Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Last night my wife and I started my Independence Day break off right with an impromptu movie date. I was much more excited about the date than the movie—Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. After the debacle of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the prognostications of various internet types, and Disney’s track record using and abusing Lucasfilm characters, I had well-founded suspicions that it wouldn’t be very good and was hesitant to see it. But I’m not going to miss an Indiana Jones film and my wife and I really needed to get out of the house, so off we went.

Fortunately, Dial of Destiny turned out to be better than I expected. That might not sound like a ringing endorsement, but in the present filmmaking landscape I’ll take it.

It’s not the years

After a prologue set in 1945, as the Germans withdraw from southern France with a trainload of looted antiquities, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny picks up in the summer of 1969. Indy is old, tired, separated from his wife Marion, and set to retire from the downtown Manhattan university where he lectures unenthusiastically to uninvolved students. (One sympathizes.) When he receives a visit from his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), child of an old colleague in both the academic and military intelligence worlds, he is drawn into a pair of interlocking schemes involving an ancient artifact called the Antikythera—a sophisticated golden mechanism of unclear purpose supposedly built by Archimedes himself. Only half of the device is known to exist. Helena wants Indy’s help finding the other half.

The other scheme is that of Professor Schmidt (Mads Mikkelsen), a German émigré physicist who helped put Apollo 11 on the moon. Schmidt, an alias for Jürgen Voller, whom Indy first encounters in the prologue, also wants the complete Antikythera and will go to violent lengths to get it. Why? Who is he working for?

As it turns out, Helena wants the device because she has been hawking antiquities on the black market and Voller wants it because he believes it can detect and open “rifts in time,” making actual time travel possible. Examination of Helena’s father’s notes on the device suggest that, should Voller acquire it, he will use it to travel to the weeks just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. The question, again, is Why? But the possible answers are much darker than Indy cares to consider.

I won’t recap the plot in any greater detail. The filmmakers do a good job following the classic Indy formula while also including some genuinely fun and surprising new stuff, and I don’t want to spoil anything.

It belongs in a museum

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a mixed bag, but fortunately the mixture is of the good and the only so-so rather than the so-so and the bad of the last film.

To my surprise, I actually liked the late 1960s setting and thought the filmmakers used it well, especially in setting up a link to the classic Indy antagonists, the Nazis. (It’s unstated in the film, but presumably Voller was brought to the US and put to work in rocketry under the auspices of Operation Paperclip. Look it up.) Mads Mikkelsen plays Voller wonderfully, using his natural intelligence and gravitas and menacing looks to great effect in perhaps his second best villainous performance after Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. His purely pragmatic scientism makes an interesting counterpart to his rival antagonist, Helena, who is interested only in money. Both have a purely instrumental view of the past—both seek to use the Antikythera. Indy, in his love for the past and desire to preserve it for its own sake, is the solution to these mirror-image sins against history.

Further, the small role played by Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and a few other classic Indy characters was well-informed by history and didn’t feel like pure fanservice. The writers have allowed things to happen to the characters between films, something missing in a lot of recent sequels.

More importantly, Dial of Destiny better evokes the feel of classic Indy than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ever did. Two sequences in particular stood out to me. The first, a diving sequence to a Roman shipwreck in the Aegean, was something new and inventive—like a cross between Indy and Clive Cussler—and resulted in a fun and exciting scene. The second, Indy’s exploration of caves leading to a long-lost burial chamber, was perfectly executed, capturing the suspense, wonder, and danger of the cobwebbed tunnels and musty tombs in the old films. It had more than a little of the opening of Raiders and the climax of The Last Crusade in it while also standing on its own.

Part of evoking the feel of classic Indy depends upon John Williams, now 91 years old, who composed the score for Dial of Destiny. Williams uses old leitmotifs to set the mood and give depth to the characters without indulging in pure nostalgia and also incorporates some new themes. It’s a very good score. Stay during the closing credits for one of Williams’s signature powerhouse brass compositions.

(Here I’ll issue my one spoiler warning—skip the following paragraph if you haven’t yet seen Dial of Destiny.)

Perhaps what most impressed me about the film was that it surprised me. Once the Antikythera has been rebuilt and Voller travels into a time rift, flying through a thunderstorm and out into bright Mediterranean sunshine, I was actually excited—I had no idea what was about to happen and couldn’t wait to find out. And what happened was so batty I loved it: Voller, deceived by the device, has flown into the Roman siege of Syracuse in 212 BC and, when his plane crashes on the shore, Indy and Helena meet Archimedes himself. (For a minute I was worried they would witness his death.) Unfortunately the sequence drifted into the grandfather paradox stuff I find so lethally dull in time-travel stories, but the excitement and fun of this climax were genuine pleasures.

(Spoiler-free resumes here.)

Digging in the wrong place

But Dial of Destiny also has a lot of weaknesses. It is too long and too slow, something that could never be said of the originals. For about the first hour after the prologue, the film galumphs from sequence to sequence. Much of this half of the film has the feeling of rewrites and studio interference, as if—to use an archaeological metaphor—there are fragments of previous Dial of Destiny scripts littering our dig. Antonio Banderas, for example, who plays the captain of the diving ship that takes Indy to the Roman shipwreck, is woefully underused.

By the time of the frogman sequence the film’s pace evens out, but the early going has a lot of awkwardly structured exposition and overlong chase sequences. These are also burdened with some dodgy CGI, not much improved upon from what you see in the trailers.

Speaking of CGI, the digitally de-aged Harrison Ford of the prologue is only convincing part of the time. Sometimes it looks good, but more often, especially in closeups, he has the uncanny valley look of Rogue One’s Grand Moff Tarkin or Robert Zemeckis’s misbegotten motion capture films. More distractingly, despite the obvious effort put into the de-aging, Ford sounds and moves like an elderly man.

As much as I love Harrison Ford, his age is a problem in the film. He looks feeble and rheumy-eyed, moving with the gingerly care of the retiree even when he’s supposed to be neck-deep in adventure, and it’s hard to take it seriously when he punches or outruns much younger characters. The writers make good use of his age in a few places—for example, in a climbing sequence in which Indy grouses about his many, many past injuries—but his fighting and chasing and the way he absorbs punches and even a gunshot are just not believable, even by the standards of Indiana Jones.

There are also some underdeveloped ideas that could have strengthened and deepened the story. The contrast between Helena and Voller should have cast Indy’s purer love for the past into sharper relief, but once the action gets going these themes are left unexplored. Further, the supernatural is pooh-poohed early in the film, an attitude that is allowed to stand. In this Indy, there is no supernatural dimension, only mathematics. Philosophical materialism and post-Newtonian physics is a strange place for an Indiana Jones film to land, but here we are.

Finally, the conclusion is weak. Nothing can beat the perfectly calculated ending of Raiders or the classic Western homage at the end of The Last Crusade, but Dial of Destiny whiffs. For one, Helena, a criminal who operates on purely selfish and acquisitive principles throughout the film, skates by consequence-free when what she needs is an Elsa Schneider fate. She gains some redemption at the end, but her past conduct, especially her manipulation of Indy, feels like a thread left hanging.

Further, in trying to resolve Indy’s relationship with Marion, the writers finally and totally cave in to nostalgia. This final scene is well executed, but I found myself rejecting what I was feeling because I knew I was being manipulated. It’s a strange, Up-like note with which to end the story of one of cinema’s greatest action heroes. After the final iris out—an oddly comic effect—but just before the credits began, I actually wondered if there would be more. But there wasn’t—no government warehouse, no ride into the sunset.

Conclusion

All that said, I’m glad I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. It offers several genuinely fun and exciting action sequences in the best Indy tradition. But it is also overlong, awkwardly paced, and tries too hard to craft a loving sendoff for a character who needs no introduction and wouldn’t want a long, tender goodbye either.

