. The first is the way it plays with the inspirational legal drama formula. If you’ve seen one crusading lawyer movie, you’ve seen them all, and Coyote vs Acme both conforms to the formula and spoofs it. (Imagine The Insider directed by Chuck Jones.) A lot of parodies have tried this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach and failed, their satire either toothless or the shift into heartwarming drama too silly. This one manages both, and often at the same time. A late scene—you know, the one that uses broken trust to introduce some uncertainty right before the climactic courtroom showdown—in which Kevin and Wile E have a falling out, reveal the truth behind their lies, and say something hurtful, works as both comedy and personal drama, and it leads into one of the best comedy-action scenes in the movie. It’s all in the execution.

And that brings me to the real gift of Coyote vs Acme—the Looney Tunes stuff. The film was made by people who clearly love the old shorts and vast stock of Warner Brothers characters but didn’t let that love curdle into fanboy reverence, undermine the whole thing with a lot of modern irony and meta quipping, or get carried away with in-jokes and easter eggs. There are plenty of both, including clips from the classic Wile E Coyote cartoons themselves, but the movie manages to feel like a Looney Tunes cartoon set in the real world for a full hour and a half.

A few favorite bits: Some of Wile E’s contraptions from the cartoons make appearances, including his off-brand Acme Batman suit and the ice-box, meatgrinder, and snow ski combo. One of the first characters we see onscreen is the Looney Tunes caricature of Peter Lorre, playing an Acme researcher who disappears under mysterious circumstances. Acme has a humorous history, alluded to offhand, beginning as a cartoon anvil factory. While I also love Foghorn Leghorn and wasn’t thrilled to see him as the villain, he was pitch-perfect for it, a bluff good ol’ boy whose folksiness conceals cutthroat pragmatism. There are even some legal jokes, like a quick reference to Sylvester v Gonzalez on the legal standing of “predator” as a profession. And of the many, many tiny jokes one could point out, I especially liked the image Kevin and Wile E’s motel uses on their “No Pets” sign.

Coyote vs Acme is full of slapstick gags, visual puns, familiar character beats, and—most importantly—it’s clever and funny from beginning to end. That’s the least you can ask for from something claiming the Looney Tunes name, but it also has some thematic depth and a message about being willing to fail that both feels natural to the material and is genuinely thoughtful. I certainly benefited from it. Wile E has always been my favorite for a reason.

And, finally, it’s a genuine family movie. My in-laws took Sarah and me and all five kids to the movie on Labor Day and everyone—from our three-year old twins to my in-laws—laughed and enjoyed themselves the entire time. (One of our twins’ favorite moment: “When the big ball destroyed the car.” Watch and see.) The crazy backstory behind the film’s belated release is relatively well-known by now. I’m thankful it finally made it to theatres, as it’s the best time I’ve had at the movies in a long time, possibly years.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

Jim Corbett was born and raised in colonial India and worked as an official for a British railway in the subcontinent for twenty years. He was a keen outdoorsman and hunter but not a professional. Despite this, in 1907, when he was in his early thirties, he was asked to travel to Kumaon in northern India to kill a man-eating tiger. The tiger had originally come from Nepal, where it learned to hunt humans, but its depredations had grown so severe that it was driven out of the area and into India by a mass “beat,” with hundreds of beaters walking in line abreast through the forests and fields to flush the tiger and run it out.

This, Corbett’s first man-eater, was the Champawat tiger, and by the time he arrived in northern India, stalked, and shot it, the tiger had killed and eaten over four hundred people.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, published in 1944, tells this and several other hair-raising stories spanning almost thirty years, but Corbett, in a sign of his priorities and character, begins the book with an explanation of why tigers become man-eaters. Tigers and leopards do not normally eat people, Corbett tells the reader. They avoid humans. If a tiger begins eating people it has been driven to do so because of age, injury, or disability—something that turns it from hunting its usual prey in its usual style to softer targets. If your picture of the man-eater is Disney’s svelte and powerful Shere Khan, as mine at least partly was, remember that the Shere Khan of Kipling’s book is lame in one leg.

The Champawat tiger, he discovers, was an ageing tigress with two broken canine teeth. Another had lost an eye to a porcupine and had dozens of quills in the muscles and pad of one of its forelegs. Another was an old, slow tigress with a cub to feed.

