Slaying the dragon

Fairy tales don't tell children that dragons exist... Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

The distinction G.K. Chesterton makes in the above quotation is an important one, I think, and not just for children.

Most of us prefer happy endings. You don't have to be a child to want the dragon to be slain, to want the bad guy to be stopped, to want the lovers to marry and live happily ever after. We would rather finish a book with a smile than a tear — unless it's a happy tear.

In classical theater there are tragedies and comedies. Shakespeare wrote both. The difference may be evident throughout, but the essential difference is that one has an unhappy ending and the other a happy ending.

In real life, of course, tragedy is at least as common as comedy, probably more so. Everybody dies in the end. "Happily ever after" lies in the realm of heaven, not earth. And so our most serious writers often prefer tragedy. Comedy may feel forced, unrealistic, dependent upon coincidences and remarkable good fortune.

Yet just as clouds can have silver linings, so unfortunate endings of stories can have something positive about them, and this is often the case in the best novels. I think of some recent novels I have read — such as The Stolen Child by Ann Hood, Heft by Liz Moore and When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzen — in which main characters die or problems remain unresolved. Still the authors give their readers something hopeful at the end. Lessons have been learned. Behavior has been changed. The future looks more promising, at least for some, than it once did.

I think of the Nick Hornby novel A Long Way Down, in which a group of people meet on New Year's Eve at the top of a tall building, all planning to jump off. They agree to meet regularly to talk over their problems. For each the problems that made them consider suicide remain, yet when they go to the top of that building a year later, they do so to admire the view, not to jump.

The importance of slaying the dragon, as Chesterton recognized, is that it leaves the reader with hope. With confidence. With the will not to give up, not to be a victim, not to surrender before the fight.

Sometimes slaying the dragon can mean something as simple as not giving up.

Hollywood and holistic turn 100

Hollywood — the term, not the place — turned 100 this year. Today many, if not most, movies are made somewhere else. It can be cheaper to make a movie in Atlanta or Vancouver than in a Hollywood studio. And so the word has come to mean less the place where movies are made than the activity itself or the lifestyle.

Each year at this time I open the Sol Steinmetz book There's a Word for It, published in 2010, and celebrate some of the words that have just turned 100. Hollywood is one of them.

1926 was a year, a few years after the Great War and a few years before the Great Depression, when people were feeling great. There was relatively new technology, and people were inventing new words to refer to new devices. That year brought us both fridge and mike, short for refrigerator and microphone.

And speaking of technology and new ways of doing things, it was also the year that gave us angioplasty, bar-b-q, cosmetic surgery, cosmetician, market research, nutritionist, pressure-cook and meals-on-wheels.

Not all was roses that year, however. There were hints of darker times. The words totalitarian and totalitarianism came into existence that year.

And then there were all those other words that entered the English language 100 years ago: airtime, blooper, boosterism, combo, cultish, downturn, expandable, fantasize, finagle, gig, gimmick, holistic, hormonal, online, pep talk, punditry, quickie, recycle and tunesmith.

Our language would be much less rich without 1926.

The sense behind the senselessness

Early-twentieth-century industrial civilization created the Western Front deadlock by producing weapons better at killing than at conquering, suited perfectly to the needs of defenders and not so much to those of attackers.

Alan Axelrod, The Battle of the Somme

The trench warfare of World War I, especially the Battle of the Somme, makes little sense to most of us more than a century later. Why would you send thousands of troops directly into German machine gun fire? In The Battle of the Somme (2016), Alan Axelrod makes a little sense out of what seems now so senseless.

Axelrod, a military historian, excels as an explainer of things. Why send lightly armed soldiers against machine guns. Because the generals didn't expect the machine guns to be there? And the top generals were miles away from the carnage and so didn't even know about it until it was too late. The attacking soldiers had simply been convinced that there was nothing to worry about.

