A Prince of the Captivity

John Buchan June enters its second half today with one of Buchan’s lesser known works, a sprawling tale of a man’s spiritual journey through shame, prison, war, espionage, and politics, ending with a final showdown between himself alone and the agents of a group clearly meant to be the Nazis. This is the 1933 novel A Prince of the Captivity.

The story begins just before the First World War. Adam Melfort, an honorable officer whose life is devoted to the army, is drummed out of the military and tried and imprisoned for forgery. It is clear to those in the know that he has taken the fall for his wife, a fashionable spendthrift who tried to extract more than her usual allowance from a wealthy uncle. Their imprudent marriage ends when his wife, as a final thank you for covering for her, divorces Adam during his prison sentence.

Adam’s loss of his commission and his imprisonment rob him not only of time but purpose. In prison, he ruminates. He retreats into memories of his son Nigel, he and his wife’s only child, who died of a fever at age five. He imagines Nigel and himself on a favorite island off the west coast of Scotland—visions that will grow more vivid and more powerful over the next years.

After prison, war comes. Adam, adrift, desperately wishes to be of service but cannot return to the army. A friend connects him to the intelligence service, and after being tested in both body and mind by eccentric figures like the elderly Mr Scrope or Macandrew, a man with a Scottish name who is clearly a European Jew, he is sent to Belgium, behind German lines, as a spy. He excels at his job and by the time of his hairsbreadth escape from German counterintelligence he has established a vast network feeding vital information to the British.

The end of the war casts Adam adrift again. When Jim Falconet, an American millionaire with an interest in exploration, goes missing in Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle, Adam sets himself the task of finding and rescuing him. He does so at enormous risk and through massive, arduous effort, with the two men—eventually all that is left of either Falconet’s original expedition and Adam’s rescue team—alternately nursing one another back to health through the long march southward.

Falconet, once returned to civilization, agrees to Adam’s request to downplay his role in the rescue. He will prove valuable ally to Adam in what lies ahead.

After this first third of the book, A Prince of the Captivity settles into politlcal and business intrigue. Adam’s experiences in the war and the near-death of his Arctic rescue mission convince him that what the world needs is strong, principled leadership to save it from the barbarism left in the wake of the war. When friends suggest that he is the one most suited to the leadership role he so wishes to see filled, he disagrees. His job, as he sees it, is to midwife the man or men who will help save civilization.

He sets his sights on three—Kenneth Armine, a young aristocrat and old friend, a people-person whose wife, Jackie, comes to love and respect Adam; Joe Utlaw, an up-and-coming Labour politician; and Frank Alban, Jackie’s brother, a young Anglican churchman with a powerful gift for speaking and persuading. All three, representatives of the aristocracy, the workers, and the Church, with their natural gifts, good character, and connection to the people have enormous potential to become exactly the leader Adam hopes to see set the world right.

And yet Adam, despite enormous efforts on their behalf, finds himself stymied at every time. His plans and hopes for all three, through various circumstances, come to nothing. Present in each failure and intimately involved at some crucial point is a man Adam has known about for years, Warren Creevey.

An admired and much-sought-after public intellectual and a well-connected and fantastically successful businessman, Creevey has interests everywhere, travels widely, and seems to know everything. Scrope, Adam’s mentor from his intelligence days, predicts early in the novel that Adam and Creevey will find themselves on opposite sides of some great contest and will be forced into confrontation. Adam, who naturally enough dislikes Creevey—and the feeling is mutual—tries to avoid and ignore him. By the final act of the novel, that strategy has become impossible.

The final portion of the story involves German politics, which one need not be reminded were unstable during the 1920s. Hermann Loeffler, the intelligence officer who came closest to capturing Adam during the war, has slowly emerged as a leading moderate and unifier but is opposed by the Communists on one side and, on the other, a group called the Iron Hands. Both desire “short cuts,” but the Iron Hands develop a special reputation for unscrupulous tactics and violence. When they become a clear danger both to Loeffler and to Creevey, Adam lays plans to intervene.

The climax of the novel, taking place at a high Alpine retreat to which Creevey has been kidnapped and smuggled for his own safety, brings the two rivals together for their long-anticipated confrontation. Present also is Jackie, who will turn out to have an important role to play, and slowly closing in from all directions are the henchmen of the Iron Hands.

A Prince of the Captivity is one of Buchan’s longer novels, with a plot playing out over about a decade and sprawling across wartime espionage, Arctic survival, practical politics, and social commentary on the dislocated world of 1920s Britain. Each component part is well done. The sections on Adam’s recruitment into the world of espionage—more grounded, unglamorous, and harder-edged than the seat-of-the-pants amateur adventures of Richard Hannay—feels very much like a precursor to John le Carré and are especially good. Adam’s rescue mission to the Arctic is perhaps my favorite section of the novel, and one of the most dramatic and compelling in any of Buchan’s novels. And the climactic struggle in the mountains, in which Adam’s story is brought full-circle and the longings created by his deep wounding at the start of the story are finally fulfilled, is powerfully moving.

But between these episodes, the middle sections, in which Adam very deliberately works his way through the social fabric of Britain in search of his new leaders, felt not just like a change of pace but a bit of a letdown. Most of Buchan’s contemporaneously-set novels of the 1920s and 30s, when he was serving as an MP, involve the nitty-gritty of practical politics at some point, but seldom does it dominate their plots the way it dominates A Prince of the Captivity. While all of the characters are finely drawn—especially Jackie and Utlaw—and the story intricately and believably plotted, it drags.

This is probably intentional. Adam’s work is laborious and Buchan conveys this vividly. But it is not as fun or compelling as the earlier chapters. Only as Adam’s plans begin to unravel and he is once again placed on the backfoot does the pace revive.

That is the only criticism I can level against A Prince of the Captivity. The plot, after all, is secondary to Adam’s character. The language I used in the introduction, of Adam undertaking a “spiritual journey,” comes from biographer Andrew Lownie. What Adam is searching for, in a metaphor introduced by Macandrew, a staunch Zionist who hopes the war will provide an opportunity for his people to reestablish their homeland, is a personal Jerusalem. The story is therefore one of pilgrimage.

Having honorably taken the blame for his wife’s crime and lost everything, Adam spends these years searching for purpose and belonging, taking on bigger and bigger tasks—from simply being useful in the murky, disreputable world of spies to saving a man’s life to saving civilization. Only in the final pages, in developments I don’t want to spoil, does he find the peace that has eluded him and everyone around him for the entire story.

Even as I read A Prince of the Captivity I was aware that Buchan was doing a lot more with this story than was immediately detectable on the surface. Though I’m not confident I grasped everything in Adam’s rivalry and final contest with Creevey, it moved me and has stayed with me. I see more and more in it and it continues to escape me. A Prince of the Captivity is not my favorite of Buchan’s novels, but it has several episodes as gripping as anything in his best novels and is the one I feel most compelled to revisit, and soon.

Keep reading, stupid

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts for the audiobook of Mr Majestyk, one of Elmore Leonard’s leanest, grittiest thrillers from his early days of crime writing. Having wrapped that up yesterday, I caught up on a promising-looking episode of The Charles CW Cooke Podcast posted on my birthday earlier this month, in which Cooke interviews Christopher Scalia about his new book 13 Novels Conservatives will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).

They have a fun, wide-ranging discussion, but late in the episode they turn to the question of why so many people don’t read now, in the course of which they talk about Silas Marner. Cooke wonders whether he didn’t enjoy it because it was assigned in school. Scalia agrees:

“That’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it.”

I think that’s what it was for me. I have no memory of it. It’s possible—I know I was assigned it—and I know what it was about but I don’t have memories of a specific passage or anything like that. And I think that’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it. Novels don’t change, but your reactions to novels change because you learn more, you have more experience and, yeah, novels that went over my head when I was younger mean much more to me now. Of course, I can’t think of a single example at the moment, but I’m sure that’s the case. Even novels you’ve always loved you love for different reasons when you go back to them.

Straight talk, and certainly true. Having not read The Great Gatsby until my late thirties, for instance, I had to wonder upon finishing it what a high schooler was supposed to get out of such a story. I gather the usual focus is on obvious symbols—the eyeglass billboard, the green light—and, of course, Themes. But the heart of the novel, a story of hidden pasts, severed roots, lust, and mountains of regret, depends for its resonance on similarly long, difficult experience—precisely the thing high schoolers don’t have.

The novels typically assigned in high school are likely chosen 1) because of the perception that they’ll meet teenagers where they are and 2) because they’re easily teachable and testable. Books subjected to this are diminished in one way or another, whittled and sorted and oversimplified. I haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye in many years, but I suspect Salinger’s work in Holden Caulfield’s narration is much more ironic than usually understood. Ditto Grendel, which is usually presented as a straightforward deconstruction of heroism when it is really a stripping away of the self-serving illusions of nihilism. A high schooler would get none of that.

Going in the opposite direction—and it gives me no pleasure to say this—having revisited All Quiet on the Western Front many times since high school, I’ve gradually recognized more and more its essentially juvenile perspective on war, politics, and suffering. And yet it is often the last word on the matter for high schoolers who, again, have no other perspective on the subject.

