Ian has posted a review of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, with some interesting reflections on the writing styles and proclivities of both King and fellow-author Dean Koontz. I always pay attention when Ian analyzes a work of fiction, because he understands the technical details of how plots and such-like work much better than I do.

There are not many authors who can steep themselves in the myths of the
Grail and the Fisher-King and put that together with mobster Bugsy Siegel
and a sleepy little town called Las Vegas and come up with
anything at all. Add in the tarot, poker superstitions, and a
generous helping of the truly odd, and you’ve got Last Call,
a long-time favorite of mine. Powers has a talent for making the
strangest things plausible for just long enough. For example, how do
camouflage an SUV against bad guys searching for it magically? Tape face
cards to the hub caps…..

I really don’t know what else to say about this book; it rather defies
description. It’s not a novel of the occult, though, despite the mention
of the tarot. Good triumphs over evil, and a case can be made that
underneath the symbolism it’s a deeply Catholic novel (Powers is Roman
Catholic, I recently discovered; who knew?).

I took my two boys to see the Narnia movie last week, and enjoyed it extremely, and rather more than Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, even though I’m also very much a Tolkien fan. I also found it surprisingly moving; I really should have brought some kleenex. The kids liked it, too.

I’ve got a few observations; if you’ve not seen it you’ll want to skip what follows. If you do read it, bear in mind that these are nits I’m picking.

Continue reading →

Some while back I made some comments about the value of genre over literary fiction (it’s all about the story) in response to some post or other; and this led to posts by a number of folks, including Lynn Sislo; and Lynn’s post led to a comment I disagreed with. And I wrote a post about that comment last Sunday morning, in which I linked to everybody involved and made a most cogent argument as to why the commenter was mistaken.

About twenty minutes later I went back and looked at that post, and Yea, Verily, It Was Lame. So I deleted it.

Now I discover that Jaquandor’s got it covered–and good for him, I say!

Usually I like Hill’s stuff a whole lot. Usually I finish books I start.
Neither is true in this case.

Dream of Darkness, which was originally published under a
pen name, is something of a schizophrenic thriller. The main plot
concerns a young woman named Sairey Ellis, who is tormented by nightmares
involving her mother’s death in Uganda during the time of Idi Amin, and
the therapy she receives at the hands of a psychiatrist who is also an
old family friend. She was just a small girl when her mother died; now,
save for her dreams her memories of those days have vanished.

Sairey’s story is interlarded with brief memories of Idi Amin and his
reign of terror. Some are cast as letters, reminiscences, and journal
entries from some kind of government intelligence archive; others are
excerpts from a book being written by Ellis’ father, a British agent
who was instrumental in bringing Amin to power and now regrets it.

The point of the book seems to be that Idi Amin was a very bad man, and
that Britain did wrong to covertly assist him–assuming, of course,
that they actually did. OK, fine. Amin was a monster; I buy that.
I’ve met men who narrowly escaped being killed by him. But the piecemeal
nature of the Ugandan side of the narrative isn’t compelling, and young
Sairey Ellis and her problems are frankly dull. There’s some evidence,
up to the point that I’ve read, that the events of yesteryear are going to
intrude into Sairey’s quiet if troubled life, but unfortunately I can’t
bring myself to care.

Possibly Hill was trying to awaken a national sense of guilt by exposing
Britain’s complicity with Amin’s rise. I dunno. But the book sure fell
flat for me.

Ian links to a blog post which quotes a professional book reviewer who says he finds so-called literary fiction to be “so jejune, self-absorbed and lifeless that I am just about unable to read it, much less pass fair judgment on it.” Instead, he says, “I find myself turning more and more to what is commonly dismissed by the literati as ‘popular’ or ‘genre’ fiction…” The reviewer’s name is Jonathan Yardley; he writes for the Washington Post, and he’s won the Pulitzer Prize. The blogger who quotes Yardley, novelist Richard Wheeler, agrees at some length.

