Many years ago now, Rachel Neumeier wrote me and suggested that I read Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede. Some years later, observing that I hadn’t reviewed it yet, she wrote me again and suggested that I read it. Eventually it came back into print, I snagged a copy, and of course I loved it. Last year, she wrote me saying that she’d signed a book deal; and a few weeks ago she wrote me and asked if I’d like an advance copy of her first book. I said yes, naturally. It arrived on Monday, and I opened it eagerly.

On reflection, I’m not entirely sure why I opened it eagerly; certainly, I had no particular reason to think that it would be any good. The only points in Rachel’s favor, other than her brief, scattered notes, are her love for Rumer Godden and the fact that the she was able to sell the book to a major publisher. But love of great writing is no guarantee of skill, and I’ve certainly seen enough dreck published by major publishers. But, nevertheless, I opened it eagerly…and the bottom line is that I wasn’t disappointed.

The book is a fantasy novel aimed at the “teen” segment of the market. As the book opens, the crown prince of the realm has gone missing; an intense search ensues, led by the crown prince’s elder brother, Neill the Bastard, but to no avail. Next, we come to a small village on the far side of the Great Forest from the main city of the realm. This particular village is notable for having its own mage, a great rarity, and the mage has a daughter named Timou. We read a bit about Timou’s training as mage, and her relations with the other girls in the village, and about her budding romance with a newcomer to the village, a man named Jonas, a romance that is stifled by the demands of Timou’s training.

Then, things begin to happen in earnest. The king disappears, and in the village babies begin to be born dead. And not just babies; livestock and wild animals are affected in the same way. Timou’s father leaves the village, searching for an answer, and doesn’t return. And eventually, of course, Timou must follow, while Neill must bear both the responsibilities of the realm and the suspicion that he has done away with his father and brother; and therein hangs the tale.

I don’t want to reveal more of the plot, but I’ve a number of observations to make. First, this didn’t read like a first novel. The prose is skillful, and flows smoothly. You can usually tell within the first few paragraphs whether you’re in good hands; I was. Second, while it’s being marketed as a teen novel I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t do well in the science fiction shelves as well. The book’s very clear that men and women, who might not be married yet or ever, can come together and have sex and have babies—there are references to courting couples finding a spot in the woods, and a farmer Timou gets a ride with is clearly expecting payment in kind—but the text isn’t in any way explicit or off-color, and the fruits of infidelity are clearly Not Good, so I see no reason why the book would be inappropriate for older children. (I recall Chesterton commenting that either the characters are wicked, or the book is.) Third, Rachel does good Faerie.

This last is hard for me to explain, but I’ll try. I owe my notion of Faerie almost entirely to Tolkien’s short story “Smith of Wooton Major”. It’s a place where humans do not rightly belong though they may sometimes stray in, or even be invited. It’s a place beyond human understanding, a place with its own laws, few of which are understood by human visitors, and those that are known are known only in part. It is perilous, and those that enter seldom leave unscathed—or perhaps “unchanged” would be a truer word. Properly done, Faerie evokes a sense of wonder, a sense of being drawn into something larger, a sense of dangerous beauty. (At least, it does for me. As Lewis notes somewhere, for some folks it doesn’t work at all.)

Very little I run across in the fantasy genre these days even attempts to enter Faerie. Most fantasy novels I see are realistic in tone, and treat the magical arts as simply the technology proper to the fantasy world. They might not be entirely understood, but there’s the sense that only further research is required. (Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera novels are an excellent example of this. I like ’em, but there ain’t no Faerie there, nohow.) Lord Dunsany could do it, and Tolkien managed it in his short stories “Smith of Wootton Major” and “Leaf by Niggle”; The Lord of the Rings at its most Faerie is still realistic in tone. Roald Dahl managed it sometimes; I recall Benjamin the True fondly, though I’ve not read it since my childhood. I dunno whether it would work for me now. Rachel does it very well, which puts her in illustrious company. And in fact, by the fourth or fifth chapter I was riveted.

