“It’s our duty to search out anywhere the excellent that exists within culture, and to promote it — because the excellent is always going to be in the minority. Excellence is the particular, whereas crud is universal. We find only the goodness where we look for it.”
Brad Birzer said those words amid an interview on “Great Film and the American Spirit”, and they sum up Mythic Realms fairly well. It is common to divide books into Literature and popular fiction, or film into Cinema and regular ol’ movies — but there is often truth buried in the mundane, so much so that classics do not become classics for until centuries have passed, and people realize the buried truth is still speaking. Many a classic author was wholly ignored in their lifetime, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare being prize example. In Mythic Realms, Brad Birzer takes literature, film, and even a few TV shows seriously — probing them for what they say about the human heart and our place in the Cosmos. They are a mix of old and new, ranging from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers to Star Trek and Stranger Things.
Dostoevsky remarked that Beauty will save the world, and books have been written on written on that remark alone, and on Beauty’s connection with Truth and the Good. In Mythic Realms we explore the practical application of that, of the power that stories have to awake us, to draw us out of the drowsy haze of the everyday and into the transcendent. He begins by sharing the authors who first made him aware of the power of literature, who formed him through their words and ideas, before settling into reflections on books and film. Mythic Realms is in large part surprising because he so often focuses on obscure and and unusual picks, like the pulp era in adventure, fantasy, and SF. (C.S. Lewis and Tolkien both feature, but one can’t write a book on the power of literature without looking at those two!) The excellence that Birzer finds here — sometimes glittering on the surface, sometimes needing a little smelting — varies on the book. Cather provides the deep, earnest love of the land that makes it possible for human civilization to endure despite hardship, whether that be prairie winds or Gulf coast humidity; pulp writers like Robert Howard celebrated strength, heroism, and man’s essential fire, which may be tamed and squelched by modernity but which will never be extinguished; in Star Trek, Birzer sees not only the power, but the importance of friendship. Jim Kirk was treble the man he would have been alone, because of Spock and McCoy, whose virtues complemented and balanced his own. It is not good for man to be alone — that is true whether a man is alone in a garden, a family struggling on the plains, or the captain of a ship to the stars. The film section does deep dives into he works of John Ford, Hitchcock, and — interestingly — The X-Files. I never watched the latter, but Birzer makes both it and (gasp) the Disney remake of Beauty and the Beast sound compelling enough to sit down and experience properly.
I thoroughly enjoyed Mythic Realms, from Birzer’s personal reflection on the power of literature, his appraisals of emerging genres like science fiction and progressive rock (at some point I need to listen to some to find out what he and Tom Woods find so compelling), to the case-by-case studies themselves. He’s introduced me to more than a few new names here, and prompted me to revisit films like Vertigo that I’ve watched previously and take them more seriously. My only caveat to the reader would be to keep in mind that this began as a collection of essays, and that mark lingers in some repeatedy quotes and background information. If you take books and film seriously, though, this is a volume to look for and savor. There’s nothing like discussing either with someone who loves and is inspired by them.
Quotes from Highlighted Authors:
“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin, but economics and art are strangers.” (Willa Cather)
The clear white lamp of science and the passionless pursuit of knowledge are not enough for me; I must live deeply and listen to the call of the common clay in me, if I am to live at all. Without emotion and instinct I would be a dead,stagnant thing. . . . Defeat waits for us all. (Robert E. Howard)
Related:
Brad Birzer’s writings at The Imaginative Conservative, which is probably where I first found him — either there, or Tom Woods’ podcast or Liberty Classroom.
Other books by Birzer, including Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West, Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, and American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll
I first encountered the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the same history book, and images of houses covered by drifts of dust and those of men standing in line looking for relief or work are forever twinned in my mind. I’ve never read a proper history of either, though, but was prompted to by reading The Four Winds, which a coworker recommended to me. Although there was some overlap in what the books have to offer — driving home how prolonged and miserable the conditions were in the Dust Bowl areas — I did not find The Worst Hard Time redundant at all, in part because the back story and scientifically-informed analysis of what led these conditions. It also explained why Oklahoma has that strange little strip appended to it, sticking into Texas — a strip which, in the 1930s, was known as No-Man’s Land because until 1890 no state claimed ownership of it.