That doesn’t mean that challenging books shouldn’t be assigned in school. Students need that challenge in order to grow. Per Tolkien, “A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one’s age group. It comes from reading books above one.” How much more so for intellectual and spiritual preparation? But we should be alive to the unintended consequences of assigning books and the inevitable consequences of dumbing down their interpretation.

As for Scalia’s last point, that even novels you love mean more and mean them differently the more you read them, that’s indisputably the case, and one of the only tried and true methods of determining whether a book is good. Even a thriller with no literary pretensions, simply a good story written at the height of its author’s craft, like Mr Majestyk, changes and reveals more of itself upon a second reading—or a third or a fouth or…

A few other books with which I’ve had that experience:

• No Country for Old Men and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• The Great Divorce and That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

• True Grit and Gringos, by Charles Portis

• The Iliad

• Beowulf and, as mentioned above, John Gardner’s Grendel

• The Divine Comedy, by Dante

The Road stands out particularly strongly in this regard. This harsh, minimalistic survivalist tale from the master of the unflinching stare into darkness became a completely different book after I had children. I wasn’t stupid anymore. At least not completely. I wrote a little about that experience here.

Check out the episode of Cooke’s podcast and Scalia’s book at the links above. The discussion is fun and worthwhile, and the novels Scalia selected for his book are nicely varied, ranging from Dr Johnson and Scott to Waugh and PD James. And, to Scalia’s last point, keep reading!

Made of words

A strange kerfuffle I recently witnessed on Substack (I still don’t know how Substack chooses what to show me and I suspect I never will):

A Catholic philosopher whom I’ll call Magus recently published a book exploring, as far as I can tell, ways to counter the disenchantment and rationalistic, reductivist worldview of scientific materialism afflicting the modern world. All well and good. This book only came to my attention, though, when Magus published a detailed defense of his work rebutting a review by someone I’ll call Simplicio, a former occultist turned wannabe Chesterton Catholic turned bearded Orthodox firebrand.

Simplicio took issue with one of the book’s later chapters, in which Magus gestures toward the esoteric tradition of hermeticism as a possible model for Christians trying to approach the world through its non-material, eternal valence. In the course of his arguments, Magus used the word magic.

These debates spanned several point-counterpoint essays on Substack and magic was the pole around which all the rest of the furor rotated. Specific points of evidence aside—and this post is not a comment on Magus’s book or Simplicio’s laundry list of nitpicks and criticisms thereof—Simplicio would not let go of the word magic, which he equated with Satanism and devil-worship. Christians are forbidden that and Magus is, therefore, a heretic, a serious word Simplicio was very free with.

Magus countered that this was a straw-man argument and that magic is not a univocal word. It can and does and always has meant many more things than Satanism. He invoked specifically the “deep magic” of Aslan which is, in the same book, placed in opposition to the White Witch’s magic. Simiplicio called this evasive—we all know what magic means.

And round and round we went, with Simplicio insisting on a single, narrow, unambiguous meaning of this word and Magus countering hopelessly that not only is Satanism not what he meant, it should have been clear in context that he used magic as a metaphor anyway.

As it happens, Simplicio is the only one of these people I had heard of. I’ve read his previous books and essays with some enjoyment but, the more I’ve read of him, the more I’ve begun to suspect he isn’t very bright. Hence the pseudonym. But I don’t follow or subscribe to either Magus or Simplicio (again, Substack), so discovering this back-and-forth gave me the bystander effect of the proverbial car crash.

But the moment that stood out to me in all the sound and fury was a joke Simplicio made at Magus’s expense. When Magus, insisting on clarifying definitions of this notoriously vague word, wrote that “it depends on what one means by magic,” Simplicio called this a “Petersonian rejoinder.” As in, the once sharp but increasingly confused and confusing Jordan Peterson.

Peterson has always, as a Jungian, been prone to wandering into what Mark Twain called the “luminous intellectual fog” of German thinkers. Sadly, this has only become more the case as he’s made interpreting religion more and more of his brand, a task for which Jung has badly equipped him. His equivocation and hair-splitting in answer to questions as simple as “Do you believe in God?” reached the point of self-parody a while ago.

But the problem there is not Peterson’s ever more convoluted and recursive search for fine distinctions. The problem, probably, is somewhere within Peterson himself. What made him so powerful and refreshing a decade ago was his insistence that definitions matter, that words matter, that precision is a crucial guide toward the truth. All of that is still true regardless of where he ended up.

What came to mind when I read Simplicio’s little dig was a scene in A Man for All Seasons. When Sir Thomas More, who has resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, learns that Henry VIII plans to require an oath of loyalty with regard to his remarriage to Anne Boleyn, we have this exchange:

More: But what is the wording?

Meg [More’s daughter]: What do the words matter? We know what it will mean.

More: Tell me what the words say. An oath is made of words. It may be possible to take it.

A Man for All Seasons is full of argument of various kinds and qualities, with More’s opponents constantly working to entrap him, catch him in contradictions, or simply embarrass him. Here’s a great sample. The movie is very much about words, and as long as More insists that words tell the truth, precisely and accurately, he is unbeatable.

But he also exceptional, as the movie makes clear and as reality continues to reflect.

The Watcher by the Threshold

Today John Buchan June continues with our second short story collection of the month, Buchan’s early anthology of weird fiction set in Scotland, The Watcher by the Threshold.

Buchan published these five short stories and novellas in magazines—four of them in Blackwood’s—between 1899 and 1902, as he was developing his greatest strengths as a writer. I called the stories “weird fiction” above, but they are hard to categorize. Buchan’s dedication perhaps best expresses what unites them. Addressing the stories to fellow Scot Stair Agnew Gillon, Buchan invokes a Scotland they know well that lies behind the stereotype of “kirk and marketplace,” of a land of hard, business-minded Calvinists: “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

Literal remoteness and inaccessibility are crucial elements of the first story, “No-Man’s-Land.” In this novella, an Oxford linguist named Graves, a specialist in the ancient and medieval languages of the Celts and Norse, embarks on a long hike through rough and desolate sheep country in search of good fishing. He decides on a small mountain loch as his destination but, when he tells the old shepherd who hosts him, the shepherd warns him off of that area. Graves presses for details but the shepherd refuses to explain why he should stay away.

Superstition, the educated Graves concludes. The old shepherd and the sister who lives with him are in the grip of old beliefs about brownies, small creatures that harass the locals and occasionally spirit children away. This would also explain to Graves’s satisfaction the strange recent killings of some of the shepherd’s lambs. They were found “lying deid wi’ a hole in their throat.” The shepherd superstitiously blames this one demons and, Graves notes, refuses to believe it was sheep thieves.

Despite the recent events and the shepherd’s dire warnings, Graves sets off for his fishing hole. Before long he is lost in the rugged terrain and the dense mountain fog, where, slowly, he realizes that something is in the fog with him. He gets one glimpse—a short, man-like figure covered in hair—before he is captured by a mob of the creatures and taken to the cave where they live. There, in the midst of a throng of small, squat, hairy, powerful creatures, he has the second great shock of the day: he can understand some of what they’re saying to each other. Far from fairytale brownies, these are the last remnant of the Picts who lived in Scotland before the Scots.

He learns some of their terrible story. Driven underground centuries before, they have survived through theft and murder and have reproduced by kidnapping women and girls from nearby settlements. Horrified, Graves seizes his first opportunity to escape. He barely makes it to the shepherd’s hut. Afterward, back at Oxford, but can’t make use of his discovery and can’t shake the feeling that he has left something undone back in the hills. He returns to Scotland to discover that the old shepherd has abandoned his cottage following the disappearance of his sister in the night. Graves, the only man who understands what has actually happened to her and knows where she has gone, decides that it is up to him to rescue her.

The remote “back-world of Scotland” is even further away in the supernatural story “The Far Islands.” In this short story, young Colin Raden grows up in a family pulled inexorably westward. Ancestors who disappeared on voyages to the west are many and legendary.

Colin has, from his early days, dreamlike visions of being in a boat at sea, looking to the west, but with his view blocked by a wall of mist. This vision recurs throughout his life—at school, at university—with Colin always yearning to see beyond the mist but unable to approach it. Gradually new details intrude: the sound of waves on a beach just out of sight beyond the mist, the scent of apple blossoms. He learns from a friend of an old story in Geoffrey of Monmouth about an “Island of Apple-trees” far to the west, reserved for heroes to “live their second life.”

After university, Colin joins the army and is sent to the desert. There, his visions reveal more and more of the world beyond the mist, and reach their final, fateful consummation.

Buchan develops overtly supernatural moods in the title story, “The Watcher by the Threshold,” another novella that is less plot-driven than “No-Man’s Land” and more of a character study. Henry, the narrator, is called upon for help by Sybil, the wife of an old school friend named Ladlaw, and travels to their home on the Scottish moors. The wife, anxious and drawn, is obviously distressed, but Ladlaw must be drawn out. Gradually he reveals that he believes himself haunted by a devil. There is a shadowy figure, he says, always just out of sight on his left-hand side. He begs Ladlaw not to leave him alone, even for a moment.

Henry complies and notes the odd changes in Ladlaw from the man he knew at university, most notably an intense interest in esoteric scholarship and a fixation on Emperor Justinian. He comes to believe that Ladlaw is haunted by a “familiar” from the ancient world. His presence helps ease Ladlaw’s mind, but when Henry is called away on urgent business he recruits the local minister, Mr Oliphant, to look after him. Oliphant is the modern, openminded kind of minister who both balks at talking about the devil and also thinks his Christianity rules out the existence of the pagan supernatural (“Justinian was a Christian,” Henry reminds him) and wonders whether Ladlaw is simply a drunk. Ladlaw is not in the best of hands, but Henry must go and returns as quickly as he can.

When he does, he finds Ladlaw’s house empty. Oliphant, terrified of the man he was asked to help, has fled, and Ladlaw has taken to the moors, raving. Henry joins the search, which ends in a dramatic hilltop fight that doubles as an exorcism.

The next story, “The Outgoing of the Tide,” is a historical tale of forbidden romance and witchcraft set on the West coast of Scotland. Alison Hirpling is an old woman reputed to be a witch and a devil worshiper—a rumor that turns out to be true. By contrast, Ailie Sempill, a young girl who lives with her and is probably her daughter, is as devoted to Christ and the Kirk as she is beautiful.

One day the swaggering, ne’er-do-well laird Heriotside, in his regular ride through the countryside, sees Ailie and falls in love with her. He strives to woo her but she, knowing his reputation, is standoffish and hesitant. Gradually she falls for him, too, and Alison seeks to use their love to bring about their destruction and damnation. She sows doubt in both their minds but holds out the offer of magic as a way to seal their love. A midnight tryst on Beltane’s Eve, she tells each of them, at a particular spot along the coast where a river flows into a bay will bind them to each other forever.

Ailie and Heriotside find this hard to resist. What they don’t realize, however, is that for Alison this time and place are sources of immense satanic power as well as treacherous tides that have claimed more than one life. Whether Ailie and Heriotside will realize what Alison is up to and what kind of danger—both physical and spiritual—they have placed themselves in drives the suspenseful conclusion of the story.

“It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

— John Buchan

The final story, “Fountainblue,” has no supernatural elements but nevertheless depicts a haunted man. The main character, Maitland, comes of Scottish stock but has spent years in business in the south. Hard, distant, and ruthless in his dealings, he has achieved fame and immense wealth through his disciplined, machine-like work and has returned to his late aunt’s castle, Fountainblue, with one object in mind: pay court to the beautiful Claire Etheridge and convince her to marry him.

Despite his difficult personality—those who don’t immediately dislike him still can’t make up their minds whether they actually like him—Maitland nurses fond memories of his childhood on the coast, adventuring among the rocks and learning the ways of the sea. This deeply buried imaginative sense and yearning for the wild comes in handy as he attempts to woo Claire, though not for the reasons one might expect.

On a boat trip along the coast with Claire and Despencer, another young man he correctly views as a competitor, Maitland is caught in a terrible storm. Only his knowledge of the tides, currents, isles, and rocks can save them. But his heroism at the tiller of their boat and in the wreck afterward will not have the consequences Maitland hopes for.

Read about The Watcher by the Threshold in Buchan’s major critics and biographers and the recurring theme is that the stories, while entertaining, are mostly noteworthy for prefiguring his later themes and preoccupations. There is some truth to this. It’s hard, having read so many of Buchan’s later novels, not to be reminded of Witch Wood when reading “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or of The Dancing Floor or The Gap in the Curtain when reading of the intrusion of the supernatural into the chummy world of late Victorian England in “The Watcher by the Threshold,” or of A Prince of the Captivity, with its hero’s cherished dream of a peaceful island, when reading about Colin Raden’s visions in “The Far Islands.” Both Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan, in their biographies, note in “Fountainblue” the foreshadowing of Lumley’s speech about the fragility of civilization in The Power-House. Lownie further notes in the same story the theme of the emptiness of worldly success which, he reminds us, animates Buchan’s great final novel, Sick Heart River, almost forty years later.

But while it is interesting to note the way the stories provide early riffs on ideas and concerns that Buchan developed and explored more fully in his later work, the stories are also worth considering on their own terms.

These stories are early Buchan, and Buchan himself, when mailing a copy of The Watcher by the Threshold to Susie Grosvenor, the woman who would become his wife, described them as “pretty crude.” As with his embarrassed assessment of John Burnet of Barns, I think he’s underrating himself. Susie would agree. Writing to thank him for the book, she said that she had “just finished devouring” it: “I must tell you how awfully good I think the stories. They are so well sustained and interesting.”

This is certainly true. The later short stories in The Runagates Club may be more polished, but in The Watcher by the Threshold Buchan shows all the strengths of his later work and few of his earlier weaknesses. The Scottish settings are beautifully and evocatively described, presenting a picture not only of places but of their moral import—their atmosphere. One feels this most pointedly in the darker stories like “The Outgoing of the Sea” and especially “No-Man’s Land,” with their oppressive, desolate landscapes haunted by incomprehensible dangers.

The pacing of the stories is also good. Graves’s escape from the troglodyte Picts in “No-Man’s Land” is as suspenseful as anything in the Hannay novels, and “The Far Islands” flows with ethereal, dreamlike ease through an entire life. The stories are also, like Buchan’s entire body of work, wonderfully varied. What unites them is his intense interest in the relict, atavistic, and uncanny hidden just below the smooth polished surface of modern life—most obviously in “No-Man’s Land” but through the collection from beginning to end—and the palpable atmosphere he creates around the stories.

Where The Watcher by the Threshold’s stories differ most from his later work, I think, is in their interiority. All five take place largely inside a single character’s head, and hidden worlds that belong to or effect a single individual are a repeated motif. This is most extreme in “The Far Islands” and “Fountainblue,” which are entirely about the imaginations and ruminations of their main characters and whose plots turn on moments of revelation and self-knowledge—metanoia, in theological terms. These epiphanies lead, more or less directly, to Maitland’s and Colin Raden’s deaths, but also to the fulfilment of their longings. In the other stories, these hidden worlds are overtly threatening and the characters must be saved from them, whether the Picts of “No-Man’s Land,” the schemes of a devil-worshiping crone in “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or demonic possession in “The Watcher by the Threshold.”

My personal favorite from The Watcher by the Threshold was “No-Man’s-Land,” a genuinely scary and suspenseful story. Last night I started to summarize the story for my kids. My wife stopped me—it was too close to bedtime and even she was creeped out. My kids begged to know what happened. A useful test of a story’s power. (Reflecting on Buchan’s choice of The Watcher by the Threshold to send to Susie Grosvenor, Ursula Buchan writes, “Why he considered these stories suitable reading matter for a very sheltered young woman, it is hard to imagine.”)

The Watcher by the Threshold is a strong early sample of Buchan’s work that I found immensely enjoyable. Not only good entertainment, they are also well-written and richly imagined, with thematic depth as a wonderful bonus. For anyone wanting a small dose of Buchan or a glimpse of Buchan working in a decidedly different mode from his thrillers and much of his historical novels, this is an indispensable read.

John Buchan’s Julius Caesar

For last year’s John Buchan June I dipped for the first time into Buchan’s enormous body of non-fiction with his short critical introduction Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work. This year I’ve read another of his late-career works of history, this time the 1932 biography Julius Caesar.

For those who know Buchan as a writer of adventure novels and do not know about his education in the classics or his extensive work in history and current events, having edited the publisher Thomas Nelson’s multivolume history of the First World War while the war was in progress and eventually writing long biographies of Scott, Montrose, Cromwell, and Augustus, a life of Caesar might seem an oddity. But Caesar as a subject combines all of Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer—the classicist’s mastery of Greek and Latin literature, the MP’s insight into political rough-and-tumble, the historian’s big-picture view, the propagandist’s PR sensibilities, the novelist’s yearning for adventure. That Buchan is such a good writer, strong, vivid, concise, and therefore powerful, helps as well.

Buchan begins Julius Caesar with a brief portrait of the Roman Republic in Caesar’s youth, flush with success and grown beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. The accidental empire carved out by the Romans over generations strained its political system, which was created to govern a single city of sober, principled, self-governing men. By Caesar’s day, Rome had grown culturally decadent and its system corrupt. Elections were about choosing between oligarchs bent on enriching themselves and voting boons to the public, policy was not so much decided in debate and voting but through bribery and influence-peddling, and the law itself had grown so sclerotic that the government resorted more and more often to once-rare emergency measure like dictatorships.

This was an all-too-recognizable Rome of empty formalities covering practical lawlessness and decay. Caesar, a sharp young man, discerned this early.

Buchan gives good attention to the great crisis of Caesar’s young adulthood, the civil war between Marius and Sulla that pitted, at least notionally, a party appealing to the masses against a party with elite support. The former favored expedients (and massive public benefits) and the latter favored tradition and order. Both used strong men to get what they wanted. Thousands were murdered in seesaw purges before Marius died and Sulla, on behalf of the Senate, crushed what was left of his popular movement.

This conflict created the world in which Caesar began his career proper. It also made the careers of the slightly older men who rose to prominence before him, like the plutocrat Crassus but especially Pompey, whose rise was fueled by military glory. Cicero came along shortly afterward, an outsider rising to prominence in law. These and other major figures—Clodius the demagogue, Cato the Younger, Milo, Catiline, and, later, Brutus and Cassius—receive good attention despite the brevity of Buchan’s narrative.

Buchan charts Caesar’s rise to prominence through the complicated, corrupted, testy arena of Roman politics elegantly, including his two consulships and what it took to achieve them. Buchan looks especially closely at the roles of political allies, debt, and the mob in making careers and suggests the jockeying and jostling of interests and personalities vividly without bogging down in detail. Likewise his chapter on Caesar’s decade in Gaul, the years that made him a legend to the masses and an enemy to partisans of the Senate, succinctly covers his major campaigns with perhaps the most attention being given to his war against the uprising led by Vercingetorix.

Throughout, Buchan narrates skillfully, with incisive and nuanced explanations of the major problems facing the Republic. His narrative nicely balances broad trends and the long view with the repeated shocks of specific crises. When Herbert Butterfield wrote that the quintessential task of the historian is to find “a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity,” he could have been describing Buchan’s work in Julius Caesar. Though covering one of the busiest and most tumultuous lifetimes in history in a little over one hundred pages, it never feels incomplete or foreshortened.

Crucially for a short biography like this, Buchan also excels at the concise character study. His portraits of Cicero, Pompey, and Clodius are especially sharp and fairly presented. But the book belongs to Caesar, and Buchan evokes both the fundamental personality of his subject—the charm, ambition, pragmatism, and keen intelligence—as well as the way Caesar learned and grew over the course of his career, first developing canny political instincts before becoming alert to possibilities he could never have imagined as a vulnerable, inexperienced young man in the wake of Marius and Sulla’s purges.

It’s in the final chapters covering Caesar’s war against the Senate, his dictatorship, and his assassination, that Buchan ventures his most controversial interpretations. The Republic, Buchan suggests, had it coming. Look at the adjectives I’ve used above: corrupt, decadent, testy, sclerotic, empty. In a community riven by personality-driven faction, mob violence, and corrupt elites, polarized, deadlocked, and myopically focused on the squabbles of its political class, Caesar’s tyranny, Buchan suggests, was a grand act of simplification if not purification. The Republic was no longer worth preserving, and Caesar represented the best possible form of destruction.

Further, Buchan argues in the penultimate chapter, Caesar was prepared as dictator to usher in a new kind of Rome, broadened and strengthened by its subject peoples, who would be Romanized just as they contributed their earnestness and vigor to the decaying original. Not only a skilled politician and military genius, Caesar was a visionary ready to unite the world.

I disagree with this interpretation. Though Buchan pointedly highlights Caesar’s self-serving pragmatism early in the book, he is too charitable in his reading of Caesar’s later actions, especially in arguing that Caesar was right to defy and wage war against the Senate and that Caesar’s mercy toward his enemies was motivated by a deep-seated kindness. Cato, whom Buchan deplores as a simple-minded contrarian, was right to see Caesar’s public forgiveness as a political stunt. And interpreting Caesar as a simplifier sweeping away hopelessly corrupt systems accepts rather too readily the premises of every would-be tyrant since.

The bigger picture of Caesar’s conquests being a tool of broadening and uplift, sharing Rome’s resources and taking in the best that the Empire has to offer, strikes me as a very British (and therefore Christian, modern, and technological) vision that does not reckon with the realities of Roman statecraft, war, and governance. Here I think Buchan’s justifiable admiration of Caesar the political maneuverer and Caesar the general misleads him. Idealism and cynicism can and often do coexist in great personalities—Buchan chooses to believe Caesar was mostly an idealist, and that his ends justified his means.

Reflecting on the future fate of Rome near the end of the book, Buchan includes a Latin tag: de nostro tempore fabula narratur, “About our time the story is told.” True to history, Julius Caesar is also explicitly meant to draw parallels with Buchan’s present. It also works with our own. As I noted above, the contemptible parody of the old Republic, recognizable in the Britain and Europe of 1932, is just as recognizable in 2025. Are we, then, to hope for a Caesar? The old Roman in me, the opponent of the populares and the fan of Cicero, the last of the true believers, shouts No. It was Buchan’s way to be hopeful, but it is far too dangerous to hope for the kind of Caesar he describes here.

While I disagree with much in Buchan’s final estimation of Caesar that does not detract from the enjoyability or value of Julius Caesar. This is a brisk, elegantly crafted short biography based on a command of the original sources and extensive late 19th and early 20th century historical research. Buchan offers us an excellent short character sketch of a great man and the times that made him—before he remade them, and us.

John Burnet of Barns

This first week of John Buchan June concludes with a high-spirited historical adventure set in the hills of the Scottish Borders. This may sound like a familiar Buchan setting until one gets into the specifics. This is his first full-length novel, published in 1898 when he was just twenty-three: John Burnet of Barns.

Taking place mostly in the late 1680s, during a time of widespread unrest and disorder throughout Britain but especially in Scotland, this novel follows the adventures of John Burnet, the scion of an old and respected Border Reiver family from Barns, near Peebles on the River Tweed. Burnet may have rollicking, swashbuckling ancestors but he is a shy, diffident, scholarly sort. Where his aging father crippled himself racing a horse through the hills with other young bloods, John is set for university studies in Glasgow.

But the old yearning for adventure in his blood shows from the very first chapter, in which John, as a boy, skips out on a lesson from his tutor to go fishing in the River Tweed. There he meets the beautiful Marjory Veitch who, like him, comes of old aristocratic stock and, like him, has an imaginative, adventurous streak. They become constant companions and playmates right up until John departs for university.

John is a good student but never fully settles into university life. After a chance encounter in the streets with his arrogant and soldierly cousin Gilbert, who comes riding through town wearing his fashionable best, John decides on the spot to drop out and return home to Barns. To his surprise, Gilbert has beaten him there. To his greater and much less welcome surprise, Gilbert has met Marjory and decided to make her his own.

The encounter in the streets of Glasgow and Gilbert’s intrusion into John’s innocent world back home mark the beginning of an escalating series of confrontations. Gilbert’s attentions to Marjory provoke an epiphany in John—he realizes he loves her and always has, and sets out immediately to propose. She accepts. Soon after, John’s father dies, and he becomes the laird of his family estate much sooner than expected. He delays his marriage to Marjory so he can step fully into his new role.

But he also decides, thinking he has settled the matters of betrothing Marjory and getting his father’s affairs in order, that he should complete his studies—not at Edinburgh, but on the continent at Leyden in Holland. Marjory agrees to wait for him.

In Holland, John meets and clashes with Gilbert again. After John defeats him in a duel, Gilbert departs Holland in a sulk. This seeming victory proves fateful for John. Shortly afterward, John receives word that Gilbert has returned to Tweeddale, has insinuated himself into Marjory’s drunken brother’s company, and is menacing her and the household. Once again he drops his studies and heads home.

But Gilbert has baited him. Upon returning from Holland, he has fabricated documents showing John to be conspiring against King James II. A warrant is out for John’s arrest, and no sooner has he landed in Edinburgh than he flees to the hills to live as an outlaw accompanied only by Nicol, his shrewd and resourceful servant.

The central action of the book follows John through his months of outlawry—falling back from one hiding place to another, encountering numerous colorful characters, passing along secret letters for Marjory, and occasionally surprising and humiliating his pursuers—a condition only ended by distant political revolution. The climax of the novel is a relentless horseback chase across Scotland to Gilbert’s remote estate in the West Country with Gilbert and the captive Marjory always staying just ahead of John and Nicol, who must contend with freezing weather, drunken ferrymen, closed gates, scaled walls, and swordplay among the dangers.

I’ve actually owned a copy of John Burnet of Barns since the first John Buchan June in 2022 but have hesitated to read it. It’s among the earliest of Buchan’s published work and Buchan himself regarded it with some embarrassment, later calling it “immature and boyish” and “a hotch-potch.” In her biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan writes that he thought it “cumbersome and ill put together.” The very first of his novels that I reviewed here, A Lost Lady of Old Years, came out the year after John Burnet of Barns, and though I liked and admired it I noted pacing problems and a passive and slightly dense protagonist. If Buchan himself viewed the even earlier John Burnet of Barns as inferior, how bad must it be?

As it happens, not bad at all. I began it with some trepidation but quickly found myself engrossed. Despite some evident problems that mark John Burnet of Barns as an early and, yes, immature work, it has all of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction and was some of the most purely enjoyable reading I’ve had in a while.

