Here’s another book by Lars Walker. It’s an ambitious concept, though
I’m afraid he doesn’t quite manage to pull it off.

Here’s the set-up. Will Sverdrup is a high school English teacher. He’s
currently teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet; he’s also a member of a
local theater group that’s just starting a new production of
Hamlet (Will’s going to start in it.) And then, during rehearsal
one evening, something exceedingly odd happens.

First, Will finds himself in pre-Christian Denmark, in
the body of a buff young dude named Amlodd, whose uncle has just killed
Amlodd’s father and married his mother. Will–

But I must digress for a moment. It seems that the original source for
the tale of Hamlet is a 13th century manuscript by a fellow named Saxo
Grammaticus. (Given his name, one can only imagine that our Saxo was
writing things down when writing things down was a great eccentricity.)
In Saxo’s version of the tale, the star’s name is Amlodd. But back to our
story.

Will is familiar with Saxo Grammaticus, recognizes where he is, and
somehow has to deal with it. Meanwhile, all of his relations not
surprisingly think he’s mad.

Meanwhile, and for no obvious reason, the rest of the theater company
find themselves in a very odd place–a castle of vague outline that seems
to want to become Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg in Elsinore. Something in
the air seems to want them to act out Shakespeare’s play for real, quite
possibly including all of the deaths at the end. But there are some
wrinkles. To begin, Will Sverdrup isn’t there, being in Amlodd’s body in
the real Denmark–but Amlodd is there in Will’s body, and let me tell you
he doesn’t know how to behave in polite company. And then on top of that
there’s one other person there, the son of one of the cast members, a
sullen teenager who has acquired an interesting set of new powers.

As the book progresses we get to follow first Will in Amlodd’s body,
then the company in the faux-Elsinore, and so on, as little by little we
learn just what the hell is going on.

There’s a lot about this book to like. The scenes with Will in Denmark
are generally quite good, and the contrast between Will’s views of
what is right and proper and those of Amlodd’s friends and relations is
intriguing. And by far the best passage in the book concerns Amlodd’s
sojourn in England, a section which is told in third person so that it’s
unclear whether we’re watching Amlodd as he would really have been, or
Will in Amlodd’s body.

The sections in the faux-Elsinore are less satisfactory, though Amlodd’s
difficulties with 21st-century manners and morals are a nice counterpoint
to Will’s problems. Walker has tried to draw the members of the theater
company from all of the philosophical schools of modern America, so as to
comment on each, and I’m afraid it doesn’t work. It would take a longer
novel to really flesh out each character; instead, several of them evolve
into rather absurd caricatures (I’m thinking especially of the sullen
teenager’s father). The points Walker raises are valid ones, but it’s
hard to get past the characterizations.

Also, I’m not entirely happy with the portrayal of Christianity
in the book; in some places it seems tacked on in a way that it
simply doesn’t in The Year of the Warrior. Will Sverdrup,
in particular, is supposed to be making a moral and spiritual journey
in the course of the book, a journey that ends in his conversion, and
I’m afraid it seemed a little contrived. I hasten to add, though, that
my concerns are literary, not theological.

Finally, the ending didn’t satisfy me. The denouement denoue’d on
schedule, but it wasn’t quite clear to me why or how things worked out
the way they did.

But no matter. The book held my attention right handily, even in the
weak parts, and I rather enjoyed the good parts.

I’ve got one more of Lars’ books left to read; I’m looking forward to it,
and I gather that a couple more are in the works. I’m looking forward to
those, to, the moreso as one of them is evidently a sequel to
The Year of the Warrior.

Check out the comments on this post over at
Mark Shea’s blog. The game is to put odd pairs of authors together (as in Wodehouse and Lovecraft). The best one so far is a excerpt from Jane Austen’s version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

I have just ordered a copy (“Like new!”) of the out of print book, Scream for Jeeves!: H.P. Lovecraft Meets P.G. Wodehouse. How I missed it when it was in print, I have no idea, but apparently it’s a collection of three Lovecraft tales as told by Bertie Wooster. The mind boggles.

