Briefly: Lectures in Systematic Theology

It’s been a busy Spring semester, but we’ve reached the time of year where I start to catch up on the backlog of things I’ve meant to post here and never gotten around to. The only book new to me I’ve finished since the last such review is, as the post title indicates, the Reverend Doctor Henry Clarence Thiessen’s Lectures in Systematic Theology, published “in book form” in 1949 and apparently steadily reprinted at least for use at Wheaton College, as my volume has a 1974 print date.

Reference is made to an earlier “syllabus form”, but the actual editing for the book, and an unclear amount of its text, was completed by a John Caldwell Thiessen, who I take to be Henry Thiessen’s son from indications in the Preface, although the relationship has been professionally obscured.

Henry Thiessen – and presumably John – appear to have been almost-Reformed Baptists (in the terminology I am familiar with today) with certain semi-dispensational leanings as appears most obviously in the section on eschatology. Most of the theologians cited whose names I recognize are I believe other Baptists. Thiessen quotes Calvin generally with approval, although perhaps makes out Calvin to be less Reformed than I believe he was.

Luther and other Protestants, as well as the Church Fathers, are rarely referred to; Roman Catholics and the eastern Orthodox theologians are almost entirely ignored. Thiessen appears to have been more concerned to present what he believed to be the correct view of disputed matters than to defend his views in detail. Even major heresies mentioned for the context of derivations of statements of orthodox teaching are most usually summarized somewhat abruptly, and the entire section on the sacraments is surprisingly, almost shockingly, short.

As a practicing Reformed Christian personally preferring the Lutheran interpretation on some matters, I am obviously not always in agreement with Thiessen, but it is not my purpose here to go point by point through six hundred pages to work out some sort of theological accuracy score. Although on a quick inspection I cannot find the information, I suppose that even Wheaton today uses a more current work for the relevant classes, although it’s not entirely unlikely a later author simply updated this one to a second (or third, or whatever number the textbook industry required) edition. But as a judgment on this volume, it may suffice to say that the Lectures provides overall a lucid statement of a strain of evangelicalism which I believe to still be prominent in America today.

Review: Africa: A Biography of the Continent

John Reader’s 1997 volume fascinates throughout but taken as a whole fails to deliver on its initial promise. Although his narrative progresses roughly chronologically, he is forever diverting from the main stream. As topics arise he constantly races ahead to compare modern conditions – of farming practice, for instance – but does not quite link “then” to “now”. His ecological interests show strongly – even in the structure of the book – but are not tied into a continuous history, and the book is badly lacking in maps.

The best-constructed portion of the book is the opening section, which presents the geological origin and human evolutionary story (as of 1997 theories: whether changes have been made to accepted theory since then I don’t know). In the remainder, Reader is at his best drawing pictures of single sites and short periods. Descriptions of the Ethiopian citadel of Aksum, the Niger delta society, and Ukara (an island in what is now Lake Victoria) – societies of which I knew little or nothing – are exciting and produce a demand to know more, but they are disconnected: vignettes among others that fail to cohere. Narratives of colonial tribulations are moving – but disconnected: his attempts to suggest larger narratives fall short. Even in noting the similar behavior of European powers towards inhabitants of areas they colonized, Reader is much better in local stories than in general scope.

The obvious reason would seem to be a lack of written sources. Reader barely refers to any oral traditions, and definitely prefers archeological evidence to traditional narratives – not always, to my mind, convincingly. He also swings back and forth repeatedly between his own inclination to present African societies before contact with Europe as nearly utopian, and strenuous efforts to acknowledge previous utopian theories as having been insufficient, to have misinterpreted evidence, or even have been entirely debunked. He openly admits that he chose to emphasize a reading of African history in which, since contact was made with Europeans arriving by ship, the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa has been dependent on European whims.

