Collected Miscellany

If you are looking for a fast paced plot and traditional characters then Tin God by Terese Svoboda is probably not for you. Part of the University of Nebraska Press Flyover Fiction Series, Tin God is instead a more dream like exploration of the timelessness of the earth and vagaries of human nature. Oh, and it is narrated by G-O-D. If you enjoy skillful prose used to illuminate interesting perspectives then you will enjoy Tin God.

The plot, such as it is, focuses on two stories set in the plains and separated by some five hundred years. In the first, a bumbling conquistador finds himself lost among the tall grasses and whispering natives after having fallen off his horse. Thanks to his blue eyes the natives take him for a god and send out a young virgin to try and capture his essence.

Five hundred years later in the same field we have two young men trying to find a bag of cocaine that they tossed out the window with a cop in hot pursuit. The search is complicated by the recent devastation of a tornado. Jim, who owns the land, needs to turn it over in order to get his government check. “Pork” needs to find the expensive bag of drugs before anyone else does so he can get on with his life as a male “dancer.”

The narrator god alternates between these two stories and slowly unwinds them – while musing on her interaction with humans and vice-versa – until we come to a climatic resolution of sorts. The story threads meet when Jim, digging with a back hoe and leaving his own monument to the past, uncovers traces of the conquistador’s travels.

So what to make of this short unique novel? I must say that I enjoyed it. It is unconventional and can be slow in parts, but it is also evocative and thought provoking. It isn’t the kind of book you pick up and can’t put down until you are finished, but I found it to be an enjoyable bedside table read. Below are my scattered thoughts and reactions.

Continue reading →

I have stumbled upon yet another book meme. Given my current state of spring fever and resulting lack of concentration, I decided to play along. Here are the instructions should you wish to participate:

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

My list is below.

Continue reading →

As part of their ongoing Spring Book Week National Review has reprinted a 1958 Frank Meyer review of Vladimir Nabakov’s classic Lolita. It is a very interesting take on the critical reaction to the book at the time. It is worth quoting at length:

Never has a society been more smugly proof against satire than ours. When one idea is as good as another and one institution is as good as another, when a dully equalizing relativism destroys all definitions and distinctions, satire is impotent. For the satiric genius works by shocking the reader into using the standards he implicitly holds but has failed to apply. It achieves its results by creating so savage a presentation of contemporary evil (exaggerated, caricatured, grotesque, but a true simulacrum of the essence of the social scene) that the bland and habitual surface of actuality is riven apart. But where there are no standards, satire has no ground from which to fight.

[. . .]

Today things are different. Vladimir Nabokov writes a novel, Lolita. With scarifying wit and masterly descriptive power, he excoriates the materialist monstrosities of our civilization — from progressive education to motel architecture, and back again through the middle-brow culture racket to the incredible vulgarity and moral nihilism in which our children of all classes are raised, and on to psychoanalysis and the literary scene. He stamps indelibly on every page of his book the revulsion and disgust with which he is inspired, by loathsomely dwelling upon a loathsome plot: a detailed unfolding of the long-continued captivity and sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. To drive home the macabre grotesquerie of what he sees about him, he climaxes the novel with a murder that is at the same time horrible and ridiculous, poised between Grand Guignol and Punch & Judy.

[. . .]

Without exception, in all the reviews I have read — and they are many — nowhere has even the suspicion crept in that Lolita might be something totally different from the temptingly perverted surface it presents to the degenerate taste of the age. Not a whiff of a hint that it could be what it must be, if it is judged by the standards of good and beauty which once were undisputed in the West — and if it is, as the power of its writing shows it to be, more than a mere exercise in salaciousness.

[. . .]

And satire, I am sure, considering his ability and the quality of what he has written, was Mr. Nabokov’s intention. Of course I may be wrong. He may simply be an immensely gifted writer with a perverted and salacious mind. But if the latter is true, it does not change the situation much. Lolita, in the context of the reception it has been given, remains nevertheless a savage indictment of an age that can see itself epitomized in such horror and run to fawn upon the horror as beauty, delicacy, understanding. But I hope that this is not so, that Mr. Nabokov knew what he was doing. It is so much more exhilarating to the spirit if the evil that human beings have created is castigated by the conscious vigor of a human being, not by the mere accident of the mirror, the momentary unpurposeful reflection of evil back upon evil.

Here is an interesting question: Can you raise serious issues or ideas in a paperback thriller? Now I am not talking about a literary novel that uses aspects of the thriller genre. I know books that often get classified as genre fiction deal with serious ideas. No, I am more interested in whether the kind of book you might take to the beach or read on the commute to work can contain some serious ideas underneath the action driven plot. If you read a Tom Clancy type novel, for example, do you think about the wider political implications?