The Three Hostages

Today we conclude John Buchan June with the fourth Richard Hannay adventure, a tale of kidnapping, hypnotism, international intrigue—and the beauty of domesticity. The novel is The Three Hostages.

A few years after the First World War General Sir Richard Hannay has retired to a house in the Cotswolds, married Mary Lamington, whom he met and worked with against the plots of Count von Schwabing in Mr Standfast, had a son, and embraced the life of a settled country squire. The detached, drifting mining engineer we first met in The Thirty-Nine Steps is utterly changed, not only by his adventures and the war but by the goodness of marriage and family life. So when two separate visitors arrive on the same day with the same offer of adventure, Hannay, surprisingly for us readers, is irritated.

The first of the visitors is Julius Victor, a wealthy Jewish banker who had emigrated from the United States and helped finance Britain’s war effort. His daughter Adela, his only child, has been kidnapped. Scotland Yard have done all they can do. Hannay is sympathetic but declines to help in the search, thinking he would only complicate and frustrate matters. After Victor’s departure Macgillivray, intelligence chief Sir Walter Bullivant’s aide, arrives wanting to speak with Hannay about the same thing. But it turns out that Adela Victor is only one of three high-profile hostages held by a powerful “combine” or crime syndicate. The others are Lord Mercot, an Oxford student and wealthy heir, and—most painful of all to Hannay and Mary—David Warcliff, a ten-year old boy and the only child of his widower father. The kidnappers have made no demands, only mailed a strange six-line poem to each of the families. Bullivant wants Hannay to pitch in. Hannay, again, refuses.

But Hannay’s conscience will not let him rest—and neither will Mary. In the first of many crucial interventions in the novel, Mary appeals to Hannay’s love for their own son, John Peter, and Hannay’s sense of duty and sharp new fatherly instincts do the rest. He heads to London to begin his own unofficial search.

An analysis of the strange allusions in the poem—blindness, fate, Eden, the midnight sun—lead Hannay into the circle of Dominick Medina.

Medina is a charismatic Irishman and a rising star in London social life and British politics. Civilized, well-educated, charming, athletic, a well-reviewed poet, a sparkling conversationalist, and “the handsomest thing in mankind since the Greeks,” Medina fought in Russia for a White partisan group during the war and has had nothing but success since his return. He seems an unlikely candidate for the leader of an international criminal conspiracy. And Hannay finds himself as charmed as any of the other Buchan familiars with whom Medina associates. Even Sir Edward Leithen is one of Medina’s friends and admirers. Everyone likes and respects Medina—everyone but Sandy Arbuthnot, Hannay’s old friend from Greenmantle. Sandy, a gentleman, a scholar of Oriental languages, and a man more far-travelled and adventurous than Hannay, is deeply suspicious of Medina. Though Hannay thinks Sandy is merely jealous, he still takes note.

But Sandy is vindicated when Medina, after dinner at their club one night not long after they first meet, tries to hypnotize Hannay.

It doesn’t work—Hannay, strong-willed and not given to introspection, as even Mary admits, is a poor target for mind control—but Hannay’s suspicions are aroused. Why would this handsome, successful young man be preying on his peers?

Hannay determines to work deeper into Medina’s confidence by playing the biggest part of his career of playacting. He feigns being under Medina’s sway and becomes more and more a toady to the man, who reveals more and more of his life beneath the glossy veneer of charm, wealth, and sophistication. Hannay discovers a grasping striver, a dabbler in mysticism, diabolism, and manipulation who is not above demeaning and using others to achieve power over them. He also meets Medina’s mother, a blind old woman and an even more powerful hypnotist than her son, and Kharáma, an Indian guru and Medina’s mentor.

But as widely respected as Medina is, Hannay cannot reveal his suspicions without betraying his own plot. He thus takes only a handful of people into his confidence—among them Sandy and, crucially, Mary—and doesn’t even reveal to Bullivant what he is working on.

Hannay’s investigations ultimately take him to Norway, to a seedy London jazz club, to a curiosity shop where nothing is for sale, to a slum where a Swedish masseuse treats patients referred by Medina’s doctor, and to a suspenseful and violent one-on-one showdown among the crags and cliffs of the Scottish highlands.

There is much, much more to The Three Hostages than I can adequately summarize here, and one of the pleasures of the novel is just how much of it there is. With its vaguely foreign villain with an unusual deformity (Medina has an almost-spherical head that he conceals with artful coiffure), its villain’s unclear aims but dangerous and far-reaching plot, its globetrotting, and its venturing from black-tie dinner and manor house to slum and nightclub, it is also the most James Bond-like of the Hannay stories. When reading about Medina I found myself thinking more than once of Auric Goldfinger and Hugo Drax. Last year I broke down the place of The Thirty-Nine Steps in the genealogy of the action or espionage novel. The Three Hostages, which CS Lewis, in a 1933 letter, accurately called “a real modern thriller,” is another clear link to the future of the genre.

One of The Three Hostages’ strengths, and one of the things that surely made it more influential than similar novels like Bulldog Drummond, is the quality of Buchan’s writing, especially in this novel’s plotting and pacing. After the sprawling, loosely constructed, somewhat unfocused Mr Standfast, Buchan here gives Hannay a single straightforward mission that unifies and gives form to every aspect of the adventure, whether flying across the North Sea with Sir Archie Roylance or mountaineering in Norway and Scotland.

Most importantly, the mission to find and save the hostages gives powerful emotional stakes to Hannay himself. Early in the novel, as Macgillvray presents what he knows of the kidnapping plot to Hannay, he says, “I should have made you understand how big and desperate the thing is that we're out against . . . You know as well as I do that cold blood is not always the most useful accompaniment in assessing evidence.” Hannay, always more intuitive a hero than Sir Edward Leithen, must surrunder totally to bone-deep bonds and instincts. What drives Hannay throughout The Three Hostages is not only his duty to England and civilization but his deep, sub-rational—and therefore transcendent—love of family.

This focus on the power and beauty and mystery of domesticity is the surprising key to The Three Hostages. Medina, in kidnapping children, has disrupted three vulnerable families and threatens to destroy them. Whenever Hannay faces renewed difficulty or a new obstacle, Hannay remembers Mary and their son, John Peter. His understanding of what the fathers of Adela Victor and Davy Warcliff are going through motivates him. Mary urges him on and sustains him, and takes no small role in bringing down Medina herself.

I say that this is a “surprising” theme because of what I’ve previously noted about Buchan protagonists. They are often young, unattached men, wandering if not totally adrift, and usually bored of routine. That Hannay has married and settled down and loves the chores and maintenance of his farm was a brilliant change. And Hannay’s resistance to returning to the life of danger and instability born of espionage and undercover work, a resistance rooted not in cowardice but care for the little bit of the world under his stewardship, feels genuine and gives both a new maturity to Hannay and emotional weight to the rest of the novel. The unwanted call to “one last mission” may have become a spy thriller cliché in the 99 years since The Three Hostages was published, but it’s seldom been done better.

The result, in the end, is a novel with the most of the strengths and all of the themes of Buchan’s earlier adventures. It revisits the theme of the crackup or madness of civilization, a vulnerability easily exploited by men like Medina—a theme elaborated as early as The Power-House.

But here the plot is richer and more complex, and Buchan leavens it one extra element that sets it apart: love. Buchan, through Hannay, offers a vision of devotion to family and home, of the strength of a well-matched husband and wife, and of how civilization, though perhaps not saved, can be shored up and passed on through these humble means.

