Praise of Folly

Cottonwood

Erasmus also picked up Scott Phillips’ Cottonwood, an engrossing historical novel set in the eponymous (fictitious) Kansas boomtown, as well as an interlude in San Francisco. The book is marketed as a Western noir, probably to capitalize on the success of The Ice Harvest and avoid the taint of the “Western,” but it’s a more expansive, literary novel than the tag warrants.

The novel (hardly as sex-obsessed as the PW review) begins in Cottonwood’s earliest days, and follows its saloon-keeper, Bill Ogden, through the town’s early boom days, then his exile after his business partner is murdered while the two of them are chasing a family of serial killers (based on these charmers), and his return, which becomes entangled with the prosecution of two women who are said to be members of the murderous clan.

Phillips does an excellent job of bring the various characters to life and telling a rich, multifacted, entertaining, often lurid tale. Erasmus looks forward to reading Phillips’ middle novel, The Walkaway, which appears to be both a prequel to The Ice Harvest and to feature one of Bill Ogden’s descendants.

Cottonwood placet.

The Ice Harvest: Redux

So, Erasmus finally got some time on airplanes to read a bit, and got through Scott Phillips’ Ice Harvest, the movie of which didn’t impress Erasmus much. The book, mirabile dictu, is much better. Phillips’ Charlie Arglist is a far less sympathetic fellow than John Cusack’s hang-dong criminal manqué. Most tellingly, he’s been dealing coke behind Bill Gerard’s back, the proceeds of which comprise the majority of the money he and Vic plan to abscond with. Moreover, his personal life is rather more sordid and squalid than the in the movie. Most tellingly, in the book, Arglist deliberately kills his partner in crime, rather than passively letting him die. One wonders if Cusack, like many actors, requested that his character be made more sympathetic (and idiosyncratic: the graffito motif in the film appears nowhere in the book). If so, indulging that whim was a signal failure on the part of the scenarist, as was removing Arglist’s meeting with Nemesis at the story’s end.

Just as remaking Arglist into a nice-guy mob-lawyer thief undermines the narrative, so does its playing up Pete van Heuten in order to give Oliver Platt a more comedic, sympathetic rôle. The book’s van Heuten is Arglist’s brother-in-law, not the husband of Arglist’s cold ex-wife who begs him for deliverance from his wealthy domesticity.

Some of the movie’s more dramatic grotesqueries, like Vic’s wife kneeling dead before the Christmas tree, and the black-comic scene with the dying hitman Roy Gelles on the pier, prove to be pure inventions of the filmmakers, and ones which also undermine the reality of the narrative, perhaps reflecting the filmmakers’ desire to venture into Terra Cohen-ita. Unfortunately, their expedition founders and is ultimately lost in the very nihilism they’ve courted.

Phillips’ book, by contrast, is a lovely, dark, satisfying little work of crime fiction, in which a bunch of low-level low-lifes plot, scheme, betray, and murder each other, with only death and ruin left behind. Phillips, it turns out, knows the gods are not mocked.

The Ice Harvest, Liber, placet.

Alea Westingi

Erasmus has loved this book for more decades than he cares to admit. If you haven't read it, hie thee to a bookery!

Deadly Web

Erasmus recently read Barbara Nadel's latest in her series of Istanbul-based police procedurals, Deadly Web. Ms. Nadel's books are only available in the UK, except for her title, A Chemical Prison which is available in the U.S. under the even more dreadful title, The Ottoman Cage. Why not just have called it Kafes and rendered it entirely unsalable?

Erasmus believed he had praised this series earlier on Praise of Folly, but a quick Google search implies he hasn't. Well, let him briefly do so: this is an exceptionally richly drawn series, with a distinct sense of place and, in general, deep, compelling characterizations. The sole running complaint Erasmus has with the series is that the British editors have no sense of Turkish spelling and apparently Ms. Nadel's Turkish isn't good enough to ride herd on them. For example, the main character, Çetin İkmen, is assisted by a character of Ottoman lineage named Mehmet Suleyman whose father is named Muhammed and whose brother is Murad. Firstly, "Mehmet" is the Turkish version of "Muhammed." Only the Prophet, Peygamber Muhammed, has his named spelled in the Arabic fashion. Secondly, "Murad" should be spelled "Murat" with the same devoicing of the final "d" that renders Ottoman "Mehmed" into "Mehmet." And, moreover, the proper spelling of the name Süleyman carries an umlaut. But Erasmus digresses rather dramatically.