The narration itself is not as tight and economical as is typical of later Buchan. As a narrator, John tends to overexplain, and even interesting incidents sometimes drag on. There are a number of free-floating incidents, like a flash flood on the Tweed that introduces the character of Nicol, that last perhaps too long and contribute too little to the plot. But the biggest weakness of the novel, at least in its first third, is pacing. John narrates his own life, and a real life is episodic, but it takes several chapters for the narrative to gain direction and momentum. The early chapters are unfocused and diffuse. We are a long way from the skillful in medias res openings of similar historical adventures like Midwinter or The Free Fishers.

These are real faults, but they barely detract from an accomplished, carefully constructed, and—most importantly—exciting story.

Technically, despite faults in pacing and overlong start, the novel is strongly written and intricately plotted. Every plot element is set up for later payoff. Considering the reputation Buchan still has for relying on coincidence in his fiction, there is very little of that in John Burnet of Barns. With such care taken over preparing the elements of the climax, the novel’s cross-country chase succeeds brilliantly.

The novel also features great historical detail in vividly and authentically described 1680s settings. Historical elements like the Covenanters and the Glorious Revolution are well integrated into the plot without overburdening it. Buchan also creates tactile, evocative atmosphere throughout. A cave full of outlaws, a lethal swordfight in a snowy forest, a rough crossing in a small ferry, hiding in the tall grass and heather as the enemy searches, and a shallow rocky fishing stream at sundown—all are beautifully imagined. And despite some incidents lasting too long or leading nowhere, others add such color and texture or are so fun and exciting that they’re worthwhile. A chance encounter with another outlaw, a nameless man with a terrible yearning to swordfight with someone, anyone, a man whom John never sees again, is especially wonderful.

But the novel’s greatest virtue is its stock of lifelike and engaging characters, most especially Nicol, Marjory, and John himself. Nicol is a recognizable type, the faithful lower-class servant (imagine a more dangerous Samwise Gamgee from the Scots Borders) but Buchan imbues him with life as a distinct, memorable individual. During his months in hiding John never seems more vulnerable than when he has sent Nicol on an errand, a clear testament to Nicol’s strength as a character.

Modern readers would unthinkingly critique Marjory as a damsel in distress, but this would be to misread a strong, canny woman with a lot of endurance. She’s sharper than John, which makes their awkward courtship sweet and funny, and in staving off Gilbert—right up until he uses his authority as a cavalry officer to kidnap her—she shows great tenacity. John and Marjory may not be Buchan’s best romantic pair—I’d still give that title to Sir Archie Roylance and Janet Raden in John Macnab—but they are well-matched and fun to read about.

But this is John’s story, and whatever the flaws of his narration he keeps the novel interesting and engaging. A recognizable Buchan archetype, the retiring scholar who is forced into action and daring, it is remarkable to see how clearly Buchan has both imagined and realized him so early in his career. Intelligent and learned but also recklessly impulsive, his earnestness, his senses of duty and honor, his friendship with Nicol, and his love for Marjory make him enormously likeable and carry us along with him as he changes. John Burnet of Barns is a coming-of-age story, and John’s flightiness and indecision gradually give way to the steadfastness and determination of maturity.

The man racing on horseback through sleet and snow in the middle of the night is unimaginable when we first meet him skipping out on school to go fishing, and that unexpectedness, through surprising turns and slow transformation, helps make John Burnet of Barns thrilling—a wonderful opening movement to a great career in storytelling.

The Runagates Club

John Buchan at his desk in 1939

John Buchan June begins its fourth year today! I started this event as a way to reclaim my birth month for something worth celebrating, and it’s grown beyond anything I could have anticipated. This year I’m reading some of Buchan’s more obscure or lesser known novels, another short biography for a taste of his non-fiction, and emphasizing some of his short fiction with three collections of short stories. We begin with one of those today, Buchan’s 1928 anthology The Runagates Club.

The club of the title is The Thursday Club, a London club to which many of Buchan’s recurring characters like Richard Hannay, Archie Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen, John Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha belong. It appears in a few previous books, most prominently The Three Hostages, where Hannay describes its meeting place as “a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street, a pleasant room, panelled in white, with big fires burning at each end.”

That’s the setting. The premise of The Runagates Club is that it is a collection of a dozen stories told by its members in the course of conversation. Like the characters themselves, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, politicians, fighter pilots, scholars, and businessmen, the stories range widely in tone, topic, and form, but they’re never very far from adventure.

The collection begins with Hannay, whose story “The Green Wildebeest” takes place in his pre-Thirty-Nine Steps days as a mining engineer searching for ore deposits in remote stretches of South Africa. While hunting for water during one expedition, Hannay and his companion, a highly-educated, rationalistic younger man, have a chance encounter with shaman, a sacred grove, and an otherworldly animal. The younger man is shaken, and Hannay narrates how his haughty intrusion changed his life for the worse.

After the eeriness of that story, the Duke of Burminster tells a comic two-part story called “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” The story begins with a high-spirited dare between the Duke and Archie Roylance leading to a footrace through the hills of the Scottish Borders and, through mistaken identity and a series of misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous coincidences, ends with the Duke plotting his escape from a mental hospital.

Palliser-Yeates follows with “Dr Lartius,” a story about espionage during the First World War and a mysterious, popular young doctor with mystical powers suspected of being a German spy. That story’s twist ending leads into perhaps the darkest story in the collection, “The Wind in the Portico.” This story concerns a rich eccentric who, having come into possession of a country house with the ruins of a Roman-era temple in the grounds, attempts to rebuild the temple and revive its ancient worship. His efforts get him the wrong kind of attention.

“‘Divus’ Johnston,” the short followup from Lord Lamancha, continues the theme of gods in a humorous vein. A story within a story, it is a tale told to him by a Scottish sea captain who, shipwrecked in Indonesia, was captured and prepared for sacrifice to a local god—who turns out to be an old friend from Glasgow, also shipwrecked.

The story told by Oliver Pugh, “The Loathly Opposite,” concerns codebreaking during the First World War and the obsession one side’s cryptanalysts can develop for their opposite numbers. In this case, a young man working in codebreaking develops an elaborate picture of the mastermind behind German codes, a picture and an obsession that continues after the war with surprising results.

Sir Edward Leithen follows with a story about how a world of adventure can be had without leaving London—shades of Leithen’s debut in The Power-House. “Sing a Song of Sixpence” relates his encounter with a charismatic but embattled South American president named Ramon Pelem and the surprising way he was able to help him both avoid assassination by revolutionaries and keep a social engagement.

“Ship to Tarshish,” one of the most moving and challenging stories, is about a friendly, well-connected, completely useless young man whose wealthy father dies immediately after a crash in the family business’s stocks. Unable to cope with the pressure of righting the ship, he flees to Canada with a small amount of cash and sinks lower and lower through lack of skill and experience. The allusion to Jonah in the title is aptly chosen for a story of manfully confronting unasked for obligation.

The uncanny returns in “Skule Skerry,” in which an ornithologist forces his way onto a remote island—one of the Norlands, later to appear in The Island of Sheep—to observe birds despite the objections of locals, among whom the island has a bad name and a reputation for the supernatural. There he has a terrifying encounter with something he later believes he can explain, though the reader may be left doubting his comforting, too-neat rationalization.

The uncanny of a different kind occurs in “Tenebant Manus,” another story rooted in the First World War, in which the unremarkable brother of an officer killed on the Western Front takes up his mantle for a brief, bright, forceful career in politics.

A final humorous story, “The Last Crusade,” is a satire of fake news avant la lettre. When a bored journalist working the South African frontier drops in on an elderly minister’s sermon, in which the minister inveighs against the Bolsheviks for threatening to execute an Orthodox patriarch, he files an amused, scoffing column which is stripped of context, exaggerated, and presented as news—as is the public response. Every news cycle makes the story bigger and wilder and less connected to the real world. By the end, the media is announcing the launch of an amateur invasion of Russia by a fictitious army of American Fundamentalists motivated by the words of the minister, who is now dead. The whole incident, according to the narrator, veteran journalist Francis Martendale, ended with fortunate real-world results, but that was no thanks to the news media.

The last story, “Fullcircle,” concerns Sir Edward Leithen but is told by historian Martin Peckwether, and begins with a time the two were tramping across the countryside and encountered an impeccably progressive, high-minded young couple in an old estate. Catching back up with them two years later reveals the power of the land to transform people.

These twelve stories originated as magazine pieces, mostly published in the mid- and late-1920s, and the frame structure of The Runagates Club was Buchan’s inspired excuse to collect and unite them. Quite apart from the fun of imagining Buchan’s regulars hanging out and chatting over a good meal together, one of the joys of this collection is the imaginative variety of the stories. Buchan was at the height of his powers as an author of fiction in the 1920s, writing novels like Huntingtower, Midwinter, The Dancing Floor, and my two favorites, John Macnab and Witch Wood, in the years leading up to this book. With horror, humor, satire, suspense, straightforward human drama—and with many stories mixing two or three of these—The Runagates Club shows off Buchan’s range to great effect.