* * * * *

I’m sorry to see this second John Buchan June draw to a close. For various reasons I feel like I’ve only just gotten into the swing of things. So I’m looking forward to next year, especially since I have more Dickson McCunn and even some Buchan short stories arriving later today. I hope y’all have a restful July, and that these reviews have piqued your interest in one of this great old writer’s novels. Give one a look this coming month. Thanks as always for reading!

The Vinland Sagas on City of Man Podcast

It’s a been a somewhat slow month here on the blog. Work, travel, illness, and some exciting personal developments have conspired to keep me from blogging much apart from announcing the publication of The Snipers and my commitment to John Buchan June. Fortunately there is plenty of that, and I hope y’all have enjoyed that as much as I have my reading and writing for it.

But mercifully I did find time last week to record another episode of City of Man’s ongoing Medieval Times series with my friends Coyle and David. The subject: the Vinland Sagas, concerning the family of Eirik the Red and their discovery and brief, violent settlement of North America around the year 1000.

In the episode we cover the background, including a refresher on just what exactly sagas are as a genre of literature, the Norwegian and Icelandic antecedents to the continuous westward sailing of the Norse, the personalities involved, the events of The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga, what to make of the sagas in historiographical terms, and geography, outlawry, ghosts, polygamy, religious conversion, sword-wielding pregnant women, and much, much more.

We conclude by asking why it was that the Norse settlements on Iceland lasted while those in Vinland didn’t. We also make plenty of recommendations for further reading and viewing, both good and bad.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Sticher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by listening in the embedded player in this post. You can find the episode’s page at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site, including links to our viewing recommendations, here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

The Gap in the Curtain

We begin the final week of John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s strangest and most surprising novels. In the introduction to the Authorised Edition I read, journalist Stuart Kelly aptly describes it as “an odd novel—a hybrid of social satire, political intrigue and science-fiction thriller, as if H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and the Anthony Trollope of the Palliser novels had attempted a collaboration.” And yet, despite this, it is also “the most quintessentially Buchan-esque of his novels.” The book is Sir Edward Leithen’s fourth adventure, The Gap in the Curtain.

The novel begins during Leithen’s visit to the country house of Lady Flambard, an enthusiastic hostess who has gathered a bewildering assortment of people for a Whitsuntide holiday in the Cotswolds. Leithen would rather go riding in the hills than be trapped in her engineered salons, but during dinner one night he notes that the guests, for all their differences in background, profession, age, and political persuasions, fall into two types—untroubled souls who can unthinkingly relax as part of Lady Flambard’s collection of conversationalists, and the melancholy, the preoccupied, the withdrawn. He will have cause to think more deeply about this division with the arrival of one final guest.

The guest is Professor August Moe, a European physicist and mathematician and one of the few on the same intellectual plane as Einstein. Moe, an enormous and cadaverous old man, requests that Leithen attend a private meeting with a few other hand-selected guests. Once all have assembled for Moe’s talk, Leithen realizes that the professor has somehow picked exactly the half of Lady Flambard’s guests he had marked as the somber and pensive. Something is up.

Moe describes a theory of time as a system of coexisting coils, with past, future, and present not separate but overlapping, and reveals that he has discovered a method of peering into the future—scientifically, objectively. Through his method, which is something like remote viewing, the properly trained mind can look across time’s structure and see short glimpses of the future. He wishes them to join him in his first test. With a few days of preparation, including a vegetarian diet, abstention from alcohol, a mild dose of an unnamed drug, and, most importantly, dedicated study and concentration upon a familiar object, a copy of The Times, they will be ready to receive a glimpse of the same object exactly one year on. They will be able to read next year’s headlines.

It works.

But it works because Moe, an ailing man, dies at the moment of the experiment. This is the hidden final part of the formula. When he collapses and breathes his last it sends Leithen’s friend Sally Lamington into a panic and Leithen, in responding to her swoon and to the Professor’s death, misses his glimpse of the future.

But the others get their one-second view of next June’s Times. Arnold Tavanger, a financier with his eye on the market, sees a story about the merger of two major mining corporations. David Mayot, a young politician on the rise, sees an article naming an unexpected new prime minister. Reggie Daker, a wealthy young homebody and book collector, sees an article about his imminent departure for the Yucatán. Sir Robert Goodeve, a promising young MP of an ancient noble family, and Captain Charles Ottery, a veteran of the Great War now working for a London business, see their own obituaries.

The rest of the novel relates what each man does with his scrap of foreknowledge over the coming year. Tavanger, equipped with what he thinks is a foolproof bit of inside dope, sets off on a globe-trotting adventure to buy up shares in one of the companies that will merge in a year. Mayot, an unprincipled political operator, maneuvers to place himself as near the top as possible in the coming change of prime minister. Reggie Daker, who doesn’t even know where the Yucatán is (“He fancied it must be in the East; places ending in ‘tan’ were always in the East; he remembered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Gulistan…”), is convinced Moe’s method was erroneous and lets himself be swept up in a one-sided romance with a ferocious girl and her domineering family, who turn his antiquarian interest in books into an exhausting commercial enterprise. As for Goodeve and Ottery, the knowledge that they will be dead in a year produces radically different effects.

I don’t want to risk giving too much away. This oddest of all of Buchan’s novels may also benefit most from reading it cold, spoiler-free. When the late Sir Roger Scruton wrote that “The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament,” he might have been stating The Gap in the Curtain’s thesis.

Each of the five sections presents a different style and tone of story, all related through Leithen, who chances to run into each of the five men at various points through the political and economic upheavals of the next year. The stories also escalate in seriousness.

Tavanger and Mayot, seeking a profitable deal and political prominence, respectively, prove themselves unserious and worldly. Their stories come across as petty wheeling and dealing when eternity is at stake. Mayot is particularly unpleasant, a self-serving striver and user, a creature of political gossip and the smoke-filled room—a type with which Buchan, as an MP, would have been familiar. Tavanger, at least, has the saving grace of not taking it too badly when his understanding of the future turns out to be incomplete and misleading. Unlike Mayot, he can laugh it off.

Reggie Daker offers a comical interlude. A hobbit-like lover of quiet pursuits, of angling and riding and contentedly browsing his books in an armchair, he finds his life turned upside down. As with Tavanger and Mayot, what he saw in next year’s Times turns out to be true—sort of. The reader sees where Reggie’s story is going pretty quickly; the joy comes in seeing Reggie trying to keep up and finally rushing into his surprising, last-minute fulfilment of what he saw through Moe’s technique. This section shows Buchan at his most playful. Reggie, whom Kelly explicitly compares to Bertie Wooster, could also be one of the kindly but clueless side characters of Evelyn Waugh. His aggressive fiancée and her horrible family are even more Waugh-like.

But the meat of The Gap in the Curtain is in the final parallel sections concerning Goodeve and Ottery. Faced with death, they follow opposing tracks. One man feels himself invincible—at first. Then he succumbs to passivity and despair. The other goes from wrath to resignation before finding a redeeming courage through love. One isolates himself, retreating more and more into himself as the fatal date approaches. The other indulges himself before turning outward, toward another, to face the future together. Through relationship he discovers courage.

The Goodeve and Ottery stories, coming after the dull and laborious self-centeredness of Tavanger and Mayot and the hapless comedy of Reggie Daker, astounded me. As meditations on death and fate, despair and courage, they prefigure Leithen’s final adventure in Buchan’s final novel, Sick Heart River. But juxtaposed as they are in the last third of this novel, they take on an exceptional power. The last section’s love story is one of the best and most surprising in all of Buchan’s works, and lies at the heart of the books hopeful vision.

I wish I could say more and in greater detail but, again, I don’t want to give too much away.

