UFO

I’m going to start this review in an odd place—with online criticism. As I read Garrett Graff’s UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There I looked through the one- and two-star reviews on Goodreads and saw lots of complaints that UFO doesn’t cover a specific sighting or incident, or doesn’t cover it in enough detail, or leaves out a reader’s favorite “researcher” (or skeptic), or—at the extreme end—that Graff is in the pocket of the CIA and his book is a psyop.

Leaving that last tinfoil hat line of criticism aside, the other disappointed or angry reviewers missed a crucial detail about a book like UFO: it is a survey.

When I introduce my courses at the beginning of every semester—I’m set to repeat this speech bright and early Wednesday morning—I explain what I mean by “survey” by talking about hiking back home. From the top of a mountain, as one surveys the view, one does not examine every tree, climb every peak, or dip into every hollow, one simply takes in a literal overview. Surveying the view provides context. This, in a metaphorical sense, is what makes a class like my Western Civ I or US History II or a book like Graff’s UFO useful—it gives an overall shape to the thicket of specifics in which it is easy to get lost.

From saucers to Tic Tacs

Graff narrates the history of UFO sightings and the many attempts to research and understand them from the immediate post-war world of the mid-1940s through the recent past. UFOs and aliens—two topics that we tend to forget don’t necessarily overlap—have become such an archetypal staple of our culture that we tend to forget how different the world was when they emerged.

Beginning with the Roswell incident in 1947, Graff tells the story through three major interweaving narrative threads. First are major incidents that shaped and directed the UFO phenomenon, including the initial Arnold sightings; the Mantell incident, in which a P-51 pilot crashed in pursuit of a high-altitude object; the Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, New Mexico; the Betty and Barney Hill and Pascagoula abductions; the Phoenix lights; and the Flying Tic Tac. The second thread, the one most clearly indicated in the book’s subtitle, consists of the various often halfhearted attempts by the US military and federal government to assess and understand UFOs.

The last thread of the story, interweaving with the previous two, consists of the researchers, a wide and colorful cast including Project Blue Book’s J Allen Hynek, celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, Jacques Vallée, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, and a host of enthusiasts and cranks and shysters who sought to profit from the various phases of the UFO craze. Graff gives good attention to the rifts between these individuals and groups, especially those who, like Hynek, sought a genuinely scientific approach and viewed the feel-good peacenik messaging of people like George Adamski’s “contactees” as a distraction from real research and who was, in his turn, looked down upon by figures like Sagan.

These three aspects—the institutional, the personal, and the incidents themselves—and the decades-long perspective Graff offers are especially helpful in seeing how the phenomenon unfolded, first as flying saucers, then as UFOs, and recently as UAPs. The postwar context also helps explain the US military’s initial keen interest and later apathy. Once the military had determined UFOs were not Soviet weaponry or an intergalactic threat, they lost interest and ceded the field to the enthusiasts—who had been itching to take control anyway.

The historical perspective the book offers also demonstrates clearly how the mythology evolved and just how much time it had to do so. Hynek and the Air Force’s investigations went on in fits and starts and the long, slow process of declassification of projects like Mogul, the nuclear-monitoring balloons responsible for some early sighting and the Roswell debris, also fed speculation. Notably, Roswell was forgotten until its reemergence in the lore during the 1980s, when it was recontextualized as an important event—with lots of suspicious new testimonial—by UFO hobbyists.

Surprises and sympathies

That point about mythology brings me to the two surprises UFO gave me. First, early in the book, Graff quotes Carl Jung, who lived long enough to see flying saucer enthusiasm through its earliest phases and who viewed the mania—whatever the reality behind it—as the genesis in real time of a new world mythology.

This insight may not explain the entire phenomenon but is clearly correct. Viewed in chronological order, without the cross-pollination of details from different stories and the projection of later elements of the mythology backward onto earlier parts,* it is easy to see the UFO phenomenon evolving and growing in intensity and complexity—from sightings to encounters to abductions to speculation about government treaties with aliens and underground bases full of reverse-engineered alien tech. UFOs, which are ambiguous enough to mean different things to almost everyone, provide a decentralized, do-it-yourself mythology for an age of disenchantment and materialistic science.**

The second great surprise for me stems directly from the narrative shape UFO’s survey offers, and that is the sympathies I developed for different groups of researchers. UFO includes a number of cads and frauds, the kind of “flying saucer people” Charles Portis’s Gringos so sharply parodies, but beyond these low-hanging fruit are two different groups of genuine scientists who engaged with the UFO phenomenon.