That this was the case from the colonial era proper (as the early trading posts expanded into settlements by the early eighteenth century) can hardly be doubted. The choice not to include the Mediterranean coast in his history could be defended, I suspect, fairly easily; but the choice to mention but downplay the gold and slave trades with the Arab states in northern Africa leaves his overall narrative open to question. He admits, for instance, that the evidence on the subject of relative numbers and effects of the three trades in slaves – internal to southern Africa, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic – is ambiguous, but chooses to tell his story in which the European (and later American) depredations are pictured as taking an out-size toll, even before outright colonization, while the trade with the Muslim world hovers in the background but is never examined. (What more recent research shows I don’t know: certainly the tenor of what else I’ve read suggests he guessed right – but is that history, exactly?) Similarly, human sacrifice appears to have been widespread (and a major source of demand for slaves internal to Africa) but while admitted is never really examined.

Reader manages to tell only the story of Africa in its relation to European power, with the resulting structure: two hundred pages of origin; about a hundred reaching from early Egypt and Ethiopia but then jumping practically immediately to the fifteenth century AD; a hundred fifty more to reach the mid-seventeenth; and the remaining two hundred and fifty to work through the almost four hundred years of colonial and now barely-post-colonial history. That this matches the thesis he expresses about halfway through the book in discussing the first Portuguese expeditions makes this weighting, I suppose, fair enough: and when Reader is good, he is very very good. But that’s not exactly what he seemed to have in mind in the beginning. The book thus raises more questions than it answers, can hardly be said to tell the African history of Africa at all, and leaves me questioning the claim of “biography” in the subtitle rather strongly.

Review: The Stars Now Unclaimed

As a first novel, this one from Drew Williams has some limitations but has to count as a success. The Stars Now Unclaimed, published in 2018, is a science fiction adventure story that would fit right in with the last decade of superhero movies: long on the action, don’t worry about the plausibility.

I found influences among my own favorites from – or at least similarities to – Star Wars, Jim Butcher, and Timothy Zahn. The backstory suggests Iain Banks’ Culture novels, although the “pulse” event/condition omnipresent through the story is – while unbelieveable – a clever way to keep the action (which is to say, the possibility of destruction) on a more manageable scale. For the most part Williams’ first person narration carries the story well, although the femininity of his protagonist is not really believeable. In fact most of his characters are simplistic, with variety of sex and species being mostly cosmetic. The one teenager is sometimes believeable, sometimes a caricature, sometimes indistinguishable from the adults – which actually doesn’t not work, exactly, since that sums up most teenagers pretty well. (Most people at any stage of life, really.)

I thought Williams did good work in maintaining a relatively optimistic, even idealistic tone given the setting. I find that there are now sequels, the next being A Chain Across the Dawn, although given the list of books I already want to read it will be a while if ever till I get around to that one. Stars hangs together well enough as a single story, and while I would love to see whether he delves into the ethical problems in more detail and if so how, I’m not quite sure whether the big-picture resolution would be satisfying.

Overall I thought Williams’ writing improved over the course of the book, his art not quite being up to selling the low-context “Lone Ranger” introductory chapters. Conversation throughout is limited – again, think action movie – mostly to exposition or repartee, but is done well enough. The most surprising success, for a first-time author, I thought was the pacing, which at all times suits the action depicted without dragging at all and only once or twice becoming unsuitably rushed.

So, to sum up: well-drawn setting, good action scenes, decent plot, satisfying resolution. While not a perfect book, one I can recommend if you’re looking for some light reading with a bit of crunch.

Review: The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga

I recently picked up a couple volumes of Gail Z. Martin’s Ascendant Kingdoms series, or as the cover has it, Saga. I was not previously familiar with the author, who apparently has written several other series as well.

The first two books, Ice Forged and Reign of Ash form a single story arc: I did not read the other two, despite completionist tendencies. Martin writes competent if uninspired fantasy, with no pretensions but fortunately also no affectation. The appeal of the books lies in their tight plot, good use of suspense to keep the pages turning, and clever twists on common fantasy conventions. Characterization even of the protagonists is however fairly weak: its hard to see them as much more than so many paper dolls with standard fantasy plot events hung on them. That plot is also perhaps overcomplicated, in that not enough effort is spent to really justify the resolution – sometimes even the origin – of each successive crisis.

The underpinning of the series’ system of magic probably would take more than even the remaining two volumes to explore. I don’t know (obviously) which of the various remaining threats or sequel hooks are addressed in those books – but Martin is clearly telling a story where we’re not supposed to get all the answers or background.