The Gap in the Curtain can be straightforwardly read as a story about fate and predestination. Certainly, the characters themselves argue about what they’ve seen in next June’s Times and debate the meaning of free will—most pointedly in that final story—and the unresolved ironies of the way the predictions are and are not fulfilled is a key part of the novel’s power. The novel also suggests that the certainties of science, with all its pretensions to mathematical objectivity, are illusory, or at best incomplete. The characters who trust most in Professor Moe those driven deepest into greed or despair.

These themes place it in good company among science fiction and time travel stories. But The Gap in the Curtain is also a story about character and virtue. Assuming you could get a glimpse of the future, what would you do with it? Self-advancement, distraction, brazenness and courage, despair and hope—these are responses brought forth and sharpened by knowledge of the future, not created by it. And, most especially in the final section, Buchan dramatizes the necessity of love as a response to whatever the future holds.

The Gap in the Curtain is a bold experiment in concept, structure, and theme, and it’s uncommonly rich for the kind of tale it is. Just note that Leithen and the rest undergo this experiment during Whitsuntide, the Pentecost celebration commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost. But it is also a fun, surprising, and deeply moving novel about something all of us will face, though without Professor Moe’s method—the future, and death. The Gap in the Curtain also suggests the best way to face them.

The Blanket of the Dark

“[Peter] hated him, for he saw the cunning behind the frank smile, the ruthlessness in the small eyes; but he could not blind himself to his power.”

John Buchan June continues with one of Buchan’s late historical novels, a masterfully crafted story of intrigue, paranoia, religious upheaval, dynastic chicanery, and tyranny in Tudor England. The novel is The Blanket of the Dark.

The hero of The Blanket of the Dark is a classic Buchan “scholar called to action,” in this case quite literally. Peter Pentecost is a teenaged clerk at Oseney Abbey outside Oxford on the cusp of taking his vows to become a monk. The year is 1536. Peter, like his mentor, a priest named Tobias, is a faithful son of the Church and a “Grecian,” a humanist scholar of the classics like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who just a year earlier was beheaded for refusing to affirm King Henry VIII’s annulment, remarriage, and authority over the Church. For this, More had been branded a traitor. Peter has, so far, observed all of this passively and with little interest. But as the novel begins, the smothering darkness lying over England comes for him.

Peter learns that he is, in fact, the only surviving son of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a rival of Henry who was executed for treason fifteen years earlier. Peter’s earliest memories—of being raised by an old widow woman, of being handed off to monks at a rural abbey for his education—turn out to be memories of a life in hiding, the rightful heir being protected until the time is right to return. The disaffected noblemen who approach Peter and reveal his true identity to him believe that time is now. They mean to challenge “the Welshman’s” tyranny and offer Peter their support.

Peter finds himself swept from his well-ordered life of prayer and study to a life of clandestine travel among the men of “Old England,” commoners who sneak him from place to place in the shelter of the woods, and landed aristocrats who shelter him in their manor houses. He also begins a remedial course in kingship, learning to ride and wield weapons properly, and makes the acquaintance of the first noblewoman he has ever known—the beautiful niece of one of his supporters, Sabine Beauforest. As the anti-Tudor conspiracy slowly moves forward and Peter moves from hiding place to hiding place, his desires—for the treasure needed to fund his attempt at the throne, for the power that will come with possessing the crown, for Sabine—grow stronger and stronger.

At first Peter justifies himself. He views his power and position as a means to good ends and intends to use it wisely: to restore the Church and the ancestral rights of Englishmen. But Peter—a bookish student and erstwhile celibate—is also uncomfortable with the worldly rewards being paraded before him, and so his pursuit of the throne also becomes both a pilgrimage and a series of tests.

One by one the chance to fulfil his desires come to Peter and one by one he learns something new about both the world and himself, until the final, climactic temptation—the launch of the coup aimed at kidnapping the King and placing Peter on the throne, culminating in a deadly confrontation with King Henry VIII himself.

The Blanket of the Dark reminds me a great deal of Buchan’s earlier novel of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Midwinter. Both take place during an uprising against a monarch believed by the plotters to be an illegitimate tyrant; both take place largely on the margins of the plot, away from the fighting and seemingly decisive action; and both involve the men of “Old England,” a traditional and continuous community outside the rise and fall of dynasties and world powers. Both evoke their period and locations with great care and attention to detail and feature convincing cameos of real historical figures—in The Blanket of the Dark, Henry VIII and his dread agent Thomas Cromwell. Both are also excellent novels.

But in The Blanket of the Dark, through Buchan’s care for what is at stake spiritually, the danger of pursuing power even for good ends achieves an unusual weight, what Sir John Keegan in writing of The Thirty-Nine Steps called the “particularly elusive” quality of “moral atmosphere.” Buchan’s portrait of England after Henry’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Act of Supremacy, the execution of dissenters under the Act of Treason, and the elevation of Cromwell as Henry’s hatchet man, is pervaded by threat and paranoia. The great threat to ordinary people and their traditional loyalties is chicanery in high places. As one character, one of Peter’s rivals for Sabine’s attentions, puts it: “‘Tis a difficult time for a Christian. . . . If he have a liking for the Pope he may be hanged for treason, and if he like not the mass he may burn for heresy.”

Peter’s pilgrimage toward the throne occupied by Henry places him in the path of the worldly-wise and powerful, and through the testing of his own desires—lust, greed, pride—he comes to see the emptiness and ulterior motives of those who claim to be resisting Henry’s tyranny. Snatched from the cloister and the scriptorium in order to overthrow a heretical despot, he comes to see little difference between Henry and his own supporters. By the time of the attack on Henry, the choice Peter is presented with, both figuratively and, in the person of the King himself, literally, is whether to pursue power or the things his supporters ostensibly want him to use his power to protect.

Perhaps, rather than anything it is used for, the power is the danger. In making his final and greatest choice, Peter does not get everything he desires, but The Blanket of the Dark suggests that he gets something far better.

The Blanket of the Dark was well reviewed at the time Buchan published it in 1931, with praise from CS Lewis and the elderly Rudyard Kipling among others. More recently, the historian of Christianity and biographer of Thomas Cromwell Diarmaid MacCulloch, in a 2019 interview, said of it, “It’s chilling. Brilliant.” With its effortless plotting and pacing, its strong and often beautiful writing, its brilliantly-realized historical setting—with everything from the spoiling of the monasteries to the Pilgrimage of Grace informing the action from a distance—its vivid characters, and its surprising but satisfyingly poignant ending, I strongly agree.

Buchan’s storytelling and craftsmanship alone make The Blanket of the Dark still worth reading. But that this novel also touches on the threats to conscience, tradition, and faith posed by the self-serving and powerful, who may talk about protecting and restoring all of those things but only aim to use them for their own ends, makes it an exceptionally rewarding and still-relevant adventure.

The Snipers has arrived!

No, that’s not a subject-verb disagreement. The Snipers is my latest published work, a short novel set during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944. I’m pleased to announce that, after the final rounds of proofs and revisions, it is now available on Amazon!

I announced The Snipers and its subject here earlier this month. Last week I posted a recommendation of the three non-fiction books I acknowledge in the author’s note at the of The Snipers. Check those posts out if you’d like to know more or look at the book’s page here. In the meantime, here’s the description from the back cover:

October 1944—It has been four months since D-day and the Allies are pressing through Germany’s last defenses. As the US Army makes its first move against the historic German city of Aachen, one unit finds itself stymied by a tenacious German sniper. With losses climbing, the commander calls up sharpshooter Sergeant JL Justus. His job: find and kill the sniper.

Weary from four months of fighting, Justus wants little more than a good smoke and some hot chow. But the assignment bothers him for other reasons. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how does he shoot so accurately and quickly? Can Justus and his buddies find him before many more men are killed? And in a battle like the one for Aachen, is finding the sniper even possible?

The Snipers is an evocative, thrilling, and moving short war tale from Jordan M. Poss.

