A Handful of Dust

My trip through the works of Evelyn Waugh continues with A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh's most autobiographical and hard-edged works. Sharp readers may intuit spoilers in the review below. It shouldn't really harm the reading experience, but be forewarned.

The man who loved Hetton

A Handful of Dust tells the story of Tony and Brenda last, an aristocratic couple living a quiet and apparently contented life with their son John Andrew in Tony's ancestral family home, Hetton. Hetton is an unfashionable Victorian gothic mansion that Brenda cordially dislikes. Tony adores it. It's not just his home, it's his family's home, the seat of the family legacy, and the symbol of his responsibilities as a family man and aristocrat. 

Tony and Brenda cross paths with John Beaver, a shallow cipher of a man who bums his way from one party and country house to another, living off of wealthy friends. He's everyone's second choice for filling seating arrangements. This is simply unthinking parasitism—he's too full of nothing to be malicious. When Beaver shows up at Hetton mostly uninvited, Tony, a quiet man who dislikes intruders and prefers his routines, fobs him off on Brenda, who is a more skilled entertainer. 

Beaver makes an impression on Brenda, not for any strengths or attractive qualities, but for his very emptiness and pliability. She begins an affair with him, absconding to London more and more often under the guise of studying economics. Brenda, perhaps owing to a guilty conscience, even tries to lure Tony into his own affair with a succession of vacuous and self-absorbed acquaintances. Tony, oblivious, and loyal to Brenda to the end, ignores them all.

The crisis comes when, with Brenda skipping out on an actual opportunity to entertain guests at Hetton, Tony and Brenda's son John Andrew has a terrible accident. When a friend tracks down Brenda and tells her that something has happened to "John," she misunderstands at first and, when she realizes it's her son John and not her lover John, she blurts out, "Thank God." Then she breaks down weeping.

After this Brenda seeks a divorce, and Tony is stunned not only at the tragedy that has befallen the family, but at his wife's betrayal. He nevertheless—because he has "contract[ed] the habit of loving and trusting Brenda"—agrees to grant her grounds for a divorce, which leads to a series of comically inept attempts to stage an infidelity involving hired detectives and a good-time girl with an annoying daughter.

Finally, Tony, fed up, drops the divorce suit, refuses to cooperate with Brenda's efforts to secure alimony, and joins up with an explorer setting out to find a lost city in the Amazon. The ending—with Tony hopelessly trapped in the jungle, Brenda remarried to one of Tony's only friends, and Hetton in the hands of distant cousins—is a shock.

The savages at home

Those in the know place A Handful of Dust at a crucial joint in Waugh's body of work, a transition from straightforwardly farcical satires of university and boarding school life, imperialism, or the "bright young things" of fashionable London, to the more reflective and sharper Catholic novels of his maturity.

Waugh's first wife—also named Evelyn—divorced him after having an affair, and Waugh, as oblivious as Tony, was devastated. He obviously drew on these experiences in constructing the story, which was an expansion on a previous short story, "The Man Who Loved Dickens," about an eccentric illiterate who lived deep in the Amazon basin and loved nothing more than to have Dickens read to him for two hours daily by a hapless prisoner. "After the short story was written and published," Waugh wrote later, "the idea kept working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them."

A Handful of Dust is a more difficult read than the other books I've read so far. Not because of its style or technique—it's as effortlessly elegant as any of the others—but because its protagonist, the "civilized man" Tony, faces a conga line of tragedies and betrayals at the hands of merciless savages and his virtue goes unrewarded. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film: 

there are passages where we cannot quite believe how monstrously the characters are behaving. We Americans like to see evil in terms of guns and crime and terrorists and drug smuggling—big, broad immoral activities. We rarely [tell stories] about how one person can be personally cruel to another, through their deep understanding of what might hurt the other person the most.

It's a hard read, but a powerful indictment of shallow society and the destructive selfishness of modern people. I recommend it highly.

More if you're interested

Charles Sturridge directed a film adaptation of A Handful of Dust, which was released in 1988. It stars James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas (Clemmie Churchill in Darkest Hour) as Tony and Brenda, with Rupert Graves (Lestrade to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes) as John Beaver, and Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, Stephen Fry, and Alec Guinness in supporting roles. I found a copy at our local library and plan to watch it this weekend.

Here's novelist Joseph Kanon discussing the book with the Wall Street Journal Book Club.