Corbett begins with that long note on what causes tigers and leopards to eat humans and the book only gets more interesting from there. Though never laying out in point-by-point detail what signs he’s looking for as he stalks a tiger and examines its tracks, one picks up a lot from each story. In addition to the drama of the hunt—near misses, near-fatal surprises, and the suspense of searching, planning, and lying in wait—each story is an education. The age, sex, and size of the tigers matter as well as the local environment and what the local people do. Many victims are snatched from fields where they’re cutting grass or harvesting wheat. Others are taken while gathering firewood or cutting down trees. Each story is different and each, even if they have the same outcome, follow surprising trajectories.

But it’s almost certainly the drama that will lead one to pick up a book like this, and Corbett delivers. In perhaps the most thrilling hunt Corbett stumbles upon the man-eater he’s hunting on a rocky forested hillside, half-turned, with only one hand on his rifle and the tiger lying mere feet away. His coolness, experience, and skill are what save him, though I don’t want to give away how.

I’ve already mentioned Corbett’s character, and that’s an important part of the story and what it is like to read Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Corbett is no Hollywood stereotype of the big game hunter. From the start, hunting the Champawat tiger in his early thirties, Corbett seeks no reward and asks the government to cancel bounties placed on the man-eater. He respects the locals, knows their languages and customs, and singles many of them out for their bravery under the circumstances. One especially vivid example is a woman who, while cutting grass with her sister, saw a tiger attack and drag her sister away. Rather than run, she pursued the tiger and attacked it with her sickle. It was too late for her sister, but Corbett admired her guts and made it a point to speak to her when he arrived and to show her the tiger’s carcass before he left.

Corbett is also no braggart. Though exceptionally skilled he freely admits to mistakes—including at least one that, he owns with open regret, allowed a tiger to escape and kill more people—and tells plenty of stories about missed or botched shots and errors of judgment. Even when he records the dimensions of his quarry after a successful hunt he notes that the figures are worthless as they cannot be corroborated. His self-effacing manner also allows the book to be funny on occasion, as in one episode in which he takes multiple shots at a tiger that leaves and returns several times with no apparent effect, only to discover that he has shot at multiple tigers and killed two.

Another important aspect of Corbett’s character, and one that makes the book especially refreshing to read, is his dispassionate account of the animals he hunts. Whether tigers, leopards, or—in one outlier chapter—fish, Corbett describes them without anthropomorphism. This attitude conveys a respect for the animals and a sympathy that stops well short of sentimentality. Once a tiger has taken to man-eating, it must be killed, but Corbett does not approach his job as a game and the only satisfaction he takes in it is ridding the people of Kumaon of a deadly menace.

And Corbett never loses sight of that menace. He never ignores or downplays the human toll of the tigers’ attacks and narrates the killing and eating of dozens of people with neither coldness nor showy emotionalism. Sons, daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, husbands, and fathers are killed, and Corbett makes it clear that these are serious and painful losses. The story of one man, a veteran of an Indian regiment in the British army whose only son is killed just after enlisting, is especially powerful.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon mostly focuses on the stories of big cats Corbett was commissioned to kill, but one chapter concerns a trophy hunt for a huge, magnificent male tiger known as the Bachelor of Powalgarh, another—mentioned above—is about fishing, and the final short chapter is about Corbett’s late-life interest in photographing and filming tigers. (Here’s a sample of his footage.) Never concerned about glory or trophies, Corbett was a conservationist who wanted the best for both man and animal. While never blaming humanity, he points out that many man-eaters were made by careless hunting—taking a shot at a tiger and not finishing it off or overhunting a tiger’s normal prey. Fittingly, India’s first national park was named after him and, thanks to conservation efforts, now has the densest population of wild tigers in the world.

“[H]aving lived most of my life in the jungle,” Corbett writes near the end, “I have not the ability to paint word-pictures.” On the contrary. Corbett’s stories are a testimony both to simple, strong, unaffected writing and to a life well-lived. I’m not sure where I first heard of Man-Eaters of Kumaon, but I’m glad I did. While I expected it to be interesting, to my great surprise it is one of the most interesting and dramatic books I’ve come across in years. I highly recommend it if you need something to shake up your reading.