Update: Perhaps my mind doesn’t boggle after all…here’s what came to mind after I thought about it for a bit:

I was in bed, eyeing the morning egg-and-bacon while getting outside of a stiffish brandy-and-soda, when Jeeves shimmered into the room. I don’t know how he does it, and I would never dream of asking. There are things about one’s man one simply isn’t meant to know, what? Jeeves coughed softly, so I sluiced down the remaining B&S.

You may wonder why I didn’t simply have Jeeves escort the creature out, and well you may ask! I’m afraid there had been a chill about the flat ever since Jeeves criticized a stylish yellow veil I’d taken to wearing over my face, and I’d had to take a firm line with him. A man can’t let his man play the tyrant, what?

This book was one of those little nuggets of gold that you sometimes come
across while digging around in the dusty corners of the used bookstore. The
cover isn’t flashy, the font is very small and it was published in 1926. The
writing, however, is good and the points he makes about the conquest of
Britain first by the Celts, then the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings, etc., is
so interesting that I squinted my way thru it waiting for the next bit to
unfold. His point about feudalism as a necessary step between tribalism and
the nation-state which allowed the accumulation of wealth and the beginnings
of the division of labor into specialties and trades is particularly
interesting. It’s also written from a pre-World War perspective when England
still had an Empire of some sort and the British thought of themselves as a
“race” so added to the history that he is writing is another layer of
historical interest to the modern reader. Unfortunately, the book is out of
print. And the bookstore only had this one volume published in 1953 by
Anchor Doubleday. I managed to find the following 2 volumes on Amazon so I
can continue the story, if my eyes don’t give out.

This is one of the more fascinating books I’ve read recently. It’s the
tale of a viking lord named Erling in the days of Olaf Tryggveson, when
Scandinavia was beginning to become a Christian land. Erling is not only
one of the first Christian lords in Norway, but also the first Christian
in his own domain, and much of the drama comes from the clash of faiths,
and the struggles between the followers of Odin and the followers of the
White Christ.

To a large extent, it’s an historical novel. Erling is an historical
figure, as are many of the viking notables he meets. It’s also a fantasy
novel, for the followers of the White Christ must overcome not only
the worshippers of the old gods, but supernatural forces as well. And,
most atypically (as I pointed out a few days
ago), it’s a work of Christian fantasy, and a remarkably good one.

The viewpoint character is an Irishman named Ailill. Having just
been kicked out of the abbey in which he had been a novice on account of
his manifold sins, Ailill arrives at his parents home just in time to be
taken captive by viking raiders. On the way back to Scandinavia the vikings
cut his hair in a priest’s tonsure, in hopes that with his monk’s robes
they’ll be able to get a good price for him at the slave market; there
are a few Christians there, and sometimes they will pay good money to
redeem a priest from slavery.

And, in fact, that’s more or less what happens. Ailill is purchased by
Erling, whose previous priest had been murdered by Erling’s father.
Ailill is given the choice of coming back to Erling’s home and being his
priest, with all the risks that that entails, or being sold again. The
difficulty is, Ailill’s nothing but a failed monk, and one with a serious
grudge against God; he’s taken no vows and is certainly no priest. But
freedom is better than slavery, and he lies to Erling and accompanies him
home.

The result is a fascinating, inspiring (and frequently humbling) story.
On the one hand we have Erling’s political and religious struggles, and
as Erling is (after his father’s death) one of the great men of Norway
during a tempestuous time, that’s an exciting tale indeed. And then,
on the other hand, we have the personal story of Ailill, failed monk,
who must perforce grow into his faith and his role as priest, and
learn to care for the flock that God has sent him. And perhaps best
of all, Walker doesn’t attempt to whitewash history. Erling is (and
historically was) gentle in his attempts to convert his people, but
King Olaf brings Christ with the edge of his sword. The Church is made
up of sinners, then and always, and the result is what you’d expect.

Walker handles the problem of how to mingle fantasy elements and
Christianity with ease. He simply feigns that old gods have a certain
reality, and that they and other less powerful beings (faerie,
essentially) are being displaced by the new religion. The work thus
feels all of a piece.

As I say, I found the story humbling–the fortitude and determination of
these early Christians in the face of hardship is almost impossible to
believe, and yet I know that Walker has portrayed them accurately. It
makes me a little less satisfied with myself, in all truth.