On the whole, a quick and entertaining read, without threatening or pretending to take up too much brain space.

Review: Stuff I’ve Read Since Last Time

One of the things I’ve tried to do with this blog over the last couple years is write at least a couple sentences about every book I read that’s new to me. It’s been a busy school year, so I’ve got a few months to catch up on – but not as many books as you might think since I tend to re-read a lot when I’m busy, to save brain power or just relax.

The Dark is Rising Sequence

I’ve been fond of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising since first reading it as a teenager. I did not find the next book in the sequence, Greenwitch, as attractive then, and never read the others, but figured I would do so now. The other sequels are The Grey King and Silver on the Tree. I still haven’t gotten around to the first book written, Over Sea, Under Stone, as the library request keeps getting screwed up.

The books are only loosely connected by recurring characters and motifs from Arthurian legends. The strength of the books individually, though, are Cooper’s tight plots, but the quality of her writing is uneven. While Cooper could write dramatic and affecting individual scenes, her overall narrative rarely flows smoothly. The best continuous stretch is the first half of The Grey King, which I think is what won the book the Newberry Medal; on re-reading, the book which best keeps a consistent tone is actually Greenwitch, though I’m still not sure it’s a story I care much for.

As fantasy, the effectiveness of the stories is somewhat hampered by Cooper’s philosophy. Her Light and Dark suggest the moral challenges often explored in the genre, but the Dark, while menacing and petty, rarely seems to reach to great evils, and wavers between being merely chaotic and serving a lust for power. Adding to the muddle is that the Light is also ruthless and at times deceitful, treating those without power equally as pawns; yet in the final book, Cooper suggests that all the Light really accomplished was to keep the Dark away so that ordinary humans can be and still are responsible – but with no ultimate standard. The ends apparently justify the means used by the powerful, but what lesson is left for the ordinary to learn? The books are well-enough written, but there’s a bit of a sour after-taste.

Best-Loved Short Stories

A collection of half a dozen short stories from the late 19th and early 20th century, this little volume’s chief merit is that it introduced me to O. Henry (pen name of one William Sydney Porter), whose work I had somehow previously avoided but would highly recommend. O. Henry’s style is very American but seems to me strongly influenced by Dickens. I’m not sure when the collection was first published (my copy is dated 1986) but O. Henry’s reputation was such as to earn him two of the six spots – with Twain’s “Jumping Frog”, Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?”, a comic cautionary tale from H. G. Wells, and one by a Richard Harding Davis making up the remainder.

Sixth Annual Collection: Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year

This volume in the long-running yearly anthology marks the year Gardner Dozois took over as editor from Lester del Ray. (That’s not why I picked it up, though serendipitous: it was free-to-take from somebody moving out.) The last time I saw a new volume – well into the 2000s – Dozois was still the editor, and has had a prolific career as editor and sometimes contributor in the science fiction community. I’ve not seen a bad story in any volume he’s edited, although he’s a little fonder of works challenging conventions than quite suits my taste.

In some ways the most interesting part of the volume is Dozois’ introduction, “Summation: 1976”. It seems the series’ change in editor was only part of a shift going on in the sci-fi scene. Of the actual stories, “Custer’s Last Jump” by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop is one of the better alternate history pieces I’ve seen; John Varley’s “Air Raid” is horrifyingly inventive (and I think must have been read by Connie Willis); Kate Wilhelm’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” is a rather unpleasant prediction of the reality TV show (while owing something to Farenheit 451); Joe Haldeman’s macabre “Armaja Das” is quite good but he pulls Heinlein’s trick of writing half a page too much and I think loses some punch in the ending; and (unsuprisingly) the best-written piece is Ursula K. LeGuin’s creepy “The Diary of the Rose”. That’s about two thirds of the volume: the rest aren’t bad either, and Dozois includes an appendix of “Honorable Mentions” which could be worth chasing down some time, though I don’t recognize any of the titles.

