Captain Yips Secret Journal

New Year's Eve Recommendation

If you like mysteries, especially period mysteries, give the Barker and Llewellyn novels of Will Thomas a try.  They're well written, reasonably unpredictable, and usually filled with intriguing information.  I'll say no more.

Happy 2009 one and all.  Back next week.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke has died.

His omnibus, Across the Sea of Stars, did a lot to make my junior high years tolerable.  I suppose that The City and the Stars and Childhood's End can be especially appealing to adolescents, or adolescents of a particular kind.  He was a superb storyteller, though, who did a lot with nuance and implication, leaving the reader to do the filling:  I can't help but wonder how bloated a retelling of a story as complicated as Childhood's End might become in contemporary hands.  Tales from the White Hart is another old favorite.  He indulged his sense of humor there, in quite funny little tales that must have owed a certain amount to Mr. Mulliner.  God be with you, Sir Arthur.

Juvenalia

When I’m sick, as I was for two weeks with the Worst Cold in the World, my reading reverts to a handful of comfort books, books too well known to be challenging, well enough written not to add to my miseries.  Sometimes it’s Nine Tailors, sometimes The Witches of Karres, sometimes heaps of Kipling’s short stories.  This time ‘round, it was a bunch of William Gibson (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Idoru, Pattern Recognition), and I realized something about him that I had not noticed before. The man is a satirist.  I am so lame. 

A very deadpan, bone dry satirist, but a satirist nonetheless, subspecies, ironist.  Maybe we’ve come to expect satire to be funny, to make us laugh, but that’s not always the case.  The art of the satirist is to say, “if you keep going on the way you are, this is the result.”  Gibson plucks at favorite threads - information, celebrity culture, the madness of the very rich, the amorality of the large corporation, the decline of education, the increasing gap between rich and poor - and they become the background for his stories.  An exaggerated formulation of a frequent Gibson theme might be that as human beings abandon humanity, machines begin to take their place, as the robot manipulator/artist does in Count Zero.  Gibson’s satire is so dry that his flat depiction can be read as approval, and I am not sure that this is the case.  In the worlds he usually portrays, whether a proximate future or one more distant, no one is likely to read a novel, and that is something no novelist can depict with happiness (another part of his elaborate irony, perhaps).

Maybe I’m wrong:   I might explore this a bit, if the rabbits and the dogs let me.

BTW, Gibson has a new book coming soon.

I won't go, and can't make me

I’ve little enough to say about The Da Vinci Code, and so, unlike Mr. Brown, I shall be brief.

I read the book.  Wild horses can’t drag me to the movie.

Demolition of the book would be fun (and then I could call this entry, Da Vinci Demolished) but useless.  Despite the stupendous, almost ambitious, ineptness of the book as fiction, Brown managed to blunder into catching a cultural wave.  He has ridden it to fame, fortune, a nice movie deal, and, I am sure, robust contracts for future books that I won’t read.

After pulling myself through the desert of The Da Vinci Code (and why, why, do people call it a page turner?  Except maybe because the only way to stop the pain is to finish the book?  Just about every page contained some crime against the craft of fiction), I forced myself through Deception Point and Digital Palace.  I haven’t read Angels and Demons, and won’t. 

What I learned is that Dan Brown has written the same book over and again.  All involve cover ups, conspiracies, and outlandishly unlikely events.  All feature wooden characters, largely the same structure and plot, and in fact mostly the same characters, very slightly differentiated.  Each features a male-female team of nimble investigators who overcome powerful but strangely incompetent opponents.  Each employs a technique of salting  a sea of turgid speculaton with a minute factoid, and claiming that the whole sea is now "true."  Mr. Brown seems to have written four books without learning anything at all about the craft of fiction.  He really has no gift for this, but he perseveres.

We were in the Barnes and Noble in Evanston the other night.  In the “Religion” section I found four titles by Sponge John, four by Bart Ehrman, three solid shelves of “Gnostic” dreck, and not one title by N. T. Wright.  One and a half shelves of C. S. Lewis.  Rather a lot of “christian fiction,” LaHaye/Jenkins (worse writers even than Dan Brown) and their imitators.  This is not a healthy landscape.

Maybe we should do something about that.

Be Careful with that Book

It might go off.  Another example of the adage (well, my adage, anywat) that reading C.S. Lewis has never hurt anyone.   I wonder if  the time has come for an unprejudiced reassessment of CSL?

Maybe not, if this sort of thing keeps happening (tug o' the forelock-Christopher Johnson).  If the mere sight of a few conservative books on a reading list can get a bunch of profs in a twist, I hate to imagine what Miracles on a reading list might do. It's a good thing the recommendations were so mild.  Think what might have happened had the list included something by, say, Russel Kirk.  Or Edmund Burke.

I hear tell that culture wars are being played especially viciously in Ohio, and maybe that has something to do with the absurdity of this complaint. 

Fourth Leg

The fourth leg of my Lenten reading arrived yesterday, the book that'll be a break from the others.  A favorite late 19th century author is Mary Hartwell Catherwood.  She's gotten stuck in the "regional" or specialized category, unfortunately.  She wrote quite well, if a little classically for modern tastes, with 19th century lapses into sloughs of sentitment.  She's not transgressive, not a muckraker, just a hard working writer fascinated with the history of the pre-Independence Midwest, especially the history and characters of New France.  She lived for a few years in an area of southern Illinois a branch of my mother's family helped settle, and where they may have run a station of the Underground Railway (we know they were ferocious Abolitionists, but the station is uncertain).  An active and fairly well known writer, she gave a talk at the Columbian Exposition (there that is again!) about the copyright problems between the United States and Great Britain.  The historian Francis Parkman thought well of her work.