I should add, Lars contacted me after visiting this blog, and asked if
I would like to read any of his books. I said sure; they are published
by Baen Books, who publish a number of authors I quite like, so I figured
they couldn’t be too bad. I was quite pleasantly surprised by how much I
enjoyed this one.

This is the first of a series of books to be published over the next
twelve years, containing the complete run of Peanuts cartoons from
October of 1952 until Schulz’s retirement, a span of nearly fifty years.
I bought it for two reasons.

The first is purely nostalgic. During most of my life, the only
Peanuts cartoons I read in the newspaper were the Sunday strips.
The daily strips weren’t on the usual comics page; instead, they were
just inside the front page, which I seldom looked at. Thus, my knowledge
of Charlie Brown et al came from a handful of Peanuts
collections, most of which I inherited from my siblings, and all of which
were from the first ten years of the strip’s existence. I read them over
and over. And many of the ones I remember best are from the time period
covered by this current collection.

The other reason is that I’m a comic strip junkie, and I especially like
watching comic strips evolve. There’s always a period of time during
which the cartoonist is figuring out how his characters are drawn, and
what personalities they have, and I find it fascinating to watch. In
this case, I also found it fascinating to re-read the same cartoons I’d
loved as a kid, and see things that had gone completely over my head.

Here are a number of things I noticed as I was reading it.

As the strip begins, there are only four major characters: Shermy, Patty
(who is not the Peppermint Patty of the later years), Charlie
Brown, and Snoopy. Shermy and Patty are the big kids–they both go to
school (though it might only be kindergarten). Charlie Brown is the
little kid in the neighborhood; he doesn’t go to school yet. And the kind
of problems Charlie Brown has with Patty and Shermy (though mostly with
Patty) are the kind of problems any little kid has with the Big Kids.
Interestingly, there’s a clear scent of on-again/off-again romance
between Patty and Shermy. Snoopy, meanwhile, is just a dog. He has
moods, and opinions, but they are non-verbal. His big thing is that he can
always tell when Charlie Brown has anything to eat, especially ice cream
or candy.

Over the course of the first year, Charlie Brown gets a little older, and
a new cast member is added: Violet, a pretty girl of Charlie Brown’s own
age, with two straight pigtails in back (though she’s usually drawn in
profile, so you can only see one). One gathers that she was added to
give Charlie Brown a love interest of his own. Violet, interestingly,
is the first girl to hold a football for Charlie Brown; and though she
takes it away at the last minute, it doesn’t appear to be due to malice.
Charlie Brown also shows up playing Beethoven (badly) on a violin during
this period.

The next kid to arrive is Schroeder, the new baby in the neighborhood, and
for the first month or so a baby is all he is–and then the piano shows
up, and he takes off with Beethoven. By the end of the book he’s walking
and talking and playing baseball with Charlie Brown–who at this point is
always shown as the catcher, never the pitcher–though he’s definitely
still younger than Charlie Brown.

Shortly after Schroeder makes the transformation from toddler to little
boy and Charlie Brown’s frequent companion, Lucy shows up. As with
Schroeder, she starts out more or less as a toddler, and though she has
an independent streak she’s initially relatively guileless. Toward the
end of the book, she does indeed hold the football for Charlie Brown in a
Sunday strip in which he twice fails to kick the ball, and in neither
case does she pull the ball away. The first time she’s afraid that he’ll
kick her, and so she lets go of the ball so that it flops over just as
he’s about to kick it. The second time Charlie Brown warns her to hold
it absolutely still, and she holds it so tightly that he can’t kick it
out of her grip. In neither case is she being mean; she’s trying her
best, in fact.

After Lucy appears, Violet’s hairstyle begins to change, possibly because
she and Lucy look too much alike. Over the course of several months it
goes back and forth between her signature pigtails hanging straight down
in back and a single proto-bun on the back of her head.

It’s about this time, or maybe a few months earlier, that Snoopy shows
signs of becoming a Dog of Parts. Charlie Brown comments that everyone
in town is getting a TV, and gives as evidence Snoopy’s doghouse, which
has a TV aerial on top. (If I’m not mistaken, this marks the first time
Snoopy’s doghouse appears in the strip.) A month or so later, angry at
being left all alone by the kids at the end of the day of a long day of
play, Snoopy stalks off to his dog house. If they don’t want to play
anymore, that fine. He doesn’t need them. He can spend the evening
watching TV.

