Fiction, Reviews

‘Mr. Whittle and the Morning Star,’ by Robert Nathan

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What had he thought about at that age? – at eighteen, at nineteen? Life . . . . the leap of spirit, like a salmon bent upstream, the wish blown into the wind like dandelion seed . . . . the shaken heart, the running joy . . . . And what was he thinking about now?

Death.

Some Robert Nathan books are heavy on the fantasy. Others downplay that element, or omit it almost entirely. Mr. Whittle and the Morning Star is one of that latter group. It’s a literary story that borders on earth-bound fable.

The time is 1947. The war is over, but a consumer goods shortages persist. The thrill of victory has subsided, while everyone worries increasingly about the atomic bomb.

Robert Whittle, a mild-mannered college professor, is suddenly absolutely convinced that the world about to end. Very soon. He mentions this to his family, to his friends, to his classes. He states it flatly to a ladies’ group that has asked him for a lecture. The ladies are not pleased.

When his wife Amanda learns of this, she’s very upset. She’s been a good wife and mother. She appreciates her standing in the community. Why would Robert make them a laughingstock this way? Her distress leads her to seek comfort with their best friends, and she finds herself kissing the husband.

Robert happens to see that kiss. He rebounds into the arms of an attractive student – they see a movie together and kiss too. But he does not want this girl. He wants his marriage. For him, the world has indeed ended.

But has it?

The only fantasy element in Mr. Whittle and the Morning Star is a couple conversations Mr. Whittle has with God – but we understand this God to be just his own imagination of the deity. The novel seemed to me to be a sort of a thought exercise, a way of contemplating our lives and our mortality and the things we value most.

Mr. Whittle and the Morning Star does not leave us with a moral. But it’s an intriguing story.

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For your Spectation

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Photo credit: Paris Bilal. Unsplash license.

After a long hiatus, I am once again featured at The American Spectator. My essay, ‘Defending “Adequate” Humans Against AI,’ is found here.

There’s a whole realm of life that belongs to the Adequate. Good enough for the general public. That’s the realm where most of us live, and where skilled workers used to learn their crafts.

In the AI future, infinite goods will be produced, but who will buy those goods? Where will the consumer acquire purchasing power, when both manual and mental labor have been automated? At what point will our AI masters decide that the human being, like Ned Ludd the weaver or Lars the script translator, is a downward drag on the bottom line?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Summer Lightning,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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‘It stands to reason.’

‘You don’t really think so?’

‘Of course I think so. Have you forgotten what I told you the other day?’

‘Yes,’ said Lord Emsworth. He always forgot what people told him the other day.

Not long ago I reviewed P. G. Wodehouse’s Something New, which I described, more or less, as a Blandings Castle book in embryonic form. Most of the classic elements were present, but the author had not yet worked out the possibilities.

Summer Lightning is considered the third Blandings novel. (I’ve skipped Number 2, Leave It to Psmith, because I have to admit I just don’t like Psmith much.) Now we’re getting closer to the full flowering.

The complex plot centers on two pairs of sundered lovers. The first are Hugo Carmody, a languid young man currently shirking his duties as the Earl of Emsworth’s secretary (which pleases the earl; he doesn’t want to be bothered anyway) and Millicent Threepwood, the earl’s niece. Lady Constance, the earl’s sister and effective autocrat of the castle, would never countenance Millicent marrying a commoner, so they’re trying to figure out a way to gain the earl’s favor and overrule her. The second couple consist of Ronnie Fish, a nephew to the earl, and Sue Brown, a pretty and sweet chorus girl. Their union is also disapproved, and their relationship is complicated by Ronnie’s hair-trigger jealousy.

The plot centers on Hugo’s bright idea of stealing the Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth’s beloved, prize-winning fat pig, and then pretending to discover its hiding place, restoring it to its owner, and claiming the reward of wedding approval. Another major issue is the memoir the earl’s brother Galahad Threepwood is writing. Because of his thoroughly scandalous youth in the 1890s and his excellent memory, his book promises to bring public scandal on some of the most prominent and respectable people in the country. What ensues is a lot of scurrying about in bushes, jumping out of windows, and smuggling of the pig from hiding place to hiding place.