The first include people like Hynek, who worked for decades with the Air Force and then on his own to understand what people were seeing and—increasingly from the early 1960s—encountering and even boarding. Men like Hynek did actual field work—when they had the funding and the manpower, anyway—visiting sites, talking to witnesses, and making a good-faith effort to sort genuine unidentified objects from those that had clear this-worldly causes. Further, they were open-minded enough to change their minds and acknowledge mistakes, which became a key part of Hynek’s story specifically.

Meanwhile, the second group are those like Carl Sagan, who dabbled in UFO research before contenting themselves with ivory tower activities—gazing deep into the navel of the Fermi paradox, fussing with the arbitrary numbers in the Drake Equation, hypothesizing about Dyson spheres as a measure of civilizational progress, fretting over the best ways to encode stick figures in signals to be transmitted to distant stars, opining on the insignificance of earth and its human inhabitants, begging for more and more taxpayer money, and occasionally abandoning spouses. For all their posture of superiority to men like Hynek, it was the latter who seemed to have his feet more firmly planted in the real world, who most directly engaged with the real, particular mysteries of the phenomenon. Not all UFO researchers are created equal.

UFO therefore does what it sets out to do: provide an overview of the history of UFO sightings and abduction stories from the perspective of researchers, both military- and government-affiliated and private enthusiasts. The book covers about eighty years of an complex and controversial topic in just over 400 pages and even manages to work in lots of odd side stories—the men in black, UFO cultists, the Majestic 12 documents, and the attitudes of various presidents to UFOs among them. Graff simplifies and excludes of necessity, but what he includes is very good, and he proves remarkably evenhanded in his treatment of ambiguous evidence.

Caveats

That said, UFO does have flaws.

The first I’d point out is a matter of emphasis. Given that Graff’s focus on the noteworthy “unexplained” cases from the early Air Force investigations, it is easy to miss that the overwhelming majority of UFO reports were and are “explained”: misidentifications, panics, and fakes. The noise-to-signal ratio is lopsidedly noise. This fact is present in UFO, between the lines—the wearying quality of UFO investigation, at least for a sincere, scientific mind, comes through clearly—but could have used closer attention.

Second, UFO has numerous puzzling footnotes, many of which have little to do with the passage they annotate. Others seem to be there to take potshots at figures like J Edgar Hoover or to work in information Graff presumably turned up for his previous book on Watergate. Most of them could be cut.

A third flaw is thematic. Graff makes much of the openness of non-Western religions and Mormons like Harry Reid to life on “other worlds.” He implies more than once that scientific resistance to extraterrestrial life stems, directly or indirectly, from Christianity, which in his telling limits intelligent life to earth and would be threatened by its existence elsewhere. This is a myth reinforced by the pronouncements of the irreligious. Here, contra that idea, are the evangelical Michael Heiser and Catholic Jimmy Akin on actual Christian approaches to life on other planets. This is a minor point but an annoying one.

The fourth flaw has more to do with the subject itself. As UFO folklore spread and evolved it grew enormous. A survey like this must be selective, and Graff mostly selects well. But the later chapters, covering the 1980s to the present, felt rushed compared to the earlier sections, and it is here that there is some merit to accusations that Graff has omitted crucial material. The most obvious example is Bob Lazar, a man I take to be a fraud but whose testimony has had a death grip on UFO enthusiasts for decades. He is not even mentioned. Given Lazar’s purported background at Area 51, this material is firmly within the book’s subject area and could have been useful in conveying how the phenomenon has evolved in the recent past, especially considering how often he comes up in UFO discussions now. Again, not everything can—or should—make it into a book like this, but bringing in Lazar and emphasizing the increasing influence of Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronauts theories, among other recent aspects of the movement, could have strengthened the later passages of the narrative.