John Mahoney, RIP

John Mahoney died three days ago at the age of 77. Everyone remembers him—justifiably—as "Frasier's dad," a part he performed wonderfully opposite Kelsey Grammer for eleven seasons. I want to pay tribute to two other performances Mahoney gave before Frasier took off, the two performances I always associate with Mahoney, and to a aspect of his life I've only learned about since his death.

Eight Men Out

Mahoney as Kid Gleason in Eight Men Out

One of my favorite movies—and, in my opinion, the best baseball movie out there—is Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 World Series scandal that ended the careers of eight players for the Chicago White Sox. Mahoney plays Kid Gleason, a veteran ballplayer and now the manager of the Sox. Mahoney doesn't have a lot of scenes in the film, which gives much more attention to the players involved in the bribery scandal—Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn), Buck Weaver (John Cusack), Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), and Shoeless Joe Jackson (DB Sweeney). But in his handful of scenes, Mahoney evokes enormous pathos. Gleason is a father to his players. He's proud of them and trusts them, not just to win ballgames but to play to the standard he has seen them set.

As the World Series unfolds, we see Gleason confronted with evidence he doesn't want to believe. He goes to his players, tries to get them to open up to them, and when they won't, we see, in a wonderfully subtle performance, his heartbreak. During the court case that follows, we see Gleason try to salvage his boys' reputations by standing up for them in the face of all the evidence against them. It's hopeless, and we know it even if he doesn't. It's tragic, and Mahoney plays it excellently. His pride, his disbelief, and finally his disappointment—who hasn't felt their heart pricked upon hearing "I'm disappointed in you" from their father?—command your sympathy and sadness.

Watch Mahoney in his handful of insert shots in the Game 3 montage, at the emotions he takes the viewer through in just a few seconds of screentime. 

Barton Fink

Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink's memorable introduction

The second film—and my favorite Coen brothers movie—that has made me respect Mahoney is his comic turn in Barton Fink. As in Eight Men Out, Mahoney does a lot with a relatively small supporting part. Barton Fink is the story of a socialist playwright who makes the move from New York to Hollywood just before World War II. There, with an enormous opportunity to spread his message and make some good money, he develops writer's block. While Barton is still trying to adjust to the Hollywood lifestyle, he encounters Mahoney's character, WP Mayhew, for the first time—a dapper Southern gentlemen puking his guts out in a restaurant bathroom. His first line to Barton, while washing his hands: "Sorry 'bout the odor."

Mayhew is an alcoholic writer whose critically acclaimed modernist novels have, like Barton's plays, attracted the attention of Hollywood, where he's been slumming ever since leaving the South. (Mayhew is, incidentally, loosely based on William Faulkner, and Mahoney in his bowtie and mustache is a dead ringer for the man.) With just a handful of scenes, Mahoney creates a character whose magnificence lies well behind him, and contributes mightily to Barton's disillusionment with Hollywood in general and writing in particular. After the initial shock of meeting Mayhew wears off (almost immediately, given the circumstances), Barton has almost nothing good to say of his one-time idol: "He's a big fat phony!" and, after Mayhew's put-upon secretary and lover weeps over a drunken Mayhew and says how sorry she feels for him, "He's a son of a bitch!" And, thanks to Mahoney's performance in what could have been a straightforwardly slapstick role, you can see why both characters feel the way they do.

Mahoney the man

Since his death a few days ago, I've learned a little about Mahoney the man. I try to avoid reading about the personal lives of actors since they're usually sordid and disappointing, but I was happy to learn a bit more about Mahoney. The respect and humility he brought to his craft were remarkable, and I think, in hindsight, that it shows in the finished product. He viewed acting as his vocation and approached it as an outgrowth of his faith: 

I’ve always prayed to the Holy Ghost for wisdom and for understanding and knowledge. I think he answered my prayers when I stopped in the church that day. My life was totally different from that day on. I saw myself as I was, and I saw into the future and saw what I wanted to be. And I sort of rededicated myself to God and begged him to make me a better person. It wasn’t fear of hell or anything like that. I just somehow knew that to be like…what I was, wasn’t the reason I was created. I had to be better.

And the prayer he would pray before each performance he gave:

Most glorious blessed spirit, I thank you for all the gifts and talents that you’ve given me. Please help me to use all these gifts and talents to their fullest. And please accept this performance as a prayer of praise and thanks to you.

