Category Archives: Book Thoughts

A Good Excuse to Read

For the last two weeks I’ve had the flu! What fun.

Actually, it was kinda. Last year when we got the flu after our Christmas trip, I read a Vince Flynn book that I’d had on my shelf for ages: Transfer of Power. I enjoyed it a great deal.

I’d read his first novel, Term Limits, years ago and thought it was really lame and juvenile, so I never tried another. But he went on to become a very popular, best-selling author, so I decided, in the hopes that he had improved his skills over time, I would try his second book, mentioned above. Surprise! I liked it.

Of course I did have the flu, and it was a welcome diversion from the wretchedness of being ill, but really, I thought it was pretty good. Transfer of Power is the first one where his series hero, Mitch Rapp is the main character, and it is about terrorists taking control of the White House, killing dozens and taking hundreds hostage. Rapp, the CIA’s “top counterterrorism operative” is sent in to take care of the problem.

With this most recent bout of the flu, I turned to Flynn again, seeing as I had found at the used bookstore the next two of his novels in the series: The Third Option and Separation of Power.

I read both, back to back, all the while going through boxes of Kleenex almost as if I were some sort of Kleenex soiling machine. (I couldn’t believe how fast I went through them, nor how much “stuff” I had to soil them with!)

The verdict? I enjoyed both books, though I struggled at bit with The Third Option at the beginning because I kept getting lost. Finally about a quarter of the way through, when I realized I had no idea what was going on, I wondered if I was no longer capable of reading books as complex as these with my aging brain… Or was the problem really Flynn simply not being clear? After all, the characters in The Third Option had been presented as if I should know who they were, but I couldn’t remember any of them and there were no reminders for those who might be in my position.

Finally I went back and dug up my old reviews of Term Limits, his first book, and made my first discovery — the characters I was puzzling over In Transfer of Power were indeed the main characters in Term Limits. A book I’d read 11 years ago! No wonder I couldn’t remember them nor the operations they’d taken part in!

I also went back to the beginning of The Third Option and started going through the writing itself, just to see if it really wasn’t very clear. (This is the kind of thing a writer does. Normal people probably don’t. If you are an aspiring writer, however, I recommend you do this… It can be very enlightening and help you avoid similar mistakes)

And what was the result of my investigation of technique? The writing was, indeed, unclear.

For one thing, Flynn writes from the omniscient point of view, which means he jumps into any characters’ viewpoint whenever he wishes all within the same scene. The problem with this type of point of view (pov) is that if you’re not careful you can lose your reader along the way, and that’s exactly what happened. You have to be very clear you’re making a pov jump and to whose point of view you are jumping, which Flynn didn’t always do.

For example, the first chapter starts in Rapp’s point of view where he’s walking alone through the woods in Germany, reconnoitering the estate he is about to “invade,” then returns to a cabin where his two teammates have set up. He enters. There’s some description of the man and woman already there, the interior, and some equipment. Then it says

“Rapp had never met the man and woman before. He knew them only as Tom and Jane Hoffman. They were in their mid-forties, and as far as Rapp could tell, they were married. The Hoffmans had stopped in two countries before arriving in Frankfurt. Their tickets had been purchased under assumed names with matching credit cards and passports provided by their contact. They were also given their standard fee of ten thousand dollars for a week’s work, paid up-front in cash. They were told someone would be joining them and, as always not to ask any questions.”

All of that is consistent with Rapp’s point of view, which we were clearly in. In the next paragraph, there’s no reason to think it’s not Rapp’s as well, recalling things the Hoffman’s have told him about their journey to this point (or perhaps that he knew from other sources since he’s running this operation):

“All of their equipment was waiting for them at the cottage when they arrived. They started right in on surveillance of the estate and its owner. Several days later they were paid a visit by a man known only to them as the professor. They were given an additional twenty-five thousand dollars and were told they would receive another twenty-five thousand dollars when they completed the mission. He had given them a quick briefing on the man who would be joining them…”

The problem is that this second paragraph is all from the Hoffman’s pov and includes information Rapp does not have. But there’s nothing in the text to give you even a hint of that. In fact, in paragraph one they’re told by their contact that someone will be joining them and in paragraph two that this “professor” has joined them… so… it seemed logical to put those two together, all of it stuff that Rapp knows about.