History of Western Europe

Columbia professor James Harvey Robinson wrote this high school textbook in 1902. In not quite 700 pages he traces European political history from the late Roman Empire down to the 1870s: the unifications of Germany and Italy and the loss of most of the Ottoman Empire’s European possessions. Robinson drew heavily on other sources to write this summary, and the volume contains extensive citations in footnotes and chapter endnotes as well as a bibliography and the end of the text.

He was particularly interested in transitions in political power. As I was already roughly familiar with the subject matter, I will mention some of the things that caught my eye:

• He discussed the Germanic tribes moving into Roman territories as mercenaries and labor before the “invasions” as we tend to think of, a matter which even today I see authors complaining about not being properly recognized.
• He did an excellent job in outlining how the Roman church obtained political power both accidentally and (especially after the example and theories of Gregory the Great) intentionally in Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire.
• He painted a picture of a much more temperate Luther than almost any other I’ve seen, and yet does not seem particularly sympathetic to the Lutheran cause (or in fact religious controversy apart from its political effects at all).
• He wrote extensively detailing – I would even say justifying – the French Revolution, in what seems to me an attempt to disrupt stereotypes and over-simplifications, for instance clarifying the progression from reform to revolution to the Terror that enabled Napoleon’s ascent.

The last particularly caught my notice because some of the ways he describes France before the Revolution resonate eerily with America today in ways I don’t see discussed regularly: to elaborate on this would deserve a separate discussion, but roughly speaking the problem he portrays is one of national identity without administrative unity.

The last chapter – which by tone I guess may even have been an addition in the 1903 edition – is by far the weakest. As he largely ignored scientific developments throughout his narrative, in this chapter he attempted to squeeze in a summary of all those changes during the whole period. Not too surprisingly, the resulting summary is over-simplified and – based on my other reading – he is too emphatic about the discontinuity of the Industrial Revolution with previous trends. Achievements in culture – music, art, dance, or literature – are ignored almost completely. Also very poor is his handling of the political importance to European powers of colonial expansion, which is barely treated beyond a brief summary of events in North America.

In terms of then-current events, Robinson was impressed with the political and military success of Prussia, but hardly predicted another impending major war. The terms in which he describes the horrors made possible by “repeating rifles and new and deadly explosives” seems the same mindset as the MAD scenarios of the Cold War – a sobering reminder. He saw a long history of tension between Austria and Prussia, and (obviously) Prussia and France, but downplayed ethnic tensions, perhaps lulled by the comparative then-recent success of Austria in pacifying the different ethnicities within her empire. Had he guessed at another world-encompassing conflict he would almost certainly have gotten the alignments of alliances wrong, but it’s hard to be fair in hindsight. He instead predicted future conflicts between European powers would continue to be sparked by colonial ambitions, with a hope they would remain minor. He seems to have felt compelled to close with cheerful projections of continued enlightenment, but to my eye doesn’t quite seem to have believed it.

Comment: Teacher in America

I had thought I had read this volume by Jacques Barzun before, but when I read through it recently I found only one of the essays seemed even vaguely familiar. Teacher in America is a collection of essays published towards (or perhaps just after) the end of World War two, but the originals of the essays – they appear to have been polished up and fit into sequence to make a book – reach back a decade or two before that.

In my estimation this particular work is most worthwhile as a sort of time capsule, documenting ideas and concerns about high schools, colleges, and universities some eighty or ninety years ago. Some complaints are still with us today. Barzun is already complaining in the 1940s about PhD inflation – which he in fact traces further back yet, to the later 1800s – and the institutional indecision of American colleges over whether their primary function is teaching or research – with results easily “predictable” in hindsight. For instance, graduate students already expected to study as well as teach – although it seems most were at least dignified with their own courses. He is inclined to be optimistic about the growth of collegiate athletics: not so much for its own sake as an alternative to the riotous undergraduate behavior of previous centures; and his hope of widespread intramural competitions does not seem to have quite caught on. He also comments on the then-new interest in studying and documenting all sorts of allegedly quantifiable characteristics: the advent of the computer means the data no longer takes up rooms and rooms, but the reader is left wondering if we put our studies to any better use today.