I was particularly struck by the role played here by the Efficient Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s former secretary, who is obsessed with dethroning Hugh Carmody and getting his old job back. Baxter was present in Something New, but did nothing notable there. Now he’s a main villain in the piece, loathed by the earl. It’s rather unjust, really. Baxter is by all accounts a very good secretary who only wishes to do his job well. His great sin in Wodehouse’s world is that he’s No Fun. We enjoy seeing him humiliated, because he threatens to bring reality into the comedy.

Summer Lightning (published in 1929) is not Wodehouse at the peak of his powers, and it’s not as quotable as his later works. But it’s plenty of fun and (spoiler alert) everybody we care about lives happily ever after.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Reviews

My top ten mystery list

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Photo credit, Getty Images via Unsplash license.

Today is my birthday. Don’t ask which one. If anybody out there wants a birthday, you can have one of mine. I have a lot more than I need.

My friend Hunter Baker, of North Greenville University, has given tongue to the voice of multitudes, thus: “When, oh when,” those multitudes ask, “will Lars Walker offer a Top Ten list of his favorite mystery novels?”

To which I reply, “Why would anybody care what my favorite mystery novels are?”

Nevertheless, the challenge has been delivered, and I shall endeavor to give satisfaction.

First, some clarifications.

This list is not, and does not purport to be, an actual list of Best Books. There are whole swathes (I’ve grown uncertain how to pronounce that word: I’ve always rhymed it with “moths,” but other people rhyme it was “lathes.” Most troubling) of the mystery genre which I’ve rarely or never tried. Especially in the Cozy vein. Many passionate (sometimes frightening) people are devoted to Cozies; I haven’t got the nerve to laugh at them. I’ll just note that Cozy is not my cuppa arsenic-laced tea and, having writ, move on.

Agatha Christie remains, I believe, the most popular mystery writer in the world. I’ve read some Christie, but was not won over. Her focus is on the puzzle, not on the characters. Her readers delight in following clues and trying to figure out whodunnit before the Big Reveal at the end.

Me, I gave up solving mysteries long ago. On the rare occasions when I’m able to outthink the sleuth in a story, it’s usually because the author tipped his/her hand through trying to misdirect me in some way, and I caught him/her at it. I’m a better storyteller than a detective.

I read mysteries mostly to live vicariously through the characters and to observe them acting in extreme situations. I am not a man of action; I’ve managed to cram, I’d estimate, ten or twelve years of living into my three-score and several years of life.

With all this understood, here’s my Top Ten list. Purely personal, biased and subjective. Delivered with no authority whatever.

Continue reading My top ten mystery list →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Invisible Evil,’ by Blake Banner

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I’ve read some of Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer thrillers before, and enjoyed them. I don’t think I made a decision to pause my reading of them, but I know I didn’t do it because they disappointed or offended me. So I picked up Invisible Evil, the ninth book in the series.

Harry Bauer is one of those highly-trained, deadly operatives working for yet another of those super-secret, deniable government agencies that you encounter so often in contemporary thrillers. Harry’s agency is called Cobra, and his superiors are the Brigadier, an English officer, and the Colonel, an attractive American woman Harry has been flirting with.

In this adventure, the Brigadier and the Colonel call Harry in to offer him a more than usually secretive job. This one is not even tacitly approved by the government. There is a man named Oscar Larsen, the leader of a motorcycle gang. He has been making a lot of money filming pornography – the unspeakable kind you have to go to the Dark Web to find. As if that isn’t wicked enough, he’s blackmailing his customers, who include some of the most powerful people in the world, for his personal purposes. He’s sociopathic, sadistic, and a megalomaniac. The FBI thought they had him once, but their evidence was ruled out of court.

The Brigadier and the Colonel have decided Oscar Larsen cannot be allowed to live any more. It’s a personal determination of their own. Will Harry agree to go New Mexico, where Larsen has his studio, and kill him?

Once he understands the circumstances, Harry agrees. Larsen has thirty men; Harry is alone. Piece of cake.

He isn’t prepared, though, to meet a nice family who get in the crossfire. Before long, the assignment becomes a rescue mission as well as an assassination job. Awful things will happen, and Harry will take (as usual) a lot of physical punishment, before we enjoy the extremely satisfying final climax.