Except that he doesn’t, as I said, the viewpoint having shifted out of Rapp’s specific awareness at the end of paragraph one and into a general omniscient. And since that’s not remotely clear, the result is confusion on the reader’s part. At least on this reader’s part.

You could say this was the fault of the reader not reading carefully enough, but I disagree. As an author, you want the reader to rip through your story, especially if it’s a thriller. They aren’t going to be reading carefully, they’re reading to find out what happens and “How is he going to get out of this?!”

No, it’s up to the author to make it all clear and smooth so the reader always knows through whose eyes he’s experiencing the story. C.S. Lewis once said something to the effect of (I’m paraphrasing) “Readers are like sheep going down a path. If there’s any way for them to go besides the way you want them to, that’s where they’ll go. Hence, you have to make sure that every gate is closed to them except the ones you want them to go through.”

I don’t think Flynn did such a great job of that in The Third Option, at least not in the beginning. Once I had figured it all out, though, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. And it was especially good to know I wasn’t all washed up as a reader of complicated political/military thrillers, which I love! 🙂

A Big Little Life

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A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog by Dean Koontz.

My son got me this book awhile back and recently I finally had opportunity to pick it up. Yes, my “To Be Read” stack is a mile high, but Dean Koontz and his Golden Retriever, Trixie have a special place in my heart. This is not only because I’ve read many, many of Koontz’s books, always admired his writing and even used it as a “model” to study for my own, but because he is also a fellow dog lover. I’ve been subscribing to his Useless News newsletter for years, wherein Trixie always made an appearance, usually funny (she was even a ‘writer’ in her own right, with a few articles in the News and several published books to her name), and through that I came to “know” her.

In fact it was in an issue of Useless News that I learned she had died, about a year after we’d had to put Bear down, so when I got the book, I didn’t know if I wanted to read the story — knowing how it ended — until I had a bit more distance from our own event. In fact, as a kid I used to check the ending of all books that featured a dog to make sure the dog didn’t die. If it did, I wouldn’t read the book. (Which is why I’ve never finished Swiss Family Robinson and why I’ve never read Where the Red Fern Grows or watched the movie based on it (that one made doubly onerous not only in that the dog dies, but that the dog is a Redbone Coonhound!).

Anyway, I finally had an open spot in my reading list, felt as if I was ready to tackle going through that and picked it up, thinking I’d only read a chapter.

Ahem.

In fact, I did manage to read it with a bit of control through the first chapter or so (at the Y, while riding the stationary bike, as I recall). But it wasn’t long before I was hooked and put in one of my all day reading jags. I think I finished it maybe two or three days after I started it, though I read the bulk that last day.

Oh my. What a wonderful book! I LOVED it in so many ways. Yes, the end with Trixie’s death was horrendous — way worse than Bear’s. I bawled outright — for quite some time. I even had to go demand a hug from Quigley, which he gave reluctantly. (He doesn’t come over to comfort you when you’re upset like Bear used to. In fact, he even pulled away a little, but relented at last. Admittedly I was acting very weird, as far as he was concerned.)

Anyway, Trixie was indeed a wonderful dog. And I think Koontz is right in his assessment that God used her in his life to pull him back from the dark, increasingly negative path he was following when she arrived. She was a purebred, but an adoptee, having gone through the entire training sessions for being a service dog, only to wash out before she ever went to work when a congenital problem with her elbow surfaced. Since assistance dogs might sometimes have to pull the wheelchair of the person they are assisting — or even bear the weight of the person themselves, they can’t have finicky elbows that might go out at the worst possible moment. Thus she was put up for adoption and Mr. Koontz and his wife got her.