I pick up her books via Alibris every so often, when they aren't outrageous.  This year it's The Chase of Saint-Castain, a short story collection in a fairly recent edition from Books for Libraries Press.  It looks like a photo-offset of the 1894 edition, but it's in a binding that will take a beating.  My copy is stamped "withdrawn" from the Cal Poly San Luis Opisbo library, and from the condition of the book and the emptiness of the "date due" sticker, it doesn't look like anyone ever read it.  Huh.  Engineers.

The Terror of her Dreams

I’ve been reading CSL’s That Hideous Strength as refreshment from some other and heavier work.  A lot of CSL critics dislike this one, and it certainly has a different flavor than the other “space adventures,” but I like it quite well.  I was delighted by one small comment made by Busby, the Bursar of Bracton College:

We all have our different languages; but we al really mean the same thing.

Busby is an ex-clergyman and one of the lukewarm bad guys, but this little sentence sounds like it could have come from any Griswoldian.

I am also struck that some of plot would have to be handled differently today.  Part of the story involves a quite young woman, Jane Studdock, 23, recently married and somewhat neglected as her husband pursues his career.  She is an unwilling seer, beset by dreams in which real events are related to her.  Early in the book, the dreams are terrifying and partial suppressed.  They become more intrusive during her solitary hours in the flat, and that solitude is essential to coming to grips with the dreams. 

Today, though, a person in her position wouldn’t be so isolated.  She would probably have cable TV, possibly TiVo, a cell phone, email, game systems.  Entertainment, communication and contact would be at her fingertips.  A woman born into a western society in 1983 would be used to perpetual interaction, to the point that solitude may seem unnatural.  She could find any number of distractions from the terror of her dreams.

There are a flock of literary questions involved in this.  As author, how would one build a convincing solitude for a modern character?  And what act of imagination and knowledge is needed on the part of a contemporary and younger reader to enter works out of their experience?  The world of That Hideous Strength is that of England, about 1948, not so long ago, yet on the other side of a cultural divide. This is a curious issue, one I plan to look into.

Lion Hunting Season

This somewhat blurry article about the author of Narnia, one of many that I'm sure is coming, the vanguard of a certain CSL demolition I begin to detect, seems to miss CSL entirely.  For example, Narnia is not Earth, Alsan is not Jesus, and the "spiritual needs" of Narnia are of a different order and type than those of our world. CSL wasn't rewriting the Gospels, but doing something else. 

If we have to personalize CSL's work (something he would have detested), it's more interesting to consider how brilliant images-the lampost in the forest, the floating islands, the well in the woods in That Hideous Strength-work.  These images seem to have dropped like pebbles into the deep well of CLS's imagination.  He constructed stories around them-maybe the better image is grains of sand that become pearls. Sometimes the stories are good, sometimes less so, but the images are  evocative and refreshing, and remind us that CSL's first ambition was to be a poet.

CSL's personal life may have been muddled and odd seems to bother the author a little.  Why it is that being a Christian is often assumed to be a portal to being scrupulously moral, I don't know.  It happens sometimes, but not always, and when it does it is the result, the consequence, not the purpose.  Being a Christian is about being called into a relationship.  CSL had to come to grips with the notion that if the Incarnation and Redemption are true, historic, objectively real events, then they are also dominant, revolutionary events that change everything.  When he realized that the "Beyond Personality" that was the source of the mysterious "Joy" that haunted him had come into the world, acted in the world, suffered in the world, it changed everything for him.  It isn't a matter of being one religious path among many others, all of debatable merit.  The historic Christian story is that God came into the world, wrote Himself into the story, and that event, if true, changed everything.  CSL came to grips with the importance of "The Incarnation-Truth or Superstition?"  Those whom Kendall Harmon calls the reappraisers among modern Christians prefer to slide over this issue, and I think that is why CSL is so popular among the non-reappraisers or reasserters or traditionalists.  CSL never shied from the implications.

The more militant secularist sections of the mass media will probably declare open season on CSL over the next few months.  It will be interesting to see what they toss at him.  The point, though, is not that CSL was flawed.  Aren't we all.  The point is that CSL, flaws and all, knew himself to be loved and sought by God, and wrote about it clearly and vigorously. 

Fiorinda Paludeskar

A few weeks ago, I was able to unpack and shelve about a third of the books that were crated up during the basement rehab.  Why a minor, almost trivial, bit of remodeling should create chaos absolute in my life is another, boring, story altogether, but I was glad to find Ursula LeQuin’s Malafrena.  A series of posts about the limits of “theory” at Prof. Drout’s place provoked me to want to reread Malafrena yet again.

Long ago, maybe twenty years, I persuade an intelligent and literate friend to read Malafrena. Our responses were quite different, and the difference in those reactions seemed to highlight a problem of more theoretical approaches to any work of fiction, that of narrowing the reader’s response.  The richness of a complex work tends to exceed any intention of the author, and, from what I can tell, theoretical approaches tend to suppress responses outside the scope of the theory.  To cite a notorious example, a reader may bring to Poe’s stories intellectual equipmet that leads the reader to see, in a doorknob, a bit of anatomy.  That insight might be enriching in so far as it goes, but it gets to be repressive when it becomes the only lens any reader is allowed to read through.  But as I’ve said often enough, I don’t get theory.

The reading was, well, intriguing.

The Historian

During my fit of travel, I read this book, a clever new use of the Dracula story.  That is suitable, since most of the characters in The Historian are in constant motion through time and space.  I’m sure that other commenters have mentioned how vivid are the characters, how well rendered the places described.