Erasmus is happy to report that in the latest installment of the series, Deadly Web, Mehmet finally receives his umlaut. He still lacks an -oğlu patronymic which would be much more usual. But perhaps Erasmus asks too much.

Erasmus was generally pleased to return to Nadel's Istanbul, however. That said, Deadly Web, is not the best mystery in the series. (Erasmus advises starting at the beginning and working forward.) While it has its strongpoints, dealing with several subcultures (hackers, Goths, occultists) respectfully yet critically, rather than in the gimmicky, shallow fashion of many authors. Nevertheless, there's surprisingly little character development in this volume, other than two related personal crises for Mehmet Süleymanoğlu (as Erasmus thinks of him) carried over from the previous book. Çetin İkmen is almost absent from large swaths of the book, and his daughter Çiçek, who should be central to the narrative (it turns out), puts in odd appearances at distant intervals. There's an attempt to capture the general mood of anxiety in Turkey during the build-up to the Iraq War, but no attempts at placing it in a global context, other than a couple shallow, snarky sentences equating the American president and the Iraqi dictator a little too facilely for Erasmus's taste. One very well-done character arc is the continuing disintegration of former policeman Balthasar Cohen after a crippling injury in an earthquake. His embitterment and dissolution at being trapped in a wrecked body in a marriage destroyed by his own cheerful infidelities is entirely believable, though Erasmus squirms a bit at having the series most prominent lech be its most prominent Jew, given old, ugly stereotypes. Still, his son Berekiah, a thoroughly decent kid, has married one of İkmen's daughters, so one grants that there is no conscious anti-Semitism at work.

Nevertheless, Erasmus found it a diverting, interesting read, though the climax was disappointing as frequently happens in books involving magic or the occult. Erasmus suspect Ms. Nadel realizes she needs to take some time off from her İstanbullu series (alas, misspelled İstanbulu in the book), as her latest volume, Last Rights is set in the Britain of the Blitz. Erasmus hopes she returns to the series refreshed and filled with interesting ideas for the İkmenler, Süleymanlar, et alii.

Despite reservations, Deadly Web placet, though perhaps not for those new to the series.

Overall, the İkmen series: Ave.

Swing, Baby!

Erasmus was wandering through his local emporium librorum a while back and happened across Swing by Rupert Holmes. "Rupert Holmes?" thought Erasmus, That Rupert Holmes?" Indeed, yes, that Rupert Holmes, the jacket informed him. Aside from writing one of the true Zeitgeist (animus temporis?) hits of the '70s (the lyrics to which are much cleverer than Erasmus remembered), Mr. Holmes' subsequent career has been quite distinguished, a fact of which Erasmus was unaware. Not only did he clean up with Edgars and Tonys for his musical Mystery of Edwin Drood, but he picked up an Edgar for his previous novel (now being made into a movie), and was the genius behind the extremely droll Remember WENN.

Much as it shocked Erasmus, the guy who wrote "The Piña Colada Song" appears to be something of a Renaissance man and artistic polymath. Still, Erasmus had his doubts and bought swing mostly because he's a sucker for the era and big-band swing music. (The enclosed CD, he thought, was a cute gimmick.)

Beginning the book with low expectations (though the lack of celebrity hype on it should have tipped him off that it wasn't a typical ghost-written job), Erasmus was pleasantly surprised at the writing and the set up (a dramatic murder at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1940). Erasmus still thought that it would be a fun little confection to parallel David Gelernter's classic 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (Ignore the Amazon review's snark about Gelernter's politics.)

Reading on, Erasmus was constantly surprised by the depth of the characterization, the acuteness of the psychology, and the masterful expansion of the plot. Holmes is a master of the historical novel: his command of detail as well as mindset are as good as anything Erasmus has read in a long time. He combines this talent with very skillful plotting and profound humanity. To choose one example of the former, there's a very, very clever cryptological puzzle near the heart of the mystery. Unlike less talented writers, Holmes doesn't make its deciphering the climax of the book. It's a critical plot point, but it's subordinated to the characters' stories. Swing is a truly great mystery that deserves as wide a readership as possible.