The final flaw with UFO is something I rarely bring up, but that is presentation. UFO has the most typos, misspellings, and syntactical mistakes of any professionally published book I’ve ever read. Every chapter has multiple errors. I don’t take this to be Graff’s fault, but it’s so pervasive it’s worth mentioning. If Graff ever produces a second edition, I hope the publisher will take more care over this.

Conclusion

Even with those quibbles in mind, UFO is a timely, useful, and enjoyable book, covering a vast amount of material from numerous perspectives. With new if inconsequential UFO revelations every year and more and more rampant speculation, especially in the podcasting world, where the last eighty years of material can frantically crossbreed newer and more powerful conspiracy theories, having a survey view of how this all began should prove helpful to anyone interested in the topic. UFO may not cover everything, but it offers a detailed and nuanced look at the people and events that gave rise to our present obsessions with the little green men.

* “Greys,” for example, which come into the mythology relatively late with later versions of Betty and Barney Hill’s story before being heavily popularized by Whitley Strieber (whom Graff writes about) in the 1980s, are often inserted into modern visual interpretations of earlier incidents like the Eagle River “pancakes from outer space” incident (which Graff does not include), in which a Wisconsin farmer encountered the occupants of a UFO and afterward described them in entirely humanoid terms. Later depictions frequently substitute greys for what he described.

** As I have theorized here recently, UFOs and aliens offer the thrill of the gothic within non-threatening materialistic modern parameters.

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.

Further notes on aliens and the gothic

A few weeks ago when I mulled over the taxonomy of UFO believers as laid out in a recent New Atlantis essay, I mentioned my pet theory that aliens had worked their way into a cranny in the cultural imagination formerly occupied by the gothic. I wrote:

Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

(I first propounded this theory a few months ago when I volunteered, very early one morning, to help my wife prepare bottles and medicine for the twins. She had not had her coffee yet and is grateful for your readership.)

I’m speaking very generally, of course, but a few of the specific, superficial things that suggest a parallel between the stories emerging from the gothic and the UFO phenomenon include:

• Remote, lonely locations

• Nighttime—ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and greys all apparently being nocturnal

• Individuals or, perhaps, a small, intimate group being targeted

• A sense that the otherworldly is fixated on or preying upon specific people

• A psychological arc that grows from uneasiness to dread and often ends in paralyzing terror

• Inexplicable phenomena and occult powers (occult in the sense of hidden or unknown)

• Relatedly, unpredictable comings and goings

• Ambiguous and minimal physical evidence

I could probably come up with a longer list, but these immediately suggest themselves. Again, all of the above are superficial general parallels and there are plenty of exceptions—about which more below—but if you were to construct either a gothic or alien story, it would probably have most or all of those traits. But there are deeper and more important qualities that both have in common:

• Their intrusive quality, the way the uncanny or extraterrestrial is perceived as breaking in upon normal life from somewhere else

• Their subsequent disruptive effect upon the normal

• The dense secrecy surrounding them

This gets us really close to the semi-religious dimensions of both, the mysterious, scary, and disruptive being neighbors to awe.

To summarize, the alien story was able to supplant the gothic because both scratch the same itch: otherworldly, slightly or overtly scary, and with religious overtones.

Two caveats:

• UFO stories sometimes originate in heavily populated areas, the two most famous examples probably being Phoenix and Mexico City.

• UFOs don’t always appear at night. In fact, some of the most perplexing unexplained incidents occurred in broad daylight.

I think the rest of my superficial observations hold true, though: the widely-reported “Phoenix lights” were seen at night and Lonnie Zamora and Kenneth Arnold, to pick two daytime incidents, were individuals in out-of-the-way places. All three of the deeper similarities remain. I’d even say that the superficial things—individuals alone in remote places at night—are probably best explained as setting the necessary mood for the intrusion of the mysterious.

Note that I’m treating all of the UFO stuff as fictional, just like the gothic. Remember that I’m mostly a “disinformation non-enjoyer,” though I do enjoy the aesthetic, atmospheric side of all of it. I think the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are sufficiently explained by terrestrial factors or simple fraud, though some—with unimpeachably honest people seeing something inexplicable, like Zamora and the others in the video linked above—remain tantalizingly unexplained.