One certainly hopes, anyway.

You can add The Snipers to your Goodreads reading list here. And if you’d like to order a copy, either in paperback or Kindle format, please use the buttons below.

I’m quite excited about this short novel. My hope is that it will be an exciting, entertaining, and thought-provoking short read. Please give it a look and let me know what you think. Hope y’all enjoy!

Three books behind The Snipers

My new novella The Snipers, a story set in northwestern Europe during World War II, arrives soon. Just waiting on the final proofs! In the meantime, I wanted to recommend three books that I made sure to cite as inspirations in the author’s note at the back.

These are not detailed campaign histories and give little or no attention to the political and strategic situations playing out at the highest levels of the war. One is a memoir, one is a short, narrowly focused history by a veteran, and the other is a grab-bag of anecdotes, reminiscences, and explanations for the public of what the infantrymen went through. They’re all excellent, and together they gave me some of my strongest impressions and understanding of what fighting in Europe from Normandy to Germany was like.

If You Survive, by George Wilson (1987)

Of these three books, this is the one I read most recently. George Wilson joined the 4th Infantry Division as a replacement platoon leader shortly after D-day. The title of the book comes from the pep talk his first commanding officer gave him as a brand-new second lieutenant plunked into combat in Normandy’s bocage: “If you survive your first day, I’ll promote you.”

Wilson survived Normandy, the breakout, the race across northern France, the Hürtgen Forest (about which more below), and finally the Battle of the Bulge.

Wilson’s descriptions of the fighting in Normandy and elsewhere are excellent, driving home the shock, horror, waste, and occasionally exhilaration of battle, but the standout chapters in his book narrate the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. Though now overshadowed in public memory by the Battle of the Bulge, the result of a German offensive that occurred shortly afterward, the Hürtgen Forest saw tenacious, tooth-and-nail German defense in a rugged, densely wooded landscape sewn with pillboxes and minefields and raked by artillery set to burst among the treetops.

One of the strongest impressions Wilson’s memoir gave me had to do with the incredible turnover rate in personnel among frontline combat units—the attrition. During Wilson’s eighteen days in the Hürtgen Forest his company took 167% casualties. As Wilson relates it, men cycled in and out of his unit so quickly that he could not get to know them all and sometimes doesn’t try. Some replacements arrived and were killed or evacuated to a field hospital the same day, often within hours.

This is a scenario I’ve read about in other books and seen dramatized in a variety of films, but Wilson, with his straightforward, unembellished, but dramatic and moving style, makes you feel it.

The Hürtgen Forest is not the setting of The Snipers but it does figure into the story near the end, and Wilson’s If You Survive has a lot to do with how I present it. It’s an excellent lesser-known memoir that deserves a broader readership.

The Boys’ Crusade, by Paul Fussell (2003)

Paul Fussell may be familiar to you if you’ve ever taken a course on World War I. His literary study The Great War and Modern Memory is still standard reading. But Fussell did not write about war as a detached, ivory tower academic. Like Wilson, he fought across northwestern Europe from Normandy to Germany, in Fussell’s case as an infantry platoon leader in the 103rd Infantry Division. He was twenty years old when he first saw combat.

The Boys’ Crusade is not a memoir, though it is strongly shaped by Fussell’s own experiences, which he has written about more directly elsewhere (especially Wartime and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic). Instead, it briefly narrates the campaign across northwestern Europe with an emphasis on the experience of ordinary soldiers, most especially the very young men like Fussell who constituted most of the combat infantry. Though a short, fast read, The Boys’ Crusade is full of vivid detail about what it was like to fight in the bocage or the forest or through villages and cities, to deal with officers, to march and march and march, to lead, to follow, to wallow in mud and snow and sleep in the rain, to deal with civilians, to yearn for women, to be tired and scared all the time—and what it was like to experience all of this at the age of eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty.

I’ve included a few passages that made a particularly strong impression on me the first time I read it some years ago and that, along with other books and more study, undergird what I try to evoke in The Snipers.

Here’s Fussell on the appearance of GIs after they had been at the front for a while, away from regulation-happy officers and the nitpicking of the parade ground:

There was one advantage of being in an attack, and only one: there, a soldier was seldom troubled by the chickenshit to be met with in the rear. At the real front there was no such thing as being “out of uniform,” for the soldier looked like a tramp with individual variations all the time, and officers were indistinguishable from the lowest dogfaces. Neither wore anything like insignia, and to look as dirty as possible was socially meritorious.

The two best approximations of this that I’ve seen on film are in one old and one recent movie: Battleground and Fury. (Really stop and look at the infantrymen in Fury sometime. Whatever else you think about that movie, it brilliantly evokes the lived in, raggedy, hard-eyed reality of the dogface in northern Europe.)

Back to Fussell, who notes that appearance was also an easy way to pick out replacements, the guys who hadn’t been in it yet:

Newcomers were regarded with a degree of silent contempt, and replacements were the most conspicuous newcomers. There were many signals by which new arrivals could be detected. Cleanliness was one of them. Soldiers or officers in new or neat clothing, not yet ripped in places or grease-stained all over from C- and K-rations, were easy to spot as targets of disdain. Company officers wearing gold or silver bars on shirt collars were clearly unacquainted yet with the veritable law of the line that unless officers’ insignia were covered by a scarf, enemy snipers would pick them off first. (Probably quite false, but believed by all.) The helmet net could become a low-social-class giveaway by the absence of a worn-out portion at the top; when the helmet was taken off and placed upside down on the ground, the net should be worn away. In many infantry divisions, rumor held that if the chin strap of the helmet was fastened and worn in the correct way, the wearer ran the risk of being beheaded by a close explosion, which, it was said, would tear off helmet and head at once. This probably began as a practical joke, like sending a newcomer to get a left-handed screwdriver, but it was widely believed.

That’s is a pretty representative passage, offering both general observations as well as vivid specifics while also conveying the mixture of boyish jocularity, protective exclusivity, half-believed superstition, and grim realism of the frontline GI.

And, finally, the opening of Fussell’s chapter on the Hürtgen Forest campaign:

If today an eighty-year-old survivor of the Boys’ Crusade were asked to indicate his worst moment as an infantryman, he might answer “Omaha Beach.” And then as an afterthought, he would be likely to add, “No, Hürtgen Forest”—less publicized and cine-dramatized but equally unforgettable, at least for the few participants still living.

This is a book well worth reading. I recommend it to students all the time as a short, accessible, but blunt and truthful explanation of the infantryman’s war.

Up Front, by Bill Mauldin (1945)

Bill Mauldin served with the 45th Infantry Division in Sicily and Italy, where he was wounded during the Monte Cassino campaign, before landing in southern France and advancing through western Europe. But he was most famous as a cartoonist, publishing a single-panel cartoon about two ordinary infantrymen called Willie and Joe. His characters first appeared in the divisional newspaper but were eventually syndicated in Stars and Stripes and published back home in the States. Willie and Joe became immensely popular and well-known, and Mauldin’s cartoons got a lot of attention—not all of it positive. He had a rather famous one-way feud with Patton, who thought the cartoons disrespectful and a threat to discipline.

Shortly after the war Mauldin collected some of the best of the cartoons in this book, Up Front, and supplemented them with a loosely structured running commentary. Though dismissive of his own writing, Mauldin brilliantly and succinctly explains to the civilian reader what the men streaming home from the military in 1946 had been through. Everything is here: the danger, the frustration, the destruction, the distance from home and family, the camaraderie and affection, the bottomless unfulfilled appetites for women and booze, the physical misery, the joy of simple comforts, the irony, the exhaustion, the plight of civilians, and most especially the tedium. If war is proverbially 99 hours of boredom punctuated by one hour of sheer terror, Mauldin deftly conveys that.