Of course the memoir centers on her, and Koontz does a fantastic job of conveying the wit, the exuberance, the intelligence, the grace — the loving nature — of this wonderful animal. That would have been enough to make the book remarkable, but it also had much else of interest to me in particular as pertains to Koontz’s writing life, his habits, his having to deal with weird fans, what his office is like, how he works. (His wife, Gerda, handles all the finances and he has a close-to-full-time assistant to do the correspondence, answer the phone, deal with publishers, movie people, agents, the above mentioned weird fans, etc.) And yes, he is a workaholic. So is his wife. I knew that he put in 14 hour days before I read this, but now I have a much better idea what that means.

Still, it’s plain he loves what he does. In fact, the only time he’s ever suffered writer’s block was in the weeks following Trixie’s death.

(And now I can no longer take myself to task for not putting in 14 hour days as well, because I do not have an assistant, a finance officer, a cook, a housekeeper, or a gardener. He did not, however, have a dog walker — he and Gerda did that, one going in the morning, the other at night.)

Anyway, I found it all fascinating, funny, learned a lot about his past and present (which gives insight into why he writes what he does) and as I said, just thoroughly enjoyed this book. Koontz is a wonderful writer, personable, entertaining, his writing heartfelt. I think that comes through in all his works, and is part of why I enjoy his novels so much, even though I don’t care for horror novels (or however his novels are categorized — I think they are in a class of their own). In any case, if you like dogs, or are a writer, or want a glimpse of what a fairly humble, best-selling novelist’s life is like, I highly recommend you read A Big Little Life.

Utopia vs Freedom

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More thoughts from The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet…

When I did my post on this book last week, I forgot that I’d written down some of my thoughts on it both during and after I’d finished reading it. The other night I found them, and today I’ve decided they might be of interest to at least some of my readers.

One of the things that has been impressing itself upon me with regard to Liberal (or should I say “Progressive”?) thought these days is the element in it of wanting to restore, through the efforts of flawed and sinful men, the Garden of Eden. Of course, they don’t call it that, they call it “Utopia,” a term coined by Sir Thomas More for his book of the same name regarding a fictional island where dwells the “ideal” or perfect society.

David Mamet maintains (from personal experience — remember he was a Liberal until he was 6o years old) that one of the primary differences between Conservative and Liberal thinking is that Liberals believe human beings have “good hearts” — and in particular, that they, themselves, have good hearts. Conservatives, not so much; in fact, not at all, if one considers the content of Liberals’ constant attacks on Conservative character: we only oppose their policies, they say, because they aren’t our policies, or because we just want them to fail so we can win, or because we want kids to go hungry, or old people to be neglected. I suppose the Liberal answer is that we do have good hearts, but are simply denying them for the sake of “partisan politics.” But then, that wouldn’t be very good-hearted, and so, really — oh, never mind!

Where was I? Oh, yes — that Liberals believe they have good hearts and thus “good-hearted” ideas and plans for the world.

One such “good-hearted” idea, says Mamet, is that If they “could just make sure everything is fair,” all would be well. Fair, not before the law, but just, you know, “fair.” Everyone getting an equal amount of the pie, for example, whether they worked for it or not, because, you know, some people just can’t work, don’t know how to work, or can’t find the sorts of jobs that are appropriate for their expectations… It’s not their fault.

Mamet illustrated this with the notion that the street sweeper, who does a valuable job that serves the community, should be paid just as much as the surgeon, who also does a valuable job. Who’s to say which is more valuable? The idea that just about anyone could sweep a street, whereas not everyone could be a surgeon, to say nothing of the years of preparation that goes into becoming a surgeon, doesn’t seem to enter the equation.

Another notion of “fairness” is having an equal number of races and/or genders distributed across the populations of various institutions — colleges, businesses (particularly in the executive suites), grant and college recipients, scientific organizations, prisons… Anything else just wouldn’t be fair.

In order to bring all this fairness about — this wonderful, perfect society where “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is the order of the day — we’ll need someone to be in charge: a socialist dictator. But have no fear, since he (or she) will be one of “them” (i.e., Liberal) and thus, by definition, will be a “good” dictator.