Blake Banner writes good prose (except that he doesn’t know how to use “beg the question”), and he knows how to plot a thriller. Harry is also an interesting and sympathetic “hard guy” character. My taste for extreme thrillers is limited, but when I feel like such a story, the Harry Bauer books, like Invisible Evil, are good choices.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Long After Summer,’ by Robert Nathan

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If Manuel says that a dory’s canvas will hold the waves, it will hold them. If he were wrong, someone would be drowned. Only a writer can talk about what he doesn’t understand, without harming anybody.

We were working on my boat together, in the vinegar sun of early spring….

Yet another Robert Nathan book to review. They’re original and various, and they don’t cost much. I was very pleased with Long After Summer.

The book’s narrator, who never gives his name, is a writer, and he has a summer home on Cape Cod. There he lives among the fishermen, who have accepted him as part of the community. When he asks around for some woman to clean house for him, young Johanna finally shows up. She is an orphan, a relation of Manuel the fisherman. She is a girl who has never known love in her life, who has never had anything of her own. The author, pitying her, gives her one of his dog’s puppies, which she adores. But when she falls in love with a local boy, she gives the puppy to him, in the purity of her love.

Then tragedy strikes. Johanna’s reaction to her unthinkable loss unmoors her from time itself (that’s the fantasy element in this story, and it might not be fantasy at all), threatening her very life. The narrator, along with the sympathetic local Catholic priest, take great risks and bend the law to save her. The book’s ending – in familiar Robert Nathan style – is open-ended.

Long After Summer is now one of my favorite Robert Nathan books. The story is touching, the prose gorgeous. I recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Turquoise Lament,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“To each one of us, the self is the most enchanting object in all creation. Sickness intensifies the preoccupation with self. And, of course, the true bore, the classic bore, is the person who is as totally preoccupied with himself all the time as the rest of us are when we are unwell.”

Among the polychromatic titles of all John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, The Turquoise Lament has always been one of my favorites. On re-reading, I’m not sure it’s as perfect as I remember (Travis goes to bed with two married women, that he admits to, in this story, and then there’s the question of Pidge’s age, less an issue back in the 1970s than it is now), but I certainly enjoyed it.

“Pidge” Lewellen is a girl Travis McGee has known for many years. He first met her as a young teenager, when he was working with her treasure-hunter father exploring old shipwrecks. She conceived a desperate crush on him back then, and he had to push her away a little roughly.

Now her father is dead and she’s married, and she writes him a letter. Travis flies to Honolulu to help her out. She tells him she’s afraid she’s losing her mind. She’s been seeing and hearing things that her husband, with whom she’s been voyaging in her late father’s yacht, tells her never happened. Trav knows her husband, Howie Brindle, a big, friendly, uncomplicated sort. He reassures Pidge, telling her she’s just suffering from anxiety. As they talk together, something sparks between them. She tells Trav that she doesn’t love her husband anymore. She has always loved him, and she’s going to come after him as soon as they’ve sold the boat and she’s gotten a divorce. Trav returns to Fort Lauderdale happy as an infatuated high school kid.

But later he gets another letter from her. It starts him looking into Howie’s background, and suddenly he understands that this guy is no teddy bear. He’s a sociopath, with a string of bodies in his wake. And now he’s alone on a boat with her in the south Pacific, hundreds of miles from any human contact

“Gaslighting” was not a common term back when The Turquoise Lament was written, but that’s what this story is about. It features all the standard philosophizing and educational sections explaining unfamiliar business operations that you expect from a McGee story. It was utterly fascinating all through, and poignant to boot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Enchanted Voyage,’ by Robert Nathan

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What sudden glance or silence, what lifted hand or piteous look, fragrance, light upon flesh, unspoken promise, knocks on the door of memory, lights the warm lamp of seeing, opens to hunger again, to the Thou-art-mine of the spirit, the I-am-thine of the heart?

Robert Nathan was a fantasy author, but he was far from formulaic in his fantasizing. His tales might involve angels or magic, but they also might rise just from unusual human kindness or – as in The Enchanted Voyage – from a slight alteration of the laws of man and nature.

Hector Pecket is a carpenter, and not a very good one. He has a house in the Bronx, and his great joy and comfort in life is the boat he built in his yard, in which he loves to sit and dream of adventure. He never intends to put it in water.

He named it the Sarah Pecket, after his wife, despite the fact that she hates the boat. She has a strong sense of entitlement, and she feels that the boat diverts Hector from useful work that would enable him to provide for her better. So one day she sells the boat to a butcher, for use as a lunch stand. Preparatory to moving it, they place the boat on a trailer.