Not a bad approach to our daily work, whatever it may be. Nor is this humble prayer a bad way to approach our fellow man:

Dear God, please help me to treat everybody—including myself—with love, respect, and dignity.

Actor John Mahoney, RIP.

Fad-proofing yourself

"I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old." —CS Lewis

This morning I rediscovered an old column called "Reading Old Books," by the late political commentator Joseph Sobran. In it, Sobran describes the best reason to read old books by long-dead authors; not because they will teach us any particular lesson—far from it—but because our contact with them and their distant mentorship will help us resist the currents of our own age. 

These are perhaps my favorite paragraphs of the piece: 

There are no particular classics, not even Shakespeare, that you “must” read. But you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind—a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof.

As Sobran cites CS Lewis as one of these voices, these internal councils of his own later in the piece, I have to assume he had Lewis's great essay "On Reading Old Books" in mind when he chose his theme and title. Lewis's essay was a preface to a new edition of St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation, itself an old book, one of the oldest in the Christian literary tradition. Compare Lewis's more detailed observations about fad-proofing:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

This is one reason people used to quote Shakespeare, Milton, or the Bible so much. They had read them often enough that the authors' perspectives became internalized, as familiar as household words, independent perspectives that could be consulted at will. The fact that the phrase "household words" has become a cliche is a measure of at least Shakespeare's influence. It's part of what separates living within a tradition from political tribalism or mere pop culture.

Lewis is certainly one of the "internal councils" I have absorbed and that continue to speak to me, a council I've kept alive by reading and rereading his books. Add to him his friend Tolkien, GK Chesterton, Dante, the Beowulf poet, Homer, and Aristotle and you've got a handful more. 

What internal councils have you cultivated in order to fad-proof yourself against "the thought-factory we call public opinion"? 

Teen Dantexting

Friend of this blog Jay has posted a fun parody of those guides to teen texting abbreviations. Parents, use his guide to find out if your teen has been texting about Dante.

A few samples:

NSFW: Ninth sphere for win
SMH: Saw Malebolge, horrible
YMMV: You must meet Virgil

A few of my own suggestions of what to look out for as you monitor your kids' High Medieval literature texting habits:

TTFN: Take that, Farinata
BC: Berate Ciacco
OMFG: On my flying Geryon or Only Malacoda farts—gross!
BBL: Burning Brunetto Latini
SMFH: Simony makes feet hot
ROTFL: Remember only things following Lethe
ICYMI: In Cocytus you meet icicles

No Man's Land

Soldiers of the Wiltshire Regiment attack across no-man's-land at the Somme, August 1916.

It's the last day of January. How many New Year's resolutions lie in smoldering ruins? I've managed to give new life to two of mine—losing weight and reading seventy books—through a simple change of routine. I'm spending half an hour on the stationary bike every day, half an hour to exercise, clear my mind, and read. I've already managed to blister through three novels this way: Evelyn Waugh's hilarious Scoop, Ready Player One (about which more at another time, perhaps), and the subject of today's post, No Man's Land, by Simon Tolkien.

I haven't actually finished No Man's Land yet, but I already want to recommend it. It was a breath of fresh air, after the empty ephemera of Ready Player One, to read a novel that, while imperfect, wants to grapple with real life, with things that matter. 

No Man's Land is the story of Adam Raine, a London boy whose father, a socialist labor activist, moves himself and Adam to a coal mining town in the north of England. There, Adam's father, a changed man after the tragedy that drove them from London, struggles as a union negotiator to balance the demands of his fellow workers with the realities of mining life and the claims of the mine's owner, Sir John Scarsdale. Adam struggles to fit in; he's a bright, bookish boy and his father works hard to keep him in school and out of the mine. Demagogues and agitators threaten Adam's father's position and the safety of everyone in the mine, and local boys show a natural hostility to Adam. Another tragedy brings the two halves of this story together, and sets Adam's life on a new and unexpected course.

When Adam is taken in by Sir John with the promise of seeing that he completes his schooling and has a chance at an Oxford scholarship, Adam becomes close with Seaton, Sir John's elder son, a principled, good-humored army officer, but falls foul of Brice, Seaton's younger brother, a boy Adam's own age. Brice is conceited, self-absorbed, and entitled. He also aims to marry Miriam, the beautiful daughter of the local parson and the object of Adam's admiration since the day he met her. 