I’m also interested in what UFOs say about culture, symptomatically. Why do these stories appeal? I think my “scratching the same itch” theory explains some of it, and yet this is where the most significant difference between the gothic and UFOs comes in:

• The gothic is historically-oriented. When intrusion and disruption occurs, it is the forgotten past intruding on the present. Hence the roles of old houses, family secrets, and medieval monsters.

• The UFO phenomenon is future-oriented. The intrusion and disruption are those of the future breaking into a less advanced past—our present. Hence the roles of laboratories and military facilities, government secrets, and monsters from outer space.

The shift from a delight in the spooky rooted in the past to a delight in the spooky giving us hints about the future is a significant one, and not easily summarized here. Food for thought.

Summer reading 2024

Though I’m thankful to say that, compared to where I was at the end of the spring, I’ve wrapped up the summer and begun the fall semester feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, my reading has still been unusually fiction-heavy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—all work and no play, after all—but I do mean to restore some balance. I look forward to it.

“Summer,” for the purposes of this post, runs from approximately the first week or two of summer classes to today, Labor Day. Since there’s a lot more fiction and non-fiction this time around, I mean to lead off with the smattering of non-fiction reading that I enjoyed. And so, my favorites, presented as usual in no particular order:

Favorite non-fiction

While I only read a handful of non-fiction of any kind—history, biography, philosophy, theology, you name it—almost all of them proved worthwhile. They also make an unusually idiosyncratic list, even for me:

An Illustrated History of UFOs, by Adam Allsuch Boardman—A fun, wonderfully illustrated picture book about UFOs and all sorts of UFO-adjacent phenomena. Not deep by any means and only nominally skeptical, this book is surprisingly thorough, with infographic-style tables of dozens of different purported kinds of craft, aliens both cinematic and purportedly real, and brief accounts of some legendary incidents from Kenneth Arnold and the Roswell crash to Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction, Whitley Strieber’s interdimensional communion, and the USS Nimitz’s “flying Tic Tac.” If you grew up terrified to watch “Unsolved Mysteries” but also wouldn’t think of missing it, this should be a fun read. See here for a few sample illustrations.

Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, by Carl Trueman—A concise, sensible, and welcoming guide to some of the pitfalls of historical research and writing. Trueman is especially good on the dangers of historical theories, which naturally incline the historian to distort his evidence the better to fit the theory. There are more thorough or exhaustive books on this topic but this is the one I’d first recommend to a beginning student of history. I mentioned it prominently in my essay on historiography at Miller’s Book Review back in July.

Three Philosophies of Life, by Peter Kreeft—A short, poetic meditation on three Old Testament wisdom books: Ecclesiastes and Job, two of my favorite books of the Bible, and Song of Songs, a book that has puzzled me for years. Kreeft presents them as clear-eyed dramatizations of three worldviews, the first two of which correctly observe that life is vain and full of suffering, with the last supplying the missing element that adds meaning to vanity and redemption to pain: God’s love. An insightful and encouraging short book.

Homer and His Iliad, by Robin Lane Fox—Who was Homer and what can we know about him? Was he even a real person? And what’s so great about his greatest poem? This is a wide-ranging, deeply researched, and well-timed expert examination of the Iliad and its author, thoroughly and convincingly argued. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Lane Fox’s book is that it made me fervently want to reread the Iliad. My favorite non-fiction read of the summer. Full-length review forthcoming.

Always Going On, by Tim Powers—A short autobiographical essay with personal stories, reminiscences of Philip K Dick, nuts and bolts writing advice, aesthetic observations, and philosophical meditations drawing from Chesterton and CS Lewis, among others. An inspiring short read.

The Decline of the Novel, by Joseph Bottum—An excellent set of literary essays on the history of the novel in the English-speaking world; case studies of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Thomas Mann (German outlier), and Tom Wolfe; and a closing meditation on popular genre fiction—all of which is only marginally affected by a compellingly argued but unconvincing thesis. I can’t emphasize enough how good those four case study chapters are, though, especially the one on Dickens. Full dual review alongside Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? on the blog here.