Conservatives, on the other hand, see the human race as potentially noble and honorable, but flawed. Sinful. Stubborn. Blind. Arrogant. Lazy. Selfish. Greedy. Combative… The idea of flawed human beings trying to make a perfect world is ludicrous. Instead we hope only to devise a government that takes into account the flaws and tries to provide liberty and equality under the law. Iindividuals will be free to make their own decisions — the bad ones that lead to failure and want, or the good ones that lead to success and plenty. It will be the outcome that motivates, not some person in charge of “fairness.”

The law merely ensures the people under it don’t violate each others’ freedom to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — for example, it’s against the law to steal your neighbor’s stuff, or worse, kill him first and then take his stuff.

If you do, and are caught, you pay the penalty, period. It doesn’t matter what you look like, what your gender or race is, who your parents are, whether you like cats or dogs, how much money you have, what your societal position is…

Laws, of course, will not be perfect, having been devised by imperfect men. Neither will they be perfectly enforced, since imperfect men will be in charge of enforcement. There will never be perfect fairness in all situations. But still, few can deny that the American system of government our Founding Fathers devised has over the last two hundred years or so resulted in more freedom and more prosperity for more people than at any other time in history.

It’s not Utopia, but I think it’s about the closest we’ll ever get to a perfect society this side of Heaven. And a far sight better than the good-hearted view that if every one could just have the same amount of the same things we’d all be forever happy. That one is a system which historically, in every attempt to implement it so far, has failed miserably… You’d think its proponents would see that. That they don’t is another of the subjects Mamet addresses: “magical thinking.”

But that’s a topic for another day.

Book Review: The Secret Knowledge

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The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture by David Mamet (Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross)

“The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal.” ~ David Mamet

I liked this book a lot. It was a challenging, but fascinating unfolding of Mamet’s attempt to explain why Liberals think as they do. He was, himself, a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal from birth. A Jew, he followed his family’s – his race’s? – predilection for Liberalism. That is, because he was a Jew he was a Liberal. It was a given. All his family members were Liberal, and voted Democrat. Ditto all his friends.

His knowledge about Conservatives and Conservative thinking came solely from his Liberal Democrat family, friends and Hollywood (which is to say Liberal) colleagues; or else from Liberal publications and broadcast news sources. Which is to say, he knew only the Liberal line regarding them.

He was 60 years old before he ever read anything written by a Conservative or actually talked to a real, live, in the flesh person with Conservative views.

The ground had already been prepared, however, by his dawning realization that though he believed ardently and fully in the Liberal views that were his birthright, the way he actually conducted his life more and more was not in accordance with those views, was in fact, more in accordance with the work hard/ free-market views of the Right. He did not know this last for some time, though, blinded by the stereotype of Conservatives as mean, small-minded, stupid, vicious people whose sole goal in life is to mess things up for Liberals.

He is now a full-fledged Conservative, and this book contains his reflections on not only how that came to be, but how it was that he took so long to get there, as well as why so many of his friends, family and colleagues still can neither understand nor accept the change.

It’s a very personal reflection, incorporating details of his life that contributed to his changing, and contrasting the two views in terms of acknowledging reality versus ignoring it. He lays out the Conservative view (eg, stick with what works and makes sense given the situation) versus the Liberal (“Change was good in itself – a problem need not be dealt with mechanically by acts whose historical efficacy was demonstrable but could be addressed psychologically, by identifying ‘change itself’ as a solution.”)

I love the way he sets the two thought systems side by side and reveals a good deal of why Liberal views have always seemed so inscrutable to me – because, basically, they are divorced from reality.

The question arises, of course, that if Liberal views are truly divorced from reality, how in the world are they maintained? In one essay, he uses the metaphor of a group of random people who share not even the most basic culture in common, assembled and placed in a wilderness where they must survive together. No this is not Survivor (whose participants do share a common culture and goal, because these randomly gathered people not only have “never learned to respect or to reward industry,” they also lack the technology to exploit the land or defend themselves from enemies. As such they form themselves into

“a cult that produces neither sustenance, peace, defense, nor philosophy, (yet) does one service, which service unites the group, and to which all other operations of the group are subservient: it provides the reassurance that although the actions of the world may neither be understood nor exploited, fear may be shared out and the stranded group may take comfort in its replacement by denial.