The novel begins in 1900, when Adam is a small boy, and, as the title suggests, the First World War is the ever-present, looming threat to all of this—to Adam's romance with Miriam, to the mine and its workers and their families, to Sir John and his heirs, to Britain, and to the lives of all the characters. When war comes, most of them end up in the trenches. Adam, Seaton, and their peers from Scarsdale end up at the Somme.

I have less than 200 pages to go, and the story has just brought us to July 1, 1916, the awful first day of the British assault on the Somme, a day that saw over 19,000 British soldiers killed, most within the first few hours, and another 38,000 wounded. The author depicts the battle in all its horror, without flinching or holding back. Not all of the characters made it out of that first day--and the Battle of the Somme lasted until mid-November. 

With its class struggle, romantic rivalries, and large cast of workers, housewives, butlers, country parsons, lords, and ladies, No Man's Land teeters on the brink of melodrama. Comparisons to Downton Abbey suggest themselves, but the novel reminds me more of Dickens than contemporary TV. The characters are sympathetically portrayed and well-drawn, and their conflicts with each other feel real. This is especially refreshing in a Games of Thrones era in which everything is resolved with murder, rape, or some combination of the two. 

Most interestingly, and something the publishers have taken full advantage of in promoting the book—the novel is dedicated to JRR Tolkien, the author's grandfather. Simon Tolkien drew on his grandfather's experiences at the Somme as an inspiration, and certain elements of the narrative, such as Adam's chaste, dutiful pursuit of Miriam, reflect real moments from Tolkien's life. The novel is mostly fiction, the plot and characters mostly fictitious, but its connection to a remarkable real life man lends the novel a richness that elevates the book.

I may have more thoughts when I've finished the book. As I've said, it's imperfect, but it's very, very good, a refreshingly old-fashioned novel that realistically and sympathetically depicts a crucial historical moment through the lives of ordinary people. 

What readers say about Dark Full of Enemies

Dark Full of Enemies has been out for a month now and the first reader reviews are coming in!

John, reviewing the book on Goodreads, describes the novel as

An Alistair MacLean-style, World War 2 commando mission story. It follows McKay, a clandestine super Marine called on to form a team of expendables and blow up a Nazi dam in Norway. McKay is sleep-deprived, guilty, unsure of himself--yet focused and cold-blooded once the bullets start flying. 

When the novel revs up, it's simple to the point of poetry. Plans go awry; friendships are tested; trust is annihilated and restored; many things explode and get shot up in ways the reader will find satisfying. At its core, Dark Full of Enemies is the story of a man's search for meaning in the back alleys of a world at war.

Steven, a reader reviewing the novel on Amazon, writes that 

The action occurs in a place I had not heard of before and adds another dimension to the story. . . . The story helps make the characters come alive and the events move quickly. I would recommend this to those who like novels based on history but appreciate some action. 

In a starred review at Goodreads (four out of five), Jay writes: 

In McKay, Poss writes a soldier in conflict with his senses of loyalty to country, duty to his mission, concern for his men, and dignity as an individual. The resolution to the conflict is satisfying, even if it has a whiff if blockbuster drama/thriller about it. 

Though Dark Full of Enemies is fiction, the war it takes place in was all too real. I would recommend this book to those interested in World War II and/or historical fiction. Personally, Poss' book has encouraged me to learn more about the Scandinavian campaigns. 

In an unsigned Amazon review, a reader writes: 

What an awesome read that has you from page one immersed into the story. He has the ability to make you part of the plot and to paint with words the environment you are in. The dark, the extreme cold, the danger surround you. I highly recommend Dark Full of Enemies!!!

Reader Jared, also reviewing the book at Amazon, writes: 

Once started, I couldn't put this book down. It takes the harsh realities and impact of war and pulls it glaringly into the light. . . . Doesn't matter if you are a history buff or just an adventure addict, this is the book for you.

Check out the above reviews, and stay turned for more. If you've read Dark Full of Enemies, I'd love for you to share your opinion of the book on Amazon, Goodreads, or elsewhere. If you haven't, check it out and let us know what you think!

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes

This is a good time for Norse myth—or at least it should be. Thor is one of the most popular parts of the central cast of the Avengers series, TV is loaded with Viking or Norse-themed programming, and last year geek darling Neil Gaiman released Norse Mythology, his own retelling of some Norse legends. 