Hector is devastated. He insists on spending one last night on his beloved boat. That night, a fierce storm arises. The sail catches the wind, and Hector finds himself coursing down the street, using the trailer’s tongue as a tiller. By morning he’s miles away, and he just keeps going. Along the way he picks up a young waitress who feels stuck in her job, and a young itinerant dentist with no prospects. The two young people misunderstand each other completely, and so fall in love. The story sails on through one implausibility after another, until the final crisis.

I’ve complained that Robert Nathan books often kind of wind down at the end, without a proper climax. There’s a climax here, but I didn’t find it entirely believable. (Unlike the stark realism of the rest of the story, ha ha.) I think people less anxiety-prone than I am would find reading it less stressful. The Enchanted Voyage is a charming tale, though, and even got made into a movie in 1946. (Nathan didn’t like it much.)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dies Irae,’ by B.V. Lawson

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I give pretty high marks to author B. V. Lawson for her Scott Drayco series, about a private eye who was once a concert pianist and an FBI agent, who also has synesthesia, the condition where people see colors in sounds. Lawson does a pretty good male character, and her stories are colorful and intriguing.

The third Scott Drayco book is Dies Irae. Unlike the first two books in the series, this one is not staged in the town of Cape Unity, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, but in Scott’s home of Washington D.C. This time he is reunited with his old FBI partner, “Sarg” Sargosian. Scott took the fall for a mistake Sarg made on the job, resulting in his own dismissal from the Bureau. It saved Sarg’s career but ruined their friendship. Only now Sarg wants Scott’s help. A student at a prestigious local college, a musical prodigy who also had synesthesia, has been murdered. She’d received a mysterious, coded note beforehand. Sarg has reason to fear that his own daughter, a fellow student, might be the next victim.

There is a possible voodoo angle in the plot, and the story delves into religious questions. The author’s attitude seems to be pretty broadminded, except that Christian evangelicals consistently look bad.

As in the previous book, the author misuses the phrase “to beg the question.” And this time out, she adds the odd quotation, “et two, Brute.”

The Scott Drayco books aren’t bad, but I’m finding them philosophically uncongenial. I can’t deny, however, that the stories are pretty well done.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Train in the Meadow,’ by Robert Nathan

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“For the artist,” said Mr. Freundlich, “the problem of immortality comes second only after the problem of staying alive. Of all people, the artist is the one most horrified at the thought of a catastrophe which would end everything, including music, poetry, ceramics, art, and making mobiles out of chicken wire and bits of string.”

Robert Nathan published his novel, The Train in the Meadow, in 1953. I have to wonder if he ever read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which came out in 1945. Because there are few novels as similar as those two, though they have very different conceptual foundations.

In a meadow in a high mountain pass, a railroad train rolls to a stop. After a while, another train, headed in the opposite direction, pulls up next to it. As they wait for something to happen, the two groups of passengers are supposed to stay apart, but there are some interactions.

The passengers in the first train are a mixed lot. There’s an old Jewish couple, one of them a famous art critic. They’re rather dejected to have been summoned in the middle of the night and expelled from their home for the second time in their lives. There’s a salesman, and also a waitress with whom he once had a one-night stand. There’s a Catholic priest, and a former president of the United States. A hard-working, embittered woman who was abandoned by her daughters. And a little orphan boy, worried because he doesn’t have any “papers” to present at the border. Before long we suspect – and then we know – that these people are all dead, on their way to the next world.

After a time a table is set up in the meadow, and two officials take their stations there. This spot is, apparently, the border. A long line forms, and each person presents his or her papers and gives an account of his or her life. (Though each of them is worried about not being allowed to enter, it doesn’t appear that there’s anywhere else to go.)

It should be no surprise that The Train in the Meadow handles such matters differently than The Great Divorce. Author Nathan did not subscribe to Christian doctrine, as far as I know. His concept of eternity seems to be based on mercy, which is pleasant to read (sometimes heartbreaking, too). His Catholic priest seems to me a pretty poor Catholic, as his hopes for eternity seem to rest on the authority of his office, rather than the grace of God.

The Train in the Meadow is a charming book, and comforting. Theologically, that’s not a great thing, but it was enjoyable and moving to read.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture