Yamen Manai's THE ARDENT SWARM (tr by Lara Vergnand)

Yamen Manai's lovely and tense The Ardent Swarm, the Tunisian author's first novel to be translated into English, has two villains,Vespa madarinia (what we in the US have dubbed Murder Hornets) and a rising political party that is mobilizing the countryside in favor of theocratic authoritarianism. But no, it's not set in the United States! Not everything is about us! For me, as for the novel's hero Sidi, it's all about the bees. 

Sidi is a beekeeper, a fixture in a village so small it doesn't even consider itself to be a village, in the fictional kingdom of Qafar, which is experimenting with democracy but is poised to reap that system's worst fruits as a demogogic fundamentalist "Party of God" is mounting a tremendous effort to convince the illiterate or barely literate citizens of the countryside to vote for them in exchange for gifts of food, clothing and blankets those citizens desperately need and, since they, like the rural poor in most places, don't really care who's in charge in the capital city, this strategy has every chance of working as our story starts.

But back to the bees and the beekeeper. Sidi is so devoted to the denizens of his hives that he refers to them as "his girls" and openly weeps when he finds that something has invaded one of them and brutally destroyed every last worker and drone, and even left the queen lying on her back, feebly kicking her wounded legs in the air before finally expiring. Reader, of course I cried. And immediately suspected, long before the other villain buzzed to the forefront of the novel's conflicts, that it was indeed the Giant Asian Hornet who had done the deed. But Sidi has never heard of such a thing; he's a simple man with profound knowledge and experience in one thing and one thing only, so this mysterious new threat not only to his livelihood but his entire existence is something he takes very seriously and approaches with a combination of deductive reasoning that would do Sherlock Holmes proud and a degree of physical courage that few of us could match.  He mounts a sleepless constant watch over his remaining hives -- he owes his beloved girls no less -- until he spots two of the thumb-length flying reconnaissance over his territory and marking the next hive for destruction with a reeking burst of pheromone attractants.

How did these monsters get here? Sidi's detective skills impress yet again as he discovers a surprising link between these invaders and the disturbing fundamentalists making weird promises to and demanding new levels of cultural and religious subservience from Sidi's friends and neighbors, who nonetheless come gladly to Sidi's aid when he decides that his plight calls for the kind of research he can't do with direct observation and experimentation and the kind of wise and careful, but slow, selective breeding that he has always employed to help his girls overcome previous threats -- fungal, bacterial, arachnoidal -- to their well-being, and this is where that title comes in.

An "Ardent Swarm" is the poetic name for a behavior that most of us who pay attention to things like murder hornets probably already know about, but was surprising new knowledge when Manai was writing this novel: bees who share the murder hornet's natural habitat have evolved a unique and devastatingly effective but costly defense: when one of these horrors lands on their doorstep, hundreds of worker bees pile on and around the invader's body and beat their wings and dance to generate kinetic energy, aka heat. The bees can tolerate higher temperatures than the hornets can, so the bees effectively cook their predator to death before it can do more damage. Of course, many workers get eviscerated by the hornet in the process of achieving the critical mass for an effective Ardent Swarm, but such is hive life. As long as the queen is safe!

The fact that this behavior strongly suggests itself as a metaphor for how Sidi's fellow visitors might respond to the threats posed by the Party of God and splinter groups that are more militant and less patient than the Party is delicately suggested but never explored outright; Manai is not writing a polemic or a guerilla warefare manual, he's writing a beautiful and tenderly observed novel about friendship, between man and bee, and between humans as well, as Sidi finds that his generosity over the years in sharing his knowledge and his honey has not gone unnoticed and will not go unrewarded. This is a strong contender for my best read of 2022.

I sure hope Manai and sound and unflashy translator Lara Vergnand bring more of his work to English language readers very soon. And now excuse me, I'm afraid I've gotten hooked on not one but two different versions of the casual mobile game of Ant Legion. Hymenoptera ahoy!

Kim Bo-Young's I'M WAITING FOR YOU AND OTHER STORIES (tr by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu)

There is only one story in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and it's a humdinger.

There are only two stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're both humdingers.

There are four stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are nine stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are 37 stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and not all are humdingers but are still very good indeed.

There is only one story.

I sound gimmicky as hell, but those are the kind of thoughts that kept running through my mind as I marveled at what South Korean speculative fiction hot shot Kim Bo-Young and her two translators have achieved here. Including making me marvel at the porousness of the boundaries between the stories within it, how they relate to each other, and how the whole came together as, originally, an engagement gift written for a friend.

I suppose most usefully this book is talked about as a collection of four stories, though the first "I'm Waiting for You" and the final "On My Way to You" are really two point-of-view chapters in a shared story, with the middle "The Prophet of Corruption" and "That One Life" serving as a story and its sequel, though perhaps since "That One Life" is much shorter and more contained, it's really a story and its coda. But even so, not only do they all feel like they're set in the same story universe, they feel like they chiefly concern the same two characters.

I'll explain.

"I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You" are each epistolary stories of 15 letters each*, with "I'm Waiting for You" presenting a bridegroom's and "On My Way to You" his bride's experiences as the pair each struggle with the consequences of fateful decisions that displace them in space and time. Our bride embarked on a trip to Alpha Centauri before her wedding that will delay that momentous day by a few months, in her subjective time, but nine years would go by back on Earth. It's the ultimate escape from her family (and there are suggestions that it's an abusive one); they are emigrating to Alpha Centauri and she's riding out with them and then coming straight back because doing so qualifies her somehow for better jobs and there are tax advantages as well, so on paper this seems like a great idea. 

Our bridegroom, for his part, has decided to shorten those months with a spaceship journey of his own, on a sort of voyage to nowhere that is undertaken solely so that people like him who have been Left Behind Because Relativity can keep up with those who have left them. As the bride explains it, 

...you came in with an armful of pamphlets on interstellar marriage and said that if you saved up for about four and a half years, you'd be able to buy a ticket to take what they call the Orbit of Waiting. You explained that it was a ship that circled around the sun at the speed of light so that the passengers could get to the same time as other people traveling in from other stars.

This is already plenty weird and engaging even before things inevitably go wrong on both trips, and not just messages go astray and get out of sync. Poignantly, our groom returns to Earth several times in his struggles to re-sync with his beloved, only to see destruction and decay advancing to the point where he is only able to return to his lonely time-delaying journeys, ultimately aboard a one-man ship, through improbable luck and what sometimes feels like divine help. Which, I'll get to that. 

Meanwhile, in "On My Way to You" his bride has her own struggles more or less re-enacting the story of Aniara, except instead of cults and existential despair she encounters class war and megalomania as the captain of the ship she is rescued by devises a scheme to keep visiting the disintegrating port in Korea, seeding it with families each time until there's a population there that will regard he and the upper echelons of the ship's personnel as gods and will rebuild civilization per His direction.

The other story-pair at first seems to have nothing to do with these most star-crossed of lovers, concerned as it is with a sort of speculative fictionalization of Buddhist ontology. We find ourselves among a protean collection of characters in "a" bardo rather than "the" Bardo that we have occasionally encountered when western SF writers play with these concepts (cough, Kim Stanley Robinson). Each character (and I'm using the term very, very loosely here, as you'll see) has their own bardo in which they reflect on the lessons learned in their most recent lives in the Lower Realm and regain their memories of all of their other lives, all the way back to when they first divided into a small number of individuals from an original single all-encompassing consciousness. Which they can choose to undo at any time if everbody consents except for those occasions on which somebody's consent really isn't necessary because all of this malarkey about separate entities is really just an illusion anyway. I am me, this grass is also me (and I can divide myself into millions of other little entities that are all blades of grass anytime I want, or reabsorb all of those blades of grass on the ground right now that are also really just me).

Our main character in these is a being called, most of the time, Naban, who being one of the small number of original entities that were the result of the first division, has a lot of power and responsibility. Naban interacts with several others at this level as they try to figure out a source of corruption that has emerged in the Dark Realm (where the bardos are), with "corruption" essentially being defined as "persisting in the belief that separate things are actually separate things". At first it seems that the problem rests with one of Naban's original "children" (also called "students"), Aman, who really digs being their own being, resists merging or sharing, and has persuaded all of their own children that the Lower Realm is real and their separateness is real and Differences Matter -- and seems to be in the process of convincing many of the other Aman-level and even maybe some Naban-level beings of the same. But is Aman really the source of corruption, or, since Naban originally "created" Aman, is the ultimate corruptor Naban? All of this is explored in a series of sort-of-chapters that could almost stand as stories in their own right, some of which, as Naban deals with yet another possibly corrupted entity, take place on a bardo formed as a spaceship that is later docked on an asteroid (and an asteroid impact on Earth seems to have been part of the problems besetting the world in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You". Hmm. There are lots of little motifs like this that unite the stories artistically), and have Naban considering the use of lasers and torpedos to get through to that stubborn Aman. Who is Naban. And yet doesn't think they're Naban. Or anything but Aman and Aman's children. Who are not Aman. Except they are.

Really, this story gave me a bit of a headache, but it never gets boring if you're willing to meet it at its level, which is, as you see, incredibly heady and challenging and rich. I had to take a day off after reading it before I proceeded with "That One Life", which takes Naban down into our own Lower Realm, but one in which the corruption from the Dark Realm and the Lower Realm have developed a wicked feedback loop and a whole lot seems to be going wrong. Naban themself is exhibiting this in their very nature in the Lower Realm as they've incarnated as a 15-year-old-girl who is immortal, the better to watch the corruption and decay, and the better, also, to continuously pursue Aman through many incarnations in which Aman is Naban's spouse or child or friend or lover or boss or commander, until one of their fellow entities, Tushita steps in and explains what Naban has forgotten from the previous story and it all sort of works out?

For I am Naban, one who remembers the beginning of time. For I know nothing in the universe is not me. For I know that no one part of a whole is more valuable than another; one is simply larger or smaller. For I know corruption arises when one tries to exclude another from a world. For I am not corrupt now.

I mean, this would be a great lesson for all the people who are least likely to take up a speculative fiction short story collection written by a Korean woman that was also translated by women** (and while both translators have done a beautiful job -- Sophie Bowman helps give both the bridegroom and bride distinctive voices in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way To You" -- I'm really just stunned at how Sung Ryu handled all this to-me-incredibly-unfamiliar material and made me feel, at least while I was reading it, that of course I understood it and it just felt like a neat spec fic story until I was done and it punched me in the brain). But it's not really much fun to read for all the feeling that one has earned some kind of merit for doing so.

At least it's not very much fun until you realize how the piquant Buddhist ontological filling of this speculative fiction sandwich really informs and is almost just another iteration of soft and tasty starship-crossed lovers bread. I find myself now, having read the whole thing, feeling like the bridegroom and bride are Naban and Aman in one of their lives. Possibly more than one of their lives. Because everything is Naban and Aman, and it's only dumb decisions and silly delusions that ever keep them apart, right?

I did not go into this book expecting a giant profound take on St. John-of-the-Cross (Songs Between the Soul and the Bridegroom)****, but I sure did get it!

Clicking around on the internet, I see that Kim Bo-Young has actually been tickling my brain for quite some time, as she worked on a little old hit film that became a TV series called Snowpiercer, and that this is far from Kim Bo-Young's first collection, and isn't even her first collection in English. She's already a Big Deal in Korea, and deserves to be one everywhere else, too.

I think I'll be attempting to merge with some of her other books very soon in This Life.

*And yes, each of these letters feels like it's own little story. See what I did there in that ridiculous introduction to this piece?

**And hey, by the way, August is Women in Translation Month! And bonus: there is an exchange of letters between the two translators (as well as a lot of cool other supplementary material, including a glossary of terms and names in "The Prophet of Corruption" and "The One Life) that gives us a glimpse of their relationship with one another as real life friends, and the interesting challenges posed by Kim Bo-Young's work, including matters of gender and the prayer-like cadences of some passages, that are super fascinating reading for fans of translated literature.

***I wonder how this, my favorite bit from that, in an old translation by Roy Campbell, would come across in Korean: 

Diffusing showers of grace
In haste among these groves his path he took,
And only with his face.
Glancing around the place,
Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.

B. Catling's THE ERSTWHILE

Where the first book in B. Catling's Vorrh series, The Vorrh, was a scattershot of interesting ideas, weird characters and language games, its sequel, The Erstwhile, is a bit more conventionally readable, while losing none of the prior's strangeness. All in all its a much more enjoyable read, but I'd kind of expected that.

I only took up the first book after reading a few tantalizing reviews of the second, which focused on the title character class. The Erstwhile are basically remnant angels, those who had failed to defend the Tree of Knowledge from Adam (Eve is never mentioned in this derivation from the book of Genesis) and were cast aside and forgotten after that little mishap. In the thousands (millions? Catling takes no stance on how old the Earth might be) of years since then, these angels have gone to ground -- literally in some cases -- and devolved into weirdly malformed monster shapes with moss and plant life growing on various bits even before they became completely quiescent.

Or so it seems until some of them start interacting with humans again, usually when they are accidentally discovered in and around The Vorrh by European colonists looking for resources to exploit there. When a few of these beings are dug up and shipped back to Germany, they come under scrutiny and care and start to seem human-like. And when one emerges mysteriously from the mud on the banks of the Thames in the 18th century and becomes the freaky muse of one William Blake (yes that William Blake, whose image of Nebuchadnezzar graces the cover of this novel and in this story is understood actually to be a portrait from life of one of the Erstwhile), and then spends a century so drifting among human society in London, that one becomes so human that he takes on the name of Nicholas Parsons and becomes a sort of trustee at Bedlam.

Meanwhile back in the Vorrh and the colony city of Essenwald, all of the characters who survived the previous novel are trying to live out their lives after those weird events, with varying degrees of success. Ghertrude Tulp is mysteriously pregnant but not sure by whom -- Ishmael? Some random guy on the same carnival night that Ishmael slept with Cyrena Lohr and by so doing cured her blindness? Ishmael and Cyrena are living together in her sumptuous house and getting tired of having sex with each other. And the city is in steep economic and social decline since the Limboia, the "mindless" slave labor force that kept the timber industry going in the last novel, have up and disappeared. Others have tried to take up the work, but unlike the Limboia, they can't handle the weird powers the forest exerts on puny human minds -- namely all but erasing them.

Soon Ishmael, the only man anyone knows who has traveled through the Vorrh without losing his memories and mind, is drafted into leading an expedition to go find the Limboia and it's all a bit like Werner Herzog's Herz aus Glas.

Already you can see that this novel has a lot more of a conventional focus and structure to it. The expedition provides one of its main narrative threads, twined with another in which a new character, Dr. Hector Schumann, is called upon to take up the mysteries posed by the Erstwhile brought to Europe. A third story, of a lonely old woman who rescues a mysterious baby from the abandoned home of The Vorrh's white savior figure and his black shaman mistress/wife, is woven in less well for all that there are structural parallels between it and the Schumann story in their final thirds. And the fate of Ghertrude's baby is, I guess part of all of this, too, but not really?

For this book is a textbook case of Middle Chapter Trouble. For all that it's a much more enjoyable read than its predecessor, it's even more frustrating, in that exactly none of the questions or problems it or the prior book poses gets resolved at all, leaving a lot for the final book, The Cloven, which just came out, to answer. But, to be honest, I have zero hope that anything will actually get resolved, because Catling isn't here to try for narrative coherence. He's all about the language.

And some of this is downright beautiful:

The stillness of the water became a secondary feature to the movement of the snow. It fell straight down into its own reflection on the mirrored Thames, the depths of the reflection rising up to meet it. Each flake fell from a black sky and fluttered up from the river's black bed to meet its twin and become one before disappearing.

I mean, god damn!

A lot of the time, though, Catling threatens to become downright annoying, especially when he gets precious with malapropisms -- which I have to assume is what he's doing because otherwise 1) He's kind of a doofus and 2) The editorial staff at Random Penguin all need remedial courses. I'm assuming its deliberate because I'd rather that were true. But there sure is a lot of "finally crafted jewelry" and whatnot in here.

But so maybe it's just sunk cost fallacy working and maybe it's still just good enough to make me want more -- I really can't decide -- but I'm looking forward to The Cloven. But I've got a lot of library books to get through before I go looking for it, because right now I'm Vorrhed out.

B. Catling's THE VORRH

Two covers for the first volume of B. Catling's trilogy seem to appear with equal frequency when a curious would-be reader starts poking around, the one at the left and the one I have reproduced further down. Both of them are maddeningly deceptive about what kind of book The Vorrh really is, for it is neither as coldly abstract as the black and white cover*, nor as lushly imaginative as the more colorful one.

Some have compared The Vorrh to the work of Mervyn Peake, whose famous Gormenghast trilogy I have started once or twice but not had the will to finish even while appreciating its uniqueness at least enough to see why this comparison is somewhat apt: Gormenghast, a "fantasy of manners" is both engaging and off-putting in its seeming plotlessness and the artificiality of its characters; The Vorrh is, perhaps, a fantasy of projections, slightly more plot-driven but also off-putting because it gives up its secrets so very, very reluctantly. And the artificiality of its characters, about which more in a bit.

The Vorrh of the title is an imaginary African forest, originally imagined by French surrealist Raymond Roussel for his Impressions of Africa, an outlandish romp through a wholly imagined version of the continent. Roussel becomes a character of sorts in Catling's book, a sketch of his story bookending the rest of the action, mostly just to remind us of how earlier generations with no actual experience of Africa romanticized it, but also to add another layer of weirdness to what is already a pretty weird tale.

For this book, The Vorrh is evoked rather than shown as an African forest of supernatural dread that just might conceal the original Garden of Eden at its heart -- and has a completely transplanted European town, moved stone by stone from one continent to another -- on its edges, thriving on an extractive economy based on timber from the forest (yes, children, this story is in part an answer to the question no one else has ever asked -- what if we started logging operations in Eden?) harvested by conveniently docile native slaves (their docility supernaturally compelled by the presence of... A pretty nasty thing I'm not going to spoil for you here though it's a perfect example of Catling's amazing ability to conjure up the truly grotesque) who are the only people who can come and go from the forest without losing their minds or memories (because they kind of don't have those to begin with? Maybe? At least according to the White Men who manage them? But maybe for reals? Maybe?). The Vorrh is also inhabited by creatures straight out of John Mandeville's fables of the kingdom of Prester John (for those non-Prester John fans out there, similar beings are visually depicted in Rene Laloux's crazy time travel cartoon Gandahar/Light Years) and by beings known as The Erstwhile, who are probably degenerated angels (?) and a sad, silent, grotesque and grey-skinned figure whose toenails have turned to horns or maybe hooves but whose human hands (the first human hands, we are told) look kind of normal and who might be Adam, as in Adam from the book of Genesis (?) Not even Roussel could come up with this stuff, is what I'm saying, but here he is, sharing some pages with them. Sort of.

Nor is Roussel the only historical figure to appear here, as a more fully developed narrative serving as a sort of mini-biography of photographic pioneer Edward Muybridge (with added steampunkish/fantastical elements and a fun interlude when he did some work for Sarah Winchester of Mystery House fame) is interwoven with accounts of Catling's own characters, which include Ishmael, a stunted cyclops of a boy raised by small bakelite robots until a pushy teenaged busybody, Gheertrude Tulp, invades the basement of the mysterious mansion given over to his care, accidentally destroys one of the robots and decides to finish raising him herself; Williams/Oneofthewilliams/The Bowman, Great War veteran and borderline white savior figure who resolves to explore the Vorrh after his shaman-lover dies and commands him to turn her into a sentient bow and two white arrows, which he fires ahead of himself to sort of (?) maybe (?) show him the way deeper into the forest(?); Cyrena, a blind woman who has her sight restored after spending a carnal carnival night with Ishmael, and many more, including a Scotsman who sort of accidentally finds out the secret of manipulating the local "hive-minded" tribesmen, another guy Tsungali,** who might be a member of that tribe but maybe it's a different tribe (the ambiguity is deliberate, as far as I can tell) who joins a host of other weird figures who have chosen to try to prevent The Bowman from crossing the Vorrh even if it means killing him, and...

Do you see?

So I can't even tell for sure if I liked The Vorrh, as such. It's overflowing with weird and neat ideas, and full of passages of stunning imagery (Catling is also an accomplished poet). None of the characters are remotely sympathetic*** but none of them are boring... And always there is the mystery. A sequel, The Erstwhile, is next on my to-be-read file, and a third book in the trilogy, The Cloven, is due out later this year. I'm tentatively on board for the rest of the set. We'll see how I feel after The Erstwhile. Which, judging from the title is going to be a bit more focused on the degenerated angels? Maybe?

Whatever. As long as the prose is still good.

*And I cannot account at all for the choice of such obvious eclipse imagery on this cover, either.

**Tsungali, who has spent most of his life as a colonial soldier and who carries a semi-sentient rifle, is my favorite character, chiefly for one scene quite early in The Vorrh, in which he visits England to serve as a living exhibit for his masters, and chances upon a display of artifacts in the British Museum that are not only the work of his own "True People" but are in fact things that his grandfather made and used, as his grandfather's ghost tells him. This is by far the most deeply felt and moving scene in the entire book, and so seems a bit out of place among the violence and willful misunderstanding and surrealism, but it made Tsungali stand out as, for me, the heart of the book.

***To be frank, all of them are awful, except Tsungali and MAYBE Ishmael, and even he is awfully creepy, even if we can understand why he's creepy. But this book is full of violence, rape, exploitation, manipulation, more violence, grotesquerie, class snobbery, yet more violence, and did I mention violence? I mean, the book starts with a guy dismembering his dead lover to make her spine into a weapon, so... yeah. Not a book to take up if you're looking for depictions of healthy relationships, honest conversations or demonstrations of the power of love and human kindness. While it's plenty critical of colonialism, it still lavishes a lot of loving detail on the mindsets that made colonialism possible and yes, this includes the female characters (which in addition only barely pass the Bechdel Test).

Sigrid Undset's THE WILD ORCHID

Wow, does it seem criminal that this book, and its sequel, The Burning Bush, seem to be out of print, at least in English. I know Sigrid Undset is best known for her great sprawling historical fiction (Kristin Lavransdatter, The Master of Hestviken, etc) but she didn't just get a Nobel for being the Dorothy Dunnett of Scandanavia, you guys.*

The Wild Orchid is little read now, I suspect, because its theme is very much out of fashion. It is, at bottom, the first half of a novel of conversion, specifically conversion to Catholicism, which was just re-establishing itself as a valid, legal religion in Undset's native Norway during her lifetime. As such, it's perhaps more than a little autobiographical, this book, in spirit if not in fact. Undset herself converted to Catholicsm as an adult, after years and years of dwelling emotionally and mentally in the pre-Lutheran Norway of her most famous novels.

About a third of the way through the book, she presents what I think must have been her own feelings about her decision in a nutshell, as her protagonist witnesses a historic event, somewhat bemused:

"If one could only reach out with one's soul and come in contact with an invisible one -- who would help one to a deeper or higher vision of all that was irritating and disturbing, to look past the stupidity and platitudes and ridiculous expressions, into what was valuable in those one associated with, a common charity, a common vow which bound one to them."

Hell, it's enough to make me miss organized religion myself!

But a religious journey isn't the only thing that's going on here; The Wild Orchid, first volume of a two part novel published as The Winding Road (the second book, The Burning Bush, is one I'm planning to read very soon, if not indeed right away. We all know what a fickle reader I've become) is also a portrait of its age, the turn of the last century (ca. 1905 as the novel opens), that is, perhaps startlingly, not all that unfamiliar to a 21st century reader.

Paul Seller is the child of divorced parents. His father remarried a blowsily bourgeois woman for whom Paul has no respect, preferring his own mother, Julie, who is a distractingly awesome character that surely any son would prefer to a fussy, conventionally motherly showoff like Paul's stepmother. Julie, finding herself divorced with four children to raise, cheerfully struck off for the country, found a nice plot of land, built herself a house and furnished it very simply, and set about planting and raising crops and carpentering and turning herself to all sorts of other traditionally masculine tasks, never once, it seems regretting not having a man about the house to whom she didn't herself give birth. Oh, I would gladly read a novel just about Julie Selmer! But as it is, she merely serves as background, as the early example of womanhood against whom Paul will compare other women, to their detriment; more importantly, as establishing Paul's starting position of regarding religion as a quaint folly of days gone by, not to be taken at all seriously.

At times The Wild Orchid, in its long passages of dialogue between its hero and various avatars of Catholocism, chiefly a woman of his own age whom he has known since childhood who grew up in the faith that  he only ever observed from the outside, reads almost like a religious tract as the woman holds forth for pages and pages about the necessary role dogma plays in human society and how non-Catholics are always more interested in the one priest who breaks his vows than in the 200 who uphold them and how it wasn't really the Church that burned heretics but Society. A reader with zero skin in that game, as I am, is challenged to read through such passages with patience and sympathy, but it's good to make that effort once in a while, no?

And that effort is quite often rewarded, in this book, for it is still Sigrid Undset after all, which means lovely prose and an infectious love and enjoyment of her native land, its seascapes and wildflowers and saeders and farms and little towns and pieces of folk art and buildings old and new, which she shares with her characters and thereby with her readers. I now want to visit Norway almost as much as I want to visit Iceland. Fjord.

*Though really, chronologically, I suppose Dorothy Dunnett was kind of the Sigrid Undset of Scotland?

**It's pretty hard not to think of Scotland's current efforts to secede from the United Kingdom, reading about this. I don't think Scotland will offer to take on, say, Prince Andrew to be their replacement king the way Norway took Hakon, though.

Ben Marcus' THE FLAME ALPHABET

I have the great and mighty SJ, aka Popqueenie*, to thank for this one, and thank her I do. She's recommended many a good book to me over the course of our friendship, but this is the best one you guys. The very best one. At least so far.

It is also quite undeniably terrible, not in the sense of its being of low quality, but in the original sense of that word "terrible": exciting intense awe or fear. Those who describe The Flame Alphabet as an intellectual horror story hit the mark very well indeed. It should be shelved somewhere between Jose Saramago's Blindness and Tony Burgess' Pontypool Changes Everything.

As in the latter, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with spoken language, but where in Pontypool language is a symptom of a disease/disorder/form of zombie-ism, in The Flame Alphabet language is the disease, but only, at least at first, as it is produced by children: a kid's simplest utterance is an assault; over time, exposure to children's speech produces a horrible degeneration of the very fabric of an adult human's being, hardening and drying out tissues, weakening or dissolving muscles, slowly killing the individual. Parents suffer this first and worst, but eventually everyone feels it, because it's almost impossible to completely avoid children, even if one is a happy spinster. And before the first act of the story is over, this language toxicity has spread to adult speech as well and we discover that children are merely immune.

And like in Blindness, the origin of this situation is somewhat mysterious, misunderstood, sudden. But Marcus locates his disorder squarely in the Judaic/Talmudic tradition, rather than Saramago's inchoate science fictional causelessness. Language, and in particular spoken language, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, created the world; as my beloved Diotallevi observes in Foucault's Pendulum, "god created the universe by speaking; he didn't send a telegram." And there are, apparently (I'm not much of a Biblical scholar, so this was news to me) lots of hints in scripture about speech becoming destructive or dangerous generally, and children's mouths producing poison specifically. Which all makes a certain amount of sense. If the world was created via speech, why would it not be destroyed the same way? But then how might that happen?**

We experience this devastating, horrific situation alongside a father, Sam, who along with wife Claire is barely clinging to life after clinging to their daughter Esther long past the time when most adults have abandoned their children out of self-preservation. Interestingly, Esther's speech is really kind of toxic even before this strange outbreak; she is a sharp, critical, demanding and altogether unpleasant girl, the kind only a mother or father could love but even the most loving parent probably, if he or she were being honest, couldn't really like that much, as shown in this passage that is really describing the situation before the epidemic of poisonous speech:

"What she said was bitter, and we sipped at it and sipped at it, her mother and I, just ever so politely sipped at it until we were sick, because this was the going air inside our house, our daughter talking and singing and shouting and writing... Whatever we thought we wanted, to hug our kiss our daughter, to sit near her, it was our bodies that recoiled first. We cowered and leaned away from her words, we kept our distance..."

This is something I don't often see in fiction (but then, I don't read a lot of fiction about parenthood), this honest admission that sometimes parents don't like their children, but I bet it's a fact of life more often than most of us think. Which makes The Flame Alphabet a very brave as well as a very terrible book.

Later acts in the book reveal Sam as a bit of a Jack Isidore-esque crap artist as he joins the effort to fight language toxicity and sets to work cooking up a lot of quacky remedies, palliatives and, later on, new writing systems. All, needless to say, to no avail. But while he's been faffing around in his play-laboratory, others are actually getting results, though via rather unpleasant and cruel means.

Slyly, this novel comments on -- indeed mocks -- the very hunger for stories that brings readers to novels, especially to speculative fiction novels, swamping us in gorgeous prose, vivid imagery and narrative self-loathing even as it drives home, oh so brilliantly, the point that language might actually be bad for us. We think in it. We preserve thoughts with it. We transmit those thoughts to future generations with it. We've accomplished so much with it. And most of those accomplishments have been as bad for the world as the symbolic salty residue of speech that is overtaking the soil and surface waters of Marcus' fictional world. It's as is we've talked ourselves into the worlds of The Sheep Look Up, of The Road.

This is not comfort reading, not even sort of. But it's very, very good reading, the kind that wins prizes and leaves readers breathless with awe and envy even as they want to take a mental shower to cleanse away its ideas. I'm impressed.

*Who had this book on her Definitive Top Ten All-Time Desert Island Works of Speculative Fiction - Novels list. And it might have to go on mine as well.

**Fascinatingly, the movement of Reconstructionist Judaism plays a huge role in Sam's and Claire's experience of this plague of language. Their religious practice is idiosyncratic and private, consisting of the pair of them retreating to a secret location to listen to radio sermons transmitted by what seems to amount to a form of carrier current radio, in complete privacy. "The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything... You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise... Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness." Being a WASPY white girl from Wyoming, I have no way of knowing how much of this represents a genuine practice and how much might have been concocted for this novel -- it suggests so strongly a cause and remedy in one for the novel's overall problem that it almost feels too neat -- but even if it's all just a Borgesian concoction, it's an effing cool one.

Michael Moorcock's BEHOLD THE MAN #OneBookAtATime

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Jungian meets girl. Jungian loses religious/philosophical argument with girl. Jungian jumps into Time Machine to prove girl wrong about Jebus. Jungian blunders into being accepted as Jebus by denizens of the time to which he has traveled. Jungian further blunders by trying to reenact what he knows about Jebus. You know, to preserve history and biblical truth. Jungian gets crucified. Jungian never sees girl again.

I'm sure this was all very shocking back in the 60s when this was published. And I can see why Michael Moorcock got noticed for Behold the Man.* But really now it's just a curiosity.

I just couldn't resist the idea of reading this on Palm Sunday. And now I have. And yes, I got some chuckles; on the blasphenomenal humor scale this is somewhere between Monty Python's Life of Brian and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. It's not as laugh-out-loud/thigh-slapping as the former, and not as intelligent and subtle as the latter, but it's a nifty way to pass an hour or two (at 124 pages, only those who try really, really hard to prolong the reading experience will find themselves spending any more time with it than that), provided you're not one of those types who take umbrage at, for instance, the suggestion that the real historical Jesus whom our time traveling Jungian backs into replacing was actually some kind of congenital hydrocephalic fetal alcohol syndrome imbecile, or that all of the cryptic sayings and parables attributed to Jesus are actually just half-baked, half-remembered scraps of folk wisdom, popular ethics and syncretic mysticism. Which yeah, this story does as well as any we might care to dream up as far as explaining why Christianity really seems like it stole the clothes of a bunch of earlier Eastern mystery cults and whatnot.