Favorite fiction

Again, this was a fiction-heavy summer in an already fiction-heavy year, which was great for me while reading but should have made picking favorites from the long list of reads more difficult. Fortunately there were clear standouts, any of which I’d recommend:

On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers—An uncommonly rich historical fantasy set in the early years of the 18th century in the Caribbean, where the unseen forces behind the new world are still strong enough to be felt and, with the right methods, used by new arrivals from Europe. Chief among these is Jack Chandagnac, a former traveling puppeteer who has learned that a dishonest uncle has cheated him and his late father of a Jamaican fortune. After a run-in with seemingly invincible pirates, Jack is inducted into their arcane world as “Jack Shandy” and slowly begins to master their arts—and not just knot-tying and seamanship. A beautiful young woman menaced by her own deranged father, a trip to Florida and the genuinely otherworldly Fountain of Youth, ships crewed by the undead, and Blackbeard himself further complicate the story. I thoroughly enjoyed On Stranger Tides and was recommending it before I was even finished. That I read it during a trip to St Augustine, where there are plenty of little mementos of Spanish exploration and piracy, only enriched my reading.

Journey Into Fear, by Eric Ambler—An unassuming commercial traveler boards a ship in Istanbul and finds himself the target of a German assassination plot. Who is trying to kill him, why, and will he be able to make it to port quickly enough to survive? As much as I loved The Mask of Dimitrios back in the spring, Journey into Fear is leaner, tighter, and more suspenseful. A wonderfully thrilling read.

The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham—Another brilliant classic by Wyndham, an alien invasion novel in which we never meet or communicate with the aliens and the human race always feels a step behind. Genuinely thrilling and frightening. Full review on the blog here.

Mexico Set, by Len Deighton—The second installment of Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy after Berlin Game, this novel follows British agent Bernard Samson through an especially tricky mission to Mexico City and back as he tries to “enroll” a disgruntled KGB agent with ties to an important British defector. Along with some good globetrotting—including scenes in Mexico reminiscent of the world of Charles Portis’s Gringos—and a lot of tradecraft and intra-agency squabbling and backstabbing, I especially appreciated the more character-driven elements of this novel, which help make it not only a sequel but a fresh expansion of the story begun in Berlin Game. Looking forward to London Match, which I intend to get to before the end of the year.

LaBrava, by Elmore Leonard—A former Secret Service agent turned Miami photographer finds himself entangled in an elaborate blackmail scheme. The mark: a former Hollywood femme fatale, coincidentally his childhood favorite actress. The blackmailers: a Cuban exile, a Florida cracker the size of a linebacker, and an unknown puppet master. Complications: galore. Smoothly written and intricately plotted, with a vividly evoked big-city setting and some nice surprises in the second half of the book, this is almost the Platonic ideal of a Leonard crime novel, and I’d rank only Rum Punch and the incomparable Freaky Deaky above it.

Night at the Crossroads, by Georges Simenon, trans. Linda Coverdale—Two cars are stolen from French country houses at a lonely crossroads and are returned to the wrong garages. When found, one has a dead diamond smuggler behind the wheel. It’s up to an increasingly frustrated Inspector Maigret to sort through the lies and confusion and figure out what happened. An intricate short mystery that I don’t want to say much more about, as I hesitate to give anything at all away.

Epitaph for a Spy, by Eric Ambler—A stateless man spending some hard-earned cash at a Riviera hotel is, through a simple mix-up, arrested as a German spy. When the French police realize his predicament and his need to fast-track his appeal for citizenship, they decide to use him to flush out the real spy. Well-plotted, suspenseful, and surprising, with a great cast of characters. My favorite Ambler thriller so far this year. There’s also an excellent two-hour BBC radio play based on the book, which Sarah and I enjoyed on our drive back from St Augustine.

The Light of Day, by Eric Ambler—One more by Ambler, which I also enjoyed. Arthur Simpson, a half-English, half-Egyptian smalltime hood involved in everything from conducting tours without a license to smuggling pornography is forced to help a band of suspicious characters drive a car across the Turkish border. He’s caught—and forced to help Turkish military intelligence find out what the group is up to. Published later in Ambler’s long career, The Light of Day is somewhat edgier, but also funnier. It’s more of a romp than a heavy spy thriller, with wonderfully sly narration by Arthur himself. I greatly enjoyed it. Do yourself a favor, though, and read it without looking at any summaries, even the one on the back of the book. My Penguin Modern Classics paperback gave away a major plot revelation. I still enjoyed it, but have to wonder how much more I might have with that important surprise left concealed.

Runner up:

Swamp Story, by Dave Barry—A wacky crime novel involving brothers who own a worthless Everglades bait shop, potheads trying to make their break into the world of reality TV, a disgraced Miami Herald reporter turned birthday party entertainer, a crooked businessman, Russian mobsters, gold-hunting ex-cons, and a put-upon new mom who finds herself trying to survive all of them. Fun and diverting but not especially funny, which some of Barry’s other crime thrillers have managed to be despite going darker, I still enjoyed reading it.

John Buchan June

The third annual John Buchan June included five novels, a short literary biography of one of Buchan’s heroes, and Buchan’s posthumously published memoirs. Here’s a complete list with links to my reviews here on the blog:

• 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)

Of this selection, my favorite was almost certainly The Free Fishers, a vividly imagined and perfectly paced historical adventure with a nicely drawn and surprising cast of characters. “Rollicking” is the word Ursula Buchan uses to describe it in her biography. An apt word for a wonderfully fun book. A runner up would be Salute to Adventurers, an earlier, Robert Louis Stevenson-style tale set in colonial Virginia.

Rereads

I revisited fewer old favorites this season than previously, but all of those that I did were good. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming—Subject of this blog post on Fleming’s poetic attention to rhythm.

• The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman—Read aloud to the kids this time. They greatly enjoyed it.

• Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis*—Subject of this blog post about the petty indignities that Portis repeatedly inflicts on his characters, what the kids call “cringe humor” nowadays.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to more good reading this fall, including working more heavy non-fiction back into my lineup as I settle into the semester. I’m also already enjoying a couple of classic rereads: Pride and Prejudice, which I’ve been reading out loud to my wife before bed since early June, and Shadi Bartsch’s new translation of the Aeneid. And, of course, there will be fiction, and plenty of it.

I hope my summer reading provides something good for y’all to read this fall. As always, thanks for reading!

The Kraken Wakes

One of my favorite discoveries last year was John Wyndham, an English author of sci-fi thrillers and an uncommonly skillful writer. Back around Christmas I read two of his most famous novels, The Day of the Triffids, in which a worldwide medical disaster turns into an apocalypse thanks to man-eating plants, and The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a small English village slowly figures out that it is the incubator of an otherworldly species’ young. I found these so brilliantly constructed, so subtle, and so absorbing that I got several more of Wyndham’s books with a Christmas gift card or two. I finally got to one of these last month: The Kraken Wakes.

This novel begins, like the other two, with an odd minor incident that the characters only realize later is the first forewarning of catastrophe. Mike and Phyllis Watson, young newlyweds and both reporters for the EBC, an upstart rival to the BBC, are honeymooning on an Atlantic cruise when they sight strange red dots in the sky. The brightly glowing vessels, which can’t be described in any particular detail by any witness and seem to radiate heat, draw closer to both the ship and the ocean before plunging into the water and disappearing. Mike and Phyllis report it as a curiosity, a brief notice to round out the evening news.

Then more of the lights appear. And more. They come out of the sky, dive under the ocean, and no witness ever sees one come back up.

By dint of having been there for one of the first sightings, Mike accidentally becomes a sought-after commentator on the flying red lights. A friend from the Admiralty shows Mike a chart of recorded sightings, which cluster over the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. Whatever this is, it’s not random. Scientists weigh in—and argue, and attack each other. Despite the controversy, no one knows what the lights are but after sightings all over the world, they stop. With their novelty and even their utility as the object of worry used up, the red lights become old news and the public moves on.

Then strange things start happening to the ocean. Vast clouds of mud from the ocean floor—specifically from the abyssal deeps where the glowing red lights had disappeared—cloud the major currents and disrupt fishing. Submarines and bathyspheres lowered to take a look are lost with their crews. Naval vessels explode and sink, and soon cargo ships and passenger liners start sinking. Most disturbingly, small settlements on out-of-the-way islands are found abandoned, their populations never to be seen again.