Ave!

(Alas, Erasmus has failed to listen to the CD yet. He apologizes to his four readers.)

Children of the Lamp: The Akhenaten Adventure

While the rest of the world is off reading the sixth volume of Dominulus Figulus, Erasmus finally picked up Philip Kerr's children's book, Children of the Lamp: The Akhenaten Adventure. Erasmus doesn't read a lot of juvenile literature and was pleasantly surprised by this book. He suspects it is the first in a series and believes children will get a lot of enjoyment and some erudition on the sly from them.

Like some of Kerr's other books, it's very well drawn, though occasionally getting details wrong here and there (in this one, he has a character expressing distaste for New York City tap water which is famously perhaps the best tap water in the world). The book is fast moving, clever, and both witty and possessed of humor that younger readers will enjoy. It also has a bit of cheeky British French-baiting.

If Erasmus had to pick a fault, he'd say that the climax wasn't quite dramatic enough, though it did feature the Pharaoh Formerly Known as Amenhotep IV himself. (Erasmus is more afraid of the ghost of Horemhab than Mr. "He is Useful to the A***.")

Placet.

Versio Tertia

If Make Love* *The Bruce Campbell Way is the best fluffy comedy Erasmus has read in a while, and Hitler's Peace one of the most satisfying pieces of popular fiction, then The Third Translation by Matt Bondurant is probably Erasmus's favorite of this summer's books.

Mr. Bondurant couldn't have crafted a tale better suited to Erasmus's tastes. Walter Rothschild, a cranky American Fachidiot Egyptologist labors in the bowels of the British Museum trying to decipher the eponymous third translation of the crossword Stela of Paser. He then gets caught up in an oddball, somewhat comedic, somewhat sinister conspiracy which leads him into all sorts of circumstances highly unusual for an Egyptologist.

Meanwhile, Rothschild's badly screwed up personal life starts to catch up with him, even as he glimpses a hope for redeeming his fairly wretched run of interpersonal relationships.

The combination of comedy, mystery, and Egyptology are custom made for Erasmus, who has long-standing serious interest in all three. Professor Bondurant has clearly done a lot of research on the last, and especially initially, he comes off almost impeccably. He later brings in some theories that seem somewhat questionable to Erasmus, who allows that he may just not be up on the relevant literature on Egyptian cosmology and theology. Still, there's a story about Hathor (hat-hor, by the way, not ha-thor), a sky goddess generally represented as a placid, maternal cow, in the book that Erasmus has only seen attributed to Sakhmet, a ferocious lioness-goddess (and Bondurant has Rothschild claim that Mut, Hathor and Sakhmet all reflect aspects of a single divinity; this is totally unfamiliar to Erasmus in twenty or so years of reading about Egyptian gods, but Erasmus could be behind the times he supposes).

Professor Bondurant should have insisted that he receive a copy editor as diligent as the book's designer. The latter did an impeccable, beautiful job, while the former let him down. At first, given the topic of cryptographic writings an allusions, Erasmus suspected that Professor Bondurant was hiding clues in the book to a further answer. After the second spelling of "Egyptians" as Egpytians, though, Erasmus gave up the idea of re-reading it for an occult meaning.

As far as the work itself, Erasmus offers an raised-arms determinative of praise. As a critic, Erasmus must note some of its flaws: some of the characters are drawn well, then let wander offstage never to return. The conspiracy comes to an end anticlimatically, and Rothschild learns of it second-hand.

The book's major weakness, mirroring the above criticisms, is that it ends far more weakly than it begins. That said, part of the dramatic weakness may come from Bondurant's commitment to realism, in which case Erasmus is inclined to nod understanding and say that rather than ending with a whimper, it concludes with the quiet fall to the ground of the feather of Ma‘at.

Nevertheless, The Third Translation is a terrific read, straddling the boundaries of popular and literary fiction with success. It is much, much less pretentious than the bombastic blurbs it carries. Do not be put off by their artifice and precious claims of earthshattering merit. Professor Bondurant has an MFA, and one suspects these are his colleagues from that world, thinking they're doing him a favor by praising his book in the terms that carry weight in their world.