Vincent Can’t Sleep

I ran across VIncent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky at the library two years ago and checked it out to read to my kids. It simply but movingly tells the story of Van Gogh’s lifetime struggle with insomnia, hints at his broader problems with mental health, and suggests the role these played in his unique work. I enjoyed it, the kids enjoyed it, and we returned it to the library.

Two things have happened since then that have deepened my appreciation of the book, though. First, shortly after first reading Vincent Can’t Sleep to the kids I read Russ Ramsey’s Rembrandt is in the Wind, which includes a chapter on Van Gogh and his difficulties, and the followup, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, which is very specifically about pain and hardship in the making of art. Both made me think more seriously about Van Gogh’s life and work and especially his suffering.

Second, as I’ve mentioned before, early this year I got plumb worn out. I was tired and depressed and—the worst of my symptoms—I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had trouble sleeping before and even worked it into one of my novels, but this year I had real insomnia.

I’m thankful to say I’m much better—and perhaps I can tell the whole story of this bad winter and spring someday—but revisiting Vincent Can’t Sleep this week I had a much deeper understanding of the story it tells and, as moved as I was the first time, it meant even more to me.

The author, Barb Rosenstock, begins with Vincent’s childhood in Zundert, where, in the attic room he shares with his devoted younger brother Theo, he often struggles to sleep. He wanders at night, once going on a long midnight walk that inadvertently takes him across the border into Belgium. The night sky comforts him in ways daytime human company cannot. The story follows him to boarding school and his first job in his uncle’s art gallery. He is lonely, creative, and volatile. Because he scares his uncle’s customers he tries his hand at other work before settling into the life of a drifting artist.

Art helps him confront his sleeplessness. In a beautiful illustration of an adult Vincent staring into the sky above his Café Terrace at Night in Arles, Rosenstock tells us that “He discovers that darkness is not plain black.”

On the next page, Vincent lies in bed, “shut tight in a hospital,” the monastery asylum where he was confined for a year. This could be the darkest moment of the story, and yet it is here that Vincent, inspired by the view from his window and his lifetime of looking at the night sky, paints his most famous painting. Completing it, he can finally—in the book’s beautiful final image—rest, absorbed into and at one with the night sky.

The story is good but the glory of the book, what makes the story work so powerfully, is the art by Harry Potter illustrator Mary GrandPré. She successfully evokes Van Gogh’s style throughout, recreating some of his most famous landscapes as part of the storybook settings and giving cameos to other Van Gogh paintings in the background. It’s a beautiful book on every level.

But it’s that final image, the restless man at peace, having created something from his unrest, that moves me so much now. At the worst moment of this spring I couldn’t write—I could think of nothing to write and couldn’t muster the will to try. Then, slowly, writing became the best way to handle what I was feeling. Even dashing off a blog post here—“all this nothing,” in the words of You’ve Got Mail, another melancholy story, that has meant more than “so many somethings”—eased my mind. There were many nights through the spring when what made me sleep best was not meds or valerian root tea or the tight control I began exercising over caffeine and screentime, but simply having written.

I am no Van Gogh, but Vincent Can’t Sleep, in its simple way, has helped me understand him and my own life better, and to even more deeply appreciate God’s gift of creativity and how it can heal. Darkness is not plain black.

I, Ripper

The scene of the crime in Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” murders

I’ll begin this review with a caution—Stephen Hunter’s I, Ripper is thrilling entertainment but not for the faint of heart. Hunter himself noted, at a booksigning at the time of the book’s release in 2015, that he was concerned about the novel’s violence when he submitted the first chapters to his editor. Her response: “Why don’t you move the violence to the front and really start the book off with a bang?”

He did, and it does. Be warned.

Jack the Ripper killed five women—that we are certain of—in the fall of 1888. All of the victims were occasional or professional prostitutes and most of them were alcoholics who spent the money they earned from their johns—thruppence at a time—on gin and, occasionally, one night in a rented bed in a dosshouse. Whitechapel teemed with such as well as recent immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe—the latter of which included lots of Jews, political radicals, and Jewish political radicals, all on the run from Tsarist persecution—and a constantly changing mob of sailors and industrial workers. The district’s dense network of shops and rowhouses and unlighted maze of small streets and alleys hummed with activity even during the night, as workers walked to or from late shifts at slaughterhouses and factories and the docks and upper class types went slumming in the pubs or, perhaps, looking for a “judy.”