Egan begins his story with conflict between Texans and Comanches, conflict that led to the same result in 1850 as it had for the Creeks in 1814: the US Army, aroused to action by attacks on civilians, drove the Comanche from the land. That land was pure prairie, home to bison and chicken and many other species. It was part of what was called the Great American Desert, a place no stranger to searing heat and prolonged periods of no rain. The first to move in were ranchers and cowboys: in place of the bison, many of whom were killed in order to force the Comanche away, there were thousands upon thousands of cattle. Cows were ecological misfits, though, not providing the same benefits to the prairies as the bison and (more importantly) often not able to stand the prairie winters. The United States government was eager to fill the land with settlers, to fully realize Manifest Destiny: cowboys weren’t quite the ticket to civilization. And so they came — and not just Americans looking for opportunities, but European immigrants like the Volga Germans (there’s an interesting story in itself) who were seeking to escape the thumb of the czar. They were urged on by pamphlets that told them how to ‘do’ dryland farming, and popular dogma that declared rain followed the plow. Tragically, these years of settlement and expansion were unusually wet, marrying people to the idea that Man had nature’s number and could make her dance to his music. Then, the rains stopped — and they would not begin again for eight years. The wind is seemingly constant in the western flatlands, and as crops died and fields lay bare, the dead land began to move. It was first obvious in 1932, when farmers and townspeople alike stood staring at the skies, seeing a new thing that they had no words for: it was though a mountain of roaring dirt was approaching them.
The pictures sent out by the wire service during that winter and early spring told as much, if not more, than Geiger’s prose: people with masks and flashlights, navigating the perils of small-town main streets, cars dodging the drifts and haze of a country road, storefronts boarded up, schools closed, cattle lying dead in the dust.
Dust storms would become a constant hazard in the years to come, and retreating inside only offered so much protection. Dust found a way in, blasting through cracks and crevices and sometimes open windows. It buried towns, cars, attempts at crops, and often people. It filled the lungs and intestines of animals and people alike, leading to something like tuberculosis among the people, and starvation for the animals. As the crops withered and the land grew in desperation — accumulating drifts and closed buildings, beaten by dust and tornadoes and plagues of rabbits and locusts, the population shrank. The government at first responded with aid that would make sense in the light of a short-term disaster, providing food and places to stay — but as the drought lingered and the storms grew worse, sandblasting buildings and people alike, shutting down life in gloom, dirt, and static electricity, the state began appraising why the land was failing so dramatically — realizing what cowboys of days past had warned, realizing what others familiar with the land had said. It was no place for thirsty, heat-sensitive annuals. Industrial man began to reprise the lessons he’d abandoned in the excitement of machinery, beginning to work with the land and climate instead of trying to run over it. As the “Dirty Thirties” began to give way to the forties, the rains came again — coinciding, oddly, with FDR’s visit out there to boost the spirits.
The Worst Hard Time is a sombering book, largely for what has already transpired: Egan is generous with graphic details of everyday hardships, of mothers losing children and having to begin the day washing a film of mud off of faces, and he even integrates one man’s increasingly despairing diary. It’s remarkable that the subject kept plugging on, kept planting crops that he knew he’d lose, but that’s human nature. We are admirable in that way, but sometimes we can persist in mistakes — and that, unfortunately, is a lesson Egan teases we have yet to learn. The land of the prairies was plundered without thought to its constitution, to its unique nature, to its environment — and the people there paid the price for over a decade. But we persist in treating our natural resources as geese that lay golden eggs, not realizing that just as topsoil that took a thousand years to develop can be destroyed in a decade, so to can aquifers that built up over generations be sucked dry. And yet the aquifers continue to be greedily sucked at, and the rivers too, and we in general continue believing that technology is a genie that will give us all we want without consequences: “We shall be as gods!”. The dark years of the Dust Bowl remind us that we know very little despite our accomplishments and ambition.