And, perhaps most importantly, he conveys the humor that sustained the GIs and bonded them together—not only the gallows humor you might expect but a great deal of pure silliness. A strong sense of the absurd and a gift for improvisation were just as important for survival as ammunition and good leadership.

I could share any number of samples, but this is the passage I always think of as the one that most strongly affected my understanding of the war—making me able to imagine some of what it was like—when I first read it as a kid:

Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

After ten or twelve miles (remember—you are carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet brush. Imagine that somebody has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in.

If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

I discovered Up Front one day in middle school while tagging along with my mom in an antique mall. I spotted an old copy lying on an end table, for sale. I had never heard of Bill Mauldin but I loved comic strips and cartoons and World War II history, so I excitedly showed it to Mom. She bought it for me. I can’t be more thankful. This more than any other book laid the foundations for my understanding, however imperfect, of the experiences of GIs in Europe during World War II.

That first copy was a very early printing. I read it so much that the dust jacket eventually crumbled away to nothing, but I still have the book as well as a more recent facsimile reprint from WW Norton that includes a foreword by Stephen Ambrose. It is also included in toto in the Library of America’s excellent two-volume collection Reporting World War II. It is well worth taking the time to read.

Conclusion

Though The Snipers is not directly inspired by anything in these books, they helped shape my understanding of what the war was like for the young men who lived and fought through it. I strongly recommend all three of them—for starters. Thanks for reading, and I hope y’all will check out The Snipers when it arrives!

Mr Standfast

John Buchan June continues today with the third Richard Hannay novel, the conclusion to an informal trilogy concerning Hannay and the Great War. The Thirty-Nine Steps detailed Hannay’s accidental discovery of a German plot to start a war and defeat England. Greenmantle followed him across Europe and beyond as he uncovered a new German plot to foment religious upheaval in the Middle East. And this novel, Mr Standfast, traces his total commitment to the war—on both the Western Front and the home front.

Mr Standfast begins with Hannay, now Brigadier General Hannay, recalled from the trenches for a special assignment by his old spy chief Sir Walter Bullivant. Bullivant tasks Hannay with infiltrating a genteel manor house in the Cotswolds frequented by upper crust pacifists, antiwar activists, leftwing literary snobs, and, just possibly, German spies. In order to do this, Hannay must playact again. If you’ve read The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle you’ll know that this comes naturally enough to Hannay, but here he meets a serious challenge—he must pretend to be a pacifist.

Despite his revulsion at acting such a dishonorable part and his embarrassment at being perceived as a conscientious objector, Hannay successfully ingratiates himself into the community. In doing so, he meets two crucial characters: Launcelot Wake, a real conscientious objector whom Hannay suspects of treason, and Mary Lamington, a beautiful nurse whom Hannay finds himself falling in love with, and who also turns out to be his handler.

Hannay, on Bullivant’s orders as relayed by Mary, infiltrates another group of pacifists and meets Moxon Ivery, a leading voice of the British antiwar movement. He also meets an old friend, the American John S Blenkiron, who is undercover as a rabble-rousing dove. Blenkiron suspects that Ivery is the German agent they’ve been looking for, “the cleverest devil” and “the most dangerous man in all the world.” The task now is to prove it, stop him, and use his connections to feed disinformation to the Germans.

Hannay’s investigation takes him all over Britain, establishing contacts in Glasgow, pursuing his quarry to the Isle of Skye, fleeing authorities who are convinced he is a criminal, losing his pursuers in the midst of a mock battle staged for a propaganda film, and surviving a Zeppelin raid on London. It is while stalking Ivery during this raid that Ivery lets his guard down and Hannay recognizes him as the German agent who nearly killed him in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He also learns that Ivery has proposed to Mary.

From here Hannay returns to the front but keeps abreast of the situation at home as much as he is able, gathering intelligence from intercepted German newspapers and tracking clues about Ivery’s network near the front. Aided by Mary; by friends like Geordie Hamilton, his Scots batman; Sir Archie Roylance, the young pilot who had flown him out of trouble in Scotland; and by Launcelot Wake himself, who was inspired by Hannay to take a noncombatant role as a laborer on the front, Hannay uncovers more of Ivery’s activities and is enlisted by Blenkiron in a scheme to capture him.

The plan takes Hannay to Switzerland, where he is reunited with his old South African friend Peter Pienaar, now a former pilot who was shot down, severely wounded, imprisoned by the Germans, and released to neutral territory because of his disability. Peter is pleased to see Hannay but bridles at inactivity. As it turns out, that inactivity will not last long.

After the twists and reversals of the Switzerland plot, the climactic action of the novel takes place on the Western Front. Hannay, returned to regular duty and promoted to Major General, uses the intelligence gathered from disrupting Ivery’s spy ring to prepare for the massive German attacks of the spring of 1918. The German offensive tests Hannay’s division—and the entire British and French coalition—and nearly succeeds, but the Allies hold out and all of Ivery’s efforts on behalf of the Germans fail thanks not only to good intelligence but to the heroic self-sacrifice of two brave men.

Mr Standfast is difficult to summarize, and I hope you’ll read it knowing that what I’ve written above contains as few spoilers as possible, with a lot of twists and surprises concealed and a whole lot more simply left out. It is the only Buchan novel I’ve read that I would call “sprawling.” It is also the only one that I’ve struggled to finish.

After Buchan successfully scaled the thrills of The Thirty-Nine Steps up for Greenmantle I looked forward to the even more sweeping Mr Standfast, but to my surprise I found it overburdened, awkwardly paced, with a plot that was difficult to track, and with many secondary characters—such as Ivery’s henchmen—who were underdeveloped and difficult to distinguish. I found this surprising because a deft stylistic touch, distinct and memorable characters, brisk pacing no matter how complicated the plot, and a well-developed and intuitive story are all among Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer.

I think this novel simply tries to do too much. At 128,000 words, Mr Standfast is more than three times the length of the Hannay’s first tight, spare adventure. Buchan also wrote Mr Standfast over the course of a whole year, from July 1917 to July 1918, an unusually long time for him. The finished book, as biographer Andrew Lownie notes, “shows signs of being written over a long period,” introducing and dropping characters and subplots haphazardly and being extremely episodic, though without the breakneck pace and clear goals that unified the first two Hannay novels, keeping them moving and easy to follow.

That’s what I found unsatisfying in Mr Standfast. But the novel is not without strengths.

First, though constructed of numerous small episodes that never quite cohere into a well-paced plot, many of those episodes are small masterpieces of thriller writing. Hannay’s pursuit of a spy up a rock chimney and his subsequent fight with a dark figure in a cave on the Isle of Skye, his flight from the authorities in Sir Archie’s unreliable plane, his exploration of a creepy abandoned French chateau by night, his dangerous mountaineering shortcut through the Italian Alps with Wake, his capture by the enemy at a crucial moment—all of these are exciting and expertly constructed.

Second, Mr Standfast brings back several good characters from previous Hannay adventures, most notably Peter Pienaar and Blenkiron, and introduces others like the brave and resourceful Mary. Mr Standfast also features the first appearance of another important figure from the Buchan canon: Sir Archie Roylance. Sir Archie is, by some counts, Buchan’s most commonly recurring character, and its easy to see why. From his first appearance through his roles in Huntingtower and John Macnab he is a charming, disarming, but capable figure with some unusual skills and no lack of guts. I look forward to rereading all of these in publication order someday and charting Sir Archie’s growth from novel to novel.