From the first page, in which Jack, as yet unnamed but in his own voice—a found diary—cuts the throat of his first victim, Hunter evokes the jungly tumult and grime of this world brilliantly. I, Ripper’s authentic atmosphere is one of its greatest strengths.

Another is its structure. Telling the story in alternating chapters of Jack’s diary and a 1912 memoir by Jeb, an Irish reporter working under a penname for the Star, a London tabloid, Hunter pits the two against each other as initially unwitting foes. Jack, roaming Whitechapel and brutalizing the lone prostitutes, is driven by some unexplained mission. Jeb, ambitious and cold by his own admission, breaks crucial news about the first murders and starts to make a name for himself.

Jack, not insane but monstrous, is mysterious only in the sense that we hope to learn who he is and why he is doing this. Jeb is a more complicated creature. He realizes he is taking advantage of Jack’s crimes—and his mutilated victims—to build up his own reputation as a writer but genuinely believes in reporting the facts and castigates himself when lured into helping fake the letter that coins the killer’s name. A fellow reporter on the Star, an American, routinely speculates in print and fixates on anti-Semitic theories early on in the crime spree. Jeb worries that his reporting may cause vigilantism or—if his colleague has his way—pogroms.

Just as he develops qualms about his work, Jeb meets Professor Dare. A linguist and an advocate of what might later be called psychological conditioning, Dare offers to share his theory about Jack with Jeb—the killer is dyslexic, and has experience in the remote reaches of Afghanistan, where the women of the tribes disembowel prisoners in exactly the manner Jack does. Find a man matching this description—they decide to call it a “profile”—and they find Jack.

Added to his ambition and his unquiet desire to report accurately and responsibly, Jeb takes on detective work. This will place him on a path to a final collision with Jack the Ripper himself.

I don’t think I can reveal more without giving away too much. I, Ripper’s fictional plot, elegantly interlaced in the imagined diary of Jack and the memoir of Jeb—who turns out to be a real person with a famous name that I don’t want to give away—is solidly constructed and resolves in several good twists, some with surprisingly literary implications. It is one of this grim, gory book’s great enjoyments.

But only one. Another is Hunter’s imagining of the rumbustious world of London journalism. The former movie critic for the Washington Post, his Star newsroom and its combination of jocularity and callousness feels utterly real. A standout chapter is that in which Jeb, goaded into it by his editor and a colleague, forges the first and most famous Jack the Ripper letter. The calculated poetry of the letter and the group effort to get it notoriety is entertaining, convincing—the “Dear Boss” letter has been suspected of fakery since it appeared, but I had never considered its artistic and linguistic character before—and revealing.

“Newspapers,” Jack muses about halfway through. “What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?”

That’s the fictional side of I, Ripper. Another pleasure of the book is Hunter’s attention to the actual facts of the Jack the Ripper case. I’ve mentioned his vivid recreation of the grungy, bestial world of Whitechapel—which is not quite on the same level of depravity as a James Ellroy novel but might still leave you wanting to take a shower—but the crimes, the crime scenes, the victims, and many of the other real people involved are painstakingly imagined without the stiff, lifeless effect of some similarly detailed historical novels. The historical figures have personality, living and breathing as convincingly as the fictional characters.

This is especially important in the case of the victims. Hunter doesn’t soft-pedal their lifestyles or recast them as somehow noble, and yet, though staggering drunk, winkingly offering mortal sin to the passerby, or both at the same time, they feel like real people and worthy of sympathy. Their encounters with Jack evoke dread and pity and his treatment of them as objects, mere matter to be parted and manipulated for his own ends, seems more monstrous as a result.