The Worst Hard Time is a solid piece of history writing, which not only covered the subject amply, but made me interested in other minor topics, like the German Russians who inhabited part of the plains, and has lit a fire under me to begin my next trip west in Amarillo, there to explore places that the whirlwind could not quite kill.
Highlights:
At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres. Dusters swept over the northern prairie as well, but the epicenter was the southern plains. An area the size of Pennsylvania was in ruin and on the run. More than a quarter-million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done. They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.
The ground could be mined at the deepest levels for water, using new and powerful centrifugal pumps, to create the garden state of Oklahoma. They could grab onto that underground lake, the Ogallala Aquifer, like the Sooners had grabbed the old Cherokee lands, and so what if the water was nearly seven hundred feet deep and had taken at least a hundred centuries to build up—it was there to be grubstaked.
It’s the earth itself, Bam said. The earth is on the move. Why? Look what they done to the grass, he said. Look at the land: wrong side up.
The great unraveling seemed to be caused by man, Bennett believed. How could it be that people had farmed the same ground for centuries in other countries and not lost the soil, while Americans had been on the land barely a generation and had stripped it of its life-giving layers? “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,” Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was “sinister,” a symptom of “our stupendous ignorance.”
High Plains nesters were more intimate with the elements than perhaps any other people in the country. They knew black dust came from Kansas, red from eastern Oklahoma, a yellow-orange from Texas. And sometimes all of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas seemed airborne at once: black, red, and orange converging. The sunlight that filtered through these dusters took on eerie hues—sometimes even green. People knew that when the wind blew from the southwest, the duster to follow would go through a range of colors—everything but the golden light they remembered from the first days of breaking the sod.
Bennett had told Congress that fifty-one million acres were so eroded they could no longer be cultivated. It would take a thousand years to rebuild an inch of topsoil.
Strong men still wept, hiding their lapses like alcoholics sipping in secret. The men cried because they had never seen anything like this and had never before been without a plan of action. Always, they had been able to hammer at something, to dig and scrape and cut and build and plant and harvest and kill—something forceful to tip the balance, using their hands to make even the slightest dent during the bleakest times.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is “fun facts about ourselves”.
(1) One of my favorite hobbies/passions is singing. I sing tenor in a church choir with the odd solo, but I especially like singing traditional British-American folk music. This was a genre I discovered thanks to Civil War reenactments, and listening to the music there. Although some music was written during the war, most soldiers began the war singing the same music they already knew, and then adopted the lyrics to their circumstances. The best example is “Rye Whisky”. Compare —
Oh Molly, Oh Molly, it’s for your sake alone
I’ve left my ol’ parents, my house and my home
My love for you, it has caused me to roam
I’m a rambling’ rouser and Dixie’s my home
~ ~ ~
Oh Molly, oh Molly, it’s for your sake alone
I’ve left my old father, my country and my home.
I’ve left my old mother, to weep and to mourn,
I am a Rebel soldier, and far from my home.
(2) Although I’ve been telling stories in my head for years, until recently the only one I’d shared was a silly little mystery that resolved with a pun draw from Roman history, probably inspired by Asimov’s Black Widower mysteries or Steven Saylor’s Roman stories. I recently wrote a little story story about small-town church drama, employing some characters who have been bouncing around in my head for fifteen years. I’m hoping to do a few more in the vein of small-town goings-on as inspiration & time allow.
(3) I’d never flown before, left the South, or planned and conducted a vacation until 2016, when I flew to New Mexico and commenced a thousand-mile GPS-free driving tour of the state. Before that, the last time I’d been “on vacation” was…2004, the last time I did a summer trip with my parents. I am hoping to go west again next year.