For the average reader of fiction, even one not as Egypt-besotted as Erasmus, what Professor Bondurant has produced is an even rarer specimen than they claim: a work of literary fiction that's also a hell of a good story, a terrifically fun read, and which holds the promise of genuine greatness in the future. If Professor Bondurant can unfettle himself from the petty bonds of the contemporary literary fashion which insists on smallness and internality, develop his gift for narrative, and employ his already formidable style, humor, and eye for character, Erasmus could see him writing books that are both great literature and great reads, perhaps à la Robertson Davies, whom Erasmus seems to remember commenting mordantly on Strunk & White that they could indeed teach writing as a skill like carpentry; but what if one did not want to be a carpenter, but build cathedrals?

Build a cathedral, Professor Bondurant.

The Third Translation, ave.

Salvator Lumbulus (1926-2005)

Ed McBain, a/k/a Evan Hunter, né Salvatore Lombino, has succumbed to cancer at the age of 78. McBain was one of the old masters of the crime novel, having virtually invented the police procedural and penned at least 100 novels under various names. A teacher and P.G. Wodehouse's literary agent, among other things, he also wrote The Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for The Birds.

As usual, the Telegraph remains the nonpareil for obituaries. Read McBain's. It's worth the registration.

Requiescat in pace.

Concumbite!* *Genō Brucis Curvoris

To complete the trilogy of cinematic posts inspired by the Cinetrix's generosity, Erasmus would like to put in a good word for Make Love!* *The Bruce Campbell Way, a genial and loopy novel, ostensibly the memoir of the eponymous B-movie star, in which he finally gets his big break as the comic foil (named Foyl) of a protagonist played by Richard Gere whom he teaches to romance Renée Zellweger in a Mike Nichols vehicle called Let's Make Love!. Alas, things don't go so well for poor Bruce, who ends up blamed for bringing "the B-movie virus" into the production, and has to find out who might have framed him. The novel is feather-light, very readable, a nice satire of Hollywood, and very well-written (which might surprise those unfamiliar with Campbell's actual memoir, If Chins Could Kill). Erasmus stayed up way too late several nights, compelled to turn pages and read chapter after silly chapter long after he'd resolved to put it down.

Make Love!* *The Bruce Campbell Way is likely the best goofy book you'll read all year. Ave.

Kerr at Last and Pax Hilterica

Philip Kerr, the British thriller writer perhaps most widely known for winning the Bad Sex Prize a few years back from The Literary Review of London (in which he used "gnomon" to describe the phallus rampant, forever making Erasmus titter when looking at sundials), is one of Erasmus's favorite popular fiction authors. When asked to describe his books, Erasmus usually says, "Michael Crichton with a classical education," for Kerr, like Crichton, skips from topic to topic in building his books, but unlike Crichton, the topics which interest him are usually human, philosophical, or historical, rather than scientific or technological. Also, Kerr lards his prose with frequent and interesting allusions to history, mythology, etc. Erasmus considers his output quite uneven but very much worth following.

A brief review of Kerr's bibliography should give an idea of his breadth of interest. March Violets {ave}, arguably Kerr's best book, is a private-eye story set in the twilight of Weimar Germany as the Nazis are coming to power. The eponymous Märzveilchen are those late-coming Nazis who've sprung up like weeds, once the party's ascendancy seemed clear. Bernie Günther, the protagonist, reappears in The Pale Criminal {ave}, set during the war, and A German Requiem {Placet} set in Harry Lime's post-war Vienna. These three novels were later packaged into a single-volume trilogy under the name Berlin Noir.

Kerr's next book was A Philosophical Investigation {ave} which is a serial-killer hunt set "ten minutes in the future," in a Britain in which genetic screening is universal, and the gene which disposes one to become a sexually sadistic murderer has been identified. A series of men are murdered and eventually, a female detective puts together that they all appear on the NHS's top-secret list of potential serial killers (who are all given mandatory counseling from birth). And the killer? He must be on the list... or are genes perhaps not the last word in evil?

After such a promising start, Kerr's work becomes a bit less ambitious, but is still generally quite professional and worthwhile. Dead Meat {placet} was once of the first novels to explore the Wild East criminal world of post-Soviet Russia. Gridiron (UK) or The Grid (US) {non placet} is a tale about artificial intelligence, "smart buildings," et cetera. Alas, the architectural and technological flourishes didn't keep Erasmus from figuring out where the book was going and getting impatient for it to get there. (It's also the source of his "prize-winning" quote, "Detaching mind from over-eager gnomon and its exquisitely appointed, shadowy task, he began to make love to her.")