Of course, I’ve been touting the virtues of genre over “literary” fiction for years. Unlike me, though, these two guys have done their time in the trenches–they’ve made a serious effort to read the latest literary fiction, and so their opinions have some weight behind them. Decent of them to jump on the hand grenade for us like that.

I’ve been fond of Tim Powers’ books for many years, ever since he wrote
The Anubis Gates. He’s not extremely prolific, though, and
although I’ve read everything he’s written, and I review everything I
read, I’ve not reviewed many of his books since I started writing reviews
eight years ago. It was clearly time to renew my acquaintance, and so I
grabbed a couple of his books when I went on a business trip last
September. This is one of them.

The Drawing of the Dark is one of Power’s earliest books,
and the first to reveal his interest in “secret history”, the stories
that might lurk behind the stories in the history books. In this case,
the setting is the Seige of Vienna, about which
Wikipedia has this
to say:

The Siege of Vienna of 1529, as distinct from the Battle of Vienna in
1683, represented the farthest Westward advance into Central Europe of
the Ottoman Empire, and of all the clashes between the armies of
Christianity and Islam might be signaled as the battle that finally
stemmed the previously-unstoppable Turkish forces (though they continued
their conquest of the Austrian-controlled parts of Hungary afterwards).

The Islamic advance began with Mohammed and rolled, seemingly inexorably,
through the formerly Christian lands of Asia Minor and North Africa,
striking into Europe as far as Southern Spain in the West…and as far
as Vienna in the East. There the tide was stemmed; had it not been, the
Western World would look rather different today. It was truly a clash of
civilizations. But what really happened?

Enter Brian Duffy, an Irish mercenary down-on-his-luck in Venice some
years after being injured at the disastrous Battle of Mohács. He’s hired
by an odd old man named Aurelianus Ambrosius to travel to Vienna and
there take up a position as bouncer at the Zimmerman Inn, until recently
a monastery, and age-old home of the Herzwesten Brewery. It’s a vital
position, for the future of the West depends on the safety of the, yes,
the Dark…..beer. The Herzwesten Dark is nearly ready to be drawn, for
the succor of….

But that would be telling.

It’s an absurd premise, that the fate of the Western World depends on
a cask of beer, and ought to produce a novel that’s at best a low farce,
but somehow it’s better than that. Powers takes the idea and has far
too much fun with it, as Jane would say, but somehow by refusing to play
it for laughs he escapes being sophomoric and pulls it
all together so that it somehow, miraculously, it works. It’s a lot of
fun, and I always enjoy coming back to it.

Watch out for the dried snakes, though, they’re addictive.

Jane and I have been reading Amy Welborn’s
weblog for some time
now, so when I ran across this book at the Border’s in Newport Beach I
grabbed. It’s an interesting book, and I’m glad we got it.

First, some context. When I was a kid, my mom taught me to pray. Prayer
usually involved the Our Father, and “God bless”‘s: you know, “God bless
Grandma, God bless Grandpa,” and so on. In catechism class (I was raised
Roman Catholic) I learned a number of other prayers, especially the Hail
Mary and the Act of Contrition. And except for those “God bless”‘s,
pretty much all the praying I did took the form of one or more of these
traditional prayers.

During high school my faith lapsed for a time; and though I remained
Roman Catholic when it came back I also got involved with Protestants.
(Mostly Episcopalians, but still, Protestants.) And in some Protestant
circles, traditional prayers have a bad name. How can you pray sincerely
when you’re using somebody else’s words? You should always, or at least
mostly, pray in your own words. Have a conversation with God, I was told.
And that’s how I mostly prayed all through college, during which I was
still Catholic but mostly hanging out with Protestants, and it’s how I
mostly prayed after I got married and joined the Episcopal Church, and
it’s how I’ve mostly prayed until now. I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer
fairly often during all of that time, but other traditional prayers very
seldom, except as part of the normal Sunday liturgy. The Hail Mary
I prayed very seldom; if Protestants are down on traditional prayers, they
are especially down on Mary.