More of the book, however, is spent of Barzun’s theories – or perhaps hypotheses – about college education. He advocates for teaching students in different settings – lecture, discussion, interview – even within the same class, especially for upper-level courses. He had some experience with Columbia’s curricular experiments that were developed into “Great Books” courses elsewhere – but thinks Great Books as a single idea for a curriculum goes to far. He is in favor of accepting the sciences as academic disciplines but seems skeptical – or perhaps the idea was only beginning to emerge – of “schools” for all manner of careers. In contrast, he is very interested in what students actually go on to do after college, although his answers seem inconsistent. I suspect the inconsistency represents change over time, but in any case, while for much of the book he seems to try to hold on to academic purity, several essays at the end deal with college as popularly envisioned: a route to a job as a certain class of American. In these he admits the goals are not unworthy, but gives no definite answer as to what colleges should actually be doing in response to such a reality. Interestingly, he does think – again, on the basis of practical realities – that colleges should at least consider whether expectations for female students should be different than for men.

On certain matters I find we have made surprising advances. Barzun seems barely to have heard of a lending library, lamenting the necessity of reading books in the library building. Although a “library movement”, led by both wealthy donors like Carnegie and public enthusiasm, was well underway at this point, it seems libraries remained less convenient and far less ubiquitous than we find them today.

I was somewhat disappointed to find Barzun says very little about teaching in high school or earlier, although it is a most honorable silence since, as he says, he never taught in such an institution himself. Written today the book might have been titled “Professor in America”. However, he does make a few suggestions. Of those, the one that intrigued me most was of separating math classes by speed of calculation. On the one hand, most American schools today of any significant size will have some sort of separation, and much of what is taught in mathematics through high school is – to a great extent – merely a great variety of methods of calculation, so that some of this now happens by default. On the other hand, speed of calculation and accuracy of calculation are in my experience not entirely correlated, and neither seems to me necessarily tied to theoretical insight.

I honestly think I have never seen this particular idea before. I suspect, however, that what may happen currently is that “slow calculators” eventually end up in classes with names like “Finite Mathematics” that approach things on a more abstract – in a sense more mathematical – level, while the “quick calculators” are put through the increasingly tricky algorithmic hoops of “Calculus” and its friends. But the basic idea of the calculus does have its simple examples, while actual use of – for instance – fractals gets into complicated calculations very quickly once you get past the basics. Do our methods ensure nobody gets a full picture unless he looks it up himself? Might there even be – what as a math teacher I’ve always distrusted – value to those textbooks simplified so the answers never have more than three digits and no final denominator more than two? I can’t quite believe it, but I’m more willing than I was to hear arguments. As usual, Barzun’s commentary is thought-provoking.

Review: God’s Country and Mine

Jacques Barzun subtitled this volume “A declaration of love, spiced with a few harsh words”, which nicely captures the tension evident in the writing. The early chapters suggest a young idealist’s first disillusionment – the college graduate entering the “real world” or the young professional having failed at a first job. But it is not really so much a single book as a series of essays: and Barzun was no longer young but in his mid-forties. The overall effect – as he admits – is that of middle-aged discontent arguing with itself.

It is difficult to reconcile this tone with the comprehensively sympathetic biographer of Berlioz, and Barzun is here only a shadow of the thoughtful analyst found much later in Begin Here or the mature historian who produced the monumental From Dawn to Decadence. Most surprising, given his later reputation and work, is the disregard for historical and sometimes even linguistic precision, including at one point a baffling gloss of hubris as the self-awareness of pride.

Barzun’s central thesis that the problems and unpleasantness found in American society have to be taken in context and will work themselves out in the direction of greater inclusion. The first third of the book is mainly spent defending American realities against – real or imagined – European criticisms. But in the remaining two thirds largely consists of his own complaints about the weaknesses observed in American society. The central weakness of his criticism is that he has very little time for social structure, contenting himself almost entirely with observation of social habits – and he never ventures into the realm of law or seriously considers its effects, although he insists that democracy entails the duty to hold appointed rulers accountable – and most interestingly suggests this extends to customers in relation to manufacturers. He doesn’t want a domineering central authority, but is inclined to suppose every social ill can eventually be managed and mitigated and is remarkably incurious about method.