Unfortunately a lot of this pop culture is just Norse-flavored. The Thor, Odin, Loki, and Asgard of the Marvel franchise are entertaining but considerably different from their original versions. TV shows like Vikings have serious historical problems. And even Gaiman's Norse Mythology, an entertaining enough read, limits its focus to the gods—and not just to the gods, but to the subgroup of the Æsir—and his depictions of their personalities owe more to the characterizations of Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston than to the dark and often inscrutable gods of the eddas. 

An excellent short introduction

I was really pleased, then, with a new book I read last week by Carolyne Larrington: The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, from Thames & Hudson. I found the book on the recommendation of Dr. Jackson Crawford of UC Boulder, about whom more below.

I was already familiar with Larrington thanks to her excellent recent translation of the Poetic Edda (a.k.a. the Elder Edda) for Oxford World Classics. She's an accomplished expert in the field and clearly loves the material, which is a good combination when approaching something as diffuse, arcane, and incomplete as Norse myth.

What we know is based almost entirely on the Poetic Edda and another work by Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda, and it is apparent from both that we don't have all the stories the Norse told about their gods and heroes. What we do have is episodic, allusive, and varies wildly in tone, sometimes within the same stories. Larrington retells the myths carefully, noting often what we do and do not know about the fuller mythology, and retelling them mostly on their own terms, without a lot of modern reinterpretation. Where she does offer "explanations" of certain tales, she is appropriately undogmatic.

A few things I appreciated about Larrington's book:

• Short, well-told summaries of the major myths, with good explanations of things first-time readers of Norse mythology would need to know.
• Larrington uses the original spellings of the gods' and heroes' names throughout, including the letters eth and thorn: thus Oðinn instead of Odin and Þorr instead of Thor. This seems like a minor detail, but I think it helps distance the reader from comic books or modern interpretations and open them to the originals.
• Sidebars on interesting side stories or other topics.
• Over 100 illustrations, many from Romantic era books with anachronisms like winged helmets, but the pictures are a welcome help in imagining the stories. Many others are photographs of archaeological finds like the Lewis chessmen, rune stones, or the Oseberg ship or reproductions of original medieval or early modern Icelandic drawings.
• Larrington is refreshingly frank about the unappealing nature of the Norse gods. Where Marvel's Thor is a well-intentioned but arrogant young warrior who learns humility and self-sacrifice and Odin is a wise—and, well, godlike—old man, the real Þorr is an unapologetically violent bruiser who kills people for humiliating him and Oðinn is a malevolent trickster who first favors then traduces mere mortals in order to stock his hall with warriors.
• Larrington includes excellent summaries of several major human heroes, including Volsung, Sigurð the dragon-slayer, and Ragnar Loðbrok. 

All in all, an excellent short book, and a great introduction to the topic. I recommend this heartily as a first stop.

More if you're interested

Check out all of the books I mentioned above, but especially the original sources for our understanding of Norse mythology, the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda.

In addition to Larrington's translation of the Poetic Edda, the aforementioned Jackson Crawford has an excellent new translation available from Hackett Publishing. As a bonus, he includes his adaptation of the Hávamál, "The Sayings of the High One," the Cowboy Hávamál, a western-inflected interpretation inspired by his grandfather. You can listen to Crawford read it here.

Another book Crawford recommends in the video linked above is the longest and most complicated of the Icelandic sagas, Njals saga, or The Saga of Burnt Njall. I read the Robert Cook translation he recommends while I was working on the first draft of No Snakes in Iceland after college. It's a wonderful book, one I've been meaning to reread for years.

Fortunately, Crawford has just completed a six-part summary retelling of Njal's Saga for his YouTube channel. You can watch all six parts below. Check it out!

Part I: Hrút and young Hallgerð
Part II: Gunnar's rise
Part III: Gunnar's fall
Part IV: Njal's sons
Part V: The burning
Part VI: Kári

Darkest Hour & Churchill in film and history

Yesterday I saw Darkest Hour, the latest in a welcome—to me—spate of Winston Churchill films. 

Those who complained of Dunkirk's crucial lack of generals pushing flags around map tables have the movie they wanted in Darkest Hour—this film takes place almost entirely in smoky conference rooms and halls of power. That's not a criticism—there should be room for both kinds of movies. But Darkest Hour is much, much more than a recreation of grand strategy and the decisions of powerful men. It's an excellent dramatization of determination in the face of defeat and the crucial role one man can play.