Third, despite its plot and pacing problems Mr Standfast is deeper and thematically richer than the standard espionage thriller. I’ll consider why in more detail below, but part of it comes down to Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Buchan’s favorite books and an anchor in the swirling plot of this novel. Hannay and Mary use Pilgrim’s Progress to pass coded messages, and Peter Pienaar reads it while recuperating in a German POW camp. Hannay sees himself as the beleaguered traveler Christian, and Peter Pienaar determines to take action against the enemy regardless of his injuries thanks to the example of Mr Standfast, who lends his name to Buchan’s story. Buchan invokes it in ways both bold and subtle, giving the action greater meaning and resonance as a result.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, this novel has the strongest pathos of any of the Hannay adventures so far. The war is not only the single unifying feature of the plot but a predominating fact looming over every action Hannay takes. The passages in which Hannay rejoins his unit at the front are among the strongest in the book, but even on the Isle of Skye or among the labor activists in Glasgow Hannay is keenly aware that enormous loss of life results from every victory of Ivery and his spies. If The Thirty-Nine Steps was the story of one man on the run and Greenmantle the story of a team working to prevent chaos in one region, Mr Standfast is continental in scope—the story of whole civilizations in a death struggle. Even when the plot meanders, the stakes are clear.

Partly this is born of Buchan’s own experiences. Though too old and ill to serve at the front line, he was active throughout the war, writing an ongoing history of the conflict that reached 24 volumes and serving at various times on the staff of General Haig, in military intelligence, and finally in the Ministry of Information, a dedicated propaganda department formed near the end of the war. And like many others in Britain, he lost people. Perhaps the greatest blow fell on April 9, 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, when both his brother Alastair and his old friend and publisher Tommy Nelson were killed. He began writing this novel just a few months later.

But Mr Standfast’s pathos also stems from Buchan’s deep capacity for sympathy. I’ve written about this before in the dramatically different context of colonial South Africa, but Buchan’s ability and willingness to see the other side and to understand even those he disagrees with is a strength of all of his fiction. In Mr Standfast alone Buchan gives us moving, sympathetic vignettes not only of the civilians of wartorn France, the common soldier in the trenches or recovering in hospital, and the patriotic desk jockey, but of people quite unlike himself.

“Rather than indulge in the crude jingoism with which Buchan is often tarred,” Lownie writes, “he in fact tried . . . to present various views of the conflict. . . . [D]espite his own commitment to Allied victory, his sympathies were rather wider than might be assumed.” Buchan includes what must be one of the first fictional descriptions of a man suffering shell shock—at a time when many on the home front were inclined to think of it as malingering or simple cowardice—and one of the surprise heroes of his story is the conscientious objector Launcelot Wake. Though Hannay despises the fashionable pacifists who lend aid to the enemy by undermining the war effort and deriding the British army, he recognizes and comes to respect Wake’s good-faith position. Over the course of the novel Wake demonstrates not only moral courage in an unpopular cause but physical courage as a messenger on the front. As in so many of Buchan’s stories, two dissimilar men learn from and better each other.

None of these strengths quite overcomes the disjointed plot, the uneven pacing, or the contrivances of Hannay’s espionage work, but they deepen Mr Standfast and give it an emotional power beyond what you might expect if you only know Buchan as an adventure novelist. As flawed as I found Mr Standfast, I intend to reread it. I may have missed something. And perhaps, like others among my favorite novels, it will reveal more of itself to me.

Cormac McCarthy, RIP

Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. No one else has captured McCarthy’s blend of the old and modern like the Coen brothers.

I was genuinely grieved to learn of the death of Cormac McCarthy yesterday afternoon. No other writer has accomplished something quite like his body of work, and no other writer’s work has meant quite what his has meant to me.

I discovered him in the summer between my last two years of college. I have a standing rule that I will check out any unfamiliar book or author I hear about more than twice within a certain short amount of time. With McCarthy, I ran across references to his novel Blood Meridian in three places within the same week. I picked it up at the Barnes & Noble in town and that was that.

Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s magnum opus. It is also the worst place to start with his work. It is rich, dense, sprawling, arcane, operatic, a deliberate fusion of old fashioned curlicued prose and modern muscularity and bluntness. The chapters have strange headings summarizing the content and McCarthy does not use quotation marks. And of course there is the much-remarked upon brutality. But because of the allusions that had convinced me to pick Blood Meridian up, that was the one thing I was prepared for. 

I was flummoxed. I knew something great was going on but I struggled to wrap my mind around it. I thought the lack of quotation marks was a risible affectation. And I only barely followed the story. I think I gave it three stars on Amazon.

But it stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. And I bought more of McCarthy’s novels. 

I read through everything except Suttree by the time I graduated, and I reread several of them over the coming years. At last, I reread Blood Meridian last year, and while I want to say that I found it a completely different book, it was I who had changed. Age and maturity and years and years of reading McCarthy and reflecting back on Blood Meridian through his other work and—to throw it into relief—the work of less skilled imitators had prepared me for the novel. I had grown into it. It amazed me all over again.

Blood Meridian was the beginning of a long challenge to my way of writing. It was a bold early demonstration to me of the power of the precisely-chosen verb, of how to use a wide-ranging but carefully controlled vocabulary to create texture (or music, if you prefer), of the necessity of deep research presented as an organic part of the story, seamlessly and without ostentation. 

And the lack of quotation marks that annoyed me so much at first caused me to reconsider even more. McCarthy, I realized, had set himself an artistic limitation by refusing punctuation conveniences. He did not use quotation marks—or semicolons or, unless absolutely necessary, commas—the same way a sonnet writer does not use a fifteenth line. It was a self-imposed boundary that strengthened and liberated his style. It meant, as McCarthy has said himself, that there was less to get in the way. It allows the language to tell the story. Pure words.

From this I learned to avoid leaning on typography to communicate meaning. And so while I have not gone nearly as far as McCarthy in this regard, in my fiction I don't italicize words for emphasis or to establish the rhythm of a person's speech or use elaborate punctuation or typesetting. In a scenario like that of his penultimate novel, The Road—which as a student of the early medieval period I don’t have a hard time imagining—how much of your typographical shenanigans will survive transmission? McCarthy wrote to last. I hope to, too.

So much for style. What Blood Meridian and McCarthy’s work also taught me was to confront the harshness and evil of reality head on. Because of the violence and darkness of his work—most especially Blood Meridian, with its scalphunters and Comanches and hangings and the inscrutable, unstoppable Satanic figure of the Judge—people call him a nihilist. He wasn’t. What McCarthy had was a deeply moral sense of the utter fallenness of the world and an unwillingness to look away.

There is a time and place for the opposite approach, but we need our McCarthys, too, in all their bleakness. Witness this passage from a 1992 interview that I’ve seen circulating since yesterday:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Uplifting? No. But it’s true. All the charge of nihilism means is “McCarthy did not reassure me.” Good. Those “afflicted with this notion,” which is most of us nowadays, need to be unsettled. McCarthy, a master of this kind of prophetic unsettling, showed us how.

Cormac McCarthy, novelist, prophet, and personal hero, RIP.

Coming soon: The Snipers

I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest book, a World War II novella titled The Snipers.

The Snipers takes place during the Battle of Aachen in October of 1944. Four months on from D-day, the Allies are pressing into the western edges of Germany and slowly, laboriously penetrating the Siegfried Line. Aachen, the former chief residence of Charlemagne and one of Germany’s most prestigious and historical cities, is heavily defended, and as the US Army enters the outskirts of the city one unit comes under devastating sniper fire. Their battalion commander, unable to slow the offensive, instead calls up the leader of his reconnaissance squad, Sergeant JL Justus for a special assignment—find and kill the German sniper harrying the men of Charlie Company.

Justus has only two men left in his squad after the continuous slog from Normandy to Germany, and he has just settled down to some much-deserved rest in reserve as other units push into the city. But he has sharpshooting experience from the weeks following D-day and the boys under fire need him. And so he and his buddies Whittaker and Porter load up and enter the city.