Not a bad read, but not one I'm going to press on people to read, either. And hey, I might even take a look at the sequel, Breakfast in the Ruins, sometime if it comes my way and I'm a bit desperate. But I'm not going to hunt it down or anything.

*And thank goodness he did. What would my life -- what would anyone's life -- be without Elric, Corum, Jerry Cornelius, Erekose, etc. etc. etc.? I shudder to contemplate it.

100 Books #114 - Jean Plaidy's LIGHT ON LUCREZIA

I thoroughly enjoyed Plaidy's earlier look at the life of the infamous but possibly unfairly maligned Lucrezia Borgia, Madonna of the Seven Hills, in which Plaidy neatly focused, not on the most infamous rumors and legends about this woman and her family, but on how those nasty tales might have gotten started. This is a nice distinction, maybe -- you can't talk effectively about rumors without mentioning their content, at least in passing, after all -- but one that Plaidy is a master of making, and making into satisfying novels.

Which is why I love her, and, as I mentioned when writing about The Scarlet Contessa, a book set in pretty much the same time and place as Plaidy's Borgia books, wish she'd taken up Caterina Sforza as a subject at some point. Oh, what a glorious book that would have been!

La Sforza does make an appearance in  Light on Lucrezia. the sequel to Madonna of the Seven Hills, but only for a few pages: a swift depiction of her resistance to Cesare's military onslaught and her famously rapey personal encounter with the man after he won the battle. How Plaidy could convey this account and then pass over the notion of writing a book about Caterina will always be a mystery to me. If I'm wrong about this, and she did write about Caterina in more detail under one of her many, many pseudonyms, please, for all love, enlighten me.

But enough about the Lady of Forli; this book is about Lucrezia, picking up exactly after the previous book with the apprehensive coming of the second of her three husbands, Alfonso, illegitimate son of the king of Naples, to Rome. Plaidy protrays this marriage as utterly idyllic, marred only by what every relationship in Lucrezia's life seems to have been marred: the jealousy of the odious Cesare. Every page devoted to this marriage -- and there really aren't many of them -- foreshadows the poor Alfonso's inevitable fate, so when it comes, the reader yawns a bit. And yawns a bit further when Lucrezia predictably chooses to stick by her evil brother, whom she has been conditioned to worship and seek to please since birth.

The rest of the novel focuses on Lucrezia's third marriage, to another Alfonso, this one the heir to the Duke of Ferrara -- which is to say that things pick up from here. Ferrara is ruled by an ancient line of haughty, snotty aristocrats, the Estes (who trace their lineage to times before the Carolingians ruled a good chunk of Europe), who resent that their bloodline will now bear the taint of Borgia ancestry, too, if Lucrezia does her job and makes Este babies. Which is to say that Lucrezia is thrown into a den of vipers, with the chief she-snake being her sister-in-law, Isabella, Marquesa of Mantua, who has long regarded herself the prettiest, most stylish, most accomplished woman in Italy and so sees Lucrezia as a rival to be humiliated at every opportunity. Hilariously, the passive and pliant Lucrezia's non-reaction to Isabella's ploys (and those of Isabella's own sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga) is precisely the best way to keep her would-be rival at the height of annoyance.

As Lucrezia's domestic troubles take center stage, at last the figures of her father Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI) and brother Cesare the Fratricide, fade into the background. This may be why a lot of readers have complained that this second Borgia novel is dull compared to the first; it lacks the dramatic focus the first book, devoted almost wholly to foreshadowing the murder of Giovanni Borgia by Cesare, had. But really? It's all in the title: Light on Lucrezia. Finally, Lucrezia Borgia is the heroine of her own life, or at least as much of one as a Renaissance Pope's only (acknowledged) daughter can be. Which is to say that the modern reader spends a lot of these books wanting to slap Lucrezia and tell her to take some control and set some boundaries, but yeah...

La Borgia's reputation seems to have been on the mend in my lifetime, and I wonder if Plaidy's books might not have helped get this started. For my part, I find her portrait of a passive people pleaser annoying but having the ring of truth to it. A pretty little girl with such monstrous relatives might well just teach herself not to see them as they were as long as they kept her in nice dresses and poets and behaved themselves when she was around, especially in a society that still exercised mighty energies to keep women in their places (the odd amazing virago like Caterina Sforza or Isabella d'Este notwithstanding; some people just don't follow the rules, no matter when they're born), and I find the idea that Lucrezia was such a one far more plausible than that she was a monstrous female Cesare, whoring and poisoning her way across Italy out of ego, malice and desire for power.

So yeah, Holliday Granger played her just right.

100 Books #96 - Jean Plaidy's MADONNA OF THE SEVEN HILLS

This is the first Jean Plaidy book I've ever read that did not concern itself with a Queen of England. I was expecting the reading of it to be a stranger experience.

But Jean Plaidy is always Jean Plaidy, writing as if she's telling a fairy tale but not sparing us any of the unsavory or unpleasant details. So of course she had to take on the infamous Lucrezia Borgia.

I've noticed a tendency, in Plaidy, to build the tale around the most popular anecdote about her subject known at the time, whether it's truth or folklore. Thus, for instance, The Follies of the King is one long argument/justification for the infamous (and possibly fanciful) murder, at the behest of his long-suffering wife, of Edward III by means of a red hot poker. And thus this first of two books Plaidy wrote about Lucrezia and the rest of the Borgia family is just a giant bit of foreshadowing for the legendary fratricide of Lucrezia's brother Juan/Giovanni by her other brother Cesare.

Thus even as it tells the story of Lucrezia's father's elevation from Cardinal Roderigo Borgia to Pope Alexander III despite being the father of three and possibly four illegitimate children by a courtesan, which is a tale quite worthy of a novel in its own right, Madonna of the Seven Hills focuses on perhaps the most famous case of sibling rivalry gone wild since Cain and Abel, except this time, instead of God's favor, the brothers are dueling for that of their own sister and father.*

Some later writers (Madonna of the Seven Hills was first published in 1958) might have gone all out for the scandalous, salacious incest plot, but Plaidy, as always, was more interested in who Lucrezia really was and why she would accept and even embrace a situation that most modern women would find intolerable. From the first pages, we see Lucrezia as a girl born to a bizarre station in life (tartly observing at one point to her friend Giulia Farnese [who has also by that point taken over Lucrezia's mother's job as the pope's mistress] that accepting bribes and telling her father all about them is her job) but who never knew anything else; the only daughter of a family of vain, proud, selfish and violently passionate pseudo-aristocrats who can't afford not to stick together however much they have gotten sick of each other.