Throughout the stories, Buchan revisits many themes and subjects familiar from his novels. The foolish things of the world confounding the wise, a biblical truth invoked explicitly at the end of “The Last Crusade,” comes through in several stories of reversal and unlooked-for grace. The virtues of integrity, physical courage, and duty, old-fashioned and neglected even then, feature in many of the stories and most prominently in “Ship to Tarshish,” in which a moral weakling, cossetted by an undemanding life of privilege, must choose hardship not only to do right by others but to be able to live with himself.

The First World War also looms large. The clubland characters narrating these stories made up the officer class of the British Army and suffered disproportionate losses in terrible combat. Buchan himself lost his best friend and brother and knew many others who never lived to see 1918. The weight of that loss comes through in stories like “The Loathly Opposite” and especially “Tendebant Manus,” but it’s there even in lighter wartime tales like “Dr Lartius.”

Buchan even seems to have a little fun with himself. I’ve noted before his reputation for wild coincidences playing a part in his fiction, a tendency noted in his own lifetime. The humorous stories in The Runagates Club like “‘Divus’ Johnston” embrace this to the point of comedy and “The Frying Pan and the Fire” is built entirely out of a cascading series of coincidences and bad luck, like the steady escalation of a Marx Brothers sketch.

But the most powerful recurring theme throughout, one revisited over and over again in Buchan’s novels, is the fragility of civilization, which Buchan justifiably saw as a thin, translucent veneer laid over bottomless barbarism. Sometimes this takes on a this-worldly political aspect, as in Leithen’s assistance of Ramon Pelem against leftist revolutionaries who, we learn in the painful coda of the story, eventually do take Pelem down.

More often, in at least three stories, civilization lulls modern man into hubris, a complacent confidence in his all-encompassing materialistic worldview that leads him to trifle with forces older and more powerful than he can reckon with. Thus the fate of Hannay’s assistant in “The Green Wildebeest” and the ornithologist in “Skule Skerry,” in which the scientific arrogantly ignore local custom and tradition and suffer for it. But this theme comes through most chillingly in the case of the amateur neopagan in “The Wind in the Portico,” who seeks an encounter with something he has romantic notions of but does not and cannot understand. His fate, quite pointedly, is the fate of mortals who trespass against the gods in Greek myth. Ancient paganism was not a hobby.

Buchan’s good solid prose and skills with structure, pacing, and description strengthen all of the stories in The Runagates Club, but these last three, with their gothic atmosphere, vividly imagined landscapes—the remote hills of South Africa, a ramshackle English country house converted into a temple, a misty uninhabited island in the North Atlantic—as well as their thematic depth, were my favorites. With such a variety to choose from, I imagine any reader could pick up the book and come away with an entirely different set of favorites. I hope some of y’all will. If you do, I’d love to hear which you liked best.

John Buchan June is off to a great start with these stories. I look forward to writing about the first full-length novel of the month, and the first full-length novel of Buchan’s career, next time.

Cicero vs Sumner

One of my “runners up” or honorable mentions in last week’s spring reading list was Josiah Osgood’s Lawless Republic, which describes Cicero’s legal career with special emphasis on the early cases that made his name. I finished the book conflicted.

On one hand, it offers a succinct, vividly drawn picture of the legal system and courts in the late Roman Republic, including some insightful explanations of procedure and the way lawyers could try to game Rome’s intricate system of holy days to influence cases. I learned a lot in these passages, even with regard to familiar stories like Cicero’s prosecution of Verres. On the other hand, as I briefly noted last week, the book is not content to tell Cicero’s story, but has to reach—strain—to impart some kind of usable lesson for us in the present.

Here’s an odd interlude in the conclusion: writing of Cicero’s “achievements as a public speaker” and his belief that the legal system “offer[s] a better chance for accountable government and justice than does violence,” Osgood notes how “Cicero’s speeches have remained valuable examples of how to convince others.” He offers this example:

[I]n 1856 the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, delivered on the floor of the United States Senate a five-hour speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner attacked senatorial colleagues for trying to extend slavery into into the territory of Kansas. Of Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina, Sumner said, “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery.” Famously, two days afterward, Sumner was brutally caned at his desk in the Senate by Senator Butler’s nephew, Representative Preston Brooks.

After cataloguing a few Ciceronian rhetorical features of Sumner’s speech, features that could just as easily be found in the oratory of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or Jefferson Davis, Osgood concludes:

Cicero’s speeches should still be studied today for their limitations but also their rhetorical power. We shall be able to better understand the achievement of later orators such as Charles Sumner by doing so, even as Sumner's caning reminds us of the problems a republic faces when it denies equality to all.

Fair enough, but that very last point is a strange thing to take away from either the history of the Roman Republic or the Sumner-Brooks incident. The Romans would have been confused by our idea of equality and the demands we make based upon it. Their legal system wasn’t meant to create or enforce equality—and it is highly questionable whether any state should or even can—but to balance the interests and prerogatives of competing orders in order to maintain Order. The Romans had many flaws but they had no illusions about what a breakdown of order meant.

In the Sumner incident, however, a self-righteous, hypocritical blowhard publicly insulted a severely ill man who wasn’t present to answer him, and said man came from a culture in which personal honor would be defended by force if necessary. Sumner viewed that culture with contempt, to his detriment. Brooks’s caning—after, in accordance with protocol, challenging Sumner and demanding an apology—had immediate and lasting propaganda value. That turned a personal dispute into a political allegory that persists to this day. Here it is popping up in a book about Cicero.

The tacked-on quality of comments like these make me wonder if they were something demanded by the publisher. Regardless, I’d still recommend Lawless Republic for its early chapters, its insight into the functioning of Roman courts, and the important fact that Osgood does not annihilate the sources through gainsaying or deconstruction in order to allow himself to explain what “really” happened, like some prominent anti-Cicero classicists I could name but won’t.

As it happens, with John Buchan June just around the corner I’m reading Buchan’s short 1932 biography of Julius Caesar. Buchan, no mean classicist himself and an elegant writer, is more charitable toward Caesar than I’m inclined to be, but his narrative is compelling and his portrait of Cicero is quite good. A sample:

Cicero was for the moment the most popular man in Rome, for even the mob had been scared by the orgy of blood and ruin involved in Catiline’s success. He deserved the plaudits which he won, for he had made no mistakes; his secret service was perfect; he gave Catiline the necessary rope to hang himself; he had the nerve not to act prematurely, and when the moment came he struck hard.

It’s shaping up to be a Roman summer. I have Osgood’s previous book on Cato the Younger on standby. Stay tuned.

Moral intelligibility

In “Ship to Tarshish,” a short story in The Runagates Club, a collection by John Buchan published in 1928, a member of the titular club tells the story of Jim, a young man whose father, a wealthy businessman, dies immediately after a collapse of the company stocks. Unprepared for responsibility after a sheltered life of luxury and entertainments, Jim buckles under the pressure to save the family business and flees to Canada to start over on his own.

There he spirals, unable to hold down a job that requires hard work or any specific skill or even consistently showing up, and lands in “a pretty squalid kind of doss-house.” The narrator describes Jim’s ruminations there:

The physical discomfort was bad enough. He tramped the streets ill-clad and half-fed, and saw prosperous people in furs, and cheerful young parties, and fire-lit, book-lined rooms. But the spiritual trouble was worse. Sometimes, when things were very bad, he was fortunate enough to have his thoughts narrowed down to the obtaining of food and warmth. But at other times he would be tormented by a feeling that his misfortunes were deserved, and that Fate with a heavy hand was belabouring him because he was a coward. His trouble was no longer the idiotic sense of guilt about his father’s bankruptcy; it was a much more rational penitence, for he was beginning to realise that I had been right, and that he had behaved badly in running away from a plain duty. At first he choked down the thought, but all that miserable winter it grew upon him. His disasters were a direct visitation of the Almighty on one who had shown the white feather. He came to have an almost mystical feeling about it. He felt that he was branded like Cain, so that everybody knew that he had funked, and yet he realised that a rotten morbid pride ironly prevented him from retracing his steps.

Back at the beginning of the year I wondered how much the values and commitments of the characters in Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic, would even be intelligible to a modern reader. Waltharius is over a thousand years old, relating a story from almost half a millennium before that. “Ship to Tarshish” is not even a hundred years old and is set in the 1927 world in which it was published. And yet we have the same problem.

The story’s drama grows entirely from the requirements placed upon Jim. Repairing damage from his father’s time proves too much for him. He can’t take it, and is ashamed that he can’t and that everyone knows and that he made it worse by running away. The redemption in the story comes from, as Kate Macdonald puts it in her introduction to The Runagates Club, “facing one’s fears and demonstrating courage and moral strength,” even when one is “shockingly inadequate.”

But, as I wondered about the bonds of loyalty and obligation in Waltharius, how much of this would a modern reader get? The ideas of Fate and retribution from God, or that certain behavior is shameful and that one should listen to critics, or the very concept of duty—Buchan conveys these powerfully but moderns scoff at all of it. Even the cultural allusions that gave the story resonance in 1927—Jonah fleeing to Tarshish, the mark of Cain—cannot be counted on to convey meaning to them. What John Keegan called the “moral atmosphere” of Buchan’s work would be not so much rejected as missed completely.