Justus, a Georgia boy with an abiding interest in the Civil War and a wry sense of the absurd, has his doubts about the mission. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how is he supposed to find him? Can he do so before many more men are killed? And why is the commander of Charlie Company so certain that there is more than one sniper?

The rest of the story, which takes place across a single day of block-by-block, house-to-house fighting through the rubble of a once-beautiful city, will challenge and shock Justus in more ways than one. I hope it will do the same for the reader.

I’m quite excited about this one. I may related the genesis of the story here sometime soon, but for now I’ll say that once I had it in my head it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d gotten it down in writing. My hope is that it will prove a brisk but involving action story, both thought-provoking and poignant and with a dash of humor, ideal for reading in two or three sittings. At 35,000 words, it’s a little less than half the length of my previous World War II novel, Dark Full of Enemies.

The first paperback proofs of the novel arrived just this afternoon. I’ve included a gallery below that I hope y’all will accept as a preview. Pending tweaks and final corrections—which should be minimal thanks to the efforts of friends and beta readers who have already looked at the manuscript and provided helpful feedback—I hope to have The Snipers out and available on Amazon before the end of the month, just in time for the Independence Day holiday.

Last week I reorganized my website’s Books page to divide full-length novels like Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville from short fiction, and to add The Snipers. You can look at the dedicated page for The Snipers, with paperback and Kindle purchasing links (not yet activated), here.

Thanks for reading! This one came together unusually quickly and I hope y’all will check it out once it’s available. Stay tuned!

The Dancing Floor

John Buchan June continues with an eerie slow-burn thriller that anticipated some of the themes and terrors of Witch Wood. The novel is the third Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Dancing Floor.

Written after but taking place chronologically before Leithen’s poaching lark in John Macnab, Leithen narrates this novel in the first-person, as a series of wide-ranging reminiscences. In the first half, Leithen introduces the reader to Vernon Milburne, a young man of noble family and every advantage who is nonetheless pensive and withdrawn, a haunted man. As Leithen gets to know him, he learns that Vernon has been terrorized annually by a nightmare. Once a year, on precisely the same night, he dreams of someone or something approaching his bedroom though a long series of interconnecting rooms in the family home. Every year it comes one room closer. When the person, or presence, or creature finally reaches his bedroom, Vernon believes, he will come into some terrible destiny. All he can do is wait.

Interwoven with Leithen’s narrative of his friendship with Vernon is how the two of them met Koré Arabin. Beautiful, popular, and rich, Koré is also the only daughter of a legendarily depraved eccentric, an Aleister Crowley type who moved to Plakos, a remote island in the Aegean, where he could research and experiment with the occult and practice his sexual debaucheries with utter liberty. He also, it is darkly hinted, preyed upon the local Greek islanders. But he is dead, and Koré, his only heir, is now the mistress of his house and the most powerful person on the island.

So Koré arrives in England already the subject of salacious rumor. And her personality does not help. When she meets Leithen and Vernon she is brusque, forward, and aggressive. Leithen finds her off-putting. Vernon is offended and deliberately avoids her. But as Leithen almost accidentally gets to know her—and even falls in love with her—she reveals that there is much more to her than her dark family history. Abrupt and ill-mannered owing to her remote and strange upbringing, she nevertheless rejects her family’s occultism and is concerned to help the people of Plakos. Far from using her position to indulge, as her father and ancestors did, she embraces the responsibility she was born into and hopes to make amends.

But Leithen is not sure this is possible. Through various means and sources, the well-connected Leithen learns that the people of Plakos, particularly those in the village nearest Koré’s house, have not forgotten her father’s evil. And following a hard winter and bad harvest, the dimly remembered pagan rites of their ancestors have resurfaced. These entail nighttime footraces, a symbolic marriage, and human sacrifice, all played out on the broad plain near Koré’s house known as the Dancing Floor. Leithen suspects—accurately, is it turns out—that the selected female victim of the sacrifice will be Koré.

In the second half of the novel, Leithen assembles a team and journeys to Plakos, aiming to intervene personally and either evacuate or protect Koré. But the locals are more suspicious and hostile than even he expected. Armed men guard Koré’s house and every movement Leithen and his friends make is watched and followed by a mob. Only the tenacious Orthodox priest, damning the locals’ apostasy, offers Leithen aid. But Leithen cannot save Koré by holing up in the village church.

Finally, as the locals capture and imprison or scare off Leithen’s men, as Leithen explores the island by night and wonders what he can possibly hope to do, and as the night of the sacrifices on the Dancing Floor approaches, he detects that he is not the only person creeping around the island by night. Is he being stalked? Or is there someone else on the island with dark and secret purposes?

The Dancing Floor, like Sir Edward Leithen’s debut in The Power-House, is a seemingly rambling personal narrative that slowly lays the groundwork for the tight, complex, and exciting events of the climax. (I’d encourage the reader beginning this novel to stick with it even if it seems to be going nowhere; the first half is Buchan setting the pieces on his chessboard.) But unlike that earlier adventure, The Dancing Floor relies far less on coincidence. It is, if anything, a character-driven thriller—a true oddity but a successful one.

It is successful in no small part thanks to the characters. Despite his infatuation and emotional vulnerability early in this novel, Leithen is his solid and reliable self, a steady professional who won’t back down from a task no matter what the hardships or risks once he has determined that it is the right thing to do. Vernon offers an intriguing departure, a moodier and more phlegmatic character than is typical for a Buchan story. Vernon has good reasons to be so, having spent much of his life as an orphan tormented by nightmares in a vast lonely house, but overcoming this, embracing his inheritance, and stepping into the role he was born to play—going from passively awaiting fate to actively pursuing it—gives him a compelling arc.

That arc also makes Vernon an interesting mirror of Koré, who is inarguably the best character in the book. With her strange and terrible background, her struggle to fit in, and a core of goodness that she is determined to act upon, she is a beautiful woman not only because of her looks but because of her character. She proves a challenge to Vernon, and an important and necessary one.

The other aspect of The Dancing Floor that makes it so successful as an adventure is its atmosphere. With its dream-haunted young men in empty houses, its lonely and desolate woods and cliffs, its dark pagan rites recounted in obscure old manuscripts, its hero creeping through dark landscapes filled with inscrutable and violent enemies, its mob of justifiably angry peasants, and the same peasants’ unjustifiable human sacrifice by firelight under the moon, The Dancing Floor is steeped in the gothic. Even beyond my personal taste—and I am an absolute sucker for gothic atmosphere—the foreboding and gloom, which even the indomitable Leithen struggles to overcome, pervades the novel and gives it weight. I relished it.

Buchan wrote The Dancing Floor the year before Witch Wood. Pagan survivals—relict human sacrifice, nighttime revels, and “elaborate cultural and religious transactions with death” as David Bentley Hart has described them—were very much on his mind. Some critics have suggested the influence of the (now utterly debunked) theories of Margaret Murray. That may be. But it certainly reflects Buchan’s recognition of the fragility of civilization. A bad harvest, a harsh winter, and a truly wicked foreign interloper in the big house on the hill is all it takes to drive people back into blood sacrifice, into the smoke and ash and the shrieking of burnt offerings.

But more importantly, this evil is only a background against which virtue and goodness can be glimpsed more sharply. Koré and Vernon, in complementary ways, demonstrate this. As in Witch Wood, true goodness in the face of evil takes two. And the redoubtable Leithen is our witness.

Having read them so close together, I can’t help but compare The Dancing Floor to Witch Wood. The latter is far better. But as an exercise in the some of the same themes, on a smaller, contemporary scale and structured as a thriller, The Dancing Floor is a gripping, moody, and unusual thriller, and another good entry in Sir Edward Leithen’s adventures.