And then, just at the end of the book, Linus makes his first appearances
as Lucy’s baby brother.

As 1952 comes to a close, none of the characters yet look quite as we
will know them for the better part of the strip’s life. Charlie Brown’s
head is still noticeably oval when seen full-face. Snoopy hasn’t
yet begun to walk on his hindlegs or sleep on top of his dog house–it’s
not even completely clear yet that he’s Charlie Brown’s dog. Violet is
clearly evolving toward her final form, but hasn’t gotten there yet.
Schroeder is already a big Beethoven fan, but Lucy has not yet fallen in
love with him. Lucy, who is still noticeably younger than Charlie Brown,
has not yet opened her psychiatrist’s booth. Linus has not yet acquired
his security blanket, nor can he talk. Charlie Brown plays baseball,
but has not yet begun to pitch.

There’s good stuff in this first volume, but clearly, the best is yet to
come.

I’ve had a fair number of religion-related posts up recently, and if it’s
becoming tedious for you I apologize in advance for posting another one.
The Foothills is supposed to mostly be a book blog, and herein lies my
problem: many of the books I’ve been reading recently involve religion in
ways I can’t ignore. So please, bear with me; it’s not my intent to turn
The Foothills into an All-Religion-All-The-Time kind of blog.

Phil at Brandywine Books has written several posts (most recently
here)
on the subject of “What is Christian Fiction?” My answer is that there
are several things which can go by that name. The first is simply,
“Fiction written to be marketed specifically to Christians”. There’s a
lot of this stuff being written, I guess, and I have no idea what it is
or if it’s any good.

The second category is fiction which expresses the Christian worldview.
Let me explain that, because what I mean probably isn’t obvious.

Every work of fiction is, in one sense, a work of fantasy. That is,
every work of fiction takes place in a world of its own, a world where
things are different than they are in our world. In mainstream fiction,
the world may correspond quite closely with our own, but it still
contains people who don’t exist in our world, doing things that never
actually happened, saying things that were never actually said. It
must–for if it did not, the work might be history, or journalism, but it
certainly wouldn’t be fiction. This created world has geography and physics
(though in a fantasy novel they might be very strange physics); it also
has a metaphysical dimension.

Most science fiction, for example, assumes the naturalistic view of
things. The universe may be a very strange place, but the rules are
scientifically discoverable, and everything that happens is the result of
physical processes acting on matter and energy. In the naturalistic
view, the supernatural does not exist. There are no ghosts; there are no
dieties; or if there are, they are subject to the same physical laws as
the rest of us, though they might involve physical processes as yet
unknown to science.

Much fantasy fiction, perhaps counter-intuitively, also assumes the
naturalistic view of things. Since the publication of
J.R.R.
Tolkien‘s essay “On Fairy Stories”, most fantasists
have seen themselves as creating fantasy worlds that follow
well-understood and immutable laws. These laws are undoubtedly different
than those of the real world, but that’s the point of most fantasy–it
doesn’t take place in the real world. Such worlds often contain ghosts,
and dieties, and stranger creatures as well, because that’s how the author
wrotes the rules. For all that she’s a werewolf,
Terry
Pratchett‘s Corporal Angua is no more supernatural in
her world than a motorcycle cop is in ours.

To the Christian, of course, the naturalistic view is true so far as it
goes, but it is severely limited. God is not subject to natural law; God
is, in fact, the creator of the natural laws, and of the very matter and
energy whose processes they describe. Christian fiction, in this second
sense, is simply fiction whose philosophical underpinnings are those of
Christianity. That is, it is fiction that takes place in worlds in which
Christianity is true.

Note that this definition doesn’t assume any particular kind of plot, nor
does it require that Christianity be mentioned, either explicitly or
symbolically, in the work in question. Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings is a work of Christian fiction simply because Tolkien
explicitly set it in the prehistory of the real world–and for Tolkien,
the real world was a Christian world, a world created by the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Eru-Illuvatar of Tolkien’s mythology is not
just a diety, nor a symbol of the Almighty God; but the true, the living
God that he worshipped each Sunday. The same may be said for
C.S Lewis‘s
Aslan. Aslan does not symbolize Jesus Christ;
Aslan is Jesus Christ, as he chose to appear in the world of
Narnia.