Mike and Phyllis, through the ups and downs of their journalistic careers and personal lives, witness much of this. And after joining the research team of a controversial scientist whose theories about the origins and goals of the undersea invaders are widely mocked but turn out to be correct more and more often, they become the first people to see and survive whatever is causing coastal populations to disappear. This scene—vividly rendered for the cover of the old Penguin paperback edition (see below)—is one of the most chilling and horrific in any of Wyndham’s books.

Finally, and seemingly too late, the world’s governments fight back. The coastal attacks stop. And the ice caps start melting.

While we haven’t lost our appetite for imagined apocalypse since Wyndham wrote in the 1950s and 60s, some threats have become passé. The large-scale alien invasion seems to be one. If any vision of the end of the world is bound to a former period of our culture, that one—with its fleets of flying saucers, desperate human armies, scientists fretting in labs, generals sweating in bunkers, and “Take me to your leader”—seems utterly inseparable from the early Cold War.

With The Kraken Wakes, which was published in 1953, Wyndham seems to have already sensed this emerging cliché and dodged it. His aliens are never seen and never once communicate with mankind. Their objectives can be inferred only after the fact, based on what they’ve already done, and don’t align with any understandable human goals. They remain alien throughout.

All of which keeps The Kraken Wakes surprising and original. These aliens prove canny and unpredictable and seem to have the upper hand until the very end.

But what keeps the novel’s story engaging, and is one of the most unusual things about it, is Mike’s narration. Wyndham presents the novel as Mike’s account, written down for a readership he may never know, of the catastrophes of the last several years and how and why society has collapsed into isolated bands hiding among islands that used to be hills. Technically, the overwhelming majority of The Kraken Wakes is told through exposition. But Wyndham structures these lengthy histories with crucial scenes of Mike and Phyllis’s work, travels, and personal life, and all of it is plausibly imagined and vividly written. The Watsons’ voyage from a flooded London to the Cotswolds by motor boat, finding their way using half-submerged steeples as landmarks and sleeping in the dry upper stories of abandoned houses, is an outstanding piece of post-apocalyptic writing all by itself. It’s a brilliant miniature of what Wyndham does at novel length in The Day of the Triffids.

My Modern Library paperback describes The Kraken Wakes as “an ingenious early example of climate fiction,” which is a modish thing to say but exactly wrong. The real, pervasive concern throughout the novel, as exemplified by Mike and Phyllis’s work for the EBC, is not climate change but journalism and public opinion. Reporters and governments live in a constant struggle not only with the submarine aliens but with a distracted public whose attention can only be attracted for more than a few minutes by novelty, outrage, or crisis.

Alexandra Kleeman, in a passage of her introduction blurbed on the back cover, is more perceptive. Focusing on a side character named Petunia, who has her own insistently held opinions about the aliens (it’s a Russian ploy), Kleeman suggests that Wyndham offers prescient insight into “anti-vaxxer disinformation and QAnon conspiracists.” Sure, maybe. But if so, Wyndham also correctly shows that this distrust cuts both ways. The government and military repeatedly attempt to control the flow of upsetting information and manipulate—some might say nudge—the public into compliance and approved opinions. But public opinion proves fickle, unpredictable, and intractable. Efforts to control it and save face for embarrassed governments and overconfident scientists don’t go well, something that will come as no surprise after the last few years.

There’s much more to The Kraken Wakes than its excellent writing and thematic insight. I haven’t even mentioned its humor, which is both wryly ironic and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Wyndham has great fun poking at Soviet pomposity, anti-capitalist paranoia, and Lysenkoism, among many other targets. And Wyndham, a master of the slow burn, uses his skill in building dread and foreboding to maximum effect.

But what is most important about The Kraken Wakes is that it is vividly imagined, thrilling, and surprising. Tastes in apocalypse—aliens, zombies, viruses, climate change—will shift and the literary establishment will politicize old books, but a good story well told will outlast both trends and politics. And the survival of storytelling beyond these and the apocalypse, as Mike’s narrative survives the floods, is a real reason for hope.