He was at this point an unapologetic progressive, of the older variety looking to increase the reach and reality of the “American Dream”, rather than deconstruct it. But he takes an awkward position, denying himself the right to question any arrangements that appear to mark or result from progress towards inclusion. Existence of an arrangement, if claiming “progress”, is its own justification. No matter what practical difficulties he observes, he tends to shrug off the legitimacy of any criticisms of the “progress” itself by noting that all other societies have also struggled with such-and-such same problems. He understands trade-offs resulting from prioritizing one good over another must exist, but assumes as a matter of course that the current state of mankind must be the best, overall, that has yet been achieved. At the same time, he is at least enough of a realist to admit that things can get worse: most of the examples he cites are, however, quality of manufacture. If he has no real suggestions of his own, he does at least admit it’s bad manners to criticize without proposing solutions, and he has boundless faith in communal ingenuity.

My own diagnosis of the problem of the missing solutions is that he has no real principles beyond the extension of democracy. He claims to be religious but his doctrine is universalism if not pantheism. He disdains “religion”, which he identifies with condemnations founded on claims of right and wrong, in favor of “morals”, which on his account consists of appropriately accommodating all possible limitations and faults. He admits “faith” has some reality but the tendency of his writing is to treat it as a natural phenomenon not yet understood. He speaks favorably of the desire of the saints “to sit at the right hand of God” but makes analogy to “the power to make an imperfect [constitution] work”, specifically rebuking the desire for a perfect constitution which is obviously a more appropriate comparison. A worse misunderstanding of the religious mind is hard to imagine. There are arguments to be made against a constitution as the basis for authority; but Barzun repeatedly in this book argues not principle but pragmatism, and meditates on symptoms without interest in deeper causes.

This litany of dissatisfaction should not be exaggerated to suggest the book is without merit. If we consider it – I think more accurately – as a collection of essays, it becomes less surprising to find some good and some bad. The whole thing shows the significant influence of Mark Twain on Barzun’s writing – in fact the title of the opening chapter, “Innocents at Home”, is an evident homage to Twain’s humorous travelogue “The Innocents Abroad”, and it is certainly among the good.

Barzun is not quite a nature writer and fails to quite substantiate his plausible suggestion in this essay that American individualism and pluralism was made possible at first by the sheer scale of the continent. But the contextualization of American failures and his catalog of popular efforts to correct injustice should be required reading if only to offset the exaggerations of universal disdain for all things American often found these days – though in an era where teachers and students alike are given to policing every word and thought I wonder whether Barzun’s (entirely polite) use of “Indian” and “Negro” will itself distract many and cause them to disregard his point.

The essay titled “Greatest City in the World”, in which Barzun trashes the management of New York in magnificent style, is more or less an imitation of Twain’s famous “review” of the novels of James Fenimoore Coooper. I hasten to add that he uses the epithet unironically and repeatedly throughout the rest of the book and clearly, naturally for a graduate of Columbia University, had a deep love for the city. This essay no doubt had its serious point but should be seen mainly as a work of artistry.

As complete chapters these two are the best, but there are many good shorter passages. In “The Under-entertained” is a four-page panegyric on the excellencies of baseball, which many a fan has likely seen and read elsewhere without noticing the author or knowing the original context. The opening line, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” is an immortal epigram – if rarely quoted with the remainder of the sentence: “the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams”. Like much of an older and fading generation of baseball fans, Barzun disdains almost all other sports: in his case, football particularly, although he follows up this passage with a riff on the implausibility of cricket. This is not quite as funny as it could be, because he can’t quite decide whether his joke is to make the existence of cricket a hoax perpetrated on the rest of the world by the English or a sort of collective delusion.

I can’t tell whether “George”, founder of “Lincoln-Vocal” in the chapter “Philosophy of Trade”, is a real acquaintance in disguise, a real person my web search is unable to locate quickly (due to the blandness of the name?), or merely a creation of Barzun’s standing for the typical American businessman. His biography portrays the strengths and weaknesses Barzun meditates on for most of the book: the “democratizing” effects of industrial business, the charity and social impulses, the undeniable improvements in standard of living; but also the anxiety and hustle, the reliance on advertising (which is to say, as Barzun terms it, “guff” – jargon and lies), and the unshakeable impression that there’s something inhumane about the machine-dominated life.