“But for denial to replace fear it must be universal, and anyone suggesting notions to the contrary… must be silenced.”

And therein lies his primary explanation for how Liberals can think as they do: denial and the fanatical silencing of anyone in the group who dares to think otherwise, as well as the automatic demonization of all who stand outside the group.

There can be no attempt, then, to truly understand a Conservative’s point of view, it is by definition anathema and wrong because it’s not Liberal. Liberal points of view are by definition correct, regardless of any provable facts of environment, history, efficacy or reality.

But even beyond the way he demonstrates the Liberal viewpoint for the empty sack that it is, he does a masterful job of delineating Conservative principles, clarifying the differences and demonstrating that they are tried and true for a reason. They make sense, they are grounded in reality and, I think, they spring from a basic sense of humility that man is flawed, imperfect, but has the ability to make choices as to how he is going to live and should be given the freedom to do so.

I also learned a lot about Jewish thought and tradition. Why they value education so much, for one. And why they are so overwhelmingly Liberal. I wouldn’t call it a fast and easy read, but it makes you think and I feel enriched for having read it.

America Lite

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I got a new book over the weekend. It’s by David Gelernter who is “a professor of computer science at Yale, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and former board member of the National Endowment for the Arts.”

The book is called America Lite — How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats).

Professor Gelernter has been writing occasional guest posts for Power Line blog on the subjects he covers in this book, and having found them all interesting I finally decided to get the book for myself.

From the inside cover:

America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and the future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How come we know so little about the past, care so little about the future, and expect so little (except cynicism) from our culture, our leaders — and each other?

In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, “can’t run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you.” These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid, steady, stately WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture…”

Mere facts are disdained, “old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true are false” are no longer valid, and the teaching of actual history has been replaced by the teaching of “theories about history.”

By removing objective facts and absolute truths observable by all or arrived at by “common sense,” and inserting endless theories and tropes and feelings and gauzy visions of utopia, concepts that on the surface don’t make sense (“lead from behind,” “spend money in order to save money,”) and as such are only really understood by the most intellectual and enlightened among us, we clearly must abandon the attempt to think for ourselves and let these brilliant academicians do it for us. And, says Gelernter, so we have.

“In fact, we have handed over the keys to the star pupil and teacher’s pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug.

How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver’s seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.”

And of course the jacket doesn’t say what that plan is. I’ll have to read the book to find out. I’ve already read the introduction and it generated enought thought for me to write an entire post in addition to this one (which I’ll put up probably tomorrow).

Even the back cover is fascinating (Click to enlarge):

What the Night Knows

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A couple of posts back, I mentioned coming upon a new Dean Koontz book in the grocery store and impulsively buying it, seeing as it filled a need I had decided I had that same morning — the need for a good book to read that would keep me from getting too active and exhausting myself in my “recovery” from surgery. That book was What the Night Knows.

I love the title. And the cover!

As I also mentioned, I read pretty much all that afternoon — not straight through the story, but skimming over all the “irrelevant” scenes to find the answers to questions I just couldn’t wait for. AFter all, I wasn’t “officially” reading the book yet, just dipping my toe in the water. In this case, it was a good thing, because I was hoping something would happen that didn’t, was in fact, the opposite of what he was doing.

After that, other things, including continued bouts of tiredness, took up my time and I made minimal progress until this weekend. Starting from where I began skimming, I read it all the way through and finished it last night.