What motivates these musings? I recently finished reading The Devil’s Halo by Chris Fox and it raised this question in my mind.

The plot is quite complex but let me sketch it out briefly. In 2010 tensions between Europe and America are at an all time high. NATO is defunct and Germany is bankrupt. A larger European Union led by France and joined by Russia seeks to challenge US dominance. Given the continued American military, economic, and cultural dominance Europe decides to draw the line at space. The US, seeking to protect itself from a dangerous world, is working on a space shield which will ensure its military power for years to come.

Terry Weston, an expert in industrial espionage in contract with the CIA, is thrust into this dicey situation when a blockbuster Hollywood movie is stolen prior to its planned worldwide simultaneous release. It seems the same technology that was thought to protect this military action flick is used by the US Military. Weston succeeds in retrieving the film, but in the process stumbles on to a plot of epic proportions. Soon Weston and his wife, a highly trained physicist, are pulled into a dangerous race to prevent a technological Pearl Harbor.

The book is basically a high tech spy thriller, and a rollicking fun one at that, but it raises some serious issues along the way. There are basically two levels to the book. On one level is the highly entertaining action/espionage plot and on another is the underlying political tensions which raise very real issues. I am not an expert on the technology and spy craft involved, but I feel confident in asserting that much of the action side of the plot is . . . hyperbolic shall we say.

Continue reading →

Charlie Williams is yet another author I hadn’t heard of until the kind folks at Serpent’s Tail sent me one of his books. The book was Fags and Lager, but being the geek that I am, I wanted to read the series in order. So they kindly sent me Deadfolk to get me started. I am not an expert on English Noir (which I take to roughly be Deadfolk’s genre), but I have to say if you like this style – or just enjoy black comedy with a somewhat violent twist – add Deadfolk to your list.

The narrator and lead character is Royston Blake. Blake is Head Doorman at Hoppers Wine and Bar and Bistro in the West Country town of Mangel. Normally things are good for Blake. He drives a Ford Capri 2.8i and walks down the street with his head high. But things begin to take a turn for the worse as rumors begin to spread around town the Blake has “lost his bottle.” To make matters worse, Mangel’s family of toughs the Muttons have decided to leverage his momentary lapse of courage for their own good.

Blake decides to take the advice of his pal Legsy and face the situation head on. Unfortunately, while this removes the problem in one sense, it leads only to more trouble. Blake would have down well to remember some good advice: the first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Instead, Blake is convinced he can dig his way out of this hole. What follows is an escalating path of violence and mayhem that includes using a monkey wrench as a weapon, a chainsaw named Susan, and a sawed off shotgun; not to mention arson, robbery, blackmail, and murder.

Continue reading →

Patrick McManus is a well known outdoors-man, writer and columnist. He is famous for his laugh inducing accounts of life in the great outdoors for magazines like Outdoor Life and Field and Stream. And his collections of columns have been New York Times bestsellers.

I only know about Patrick F. McManus, however, through word of mouth. I haven’t read any of his work, but my wife and in-laws are all big fans. Having lived in the Northwoods they find his style of writing familiar and highly entertaining. So when I got a copy of The Blight Way, the first book in a new mystery series, I grabbed it away from my wife and started reading.

I am glad I did. The Blight Way is a funny, fast paced small town mystery. It is set in Blight County Idaho, hence the title, and features Sheriff Bo Tully. The Tully family have been sheriffs in Blight County for decades. Now being sheriff in Blight usually involves breaking up bar room brawls and feuds between neighbors and doesn’t require a great deal of sophistication or familiarity with the niceties of the law. And that is just fine with the Tully’s. But when a stranger in a fancy pinstripe suite is found dead on a barbed wire fence, the town’s gossip mill is working overtime and Tully knows he has a challenge on his hands.

Bo puts everything he’s got into getting to the bottom of it, which includes “Lurch” the crime scene expert; Dave the self-proclaimed Indian tracker and owner of Dave’s House of Fry; Susan Parker the attractive new medical examiner; and Bo’s seventy year old father, and former sheriff, Pap. After checking out the crime scene the team realizes that someone set up a high powered ambush, but things didn’t go quite as planned. It doesn’t take too long for Bo and Pap to figure out that this isn’t your normal Blight County crime. Problem is the townspeople don’t seem real eager to talk and clues are scarce.

Continue reading →