The difficulty with books that evoke Faerie is that much of the reader’s response comes from within the reader rather than from the book itself. And there are two cases. Sometimes the book honestly and fully evokes the response, and sometimes the reader in their eagerness fills in the gaps in a book that dances well but has an empty heart. In the latter case, the book will often disappoint on a second reading, or at a later stage in life. I’m minded of an author I read avidly my first year or so of college, Nancy Springer; I came back to her books a little after I got married and as I recall there was nothing left in them for me.

The question then is, which kind of book is The City in the Lake? It’s too early for me to be sure, of course; but I think Lewis points the way. Some books, he points out, are read just for the fun of reading them. Others take up residence in your head, and you ponder them, and begin to fill in the gaps on your own: Why did so-and-so do such-and-such? How did so-and-so get from hither to yon, and was he doing in the meantime? What does it mean?

In contemplating the book prior to writing this review, I’ve often found myself doing just this. I’ll form an initial, somewhat critical impression of some aspect of the book…and then find counter-examples rushing to mind. There’s surprising depth, here, and goodness.

But I’m in danger of gushing. Point is, I liked it, and I’m eager to see whether Rachel can do it again.

The book’s due to be released in hardcover this coming July; you can preorder it from Amazon should you be minded to do so.

Over the last year I’ve read quite a few books that I never got around to reviewing. Some had a bearing on my decision to return to the Catholic Church, and were omitted because I wasn’t ready to go public with that; others I simply never got to. I’d like to acknowledge these books, some of which I thoroughly enjoyed, but in most cases I don’t feel like I can give them a thorough review after so long. Consequently, and most unusually, I’ve decided to do one or two grand grab bag posts, and get ’em all out of the way with a few words each.

Hah! Words have a way of multiplying. So grab your popcorn; this might take a while.

The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. Harry Dresden is more or less your basic hardboiled PI with a heart of gold…except that he’s not a PI. Instead, he’s a wizard-for-hire. He lives in Chicago in a basement apartment heated only by a wood-burning fireplace and keeps his milk cold in an old-fashion icebox, because electronics go wonky when he’s around. Sometimes he consults with the police department, but most of Chicago’s boys in blue think he’s a charlatan. From his point of view that’s OK—the world out there is scarier than most people imagine, and it’s his job to keep it that way. If the White Council doesn’t execute him first.

Sometimes a book will jump off of the shelf into my hands, and sometimes I’m desperately looking for something to read. But usually, I wait until I get two intersecting recommendations for a book or series by an author I’m not familiar with. In this case, I got the recommendations from Julie of Happy Catholic, and Ian of Benevolent Misanthropy (née Banana Oil). That’s a considerable angle of parallax, and so even though the first two books in the series (Storm Front and Fool Moon) didn’t grab me I soldiered on. There were some really good moments, and Ian had warned me that Butcher really hit his stride with the third. I read up through book 8 during my spate of travelling last year, and had a lot of fun with them.

Be warned; Dresden hangs out at the “Horror” end of the Dark Fantasy spectrum, so there’s a fair amount of gore and occasionally some rather outré sex (there are vampires involved, natch). The ninth book, White Night, is due out in paperback in a couple of days, and I am so there.

The Codex Alera, by Jim Butcher. Mr. Butcher’s been busy, and he’s also been working one of the more interesting fantasy series I’ve run into in a while. The series includes four books, at the moment: The Furies of Calderon, Academe’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury (just out in paperback) and Captain’s Fury (just out in hardback). I’ve enjoyed the first three—more than the Dresden books, truth-to-tell. The series takes place in the land of Alera, on a world densely populated by a variety of races, some human, some nearly human, and some not at all human. The folk of Alera are human, descendants of a sizeable quantity of Romans who were transported to this world by some means as yet undisclosed. Alera is also densely populated by elementals, colloquially known as “furies”; and virtually all Alerans have the ability to communicate with and command furies to a greater or lesser extent. Aleran society is roughly feudal; the noble families are precisely those which have shown a great capacity to command the furies. There’s an interesting political situation, an interesting backstory, interesting enemies, and some neat characters, and I’m quite curious to see where Butcher takes it next.

1812: The Rivers of War, by Eric Flint. This is the first book in yet another alternate history series: what if Sam Houston hadn’t gotten seriously wounded fighting the Creek Indians with Andrew Jackson…and went on to be more thoroughly involved in the War of 1812? Houston had ties to the Cherokee nation…perhaps, instead of the Trail of Tears, something different might have arisen…. I was hesitant to pick this up, being greatly annoyed with Flint over how long it was taking for the follow-on to 1634: The Galileo Affair to be released as a paperback, but eventually I did and enjoyed it considerably. The sequel, 1824: The Arkansas War, is now out in paperback; I have it but have not yet read it.

C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, by Victor Reppert. In Chapter 3 of Miracles, Lewis argues that the fact that we can reason shows that philosophical materialism is necessarily false: that if we were, in fact, the result of a mindless, purposeless system of physics and chemistry that scientific reasoning itself would be fundamentally flawed and not worthy of being believed.

I will not attempt to restate his argument here.

It is generally held, evidently, that Lewis was mistaken—that his argument was insufficient to prove his point. In this book, Reppert disagrees…and goes so far as to extend, strengthen and complete Lewis’ argument, making it even stronger. Or so the back cover blurb would indicate; once Reppert got down to brass tacks and began to lay out his argument, I was completely at sea and soon gave up reading.

C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Joseph Pearce. By the end of Lewis’s life, he was the highest of High Church Anglicans, and engaged in all sorts of practices, up to and including private confession, and believed all sorts of things, up to and including the notion of purgatory, that are more regularly associated with Roman Catholicism. Pearce asks the question: given that Lewis’ religious life was so Anglo-Catholic, why didn’t he take the next step and join the Roman Catholic Church? This is a very natural question, I might add, for those Roman Catholics who love and esteem Lewis deeply.

In the end, of course, the question is unanswerable, for Lewis evidently never gave any definitive answer. There is some evidence, I gather, that he contemplated making such a step but could never quite bring himself to it. While warning against simplistic answers to complex questions, Pearce traces it home primarily to Lewis’s youth as a member of the Church of Ireland. Lewis described his father as being fairly “high” in his churchmanship; but Pearce makes it clear that “high” for the Church of Ireland in that time and place was still remarkably “low” compared to, say, the Oxford Movement, and of course anti-Catholicism was in the air. (Lewis remarks somewhere about his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien that it violated two pieces of advice he’d been given: never to trust a Catholic and never to trust a philologist.) If I recall correctly, the Church’s Marian doctrines were also a sticking point, though Pearce (again, if I recall correctly) also linked this back to Lewis’s childhood in some way. Pearce also suggests that Lewis’ espousal of “Mere Christianity” relates to his inability to come to terms with Rome: if Christian unity could not be found in Rome, it had to be found in something more general.

Bottom line? I dunno. Lewis has certainly had a greater influence on the progress and content of my faith than any other single writer, and for that I’m grateful. Pearce’s book? I found it interesting, but I guess that’s as far as I can go.

Six Frigates, by Ian W. Toll. This is book about the construction of the United States’ first six heavy frigates, the cornerstone of the American Navy and the key to winning the War of 1812. I don’t have much to say about it, but I spent quite a bit of my time during our last summer vacation reading it, which for a history book ought to be a pretty good recommendation, unless you prefer your history dry, pedantic, and in small doses. If you’ve any interest in history, and particularly in the Age of Sail, this is well-worth your time.

Adventures in Orthodoxy, by Fr. Dwight Longenecker. Fr. Longenecker, an American by birth, went to England, became Anglican, was ordained an Anglican priest, served for many years, and was then received into the Roman Catholic Church. He spent many years as a layman, during which he wrote this book; some while back he started a blog called Standing on My Head, and shortly thereafter was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He’s currently serving as chaplain to a Catholic school in South Carolina. Not surprisingly, when I ran across this book last summer during one of my business trips (to Orlando, Florida, if I recall correctly) I snagged it and brought it home. And, I’m afraid, quite thoroughly failed to appreciate it. I don’t know why; it didn’t strike me as badly written, or dull, but it didn’t really grab me. I’m holding on to it, and I expect I’ll give it another try some day.