Middle-Earth and Narnia are, of course, worlds not only of Christian
fiction but also of Christian fantasy, and both illustrate the
fundamental problem that faces the would-be author of Christian fantasy:
how can one introduce fantasy elements, things which contradict natural
law and the world as it is, after constraining oneself to remain true to
Truth Himself? He resolved it by setting his story in an ancient,
ante-deluvian world, at a time before the Almighty had begun to reveal
himself to his Christian, and by limiting the supernatural aspects of his
story.

Have you ever noticed that despite being the pre-eminent work of fantasy
of the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings contains very little
that’s actually fantastic? The geography is different than in our world,
but the physics are the same. There’s elven-magic, but Galadriel
cautions that it’s not what we’d usually think of as magic. There’s
nothing particularly supernatural about elves, or dwarves, or orcs, or
ents; though extinct, they are creatures just as men are. Indeed, the
only really magical beings we see are the wizards Gandalf and Saruman,
Sauron the dark lord, and the Nine Nazgul. The Silmarillion makes
it clear that Gandalf, Saruman and Sauron are all nothing more nor less
than angels; the Nazgul can then be thought of as extreme cases of
demonic possession. In any event, all power in Middle Earth derives
ultimately from Eru, the One, the Creator.

In short, the mythology of Middle Earth extends Christianity and goes
beyond it, but doesn’t contradict it. The same can be said for Lewis’s
work. It’s a difficult line to walk, and few have been successful at it.
There’s Tolkien and Lewis, of course, and Lewis’ master George MacDonald;
I’m hardpressed to think of any others.

Indeed, even less successful attempts are hard to find. Christopher
Stasheff wrote a series beginning with The Oathbound Wizard, which
takes place in a world (if I recall correctly) in which basic Christian
morality is enforced by natural law–the wizard truly is oathbound,
because having once sworn an oath it’s impossible for him not to keep it.
And yet, that seems to me to work against the Christian belief in
original sin and the need for redemption. Kathryn Kurtz sets her Deryni
series in a world with a church much like that of medieval England, but
though the forms of the Catholic church are retained there’s little of
Christianity here–except for numerous examples of original sin at work.
C. Dale Britain has written a book called A Bad Spell in Yurt (one
of a series, if I recall correctly) in which the dominant religion is
Christianity, positively portrayed; a nice touch, though an odd one–it
bothers me, here and in the Deryni books, to find a church that
celebrates the crucified and risen Christ by name in a world with no
apparent connection to the world in which he was crucified. Poetic
license, I suppose.

Now, why have I gone through all this? To define Christian fantasy, and
to make the point that writing it is extremely difficult–all in
preparation for some interesting books I got in the mail recently. But
that’s a post for another day.

I first read this last July and enjoyed it very much. I
just heard that a sequel is due in June, and so I pulled it out and read
it to Jane, who also enjoyed it very much. I won’t say much about it
(you can read the earlier review) but there are a few points worth
mentioning.

First, it’s a Discworld book; but it’s also a juvenile. I’ve generally only seen
it in the young adult’s section of the bookstore; so even if you’re a Discworld
fan you might have missed it. Hie to a bookstore (or, more likely, to
Amazon.com) and order it! (Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have cameos.)

Second, it contains one of his best lines in a long time–one
of the ones that doesn’t hit you until you’re already a couple of
sentences past it: “The universe is a lot more complicated than it looks
from the outside.” Think about that for a while.

Now, this you gotta see. Courtesy of Lileks.

This is the fourth of Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and if you’d
asked me some months ago, before I started reading them to David, I’d
have told you it was my favorite. It might still be…but I was
surprised to discover that it’s not the book I thought it was.

Or, rather, it is…but the events that I remember and that made the book
special for me and that I thought filled the whole book are actually all
jammed into the last thirty or forty pages.

Anyway, this is the book where Taran, through self-sacrifice and
hard work, finally becomes a man. This is the book where he discovers
his limits–which are wider than he thinks in some places and which pinch
unexpectedly in others–and makes his peace with himself. He becomes a
man who can see what needs doing, and will do it, as best he can; who
does not make excuses; who is brave, honest, and skilled, all three. Not
a bad package, I think.