Hunter committed himself to changing as few known historical details as possible, working around the truth rather than altering it for his fiction. In an afterword, he notes four minute details he tweaked, only two of which actually relate directly to Jack’s actions. An impressive achievement. And if you know the case well, he includes enough detail to pinpoint where his fictional story is weaving into the truth. For example, as Jack approaches Elizabeth Stride, the Swedish-born third victim, he passes a man wearing a deerstalker cap. This was a real man seen in conversation with Stride by the penultimate witness to see her alive, a police constable. This places Jack’s assault in time and in relation to other witnesses like Israel Schwartz, who, based on Hunter’s fictional reconstruction of events, did not actually see Jack.

Real life informs the fiction, which convincingly creates an alternative explanation for the known facts. This is a tricky bit of business for a novelist to pull off, and Hunter does it effortlessly—and, for the reader who doesn’t know their Jack the Ripper lore, invisibly and unobtrusively. His fictional solution, rooted as it is in the facts, offers enjoyable resolution to a real life mystery.

If I have any complaints whatsoever about I, Ripper they are minor: a handful of anachronisms (Belloc’s famous line about the Maxim gun, from 1898, is paraphrased by Jack ten years too early) and some tonal convergence of Jack’s diary and Jeb’s memoir that led me to suspect, briefly, that Jeb would turn out to be Jack (he doesn’t; Hunter is much better than that). I suspected the ultimate culprit early—it’s a whodunnit, or maybe who’s-doing-it, after all—but Hunter successfully obscures, misleads, and distracts so that the final reveal was still satisfying.

Finally—an odd complaint—I, Ripper is simply too good. I don’t think I can recommend it to just anyone. This is a gripping, disturbing thriller and a masterpiece of historical fiction, and Hunter’s success in conveying Jack’s horror is what makes it difficult to recommend. But if you’re interested in the case, enjoy a well-constructed crime and suspense novel, and think you can handle a few months in Whitechapel and the company of one of the worst people who ever lived, you should definitely check it out.

Nolan’s Odyssey

I dashed off some initial thoughts on the first teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey just before Christmas. I concluded with this: “Even from this teaser it’s clear that [Nolan has] put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.”

This is more or less exactly what I thought of the film, which I finally saw this Wednesday. Homer’s power and that “despite” both feature strongly in my opinion.

I won’t bother to summarize the story. Everyone knows a little bit of it and if you’re here, bothering to read this, you probably know it even better than most.

To begin with what I liked, The Odyssey is hugely entertaining. That’s the basic standard a good movie must meet, and as a movie The Odyssey is astonishing. (Its quality as an adaptation of a great work of literature is a separate question, which we’ll return to.) The film is technically accomplished, the IMAX cinematography and the staging of the many action scenes expertly done, and the special effects seamless. The vast, cast-of-thousands scale of sequences like the Fall of Troy is overwhelming in the best sense. And for all his practical effects street cred, Nolan wisely used CGI in a number of appropriate places, a lesson seemingly learned from the underwhelming attempt to mimic the atomic bomb with a practical gasoline explosion in Oppenheimer. And I’ll go ahead and say here that I think The Odyssey is a much better movie than that one.

The film’s pacing is strong but not flawless. I’ve heard a lot of people say the movie didn’t feel three hours long. That wasn’t my experience—it actually felt enormously long to me, but in a way that conveyed the scope of the story rather than simply being boring. The Odyssey’s strongest sections are, unsurprisingly, those depicting Odysseus’s wanderings. The cyclops scene is a small masterpiece, tense, terrifying, and suspenseful, and makes the familiar one-eyed giant strange and scary again. Likewise the passage between Scylla and Charybdis and, in an episode from the poem I always forget about, the monstrous Laestrygonians, depicted here as plate-armored giants who can turn the very trees against intruders. The most disturbing scene in the movie is certainly that involving Circe, whose transformation of Odysseus’s men using half-glimpsed body horror is both frightening and unspeakably gross.

My favorite sequences were certainly Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops and his journey to Hades to speak to the shade of Tiresias. In mood, atmosphere, and technical execution they were flawless and totally absorbing. These sequences were also allowed to breathe, lingering and building tension in a way some others, though exciting, were not.

Another favorite, coming at the climax, is Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors. Though not the film’s best action scene, it draws together many expertly prepared strands of the story—Odysseus’s bow, Antinous’s treachery, Telemachus’s arc toward manhood, and the utter loathsomeness of the suitors—in a satisfying explosion of violence. When Odysseus, having revealed himself to the crowd gathered in his palace by stringing his bow and shooting through the twelve axes, puts his next arrow into the throat of the first suitor to die, the audience at my showing clapped and cheered.

This climactic resolution is a good example of the dimension is which Nolan has most successfully adapted the Odyssey to the conventions of film—structure and resolution. The setups and payoffs necessary for a film to make sense and satisfy as a narrative are well done, likely his best work in this regard since The Prestige.

But easily the best aspect of Nolan’s Odyssey is just how much of the original is in here. It’s impressive for a movie that, though long, still comes in under three hours. While in most cases deviating from the plot of ancient literature in adaptation is accepted as necessary, Nolan hews very close, including things left out of other adaptations (the Laestrygonians, the sirens, Odysseus’s dog Argos) and leaving out little. Some of these omissions, like Nausicaa and the Phaiakians and the almost total absence of the gods, require reshuffling of other plot elements. We’ll return to this, but as an adaptation Nolan has chosen mostly wisely and with attention to narrative concision without sacrificing much.

As for The Odyssey’s flaws: with a couple exceptions I was unimpressed with the acting. Tom Holland had a welcome earnestness as Telemachus but felt stiff much of the time, and Zendaya performs Athena like a slightly less angry version of Chani in Dune, all frowns and glares. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were good in their roles as written by Nolan, but—again, a point we’ll return to—the cunning and wiliness of this eminently well-matched couple was missing. Damon’s Odysseus has blunt-force persistence but not much in the way of guile, and he lacks the glory-seeking and boastfulness that attract the destructive attention of Poseidon. Homer’s Odysseus had charisma. Damon’s is dogged, but one is not left wondering why his men would rebel against his authority.

The two exceptions—scene-stealers both—are John Leguizamo as Eumaeus and Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous. These two elevate the film, and Pattinson, who imbues Antinous with an awful oleaginous magnetism, is largely responsible for how satisfying Odysseus’s slaughter is.

The material culture I was so uncertain about in my trailer reaction didn’t end up bothering me much. Yes, the armor is ridiculous fantasy Greek armor (that also doesn’t seem to stop or turn aside any weapons whatsoever), and yes, the ships are all wrong (they are literal Viking ships, the largest of which I got to look at in Mystic, Connecticut some years ago). The film’s approach to material culture is to shrug and say “whatever,” which makes it no different from any of the other Odyssey or Trojan War epics made since the silent era. I wish we had gotten a movie more firmly rooted in the Bronze Age of Odysseus, but we didn’t and that’s fine.

Which raises the dread spectre of the controversies surrounding Nolan’s Odyssey, including “historical accuracy.” It is not, as some internet types congratulate themselves for believing, ridiculous to want the film’s ships, sets, and costumes to reflect either the world of the Trojan War or the world Homer may have imagined in his own context. Just because Homer’s Odyssey is fiction—at least, that’s how we think of it—doesn’t mean its original context is valueless.

That’s not the path Nolan chose, unfortunately, but it is also true that the Nolanesque look he decided on isn’t inherently wrong, either. It’s worth judging on its own merits, and I think his brutalist matte black tactical imagination is somewhat self-limiting—a theme to which we’ll return. The look of The Odyssey is fine, but not a surprise. A surprise, whether rigorously historically sourced or even more archly fantastical, like 300, would have been nice.

However, Nolan himself undermines the argument that accuracy of whatever kind doesn’t matter by including numerous mentions of the Sea Peoples, mysterious raiders from the central and western Mediterranean who relentlessly attacked the east and brought on the Bronze Age Collapse. This is an unnecessary gesture toward real historical context that doesn’t mesh with the fantastical elements and doesn’t work historically—Homer’s characters wouldn’t have been aware of impending civilizational collapse and Homer himself didn’t include it because, though he lived in its long aftermath, he didn’t know about it. A strange choice but one clearly made for thematic reasons.