So of course Plaidy's Lucrezia** grows up to be a pathological people pleaser. She is rich and powerful and beautiful and educated, but despite these advantages her self-worth is bound up only in how her father and brothers react to her; if they are adoring her, they are not fighting each other, or killing people, or starting wars or seduce-raping innocent girls (or boys) -- so it's very important that they keep on adoring her, even if it means keeping them trapped as rivals for her attention and affection. Whether or not she had a sexual relationship with any of them is quite beside the point, for Plaidy; if she did, it was just another symptom. Plaidy is more interested in how the rumors got started than if they were true.

As I said, though, all of this is just foreshadowing for the culmination of the big and legendary hatred between Cesare and Giovanni***, the two brothers who have only ever been friends when they were teaming up against an outsider whom they perceived as a threat to the family (usually a husband or lover or would-be lover of Lucrezia's). It's a tricky thing Plaidy has done here, making us sympathize for their prize even as our author so obviously taps her foot impatiently waiting for the Big Showdown. Lucrezia gets humanized only to be turned into a thing, a prize, anyway.

Which is to say that in Madonna of the Seven Hills, Plaidy may have achieved her greatest degree of verisimilitude, of art imitating life almost painfully perfectly, of all.

But that's not quite what we turn to historical fiction/romance for, is it?

*Alexander VI was an infamously indulgent and doting father, but even so, imposed his will on his children somewhat mercilessly. Giovanni, his favorite, he chose to be the soldier and the secular nobleman, blind to the fact that Giovanni was about as much a soldier as, as, well, as Cesare was a clergyman. And, famously, Cesare was the one who got trained up in the priesthood and made a Cardinal by age 18. Of course, had this not happened, Niccolo Macchiavelli wouldn't have had his model for The Prince, because Cesare wouldn't have had to become the consummate schemer he was, etc.

**And possibly the historical Lucrezia, too.

***Peculiarly, the actual murder is dealt with offstage, which feels like a bit of a cheat after all of the build-up, but again, is the sort of anti-climactic "truth" writers like Plaidy most like to highlight, even at the expense of causing the last third or so of the novel to fall flat.

100 Books #80 - Chris F. Holm's DEAD HARVEST

Stop me if you've heard this one. Boy meets girl. Boy tries to collect girl's soul for the Devil. Boy can't collect girl's soul because girl is blindingly pure (and a hottie). Boy chucks his assignment and steals girl away to try to protect her from all the Hell (and Heaven) that's about to break loose.

Yeah, I didn't think so. And I haven't even gotten to the really novel pleasures this book has to offer. Like the slapstick horror potential of a reanimated cadaver trying to escape Bellvue hospital with an unconscious teenager who all but made the Most Wanted list before blacking out. Like pieces of an ubiquitous lucky money cat being wielded as a powerful supernatural weapon. Like a hero who can possess any body he chooses but tends to choose newly dead ones because fighting off the soul of a living body is a huge hassle.

Some of these elements are used to better effect than others, but even if underexploited, they come together into a seamlessly enjoyable whole due to a strong crime noir-flavored plot and a weirdly engaging hero, our man Sam, who was originally an unemployed nebbish on Staten Island in 1944 but who made the wrong deal with the wrong people. His past, alluded to in carefully placed vignettes throughout the story, strongly colors his reactions to his present, as is strikingly reflected in the book's amazing cover art (even if you have your AdBlockers turned on and don't usually see my Amazon Affiliate links that I place at the beginning of these posts, shut 'em off for a second and make with the clicky and bask in the perfection of yet another amazing Angry Robot Books cover design. The book looks just like a mass market paperback did back in Sam's original day, when mass market paperbacks were the new and terrible Thing That Was Going To Destroy Publishing. It's brilliant!), as his mission brings him back to his old original haunts over 60 years since he himself was Collected.

The plot itself is interesting enough, but what I really found fascinating was the way Holm depicts Sam's experiences. A first person narrator, Sam loads his account of himself with sensations as experienced through his varied host bodies, relying on the superb physical fitness and muscle memory of one, on the suave good looks and body language of another. It makes the storytelling quite visceral and alive. I go back and forth on one niggling point, though: how often Sam should have been allowed to get away with calling it his own heartbeat, pulse, breath, blush response, versus calling it that of his host body. Sometimes he does one, sometimes another, and I'm not sure if this is meant to be taken as a way of tracking how deeply he is immersed in the experiences of a body, or if it's just something the narrator-writer slips to out of habit and narrative convention. This distracted me sometimes and yanked me out of that happy reading trance you guys know I like, but at least this time I was being yanked out by something interesting rather than a lot of verbal tics and typos (though I think Sam released a breath he didn't know he was holding a few too many times; ditto with setting fire to a cigarette instead of smoking one...).

At any rate, it was infinitely preferable than, say, Stephen King's version of possession as depicted quite a lot in The Drawing of the Three, in which a host body is pretty much just treated as a robot-cum-walking database after a token brief struggle.

And but so, here's the thing. I was not originally prepared to like this book very much, because it's pretty obvious from the early blurbs that Sam's decision to run away with the girl is likely to trigger all out war between Heaven and Hell, which really hasn't ever been my thing. For example, I only went to see that damned movie Legion because I love Paul Bettany, and boy was that a waste of my ticket money and his talent. Dogma is my least favorite Kevin Smith film. Et cetera. Plus I couldn't figure out the relationship of that neato vintage cover to what was pretty obviously a modern urban fantasy. So yeah, I fully intended to read it at some point, because Angry Robot has yet to truly let me down, but it never, you know, leaped out at me and said Read Me, Read Me Now... until my friend EssJay (yes, I know, we're like brainlocked or something. Hush) got her hands on it and devoured it and flagged down Angry Robot for an advance review copy of its sequel, The Wrong Goodbye, and gushed about that even more. And finally Dead Harvest started doing the Read Me Now Hula.

I'm very glad it did. It's a perfect example of what Angry Robot seems to be better than anybody at finding: a genre fusion that will please fans of any/all of the genres it's mashing up. There's a nice heroic protection/rescue plot (though sometimes it's a real question of who is rescuing/protecting whom; the young girl, Kate, is plenty resourceful and feisty all on her own), with plenty of exciting action scenes*; there are plenty of crime/noir elements; there is the much-mentioned War Between Heaven and Hell. There are shades of what I still consider Piers Anthony's finest book, On a Pale Horse -- but only of the good elements thereof.