When the clerk at my local diner coughed at me to remind me that I was standing in front of her cash register, bill and money in hand, but ignoring her to finish the chapter I’d walked up reading, I realized that the coworker who lent this to me with a warning about its compelling nature had undersold it. The Four Winds begins as the story of Elsa, a young woman growing up in the Texas panhandle, overlooked and unloved by her own despite her best efforts to please them, who begins finding happiness only to see it buried by the drought and dust storms of the 1930. Forced to leave her home behind in order to keep her children alive, they migrate west and find not a land of promise and opportunity, but of cruelty and contempt. The Four Winds is a novel of enormous pain and suffering, of human resilience, of a woman’s tortured love for her daughter — and finally, of courage. It is quite the book.
Elsa was sickly as a child, and perhaps that explains why her parents distanced themselves from her emotionally, bestowing more love on their flower garden than her. She sought love elsewhere, and (as is the natural course of things) found herself pregnant with the child of a young man who was engaged to someone else. Despite their reservations, the Martinelli family are good Catholics, and make their son Rafe do the proper thing — and they quickly learn to love Elsa, who doesn’t cling to her city ways but throws herself into the life of the farm, growing to love it. Though her husband is not in love with her, she has their children, and she is much the Martinelli’s daughter in law as she could have been their daughter in blood. But then the rains stop, and the dust begins to blow.
It’s one thing to read nonfiction about the Dust Bowl, another to see photos of it — but Hannah’s slow burn of misery really drives home the point that the Dust Bowl sucked. Through Elsa’s eyes we witness the boom years of the 1920s, when farmers in the Texas panhandle were enjoying high cotton — or high wheat, in their case, buying threshers and more land on credit. But then the rains failed, as they were known to do in the Great American Desert, and the plowed-up land waiting for growth began to blow away — and nothing would be reaped for years but the whirlwind. We experience through words the slowly growing desperation and fear as the seasons pass and nothing gets better — as the pantry empties out, as the light in her husband’s eyes grows dimmer and dimmer and soon there’s nothing but the moonlight reflecting off his whisky glass and the pale glow of a cigarette as he mopes for hours on end in the now-desolate barn loft. The physical torture of a place is one thing — the constant fight against the growing dust dunes, the groans of starving animals whose bellies are filling with dirt, the all-too-frequent arrival of death. But for Elsa, the hardest part is watching her husband, never happy, sink into true misery — and enduring her daughter’s sudden viciousness, for Loreda is very much a daddy’s girl and blames her mother for trapping her father here, for depriving them of lives of adventure and fun. Loreda is a character I’d very much like to see a switch taken to early on.
Despite her fierce love for her in-laws and for the farm, despite her stubbornness, when her husband abandons her and her son almost dies of dust pneumonia, Elsa has to take her two children and seek work elsewhere. Anyone who has read The Grapes of Wrath knows what’s waiting for her there: desperate men hardened by their hunger, frightened Californians who don’t know what to do with this sudden tide of displaced farmers looking for work, who close their hearts and doors to fellow Americans; cruel men who see in the need of others an opportunity to make the most of hard times. It isn’t just that the hours are long and the pay envelope light, but the workers are paid in scrip and the company store charges money to cash that scrip, and if people have cash from elsewhere, the store won’t take it: only company credit will do. The result is debt-slavery, not even worthy of being called serfdom because the feudal lord at least saw peasants as people he was obliged to take care of. At every turn, Elsa is wrung like a turnip for the little she can produce, and survives only by the help of those around her — sharing resources admid the hatred of the Californians for these ‘Okies’, and the armed viciousness of the bosses. These hardships are a forge, though — forcing Lareda to grow up and see her mother for who she is, a woman of inexaustible strength. Lareda has that strength, too, but instead of merely enduring meanness until she dies, she wants to fight back against the cruelty — but we’ll not cross that line into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say, Hannah takes the politics of The Grapes of Wrath and raises the volume.