Koontz is, as multiple reviewers point out, a master at what he does. His characterizations, descriptions, pacing, humor, plot twists… are all top of the line. In this book I especially loved how he gave each of the protagonist’s three children a distinct voice when he was writing from their point of view. There was the 13-year-old wanna be Marine, Zachary; the 11-almost-12 diva, Naomi, who was in love with life — and hats — her perception cloaking almost everything in her periphery with an aura of magic and wonder; and 8-going-on-9 Minette, or Minnie, the wise beyond her years “baby” of the family who alone of all of them had the best grasp of the evil that stalked them. They are great kids — funny, individual, typically kids in the way they interact with each other, annoying, pestering, teasing… but also loyal and loving. Probably a bit more thoughtful and mature than the general run of kids, but seeing as they’ve been homeschooled, this was not too much of a stretch for me. They reminded me in a way of the Narnia kids…

The story begins with their father, Detective John Calvino, investigating the recent group-murder of an entire family that eerily echoes in numerous precise details the first of a string of family murders that occurred twenty years previously. John’s parents and sisters had been the fourth family to die in that previous string, before John himself, at age 14, shot the murderer dead in their home. Now he increasingly comes to suspect the ghost of the original murderer has somehow come back from the grave to start anew, and he fears his own family is on the list of new victims-to-be.

There was much to ponder as I read, and after I finished, as well. Koontz explores the depravity of man, demon possession, the intervention of God, guilt, sacrificial love, and redemption — this latter not, I’m sorry to say, through the agency of Christ, but rather a man’s willingness to lay down his life for his family as a sort of penance… But regardless of whether I agree with Koontz’s position there, it still draws my thoughts to the subject and provides occasion for contemplation and clarification of my own understanding.

One of the things I was particularly interested in was the unfolding of what is in essence a spiritual battle against forces of evil, a battle our culture has managed to delegitimize. Battles against evil spirits and tales of possession, vampires, etc, might abound in movies, books and video games but mostly people don’t believe any of that is real. Granted the true battle is largely invisible and involves thoughts and words more than the physical attacks of a possessed psychopath, but even an invisible battle is difficult for many to swallow, perhaps because the physical battles as portrayed in the above mentioned outlets are so outside of anything they’ve ever seen in real life they can’t help but throw the baby out with the bath water.

Koontz played off this reluctance to believe in supernatural battles. When John is finally forced to tell his boss not only what he suspects but why (to explain why he has been breaking regulations in the things he’s been doing) his boss immediately assumes he’s having psychological problems and gives him thirty days’ leave.

When he goes to his parish priest, he is told, “We’ve come a long way in the past hundred years, and further with every passing decade. But the full flowering of the faith in our time is delayed by medieval ideas that make the Church seem hopelessly credulous. Faith isn’t superstition, John. Superstition is a stain on faith, a perversion of the religious impulse and possibly a fatal corruption of it.”

When John attempts to clarify what he takes for a misunderstanding, the man adds, “In an age of nuclear weapons, we don’t need Hell and demons, succubi and incubi and hungry vampires on the doorstep. We need food banks…thrift shops, homeless shelters and the courage to express our faith in social action.”

He then gives John the name and number of a psychiatrist who is a “good man” and will be able to help him.

John’s partner later comes to believe the threat is real, as do all the members of John’s family who have each experienced their own encounters with the evil spirit. Naturally, the reader does as well, having been present with each viewpoint as the story unfolds and in that experience willingly suspending disbelief.

Late in the tale John speaks to another priest, a defrocked former exorcist who does believe in demons and evil. The ex-priest brings up the matter of divine interventions in delivering people from demon possession, implying that is the only real hope he can offer John in the matter. He even points out the disparity that exists between believing that a demon might actually be tormenting them, but not that God might also be present and willing to deliver them.

“Is your willingness to believe so elastic,” asks the ex-priest, “that it can stretch that far?”

“I’ve seen the demonic,” John replies. “If it’s real, so is its opposite.”

Yay!

Sort of. Because the opposite reasoning can also be applied. That is, “I don’t believe in demons — I’ve never seen any actual manifestation of demon activity — and so I don’t believe in God, either. Nothing supernatural for me. All truth resides in the mind and understanding of man and must stand up to the rigors of the scientific method, must give measurable physical proof of its existence in order to qualify as truth.”