The film

When Darkest Hour begins in May 1940, Nazi Germany, flush with diplomatic victory in Czechoslovakia (1938) and military conquest in Poland (1939), Denmark, and Norway (April 1940), has invaded France. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, once lauded as the savior of world peace, is now derided and mocked to his face in Parliament. Chamberlain recognizes that he must step down, and that political and military necessity require the formation of a coalition government between rival parties. Chamberlain nominates Lord Halifax as his successor, but it rapidly becomes clear—to the immense exasperation of Chamberlain, Halifax, and King George VI—that the only member of their party that the opposition will accept as head of a coalition is Winston Churchill.

Darkest Hour follows Churchill—65 years old, outspoken political pariah and flipflopper, veteran of many failed imperial and military ventures, the most prominent of which is the Gallipoli campaign—through roughly the first month of his premiership, into but not quite through the crisis at Dunkirk, which plays out, off-screen, through the last third or so of the film. Throughout, Churchill must battle rivals within his own government, especially Chamberlain and Halifax, who want to pursue negotiations with Germany in order to avoid further bloodshed and the total destruction of the British army in France.

The performances throughout are excellent. Gary Oldman, in heavy prosthetics and a fat suit, is very good as Churchill. His voice never quite loses that familiar Gary Oldman timbre, and he sounds whinier than Churchill when reaching into the upper registers, but he captures a great deal of the spirit and especially the energy of the man—the real man, not the icon. Oldman ably walks the line between caricature and character assassination, about which more below. 

Other standouts include Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in HBO's John Adams) as Lord Halifax, depicted here as perhaps oilier and more conniving than in real life but a powerful opponent to what Halifax perceives as Churchill's recklessness with the lives of British soldiers and civilians. Ronald Pickup is good as a politically disgraced and physically failing Chamberlain. Kristin Scott Thomas is good as Clemmie Churchill and Ben Mendelsohn is good as a standoffish George VI who must warm up to Churchill over the course of the film. Lily James brings the luminous innocence of her characters from Downtown Abbey, Cinderella, and Baby Driver to the small—probably too small—part of Elizabeth Layton, Churchill's new secretary. Crucially, all of these performers work well together, and especially with Oldman, who is willing to share his scenes with other characters rather than grandstand.

The film is beautifully scored by Dario Marianelli, and beautifully shot by Bruno Delbonnel. Especially stunning are scenes set in Parliament or Churchill's underground war cabinet. A radio broadcast lit by the red On Air bulb is particularly striking. The cinematography has a digital sheen that I don't care for, but digital cinematography is in the ascendant; you won't see many more Dunkirks going forward.

Darkest Hour as history

A brief word about the film's historical accuracy, something I've mentioned before that I care a lot about. 

Darkest Hour depicts an intensely busy and chaotic month in one of the most dramatic events of world history. Naturally, the screenwriter and filmmakers have massaged the material to fit within a two-hour runtime. Characterizations are mostly accurate, and the events themselves are largely true to the historical record.

I was underwhelmed by the famous and apparently controversial scene in which Churchill travels one stop on the tube and talks to ordinary Londoners. One reviewer, who apparently didn't pay much attention to the movie, claims that Darkest Hour "dishonors Winston Churchill's memory." The tube scene is charming and sentimental—and extremely restrained compared to the sentiment in historical films by Steven Spielberg—but hardly dishonors the man. Oldman, in an interview linked below, described it as "lyrical," a poetic scene that aims at "emotional truth" rather than literal, events-based drama. I'm fine with that.

Like those of another great World War II film, Valkyrie, the events of Darkest Hour are well known. What the film succeeds at brilliantly is portraying the doubt and fear of living through those events ignorant of the outcome. That's always a worthy achievement.

But the film Darkest Hour reminded me most of was Lincoln, with its dramatic depiction of how ideals and determination must force their way through the realities of political life: compromise, cooperation, wooing, and sometimes abject failure. Like Lincoln, Darkest Hour is held together by a great central performance. And through those perfomances both films show us leaders who can accurately parse what is and is not important, which hills to evacuate and which to die on, and, rather than succumbing to defeat or cynicism or mere jockeying for power, see the big picture and drive toward it.