As for the casting controversies that generated a seriously annoying amount of internet bloviation: they proved a massive nothingburger. I’ll focus on Helen of Troy here. On one hand, as Homer translator Daniel Mendelsohn put it recently in a Rest is History Club episode, “it’s a little disingenuous to assume that Nolan wasn’t being consciously provocative in his choice” of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen. It’s not ridiculous—much less racist—to notice. On the other hand, Helen appears only briefly, and I didn’t find her presence jarring at all given what I’ve already said about the film’s historically unmoored approach. Something else bothered me much more.

The worst flaw of Nolan’s Odyssey reminded me of the recent adaptations The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front. In both of those cases, I wrote much longer than normal reviews—as here—trying to strike a balance between appreciating the filmmaking and decrying the vandalism of the originals. The Odyssey is a much better movie than either of those and more faithfully presents the events and even the structure of the original, but it still fails to understand and present the original’s worldview.

In place of the deep concern with piety and hospitality in Homer’s poem, something almost every incident from the cyclops and Laestrygonians (uncivilized bad host, civilized bad hosts) to the Phaiakians (the ideal of civilized good hosts) illustrates, Nolan’s film foregrounds what he calls “Zeus’s law,” a watered down form of hospitality that amounts to the Golden Rule—almost directly quoted at one point—and a strange nonviolence. Despite what the suitors have spent years doing to Odysseus’s wife, son, servants, and palace, Odysseus for some reason can’t retaliate without going into exile. (Exiled by whom? I saw someone ask online. Is he not the king?) One of the few major departures from Homer is the film’s ending, in which Odysseus and Penelope, rather than restoring Ithaca through Athena’s help, leave, sailing west as in Dante and, later, Tennyson, but for twenty-first century reasons.

This strange, confused theme grows out of the film’s larger point about war and violence and the destruction of civilization. This is where the Sea Peoples come in—at the end, Penelope explicitly connects their threat with the Greek victory in the Trojan War. And for Odysseus himself, this is manifested in his guilt and trauma over the sack of Troy. Nolan’s Odyssey is about processing trauma and atoning for sin.

This leads to a running undercurrent of resentment. Antinous’s wickedness stems from his resentment of Odysseus and Telemachus much more than greed, Circe vents years, possibly centuries of resentment on Odysseus when thwarted, Sinon, in Hades, grouses at Odysseus for leaving him ignorant of his designs, and everyone resents Agamemnon. The biggest problem with Nyong’o’s Helen isn’t Nyong’o, it’s the seething resentment at being returned to Menelaus that Nolan has imparted to her.

This is not unique to this film, of course. I’m struck that in updating or making relevant an old story, the go-to modern method is to import and emphasis grudges and resentments. This reveals more about us than Homer, certainly.

Like Nolan’s matte black and concrete visual style, all of this is both ultramodern and—worse—uninteresting.

It’s strange, but The Odyssey makes the same mistake here as the The Return, which squandered a brilliant performance by Ralph Fiennes—whose Odysseus had obvious cunning—in simplifying and deconstructing the story. The Odyssey is a far better movie than The Return, but its psychologizing and therapeutic themes have the same flattening effect, a fact noted by no less a light than Emily Wilson, whose iambic pentameter translation I would not recommend but has been unfairly blamed for what a lot of online rage-baiters perceive as Nolan’s failings. Per Wilson: “The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrized way—and needs drugs to do so!” Fuss about helmets, ships, and casting all you like—this is the real, most serious departure from Homer.

Do we need another PTSD therapy fable? Is there not something in the alien world Homer’s imagination has kept alive for 2700 years that speaks to us without thinking we have to modernize it? Homer is brilliant on his own—dramatic, funny, terrifying, suspenseful, and moving by turns. It’s a fool’s errand to think one can improve him by making him relevant.

So this is not Homer’s Odyssey; it’s Nolan’s, for better and for worse. It’s riveting entertainment on a massive scale and worth seeing just for that. It also succeeds better than any other film version at covering most of the epic’s plot and events. But its worldview is not the original’s, and what it substitutes—or, rather, clumsily adds onto—is predictable and unsatisfying.

And yet, whatever misgivings one might have about Nolan’s imprint on the story, he was smart enough to get as much of Homer into the film as he could, and that’s the film’s saving grace. As I had hoped back in December, Homer’s power is much greater than any limitation or miscalculation on Nolan’s part, and so The Odyssey excites and moves precisely where it’s truest to the poet.