The modern reader is more likely to sympathize with the “useless” Jim at the beginning of the story: a well-liked, inoffensive, sociable non-entity whose only noteworthy skill is dancing. Rather than tough talk and hard work, they’d recommend therapy. And yet that would leave Jim stranded in his weakness. Worse, it would probably give him a flaw he lacks, a lack that is one of his few saving graces in the story—entitlement.

You can read “Ship of Tarshish” at Project Gutenberg. The Runagates Club is a fine collection of a wide variety of stories and will be one of the first books I write about next week, as this year’s John Buchan June gets underway.

Riddles in the Dark

I’ve previously mentioned here the precise moment I knew I loved The Hobbit—reading “Riddles in the Dark” in the car on the way to the MLB Home Run Derby in Atlanta, July 10, 2000. I had just turned 16 the month before and The Hobbit was my first Tolkien, picked up on a friend’s recommendation and read with uncertainty. That car ride made me a devoted fan.

It’s unusual to be able to date one’s love for a favorite book so precisely. The special event associated with this one helps it stick in the memory, I’m sure, but it’s that chapter specifically that is so powerful. Up to Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum I had enjoyed The Hobbit, but that chapter was a revelation, the moment I became aware that I was reading something great. To this day, rereading that chapter brings back that feeling of breathless anticipation.

The special character of this chapter has been on my mind this week because I just read “Riddles in the Dark” aloud to my kids. I’ve read The Hobbit to them once before, a few years ago. They enjoyed it, but, being much younger, I think what they enjoyed most was simply that I was reading to them.

This time through has been different. From beginning to end of “Riddles in the Dark” they showed the same breathless anticipation I felt as a teenager. They were scared for Bilbo, creeped out by Gollum, wanted to guess the answers to the riddles, and thrilled with suspense as Bilbo finally made his escape, minus his brass buttons. They loved it, and it’s been one of the best bedtime story experiences I’ve had with them. I’ve also enjoyed the excuse to reflect on one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books.

So: Why is “Riddles in the Dark” so good? A few thoughts:

• After several chapters with a crowd of dwarves, Bilbo is alone. The reader can focus on the protagonist again, and because he finds himself alone in a dangerous situation it is up to him to get out. For the first time since Bag End, he cannot simply (and literally) be carried along by the others.

• Kids can identify with Bilbo. Put-upon, scolded, not often understanding what’s going on, ordered around by seemingly everyone, he now finds himself alone in the dark, and it’s a rare child that doesn’t mind that.

• Further, this chapter confirms every child’s fear—there’s something in the dark! And it turns out to be one of Tolkien’s greatest creations.

• Bilbo and Gollum’s encounter, a surprise followed by mutual curiosity, need, and hostility, feels exceptionally real, especially in the way it moves from one mood into another.

• Games are great to read about if they’re well written and used as extensions of character—even games we don’t understand, like all the baccarat in James Bond—and Tolkien makes the riddle game instantly clear, engaging, and reflective of Bilbo and Gollum as characters.

• Often overlooked, I think, is that despite the atmosphere and the threat posed by Gollum, this part of the story is funny. The tone is perfectly balanced.

• Structurally, this chapter is a perfect story within the overall story.

• Narratively, Tolkien uses omniscience with great skill, shifting back and forth between Bilbo and Gollum so that the stakes of the riddle game are raised and the reader feels tension through dramatic irony, knowing before Bilbo does that Gollum means to eat him.

• I’m not usually one to talk psychology in fiction, but Bilbo and Gollum’s personalities are sharply realized and believable. I’m not sure Tolkien gets enough credit for the truthfulness of the people in his books. A line that stood out this time, when Gollum returns to his island and searches with increasing desperation for the ring: “Utterly miserable as Gollum sounded, Bilbo could not find much pity in his heart, and he had a feeling that anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.” So simple, so much going on.

• I’m also not one to invoke “character arcs” or the dreadful “Hero’s Journey,” but Bilbo’s experience in “Riddles in the Dark” is noticeably transformative. As I noted above, it’s all on him. He has to stick up for himself both through force of arms and his wits (combining the strengths of the warlike dwarves on one hand and the intellect of Gandalf on the other). In the next chapter we learn that he’s earned the respect of the dwarves for the first time and—again, something a child will understand—that Gandalf sees through at least part of his version of the story.

• The whole thing is just brilliantly written, down to the basic level of word choice and sound. Tolkien manipulates both for maximum atmosphere. The darkness of the tunnels, the weight of the stone above, and the cold and damp of Gollum’s cave are tactile.

• Related: last night, after finishing the chapter with the kids, my wife complimented my voices. I couldn’t take credit: reading Gollum’s dialogue aloud almost creates his voice on its own. Tolkien loads it with sibilants, most obviously, but also lots of breathy, open-throated sounds. And unlike the smooth, respectable Bilbo, Gollum speaks with a jarring, sprung rhythm that reads naturally as disturbed and aggressive.

I should make a more formal study of Tolkien’s work in this chapter here sometime. In the meantime, the short version: This chapter of The Hobbit is the work of a great writer at the peak of his imaginative powers and technical skill. A model worth studying—and enjoying for many years.

Spring reading 2025

It’s been a hard semester, but through it all I’ve had some astonishingly good reading. With over thirty books read I feel like my reading has finally bounced back from the birth of the twins almost two years ago. I had a hard time narrowing this list down, but below you’ll find a handful of favorite novels, history and general non-fiction, and kids’ books, as well as a few honorable mentions in the two main categories and the books I revisited this semester.

For the purposes of this post, my “spring” ended Monday the 19th, the first day of summer classes here at my school. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

A Month in the Country, by JL Carr—A veteran of the Western Front, physically and spiritually broken, is commissioned to restore a defaced medieval mural in a small church in the English countryside. A short, seemingly simple, but rich, beautifully written, and moving story. One I plan to reread soon, as even while reading it I was aware that I wasn’t picking up all it had to offer.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle is an undistinguished scholar of 19th-century British literature and an expert on the obscure Romantic poet William Ashbless. When an eccentric businessman contacts Doyle with the opportunity to lead a group of millionaire tourists to 1810 London to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Doyle is skeptical but accepts. To his astonishment, the businessman’s time travel works—but Doyle is stranded in London when the party returns. Reduced to begging, he encounters Jacky, a girl disguising herself as a man in order to avenge her murdered brother; Horrabin, a terrifying street-performing clown who leads an army of beggars from an underground hideout; Dr Romany, a magician with ties to the gods of ancient Egypt; and Dog-Face Joe, a werewolf with the ability to swap bodies as the one he occupies becomes more and more obviously a monster. As Doyle simply tries to survive and find a way back to the present—with the help, he hopes, of Ashbless, whom he knows from his research will be in London soon—all of these characters try to use him, and even the businessman who got Doyle into this mess turns out to have hidden designs for Doyle, for Dog-Face Joe, and for the capabilities he has developed. This is the best kind of time-travel story, with minimal explanation of how the technology actually works and a great emphasis on a realistically rendered past for the characters to get lost in. The horror elements are, as a friend put it, a “fever dream,” a totally involving and mysterious adventure, and the intricately constructed plot resolves with one of Powers’s most satisfying conclusions. One of the most purely absorbing and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.

Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd—A short but complex and well plotted spy novel concerning a journalist, having gotten a rare interview with the president of a revolutionary government in the decolonizing Africa of the early 1960s, being slowly pulled into the world of espionage and deception. Shades of Buchan and Ambler with a more powerful sense of uncertainty and paranoia than is usual in either. Full review on the blog here.

Bomber, by Len Deighton—The story of a single day and a single fictitious air raid by the RAF on Germany in the middle of World War II. Deighton moves between the bomber crews, ground personnel, German radar operators and night fighter crews, and the civilians and military authorities of the small German town that the bombers, through technical malfunction and bad luck, accidentally target. Brilliantly executed, gripping from beginning to end, with powerful and moving irony throughout. With The Anubis Gates, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—The Jim of the title is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in history at a small English university. Jim is not very enthusiastic about his job but needs to pass the review chaired by his department head, the vague, inscrutable Professor Welch, in order to have his probationary position made permanent. In his increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Welch he gets drunk and embarrasses himself at a party hosted by the Welches, antagonizes Bertrand, Welch’s bohemian artist son, and must contend with a manipulative sometime girlfriend, irrationally hostile flatmates, an earnest student who knows more than he does, and his own growing attraction to Bertrand’s girlfriend, the angelically beautiful Christine. Hilarious and cringe-inducing, Lucky Jim’s vision of hapless academia is often all too recognizable, and Jim himself vies with Ignatius J Reilly as the worst-case-scenario version of myself. Another one I intend to revisit soon.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A short, snappy crime thriller about low-level Boston thugs selling guns and an aging con trying to play the cops and other crooks off each other to his own advantage. Any plot summary will make the novel sound more familiar and predictable than it is. Higgins’s dialogue is excellent and his storytelling reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard. A great surprise, and I’m going to seek out more of Higgins’s work.