The quality of each individual observation aside, Barzun fundamentally fails in this volume to accomplish anything except, perhaps, call attention to existing tensions. In the finale titled “All the Other Halves” he perceptively catalogs what we might lump together as “relationship problems”: dominance of sex appeal in advertisement and other cultural discourse as opposed to the realities of an actual marriage (Barzun suggests we should not imagine lust a sufficient substitute for a consuming “passion”); feminist ideas of equality militating against the real problems of family (Barzun, ever-hopeful, has no suggestion except to assume “modern technology” has not yet faced the problem fully); idealization of children over against the very real problems of teaching manners and in fact teaching anything (Barzun is much more complimentary to schools here than he would become but cautions against trying to extend schooling to ever-greater hours and ages). At the end of all this, his assurance that “these are practical problems and we are nothing if not practical” sounds rather hollow: the whole book is elegant but hollow, almost a perfect illustration of Lewis’s claims in The Abolition of Man about the incapacities attending the abandonment of right or wrong.

Review: A Brightness Long Ago

A Brightness Long Ago is Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest novel. Like the majority of his work, it is what might be called historical fantasy. Unlike what Tolkien referred to as “invented worlds”, Kay mostly writes – very thinly – disguised worlds. A casual knowledge of history – or Wikipedia – and a map is usually all it takes to identify the region and era referenced. Kay’s usual procedure is then to write a double plot. In the background, there will be a story based on historical events: sometimes important, sometimes not; sometimes sticking closely to what actually happened, sometimes in more modified form. But the foreground, the main plot of each novel, has to do with – usually invented – minor characters caught up in the resulting chaos.

In this case the historical analogue is 15th century Italy – or rather, Eastern Europe, although the main plot is Italianate, as the layering goes another level down, set during the final siege of Constantinople. The background plot is a feud between mercenary dukes of the era. The main characters are retainers, courtiers, soldiers, relatives, doctors – the dukes themselves feature rather more than commonly in Kay’s work, but then (as he notes in the Acknowledgments) they were very minor rulers.

I don’t think this novel ranks with his very best – generally considered to be either Tigana or The Lions of Al-Rassan – but it has all the hallmarks of Kay’s style. Intricate plotting; simple language carefully used; careful attention to the details of the base historical technology; and a titillating interest in sexual affairs – I thought here more than Kay’s usual, although given the realities of Renaissance Italy this can perhaps be considered justified. And, of course, a big twist in the final few pages to produce a resounding finale. Unusually, I can’t figure out what the title refers to – my best guess is that it’s another line from the Milosz (not an Italian) poem quoted as the introductory epigraph.

Review: The Archer’s Tale

I’ve read a few of Bernard Cornwell’s historical and quasi-historical novels over the years, and The Archer’s Tale (originally published as Harlequin in Britain) is like most of the rest – only more so. The setting in this case is the campaign that led to the Battle of Crécy: Cornwell has a certain fascination with the barbaric and a steady determination throughout his work to show the horrors of war, and this gives him plenty to work with.

Historically, an initially successful English campaign in Gascony was eventually beaten down by a French army. English efforts in northern France had been less successful, and when Edward III landed personally in Normandy his objectives too were rebuffed by French positioning. When Edward attempted to withdraw to other lands he held securely, the French set off to chase him down, doing so successfully – but Crécy itself was a disaster for the French due to careful English positioning, poor French strategy, and the longbow used to maximum effect. Meanwhile, the French army in Gascony had been ordered to assist against Edward, but would never make it to the battle, and the English would re-establish their position in Gascony as a result. The French could hardly have squandered a dominant strategic position more effectively if that had been their goal.

Our hero Thomas joins the army for revenge after a French raid burned his village – besides which he gets saddled with a putatively mystical quest reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard. With a minimum of fiddling with implausibilities, Cornwell gets him both through the Gascony campaign and up through France to catch up with Edward’s army before Crécy.