“This was a hell of a novel,” I said to that same clerk several days later, who had seen me reading it so intently and ignoring my food that she asked if anything was the matter. I was generally aware of the Dust Bowl and its connection with the Great Depression, but Hannah’s writing made the suffering and despair come alive — and perhaps that doesn’t sound attractive, but when a character I’d quickly become attached to because of her strength despite rejection and heartbreak had to face these challenges, I had to see her through them. The character drama in this novel is superb, its only weakness being how quickly Lareda erupts into viciousness. Frankly, I don’t buy her as a character who came of age in the 1920s: she has too much of the emotional shallowness and meanness of a kid who grew up with a smartphone in her hands. She has no roots to her time and place. I’ve seen nothing like her in Wallace Stegner or Willa Cather’s western novels, which shared the general temporal setting. She does mature, though, and her constant struggle with her mother — their love for one another despite their differences — continues making the novel work, even as the politics drift more obvious and more shallow. The Californians begin as antagonists who are roughly understandable, but by the time we’ve reached the end, they’re more Snidley Whiplashy. Their taking a level in villainry forces heroism from our main characters, though, so it’s not necessarily gratuitous.
The Four Winds is a novel I won’t forget about any time soon, and it prompted me to begin reading a nonfiction title about the Dust Bowl. I can definitely see visiting Hannah again, though she’s apparently known as a romance author. There’s little of that here: this is a love story, sure, but it’s about a mother and her daughter. Frankly, there’s more romance in the average Jack Lark novel than this.
Related:
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.
My Antonia, Willa Cather; O Pioneers, Willa Cather. Other stories of resilient women who love the land of the West.
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. There are some definite similarities between Elsa and Jurgis’ determination to endure.
Ho! Waitaminute. This is a review of a book about The Sopranoes called Woke Up This Morning. It would be wrong to begin it without “Woke Up this Morning”.
Alright, wiseguy, you watched the theme? Good. This thing of ours, it’s no good you go about exploring Sopranoes content without the proper mood-setting. So twenty years ago, David Chase creates a show that’s unlike anything else seen before. I won’t say “or since”, given that we’ve had a few other works of similarly brilliant television, most notably Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad — and Gilligan has acknowledged that without The Sopranoes breaking the ground it did, Walter White would have never existed. The Sopranoes was notable, chiefly, for featuring an anti-hero, a mob boss who opens the story by seeing out a psychiatrist to treat a recurring issue of panic attacks. James Gandolfini would deliver a masterful performance as Tony Soprano in the years to come, and he was joined by dozens of other very serious actors whose talents were brought to bear through solid storytelling and tight writing. That storytelling took The Sopranoes into new terrain, as no characters were truly safe from being knocked off — fitting, given the nature of their their work. The show would be notable for the complex emotional and moral ground it covered: Tony’s relationship with his mother, his divide between being a dad to Med and AJ, and being Mr. Mob Boss; his frequent need to choose between friendship and business. The storytelling was artful on multiple levels, like the use of subtle visuals — witness one dead character appearing in a mirror in a scene where the memory of his treachery and death were on the minds of the characters. They don’t see him, but it’s a visual way to express his continuing presence despite his character’s absence. The Sopranoes was the first show to really live up to HBO’s “Home Box Office” name, being filmed as and delivering the weight of a movie. We watched putzi before David Chase gave us the gift of his art.