Dueling Winstons

As I mentioned above, there have been a number of films about or prominently featuring Churchill in the last few years. While waiting for Darkest Hour to start, I was able to tick off seven others:

The Gathering Storm, starring Albert Finney
Into the Storm, starring Brendan Gleeson
Churchill's Secret, starring Michael Gambon
Churchill, starring Brian Cox
The King's Speech, with Timothy Spall as Churchill
The Crown, with John Lithgow as Churchill
Inglourious Basterds, with Rod Taylor making a cameo appearance as Churchill

And there are surely more.

Oldman is a powerhouse in Darkest Hour, but as I've hinted above, I never quite overcame my sense that I was watching a really good performance. The voice, for me, was the giveaway. This is not to detract from Oldman's performance or the film—go see it—but Oldman will ultimately come up second or third in my favorite cinematic Churchills.

Albert Finney's performance in The Gathering Storm is a longstanding classic, a handsome and well-acted TV movie that gives you a very good sense of Churchill out of power. This is Churchill during his "wilderness years," politically ostracized and barely making ends meet through his writing. Finney is excellent. The best sound-alike I've come across is certainly Timothy Spall in The King's Speech, where he has a small and not particularly accurate role in the abdication crisis. Into the Storm boasts one of my favorite actors, Brendan Gleeson, as Churchill, but Gleeson is too burly for Churchill and the film is a rather cheap-looking TV production. Michael Gambon, the second Dumbledore, was miscast in Churchill's Secret, which also missteps by devoting a lot of its time to a fictional nurse's personal struggles. I haven't seen last year's other Winston movie, Churchill, but I love Brian Cox and he apparently gave a solid performance in a film that was—speaking of character assassination earlier— otherwise garbage.

To the surprise of no one more than myself, perhaps the best Churchill performance I've seen recently—vying with Finney's classic and the bold new Oldman—is John Lithgow in The Crown. 

Lithgow is too thin and tall—by eight inches—for Churchill, and he's American to boot. So what a wonderful surprise to see a nuanced, carefully balanced and real portrayal of Churchill. To me, Lithgow's unlikely Churchill perfectly blends the traits that make it easy to caricature the man in one direction or the other: the crankiness and amiability, the cold blooded determination and maudlin sentimentality, the confidence and bouts of depression, the devotion to honor and tradition and the political calculation, the high-flown grandiosity and candid self-deprecation. Churchill was both a frustrating man and one who inspired intense devotion. I haven't seen both sides of him portrayed quite as well.

More if you're interested

A few books and other resources that I've enjoyed and benefited from on the topic of Winston Churchill in World War II:

Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings is a comprehensive look at Churchill's wartime leadership, including much, much more than the month covered by Darkest Hour, including Churchill's ill-fated courtship of American help (carefully and subtly portrayed in Darkest Hour), his obsession with commando operations and opening a front in the Mediterranean, and his eventual marginalization by Roosevelt in favor of Stalin and his fall from power. It's a triumphant and tragic story brilliantly told. I highly recommend it.

The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill & Hitler, by John Lukacs, is a short, brisk history that frames May and June of 1940 as a battle between two titanic personalities at the height of their powers. Both Churchill and Hitler struggled with recalcitrant subordinates and military setbacks, and both traveled extensively back and forth between command centers and points of crisis as the invasion of France unfolded. Lukacs, with pointed insight, does an excellent job of laying out the parallels but also, more importantly, explaining the deep differences between the two men and their sides and foreshadowing the different courses Churchill's and Hitler's wars would take. As I watched Darkest Hour, I was reminded again and again of The Duel, and when I watched the end credits I realized why—Lukacs served as the film's historical advisor. 

Lukacs has also written Five Days in London: May 1940 and Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning, Churchill's First Speech as Prime Minister, two short books on even narrower slivers of Churchill's early leadership: a few days during the collapse of the Allies in France and a single speech to parliament. 

Winston Churchill: A Life, by the late Sir John Keegan, is a short biography from the Penguin Lives series. Keegan manages to compress Churchill's massive life into a brisk 200 pages, with good attention given to his wartime years. I recommend this biography to anyone setting out to study Churchill for the first time.

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Great Speeches is a wonderful Penguin Classics collection of Churchill's oratory from across his long career, including the three immortal speeches dramatized in Darkest Hour.

Finally, Dan Snow of the History Hit podcast has two excellent interviews on Darkest Hour available: one with Anthony McCarten, the film's screenwriter, and another with Gary Oldman himself, who is remarkably humble and candid about his approach to portraying Churchill. Each interview is around twenty minutes long, and well worth the time to listen.