As I mentioned, Cornwell’s narration is even grimmer in this book than in many of his other novels. I think from his afterword this is due to his taking out his disappointments with history on the novel. He admits to expecting a chivalric war when he began his research, but the chief French strategy was scorched earth to keep the English from moving freely. Meanwhile, the chief English strategy was the chevauchée – literally “cavalry charge”, a euphemism if there ever was one, as while forces were mounted for speed, the method amounted to rape, pillage, and burn, and might have been considered extreme by Sherman four hundred years later.

The book has its moments, but doesn’t amount to a unified whole: Cornwell tried, I think, to do too much with it. There is a hint of conflicts of conscience in Thomas over his varying goals, but the note feels forced – and Cornwell seems to use it either to force the plot along or resolve conflicts too easily with things that would happen anyway. The Archer’s Tale is a stand-alone work, but is also the first in a series continuing with Vagabond and Heretic. Whether Cornwell meant to write a series to begin with or just picked up the loose threads he’d left afterwards I don’t know.

It’s probably worth reading some of Cornwell’s stuff if you’ve got the time, but I’d give this one a pass unless you’ve got a lot of time. I’ve never read any of what is apparently Cornwell’s best-known series, the Richard Sharpe novels, but I’d guess they might be the best-known because they’re the best. (Or because they got made into a TV series. Or both.) His Arthurian series starting with The Winter King is quite decent too, while his novels set around Alfred the Great are on the less-good end. And then he’s written a bunch of other stuff I’ve never read too.

Review: August 1914

August 1914 is a historical novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounting the Battle of Tannenberg – a crushing defeat for Russia, which halted the invasion of Prussia in the opening weeks of World War One. Solzhenitsyn appears to have intended to work through the entire events of the war, perhaps even month by month, at least up to the revolution in 1917, but would eventually produce only a few more volumes set in late 1916 and 1917.

After his exile from the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn apparently completed a second edition, restoring for example a chapter originally removed at “the request of the author” (but meaning, of course, the Soviet censors – apparently the criticisms of the revolutionaries were too open) and making what other changes I do not know, as my copy is the originally published text.

The novel is both an homage and reply to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The narrative method – individual experience set against the backdrop of sweeping events; episodes of peace contrasted with the war – is lifted wholesale. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn really believes men – if not necessarily self-proclaimed “great men” – have responsibility for their actions and guiding events. Solzhenitsyn’s comparison of the Russian generals to Tolstoy’s portrayal of Kutusov – hoping to merely ride out events – is unfavorable.

The opening scenes, building up from peace, then conscription and volunteering in the Russian heartlands, moving towards the front lines, are remarkable – among the most remarkable passages I have read. Solzenitsyn seamlessly picks up one character and then another and another into his design, without confusion of persons or motives, and with a deep and evident love for the Russian land itself. The later scenes of military engagement, although well-enough done, really do not compare; and throughout the moments focused on individual experience are the best.

Two oddities occur throughout the book. Solzhenitsyn researched the work very carefully, and occasionally will pause his own embellished narrative to summarize the historical action – particularly of the German armies, as he uses no German characters. However, he seems to have exaggerated the dissensions within the Russian high command. I have no way to tell whether this was based on faulty information which has since been corrected, or if it was intentional (and if so, whether it was Solzhenitsyn’s free choice or one encouraged by Soviet authorities still anxious to discredit the Tsarists.)

He also periodically writes certain scenes as if giving cinematic stage directions – or at least, this is the publisher’s conceit. Whether it was Solzhenitsyn’s intent I am inclined to doubt, though I suppose it is possible. However, I really suspect these portions were, for whatever reason, actually still left in draft form, still unfinished, when the manuscript was received. Since they are for the most part in full sentences and close to the style, itself realistic, of the main novel, they do not disrupt it, but in my judgment they certainly add nothing.

Although the intention to write a series leaves the ending hanging, waiting to transition to another volume and without even the conclusion (even the actual end of the battle is not quite shown) and “sequel hook” we might expect, August 1914 stands on its own as an excellent novel. The translation, by Michael Glenny, is really admirable: a free-flowing English style with just enough flavor that, even apart from the names, the Russian authorship is evident.