Or, slightly less antagonistic, believing only in a God who is impersonal, remote and primarily occupied with things other than what’s going on on earth.

Oddly, in the end Koontz seems to buy into the latter notion, for even as he writes in some detail of the personality, motivations and nature of the demon, who is extremely up close and personal with his victims, God on the other hand is portrayed as largely uninvolved, deigning to intervene only occasionally and only in the most dire circumstances — though even in those He is not consistent. When He does intervene, He does so by means of proxies — either “innocent” children or loyal animals or both — and apparently requires some sort of worthy action on the part of at least one party among the rescued.

In fact there is much made in this story of innocence and purity being the protection against possession, while sin and weakness and deception are the doorways for it. By this template, any adult or adolescent male child can, almost at any time, be possessed, if a demon is about. We all have weaknesses. We all sin. We are all deceived in some way or other. Only the truly saintly, of which there are almost none, says the former exorcist, can be assured of protection.

This is the God of religion, I think. The God of the natural mind, for the natural mind always wants to make things hinge on itself, on things the creature has done, rather than celebrating what the Creator has done. On the power and integrity of the creature rather than that of the Creator.

More and more God is showing me that it is the latter that is the only thing that really matters: What He has done. Who He is.

And that is not the message of this story; instead it celebrates the basic goodness of a man, the power of human love and a man’s decision to sacrifice for his family. That is what we are to applaud.

It is a common theme in Koontz’s work, and, I’m sure, one of the reasons he has become a best-selling novelist. But ultimately, man is not basically good, human love is weak and while self-sacrifice is laudable, it’s nothing compared to the sacrifice of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, particularly when you consider that it was done for those who were at the time His enemies.

The Darkest Evening of the Year

The Silver Pigs

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I found this book through a recommendation in Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome (Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins): “The Falco novels by Lindsey Davis give an entertaining and well-researched look into life in the Roman world in the early empire.”

Since I was drowning in the technicalities presented in the Handbook — specifically I was struggling to understand Roman naming practices — I thought these might be just the deliverance I needed.

I found the first of Davis’s Falco novels, The Silver Pigs, at our library and just finished it last night. I really enjoyed it. Her objective in writing these books was to take the modern-day detective story and translate it into ancient Roman times. Except that her detective, Marcus Didius Falco, has a family, and doesn’t find a new love to leave with every story. Or so says the introduction.

I enjoyed Falco, his family, and the setting. Falco even did a stint as a slave in a lead/silver mine in Britain. And there is a bit of a romance in it, as well. Quite entertaining. And not only did reading it spark several ideas for Sky and get me out of the mental mud I was stuck in, but it pointed me to further resources when I investigated author Lindsey Davis’s website: A Falco companion filled with info on how she did her research and dealt with author problems in coming up with her various stories, which I immediately purchased from Amazon along with the next book in the series.

Anyway, I’m not going to do a summary — you can find that on Amazon here and here — nor much of a review — you can find many on Amazon as well. But what I thought was especially cool and want to talk about here is the triumphal march of Vespasian and Titus. As it happens, the first Falco story takes place in 70 AD which is the year that Titus destroyed Jerusalem. I’d already done a bit of reading on that subject for Sky, so the fact the story is set in the same time frame was an extra plus. I don’t think Davis is a Christian; I seem to recall reading she is an atheist, but I’m not certain.

In any case, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she put a description of the procession into the book, toward the end, and I thought immediately of our Lord, who led His own triumphal procession after the Cross, “when He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, [and] made a public display of them (fallen angels), having triumphed over them through [the Cross].” (Col 2:15)

Paul was referring here to the Roman practice of the triumphal procession, something I doubt any of us have seen, but Davis’s description really made it take on shape and substance for me. It runs for several pages, and to try to reduce it to a paragraph or two completely guts the impact. Not wanting to commit copyright infringement I’ll have to recommend you find the book itself to read the full description

One of the things I was surprised to learn from her portrayal was that the Emperor had the role of Chief Priest, another parallel to our Lord who is our High Priest. Then there was the Crown of Jupiter which was held over the Emperor’s head as he rode in his chariot — the crown of a god, which no mortal man can wear. And our Lord being the God-Man, but crowned as a man, king of the Jews, Lord and Head and Husband of the Church. And she even had the slave whispering sic transit gloria mundi — “the glory of the world passes away.” I first learned about that slave from Colonel Thieme years ago, so it was a kick to see him presented here.