In the last few years, though, thanks largely to the efforts of certain
lunatics in my denomination who shall remain nameless, I’ve been
re-examining my faith, and especially the roots of my faith. One of
those roots is liturgy–I’m simply not comfortable attending a
non-liturgical church. And really, in light of this, it’s surprising
that I absorbed so much of the Protestant attitude toward traditional
prayers, because that’s really what the liturgy is. And the joy and
delight of the liturgy is very simple–it’s always there, it covers all
of the bases, and it makes sure you don’t miss anything. The liturgy
isn’t there for those days when it’s a joy to go to church; it’s there for
those days when you’d rather be anywhere else, and when trying to focus
on the service is nearly impossible. It’s there, it’s an anchor, and
because it’s always the same it helps you to stay focussed.

Standard prayers are really the same thing–but for every day, rather
than just on Sunday mornings.

So this book came into my hands at just the time when I’d find it the
most useful.

The Words We Pray is a survey of nineteen traditional
Catholic prayers, many of which I learned as a child, and many of which
were new to me. Only a few are specifically Catholic; most are used by
Christians of all traditions. Each chapter begins with the text of one
of the prayers, followed by Welborn’s commentary. She discusses the
origin of the prayer, how it evolved over time, and how and when it is
usually prayed; and the purely factual material is leavened with her own
personal reminiscences about occasions of prayer. (As fellow parents,
Jane and I felt right in tune with many of them.)

The old familiar prayers include the Sign of the Cross (about which there
is more to be said than you might think), the Our Father, the Hail Mary,
the Creed, the Act of Contrition, and the Prayer of St. Francis; I was
also already familiar with the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ,
have mercy on me, a sinner), and St. Patrick’s Breastplate, though I
learned both of those as adults–that one’s particularly stirring, and I
need to spend more time with it. Of those that were new to me
my favorite is the Anima Christi, which somehow I never learned as a kid.

Anyway, it’s a quietly joyful book; and if reading it has turned my
prayer life upside down, that’s rather a good thing.

Ian’s got a delightful take on author Thomas Hardy; it’s exactly the sort of thing I expect I’d write if I seriously attempted to read Hardy, though I doubt I’d have said it so well. As it is, now I don’t have to. (Does this make me a Philistine? Possibly so.) I can’t comment on Ian’s opinion of David Copperfield (the character, not the book), because I haven’t read the book, but I suspect I’d feel the same way. (Am I the only one who can’t stand Romeo and Juliet because the young lovers are such idiots?)

These are the third and fourth volumes of
The Complete Peanuts, and they are surely a treat.

I had a pretty sizeable collection of Peanuts paperbacks once upon a
time, one or two which were bought just for me (the one I remember in
particular was a green book with an angry kite chasing Charlie Brown
on the cover–I don’t remember the title) and a whole bunch I inherited
from my siblings. As near as I can tell the set spanned the period from
maybe 1952 or 1953 until probably 1960 or so. Friends of the family had
a book or two that covered the earliest strips.

Thus, I was on familiar ground in these two books, and was delighted to
renew my acquaintance with many an old favorite.

One of my joys in reading old comic strips is watching the strip and the
characters as they develop. At the beginning of this pair of books, the
classic cast is pretty well complete: Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus,
Schroeder, Pigpen, Shermie, and Violet are all here, all recognizeably
themselves, all drawn just as you’d expect them to be drawn. Sally
hasn’t been born yet.

But Snoopy–these are the books where Snoopy really begins to come
together. In these books, Snoopy first dances, first tries to sleep
on top of his dog house (with mixed results), first kisses Lucy on the
nose, first begins to exercise his imagination. At the end of 1958, he’s
still not drawn quite like the iconic Snoopy of today, but he’s getting
closer.

I can’t wait for the next volume.