In conclusion

Go see Darkest Hour. It's a very good film and an excellent look at one month of history. Pair it with Dunkirk to get a sense of those events from the top down and the bottom up. And check out some of those other Churchill films. If you already have and have a favorite film version, let me know which it is with a comment. But above all, dig into the history and learn from it. It's something Churchill himself, no mean historian, would heartily endorse.

Writing Rules

John J. Miller, who teaches journalism at Hillsdale College and hosts the excellent Bookmonger and Great Books podcasts, offers five pieces of writing advice inspired by great advice from other writers.

Be sure to follow Miller's links to Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing and the great Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language," which is always worth a read. Orwell's final piece of advice is crucial.

The Second World Wars

Just before Thanksgiving I had the honor to talk with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian whose work I've long admired, about his most recent book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won. An analytical rather than chronological history, Dr. Hanson's book looks at World War II from multiple perspectives—like industry, leadership, infantry, armor, and naval power—to examine why the Allies won, the Axis lost, and why the war was the bloodiest in human history.

This interview is part of the Christian Humanist Profiles series. Profiles is a member of the Christian Humanist Radio Network. Listen in to my interview with Dr. Hanson below, and check out the network as a whole.

John Ronald's Dragons

Saturday morning I took my kids to the library. My daughter insisted on finding a picture book "bout dragons," so I went to the catalog computer, and once I had narrowed the search to that particular branch of the library and its kids' collection, I found this gem: John Ronald's Dragons: The Story of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Caroline McAlister with illustrations by Eliza Wheeler. 

John Ronald's Dragons is a children's picture book biography of the first half of Tolkien's life, and it's wonderful. The story follows young John Ronald from his youth in the Midlands to school, his move after his mother's death when he was twelve, his meeting and courtship of Edith, his experience in World War I, and finally his professorship at Oxford where, one day while grading exams, he came across a blank sheet of paper and scribbled "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." The theme throughout is Tolkien's love of dragons, and the illustrations bring out the inspirations for his dragons in his everyday landscape.

The story is well told and a good jumping off point for your kids. I'm a bit of a nerd about Tolkien and his life, and so I would have liked more detail on, for instance, his remarkable courtship of Edith (when his guardian worried that she would interfere with his studies and forbade him to see her until he was twenty-one, Tolkien obeyed; he sent her a proposal the day of his twenty-first birthday), but this is a succinct and warm retelling that kids will enjoy. My daughter certainly does. We've read it five or six times in two days.

The illustrations are beautiful—far and away the best feature, and the best I've seen in a picture book in quite a while. The pictures include many real places, especially Oxford locations like the Hertford Bridge and the Eagle and Child, with a cameo by C.S. Lewis. Illustrator's notes at the end of the book point out some nice details tucked away in some of the pictures: a fountain pen that Edith gave John Ronald for his birthday, a copy of Beowulf hidden in his study, distinctly hobbit-like neighbors from Tolkien's childhood in the background of a landscape scene. 

Perhaps my favorite—or at least the most evocative, to me—shows Tolkien huddled in a trench, hard at work on Quenya, as tanks breathe fire in a treeless no-man's-land above.

The climax of the book is a trip through two-page landscapes from The Hobbit, in which John Ronald follows Bilbo and a troupe of dwarves through the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and across the Long Lake to find "his dragon," a lavishly illustrated Smaug hulking above a mountain of gold. Sharp eyes will note a golden cup and the Arkenstone among the pile of treasure.

As a geek bonus, the end matter includes a list of dragons from Tolkien's work, including Glaurung, Smaug, and the underappreciated Chrysophylax, and quotations from several of his essays and lectures on dragons. Good stuff.

John Ronald's Dragons is a beautiful picture book and I highly recommend it. It's a double treat in that I can read my daughter a book about one of my favorite authors and both of us enjoy it.

Visit the publisher's page for some full-page samples of the gorgeous illustrations.

Another Dark Full of Enemies sighting

A few paperback copies of Dark Full of Enemies have been sighted at Re/Max of Rabun in my hometown of Clayton, Georgia. They're available at the front desk for just $10, three dollars off the list price of $12.99. Stop by and pick one up while they're still available!

If Clayton is too far a drive, you can always find it and my other books at Amazon. Enjoy!