As an interesting side note, I noticed in a timeline in my Handbook that not long after this procession, which occurred 71 AD — a year after Jerusalem’s fall — Rome was hit with both plague and fire. I do not think that is coincidental. Nor the fact that 10 years after Titus, under Vespasian’s command, destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem, another fire in Rome destroyed Vespasian’s newly completed temple to Jupitor.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Marcus Didius Falco and his world. Perhaps the next book will even reference the above mentioned plague and fire…

A Book I Am Supposed to Read

Willing to Be Bad

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I’m reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In fact, I first read it years ago. Maybe you’ve heard of it, if you’ve been involved with the artsy community in any way. I think I bought and read it maybe fifteen years ago. The book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” and its tagline is A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self.

It has some good stuff in it, but also lots of weird stuff, for though she talks about God and seeking out the “Great Creator” to find one’s own creativity, this is not a Christian book. And years ago, I only made it about halfway through before I got too annoyed by all the New Age gunk and put it aside. Later I took it to the used bookstore.

About a month ago, I got down the journal I’d kept during that time, one that goes with the “course.” Part of that course is to do morning pages — three pages of handwritten, stream of consciousness material, done first thing upon rising every day — and this journal had some of those morning pages, plus a lot of quotes from the book as page decorations. I was surprised by how doctrinal they were. Here’s a couple, in italics, with the verses that say the same thing (not italicized).

“I am a channel for God’s creativity and my work comes to good.”

“I am the Vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.” John 15:5

“For it is God who is at work in you both to will and to execute for His good pleasure.” Phil 2:13

“My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.”

“Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.” Ps 37:4,5

“And God is able to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything you may have an abundance for every good deed.” 2 Co 9:8

“There is a divine plan of goodness for my work.”

“I am willing to let God create through me.”

“Faithful is He who calls you and He will bring it to pass.” I Th 5:24

You get the idea. Having recently been shown that God is able to use evil priests (like Caiaphas) and donkeys (Balaam’s ass) to communicate truth, and having experienced His ability in using unlikely sources to speak to me personally, I decided to buy a second copy of the book and give it another shot.

And today, in reading an early part of it, I found this:

“Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.”

Whoa! Did that bring back memories! I know this. I know it from painting and I know it from writing.

Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird :

“Why I encourage really, really awful first drafts is because this is how every single real writer I know writes. My students have this illusion that good writers sit there as if they’re just taking dictation and it’s coming out fully formed. I believe that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor and the enemy of the people. It makes it impossible for us to get anything down. As soon as you can break through that need, and just let yourself write whatever comes out, knowing that no one’s reading over your shoulder, knowing you can go through and start to shape, cut stuff out, save it for other projects… winnow out what the real structure and the real story is that you’re attempting to capture, then you’re home free. Sort of.”

I saved this quote in a special book along with a number of others from other writers, all advocating the same thing. You must be willing to let it be bad.

In that vein of thought I realized that by trying to get everything in the story and the world and the characters worked out and logical and ready before I could move on in Chapter 1, I had hamstrung myself. That’s not even how I work. The moment I gave myself the permission to just go forward, letting it be awful, illogical, with stupid dialogue, lame characterization, inscrutable or nonexistant motivations, inconsistent, arbitrary world building elements… something seemed to release inside me. My interest perked up. Is this the key? Is this what I needed to see?

I don’t know. I’ll know better in the morning. But things suddenly seem hopeful. I am SOOO sick of laboring over the first three pages of Chapter 1, the whole of which is already written, albeit, ahem, badly. The thought of just leaving it and moving on is rather exciting.

Karen Hancock

Award Winning Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy

Category Archives: Book Thoughts

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