It could all have gotten very, very corny, but it didn't. Though sometimes it came close:

He was a mountain of a cop, with dark deep-set eyes peering outward from a fleshy face, the features of which were twisted into an angry frown around a mustache the size of a small woodland creature. His barrel chest strained the button of his uniform blues as he approached, nightstick in hand... When he gave my bum leg a good thwack, I made my move. And by made my move, I mean fell down.

Hee hee. So you can kind of see this is also often a very funny book. But not long after one laughs, one cringes. Sam is as attuned to the moral crises as the physical sensations he and his fellows experience while possessing unwilling "vessels", and Holm makes sure that we feel them, too. Yikes.

At bottom, Dead Harvest is a perfectly fine whodunnit in the classic mode. It's just the howdunnit and whydunnit that are so very, very strange. And I like that.

I'm looking forward to the sequel.

*Especially an OMG sequence on board a hijacked helicopter, which, OMG.

100 Books 4 - C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy - Jeff Sharlet - Little, Brown & Company

Somewhere out there in Twitterland, close to 2000 followers of mine are probably going to cheer as one to learn that I've finished reading this book. I've been spouting off about it at odd intervals for a week or more.

I was worse as I made my way last year through Sharlet's prior book on the shadowy "Christian"* fundamentalist group known variously as "the Family" or "The Fellowship", The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, a book I read with all the lights on, the way we always talk about reading genuinely scary horror novels. I said then and I'll stand by it now: Jeff Sharlet writes damned scary books.

Right away I've betrayed myself as a secularist and a rebel. I'm a fan of fully informed juries, workers' rights, the need for government to protect the people against force and fraud and the right of every nutjob with a voice and a magic marker (or, in this day and age, a keyboard, a few fingers and an internet connection) to spout off his views, however crazy or distasteful or true or saddening. I think Jenny McCarthy is nuts, but I won't advocate forcing her to shut up about vaccines. I think Fred Phelps is a sue-happy fraud and provocateur who makes a very good living off of baiting people who cannot stand to listen to the crap he spews that I don't even believe he believes. And I think freedom of religion is in the Bill of Rights for a very, very good reason. Lots of them, actually. Ditto all the other stuff that's in there.

So really, there is no reason for me to keep on reading Sharlet on the Family except for the same reasons that people keep reading Stephen King books or watching Friday the 13th remakes: it's a weird, fun little thrill to stare for a while at what scares you. It's entertainment in an activating, emotionally jarring way.

That said, I still find this second book of his on the subject to pale in comparison to the first. Where The Family exposed a secret history and named names, C Street... well, C Street mostly just calls out the same villains some more. That's not to say it's The Family 2: Electric Boogaloo: Sharlet's foray into the nation of Uganda and the story behind its infamous "death penalty for homosexuals" bill is shocking all by itself in all its painstaking detail, though it does drag on a bit (OMG, Jeff, we get it! Ugandan legislator Bahati and dictator Musevini aren't fundamentalists themselves so much as sucking up to the Family to get what they want). He spends a fair amount of time exposing how evangelism/fundamentalism has all but taken over a huge chunk of the United States' armed forces (especially the U.S. Air Force, but that's not news to anyone who knows any flyboys or pays attention to where they come from: the USAF Academy and James Dobson's Focus on the Family are both based, along with megachurches galore, in Colorado Springs, CO, surely a strong candidate for the capital city of Jesusland if ever there were one). And of course the scandals around Mark Sanford and Jim Ensign and Chip Pickering get a good airing out once again, with a chillingly amusing "what might have been" look at Sanford's future had his brothers in the Family chosen to continue keeping his naughty secrets.

But the real value of this book lies in Sharlet's interlineal commentary, his turns of phrase in summing up the scenes and backgrounds he's describing, for which he's taken off the gloves considerably more of a degree than we saw in The Family, here pointing out that the group takes a very different lesson from the story of David and Bathsheba than the rabbis or even the original Calvinists teach**, there holding forth on "the paradox of humility as authority that's inherent in the term 'servant leader'" as "the essence of the fundamentalist threat to democracy: not brute force but seduction... the promise of support and intimacy in return for power"... and wow of wows, can you tell I love the highlight function of my Kindle, which lets me highlight/mark thumping great blocks of text that strike me as especially important or meaningful or true without damaging my book?

And that's what Sharlet is good for. He provides fantastic talking points. It's important to always remember that when my Senior U.S. Senator (Mike Enzi) talks about his prayer group in Washington, D.C., he's talking about people who admire Hitler and Stalin and Ho Chi Minh as examples of men who changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers" and who supported dictators like Suharto and Ferdinand Marcos because they value access to power over holding leaders accountable for the fantastically un-Christian atrocities they commit with it. It's important to me to arm myself against the kinds of arguments that lead to the world of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, which, until I read The Family, I had always named as the scariest book I'd ever read ("In the days of anarchy it was 'freedom to.' Now you're being given 'freedom from.' Don't underrate it" says Aunt Lydia -- in the movie, flatly and chillingly delivered by the perfectly cast Victoria Tennant so as to give any democracy-loving uppity female of tender years a lifetime of nightmares).

But not everyone, in this day and age, has the time for reading that I have, and if you're one of those whose opportunities are limited, who really needs to read just one serious book on this subject, that book should be The Family. If you've time for another, read Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (which, in devoting a great deal of its length to decrying the financialization of America's economy sounds a lot like a prediction of the current completely dumbass economic crisis we're experiencing now). And if you've time for a third, have a look at C Street.

And keep a flashlight handy.

*I put scare quotes around "Christian" here because I find the "screw the weak and minister to the strong so they can maybe someday get around to taking care of the weak like good daddies" ethos of the Family to be about the least Christian mindset imaginable.

**"The chosen politician does not take credit for his success, he does not suppose that it was his virtue that led the people to elect him. He is just another sinner. But God wants to use him, as He used David. 'God appoints specific leaders to fulfil a mission; He doesn't hold a popular vote,' writes John C. Maxwell, a management guru on C Street's Prayer Breakfast circuit, in a Bible study titled Leadership: Deliberate Selection vs. Democratic Election. The other side of such humility is the abdication of responsibility. Once chosen for leadership isn't accountable for his own actions."