Woke Up This Morning is an offshoot of a Sopranos podcast created by Michael Imperioli (Chrissie) and Steve Schirripa (Bobby), which like other TV podcasts covered each episode in turn. Woke Up doesn’t take that approach, though, instead beginning with a chapter on The Sopranoes‘ development, and then dealing with each season in turn, with intermediary chapters taking us into the writers’ room or spotlighting minor but memorable characters. The format is of an extended conversation between Michael and Steve, who are frequently joined by other members of The Sopranoes cast’ and glorified crew. The conversation largely sounds natural, but there are parts where it distinctly sounds like a reading, lacking the back-and-forth dynamism and reaction that marks real conversation. There are attempts at making it sound more authentic, with Imperioli and Schirripa getting off-topic, but frankly these were obvious, distracting, and often dumb — especially Imperioli trying to convince Bobb- er, Steve — that dolphins and squids (which are from outer space) are smarter than humans, and Schirripa getting indignant and protesting loudly that he is definitely smartah than a dolphin! This is only a little fly in the soup, though, nothing to go to the don about. Fittingly, given his character’s interest in the TV and film industry, Michael is the one who most frequently explains production concepts that come up in the conversation, like what it means to ‘beat’ a story out. Most everyone from the show makes an appearance here, and it was good to hear them — even if Jamie Lynn Sigler, who played teenage Meadow, just had to remind listeners that she’s now older than Edie Falco (who played her mother) was when the show began. Ooh, madone. The big exceptions are James Gandfolini and Frank Vincente, who have unfortunately died since the show’s airing.
If you’re a Sopranoes fan, there’s no question that Woke Up This Morning is worth your time. Granted, it’s available in a book form, but unless you’re deaf I can’t imagine not wanting to experience this in the intended format — listening to all these people in their rich accents talking with passion about something they and the audience still love. There’s quite a bit to learn here, or to be reminded of: a common theme is that James Gandfolini was a prince of a man, loved by all of his coworkers, even if they found his intensity hard to work with at times. Beyond his dedication to the acting craft, he was a compassionate mentor to the Sopranoes’ younger actors, offering them advice, moral support, and helping them grow to be the best actors they could be. He supported his other costars, as well: during a wage dispute where filming was suspended, Gandfolini personally paid his fellow actors’ salaries during that time. David Chase’s own intensity is also frequently mentioned: he took the stories he was telling very seriously, and The Sopranoes set was not a place for improv, though sometimes actors’ work at giving their characters emotional backstories would be incorporated into their canon background. Some of the actors contributed more to their characters than just giving them life: Tony Siricio was so much like his character, Paulie Walnuts, that when a set was needed for Paulie’s apartment, the production crew visited his own pad and recreated it. The cast of The Sopranoes formed intense emotional bonds with one another, and their delight in being partially reunited here definitely comes across. There’s still a lot to learn about the show, and I loved taking that ride to Jersey with Tony again through this production.
Related:
Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, Brett Martin. On The Sopranoes and the road to Breaking Bad.
Emika Chen is a young woman, desperately in debt because a past criminal record makes it impossible for her to obtain the kinds of work that she’s developed skills for. What’s she’s good at coding and hacking, and these days that doesn’t just mean sitting in front of a computer wearing a hoody with a PowerShell window open and hitting random keys rapidly while intense Hacking Music plays. She lives a little deeper into the 21st century than we do, and augmented reality is ubiquitous, using glasses that established a direct neural connection with the user: some mega-cities like Tokyo have rebuilt themselves to take advantage of it. A driving force of the economy and culture is a game known as Warcross, which seems a bit like Capture the Flag, but with dynamic environments that can be modified and weaponized by the players. Chen gets by by hunting down people who make illegal bets on the money, and her pen skills have grown to the point that she accidentally thrusts herself into the national spotlight and glitches into a mass-televised game of Warcraft, shutting down the opening ceremonies and driving her into bed in terror that she’s just give herself a life sentence. Instead, she gets a job offer — from the young tech genius turned corporate mogul she’s idolized most of her young life.
I was immediately drawn to this book because of the apparent similarities between it and Ready Player One, with a near-future setting dominated by augmented reality, and driven by a massive culture fixation on a single game. The game itself is interesting, but I don’t quite get why it would become the bedrock of economies and culture the way The Oasis did: The Oasis’ universal appeal lay in its infinite possibilities, whereas Warcross is just a team v team competition. It sounds cool to watch, but to live in? Still, the plot sucked me in pretty quickly. Take a kid who is in problems not largely of her own making (her dad died early, a debtor) who suddenly goes from not being able to pay rent for her glorified closet in New York, to suddenly being invited to Tokyo, where she’s standing cheek by jowl with billionaires and celebrities. Without going into a spoiler territory, the creator of Warcross and the technology sees in Chen an unparalleled talent whose ability to manipulate his game makes her a talent worth snagging. He has a job for her: someone else is trying to hack the annual Warcross Tournament, and he wants answers. This will take Chen into the Dark World, augmented reality’s answer to the Dark Web, and expose her to dangers both real and digital — and it is where she will realize that there’s a deeper layer to the world of Warcross and the neurolinks made than even she realizes.