Esau {ave} is a marvellously entertaining adventure in the Himalayas, where explorers run into the last branch on our family tree, homo vertex, a/k/a mi rgod.

A Five Year Plan {placet} was a decent heist-at-sea novel, followed by two works Erasmus didn't particularly care for, a science-fiction heist novel, The Second Angel and a Kennedy-assassination alternate history, The Shot {non placent}.

Kerr returned to form with Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton {ave}, an intriguing mystery set in the tower of London while Newton was Master of the Mint.

His most recent book, Hitler's Peace, returns him to the apocalyptic 1940s, with the world at war. It's 1943, and becoming clear to the Nazis that the war is lost. Some, like Hess, are trying to broker a separate peace with the Allies, while others prepare for a Götterdämmerung. Meanwhile, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, are preparing to meet in Tehran (or in the spelling current at the time, Teheran). The Teheran Conference was unusual in a number of ways still not clarified by historians, as most of the documentation remains in classified archives. Kerr, in his afterword, explains some of the questions around which he has built an intriguing, occasionally breathtaking speculative-history novel.

The novel begins in Washington where Willard Meyer, a logical-postivist philosophy professor working as a German expert for the OSS (consequently slightly nervous about his youthful flirtation with Communism and the NKVD coming to light), is enlisted by President Roosevelt to get up to speed on some dossiers in preparation for what he eventually learns is the Teheran Conference. Meanwhile, a State Department diplomat is assassinated and framed as homosexual. Kerr gets a few period details wrong in the Washington section, Erasmus believes, and his portrait of Roosevelt is a bit too bookish to be entirely accurate, I'd guess, but overall, the effect is quite well done.

The action shifts to the Nazi side, where the machinations are darker and deadlier. Then, as the professor steams across the Atlantic on a battleship with FDR and his delegation, another murder occurs, which may be tied to the first. A Nazi assassin may lurk in the delegation. An SS commander in Berlin plots a mass assassination of the Big Three (the actual Operation Long Jump). The Roosevelt delegation travels through North Africa and Cairo, with more murders following, and some risky espionage related to the Katyn Massacre. Finally, with great difficulty, Meyer et alii reach Tehran.

The book seems rather scattershot, as my summary implies, but some 300 pages in, it all comes together in a turn of events Erasmus found genuinely surprising. And then Kerr gets to the heart of what he's at here. First, could the compromise with evil inherent in the alliance with Stalin extend to a truce, the peace of the title? Kerr answers yes, and Erasmus finds it hard to disagree. In one of the book's most chilling passages, a Nazi who's come to talk truce addresses Roosevelt and Stalin (Churchill has refused to listen).

"...I would say that the notions of what is proper in war and peace have little to do with political reality. Morality has no place at the negotiating table, and the only truths we need recognize are the truths of pragmatism and expediency."

Roosevelt beamed like a benevolent uncle and nodded happily...

In another key passage, Professor Meyer reflects on how the academic parlor-games of modern philosophy have hideous, depraved consequences in the world of men and mores. Having contemplated the character of Adolf Hitler as an OSS analyst, Meyer has a shattering epiphany.

...I felt an understanding of what the Führer and I were: two men for whom the entire spectrum of moral values had no meaning, who had no real need of the humanities and the immaterial world. Here was the obvious extension of everything that I, as a logical positivist, believed in. Here was a man without values. And I suddenly perceived the bankruptcy of all my own individual endeavors. The meaninglessness of all the meanings I had striven to find. This was the truth of Hitler and all rigid materialism: it had absolutely nothing to do with being human.

How Professor Meyer attempts to redeem himself provides an interesting ending that will not be dramatically congenial to many but which Erasmus found a realistic decision of a man desperate to justify his life.

Hitler's Peace is Kerr's best work in a very long time and a fascinating set of portraits, even if a detail here or there seems a bit out of place. It is popular fiction of the highest order, and a successful attempt to address themes with which much more self-consciously literary works grapple far less successfully.

Ave.

And, no, Erasmus has not yet read Kerr's children's novel, Children of the Lamp: The Akhenaten Adventure, though he does have a copy on his night table...