Runners up:

• Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John Le Carré—Two short, brisk, sharply observed detective stories that also happened to introduce George Smiley, one of literature’s greatest spy characters, to the world. Read before revisiting The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time since grad school.

• Baron Bagge, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—A moving, dreamlike novella about an Austrian cavalryman’s brushes with love and death during World War I. Full review for Substack forthcoming.

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—An involving fictional account of one of World War II’s many frustrating side-shows by a man in a thick of it. Full review on the blog here.

Special mention

Back in January I read Uppsala Books’ newly republished edition of Waltharius, a medieval Latin epic translated by Brian Murdoch. The story is set in the mid-5th century and concerns Walther of Aquitaine, Attila the Hun (briefly), and other semi-historical figures familiar from centuries of subsequent legend and poetry. I greatly enjoyed it, and wrote about it in some detail here.

Favorite non-fiction

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, by Russ Ramsey—The followup to my favorite non-fiction read last year, Rembrandt is in the Wind, this volume is not quite as good as that book but was still a thoroughly involving, moving, and thought-provoking look at art and faith with the added dimensions of pain and suffering as a theme. I hope to revisit both of Ramsey’s books sometime soon.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—A massive account of the life of James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare has not only read every source, he has spoken to every possible living connection to Fleming and incorporates all of it into the story. At first the level of detail is overwhelming but once Fleming reaches adulthood and steps into his crucial role in British intelligence during World War II the book settles into a confident stride and breezes through hundreds of pages. The result is an exhaustively detailed picture of Fleming, his world, and his work. Bond doesn’t come along until at least two-thirds of the way through, a good reminder of how much life Fleming was drawing from by the time he created this character. It is also powerfully sad. One gets a sense of Fleming as both a first-rate bounder and a damaged little boy who lost a sterling father and lived his life under the thumb of a ghoulish, manipulative mother—and then married a woman just like her, who mocked his books with her highbrow friends during all-night salons while Fleming tried to catch up on sleep. Far from “failing upwards” because he was posh, as I’ve seen some online critics of Fleming assert, Shakespeare shows that Fleming had both natural talent and a powerful work ethic alongside serious personal flaws. Charm and connections may have gotten him far but can’t account for his success—as reporter, intelligence officer, and finally novelist. This is probably far more Fleming than casual readers will want to spend time with, but a very good biography and a worthwhile read.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers—A comprehensive, readable, and fair biography of Poe that pays good attention to his life, character, work, and reputation. A few years ago I read short biographies of Poe by Peter Ackroyd and Paul Collins as well as thematic studies of his life and work—Poe and science, Poe and the American city. I’d recommend Meyers’s longer biography to anyone wanting a more thorough treatment. His examination of the confusing and controversial parts of Poe’s life is especially judicious, and his account of the posthumous smearing of Poe’s reputation and the long process of rehabilitation since is very good.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—Why do so many kids from affluent families have vaguely-defined anxiety? Why do so many in sheltered suburbs suffer from trauma? Why are so many taking psychoactive meds? Why are so many seeing therapists? And, most importantly, why is none of it helping? Shrier’s basic thesis is that modern American parents, operating from fundamentally flawed premises about harm, have panicked and committed whole generations to regimes of psychiatric “help” that actually leave them emotionally stunted and make them more anxious, passive, morbidly self-absorbed, and less resilient. Shrier couples this with a critique of the child psych industry and the dangerous theories its practitioners often field-test through their patients. A tough but necessary read. Should pair well with The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which my wife read about the time I was reading this and which I mean to read sometime soon.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A wide-ranging thematic account of the life and art of the great German Romantic painter as well as a poignant, often bitterly ironic look at his work’s afterlife—forgotten, rediscovered, repurposed, occasionally stolen, and much of it destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson—An interesting look at the political events, social trends, and intellectual currents in a single year that contributed to our present WEIRDER world. I found some chapters weak and the overall point muddled, but the majority of the book is excellent.

• Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood—A good overview of Cicero’s legal career that also attempts to chart the breakdown of law and order in the late Republic. The former is better than the latter, which is when the author strains for relevance or lessons in this story.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garret M Graff—An enjoyable if necessarily incomplete survey of the evolution of the UFO phenomenon since World War II. Full review on the blog here.

Rereads

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Kids’ books

• Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Gareth Hinds from William Shakespeare

• The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander

• Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

• Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim

• James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

Looking ahead

I’m still reading a few books I had started before my cutoff date and I have several more promising reads lined up, including more John Le Carré and Len Deighton and several books for John Buchan June. Stay tuned next month for those. In the meantime, I hope as always that this list leads you to something good to read, and that y’all have a pleasant and restful summer. Lord knows we need it.

Thanks for reading!

The Return

Ralph Fiennes strings Odysseus’s bow in The Return

Last night I finally had a chance to watch The Return, last year’s film adaptation of the climactic second half of the Odyssey. After anticipating it eagerly for some months, and more so as a steady drip of information about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey epic for IMAX has begun, I was underwhelmed.

First, the good. Ralph Fiennes is an excellent choice to play Odysseus and got into gnarly physical shape for the part. He looks every bit the weathered and toughened old warrior-king, and when he first opens his eyes on the beach at Ithaca they shine with sharply focused intelligence.

And, to be honest, that’s about it. There are a few nice touches I want to come back to, but the best I can say of The Return is that Fiennes performs excellently at the center of a movie that doesn’t measure up to what he’s doing.

I had two big problems with the film. The first is that, from production design and costuming to tone, the film is relentlessly dull and bleak. In the first two areas this bleakness betrays a depressing unoriginality and inauthenticity: inauthentic because this is not what Homer’s or Odysseus’s world looked like, unoriginal because The Return offers the same coarse, dingy, brown-on-brown vision of past peoples as primitives that was already old when Monty Python and the Holy Grail spoofed it.

The Return reminded me of Franco Zefirelli’s Hamlet in that it makes token nods toward a popular misconception of what a period is like—rough wool clothing in impractical designs, rickety dwellings made of sticks, cavernous stone palaces—while using flagrantly anachronistic elements—medieval castles in both cases—to create atmosphere. This could be forgiveable. Indeed, I love Zeferelli’s Hamlet. There will probably never be a movie that gives us a realistic look at the Bronze Age world Homer describes, but at least try to come up with something other than a stereotype.

The bleakness of the film’s tone is the bigger problem. Homer is serious when he needs to be, and presents the stakes—for Odysseus, for Penelope, for Telemachus, even for the suitors—seriously, but is never dour. The Return is simply dour. The film has no comic relief, no joy, no gratitude, no fond reminiscence or hope for the future. There is not even an Athena to pity or help or intercede for Odysseus. The Return is not just demythologized, it’s dehumanized.

This tonal problem is rooted in the film’s approach to the source material. The screenwriters have used the Odyssey to dramatize and explore modern pathologies. This is most evident in the case of Odysseus’s two most important allies upon his return, Eumaeus the swineherd and Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. In the film, both of them hate Odysseus for leaving for Troy and tell him so. They help him grudgingly. When he finally reveals himself and kills the suitors, Penelope reacts in horror and intervenes to spare Antinous, one of the ringleaders, whom Telemachus kills anyway. Penelope turns on them both, berating Odysseus for turning their hall into “a slaughterhouse” and leading Telemachus into a life of violence.

At this point, by replacing Homer’s characters with modern people, the story becomes absurd. What did you think was going to happen when Odysseus came back, lady? When Telemachus hesitated to give Odysseus his bow in the first place, why did you tell him to do so? Why did you bother to delay the suitors at all?

Then, in their long-anticipated reunion, Odysseus tells Penelope that he took so long to come home because he was ashamed of what he had become during the war. At this point all clicks into place: he’s been traumatized you see. Everyone in The Return is dealing with trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma, just like a bunch of suburbanites moping their way through life. In place of Homer’s lost world of custom, loyalty, duty, ritual, and protocol, a world in which there is still room for love between father and son and tenderness between a well-matched husband and wife, The Return gives us angst and resentment.

It’s strange to me that the film finally squandered what goodwill I still had toward it during the climax, the well-staged slaying of the suitors. But I suppose it was there that the film shows its hand and I realized how far from Homer this story has wandered.

And yet a few glimpses of Homer shine through. When Odysseus poses as a beggar and is beaten and mistreated by the suitors, I felt an outrage true to the poem. When Eurycleia, Odysseus’s elderly nurse, recognizes him from a scar on his leg and is overpowered by excitement that he has returned, I felt that excitement, too. And, most poignantly of all, Odysseus’s encounter with his dying hunting dog Argos, abandoned outside the palace and the first creature on Ithaca to recognize his master, makes it into the movie. This simple, wordless scene moved me to tears.

If I’m being harsh it’s because I’m disappointed. I’m grateful to see an attempt to treat this story seriously, but grieved that the original wasn’t apparently good enough for the filmmakers. That the most emotionally powerful moments in the film were those lifted from the Odyssey with the least alteration or meddling makes The Return a useful warning against trying to improve on the classics.

I suspect it’s already too late for Nolan to learn the lesson. We’ll see next summer. In the meantime, I plan to reread Homer.