I didn’t realize going in that this is meant to be a YA book, so there are some bits of shallowness — one relationship emerges rather quickly, and as mentioned I don’t quite buy Warcross as the neurolink’s killer app. Still, I was completely taken in by Chen’s story, and when I reached the end, wholly on the hook, I was dismayed to realize this is part of a duology, because I wanted resolution and the second book isn’t available at my library. There’s an interesting twist at the end, one that seems inexplicable at the moment but which should make for an interesting story further in. While most of the book comes off as a kind of lit-rpg adventure, when Chen begins encountering serious questions about the neurolinks, it grows to the level of genuine SF. I would not be surprised to see this one made a movie — it’s far more adaptable to cinema than RPO was.
Over a decade ago, young Sebastião Fox was spirited away from Portugal, a freshly-minted orphan. His parents destroyed by the Inquisition, Sebastião came into the care of the now-aged Benjamin Weaver, London’s most accomplished thieftaker. After coming of age and absorbing Weaver’s skills, “Sebastian Fox” purposes to return to Portugal, find the inquisitorial priest who destroyed his father, and return the favor. He finds Lisbon as treacherous as ever, with a maze of personal and social snares to navigate around. Day of Atonement is essentially a Benjamin Weaver novel, with all the danger, mystery, and fascinating historical richness that entails, but with Weaver being literarily reincarnated.
I’ve been reading Liss for over twelve years now, and I don’t anticipate stopping anytime soon. Day of Atonement, like his previous Weaver novels, takes the reader into a setting un-explored by other historical fiction authors, tells the story with an authorial voice that conveys a little bit of that era’s distance from our own, and builds a complex mystery with memorable characters and intense emotional drama. Deep betrayals are part and parcel of a Weaver tale. When Fox returns to Portugal, he is a changed man from the relatively innocent child who was smuggled away, a man who knows and practices violence and regards himself as almost bestial for his rage and past actions — actions the reader does not directly witness His parents and he were “New Christians”, Jews forcefully converted to Catholicism years before but still legally and socially regarded as separate, second-class citizens — not allowed to marry “Old Christians”, for instance, and constantly held under suspicion. Sebastian’s father had dealings that were intended to let their entire family escape, along with Sebastian’s young love Gabriella and her father, but instead the inquisitorial reapers swept down and only Sebastian managed to escape alive — or so he thought. There’s a surprise or two in store, and not necessarily happy ones. Although Sebastian’s goal of finding and isolating the priest responsible for his parents’ death involves a fair bit of delicate maneuvering, Sebastian’s journey in Lisbon becomes increasingly more dangerous after he meets the man who rescued him — a man who himself needs rescuing, but for whom rescue involves generating alliances and funds among New Christians and Old Christian investors — and learns the identity of the man who betrayed his father to the inquisitors. Others spot him as a man of intelligence, talent, and drive, and try working him into their own conflicting schemes for gold and glory.
The Day of Atonement is as fascinating and absorbing as any Weaver tale, though the setting is darker and more inhumane than say, 18th century London, given the hateful social structure arrayed against Porutgal’s Jewry. Unfortunately, I think I’ve plumbed the last of Liss’s historical fiction proper, though he does have another one with fantasy elements.
Note: I had planned to release this review as part of a series on Jewish literature, along with Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and Geraldine Brooks’ The Secret Chord, but Chord has wandered off somewhere. Asher Lev will post this weekend.
Reading Freely 