The generals has ordered days of heavy artillery fire against the German trenches before the assault and didn't expect any Germans to survive. The problem was, the German trenches were nothing like the English and French trenches. Instead of simple holes in the ground, the Germans built underground fortresses that could withstand heavy artillery. When the shelling ended and the attack began, the Germans simply came out of the ground and opened fire.

It may seem odd, but the Germans, who had invaded France, actually played defense. For the time being, they weren't going anywhere. The Allies, meanwhile, felt compelled to drive the Germans out of France. So they become the attackers. And in trench warfare, these in the trenches had a big advantage over those on open ground.

The battle actually lasted for months, but mostly we remember the first day, July 1, 1916, because that is when most of the killing took place.

Too much information

When my son was a boy, I discovered it could be a mistake to ask him about what he was reading. What I wanted was a simple review. What was it about? Did he like it? What I got instead was a long, plot twist-by-plot twist description of everything that took place in the book.

That memory returned as I was reading Literature in 30 Seconds or Less! (2021) by Tim Rayborn. Rayborn, whose name appears nowhere, not even on the cover, until an "About the Author" at the end of the book, gives us two-page summaries of 100 literary classics, including several you have probably never heard of. He covers numerous cultures and time periods. If the work — novel, nonfiction, poetry, play — was important to somebody at some time in some place, he includes it.

The trouble is, he tells us about these literary works sort of like my son used to tell me about a book he had just read. This happened, then this happened, then this happened, etc. When we are reading a book, these developments come gradually, giving us time to understand and digest each one. When presented altogether, they become a confusing jumble.

Even works I loved when I read them seem terribly boring when Rayborn writes about them. Why would anyone want to read them?

Two books in particular escape this treatment. One is The Trial by Franz Kafka. Kafka's plot is so simple that the summary sounds enticing, rather than confusing. The other is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. This novel is long and has so many characters that a two-page summary would be impossible. And so Rayborn gives us just a general idea of what the novel is about, which works. Never before have I actually wanted to read that novel.

As a long-time book reviewer, summarizing books is sort of what I do. Yet I try to avoid the details and just give the gist of the book. Most of the characters and most of the plot developments I simply ignore. I think this works. If you want to know everything that happens, read the book.

When writing about Fahrenheit 451, Rayborn tells us that the author Ray Bradbury hated "the very idea of ... a summary." He should have paid more attention to Ray Bradbury.

Divided love

When I last visited the Murderbot Diaries, in Exit Strategy, the part-human, part-robot at the center of the series had feelings for Dr. Mensah, the woman for whom it is more or less working. (After having deactivated its governor at the start of the series, the SecUnit is a free agent, but it likes protecting Dr. Mensah because it likes Dr. Mensah.)

In the next installment, Network Effect (2020), however, the self-described Murderbot develops feelings for an intelligent spaceship, a research transport named Perihelion. Murderbot calls it ART. They quarrel like lovers. Is that what they have become?

In the novel, Murderbot works to protect Dr. Mensah's daughter, a teenage girl named Amena. But she, Murderbot and others are kidnapped and find themselves aboard ART. The novel is more technical and complex than others in the series, and it is also much longer than the others, but readers can get the gist as Murderbot struggles to protect its humans, rescue ART's humans from evil ones simply called Targets and return to Dr. Mensah — with the news that it is leaving her for ART.

Along the way, Murderbot must duplicate itself, creating Murderbot 2.0. Murderbot's faithful readers won't want to miss Network Effect, despite all the difficulties it poses both for them and Murderbot.

Nurse Fletcher

The writer Robert A. Liston is best known for his book The Pueblo Surrender, but he wrote books of all kinds and was amazingly prolific. He wrote books on alcoholism, urban America, psychotherapy, censorship, housing and numerous other topics. He also wrote novels.

For a time he lived in Richland County, Ohio, where I worked. I reviewed books, including his books, and sometimes he appeared in my office for a conversation. On one occasion he told me that he also wrote romantic novels using a female pseudonym. He refused to tell me his pen name, fearful that I might reveal his secret identity and that women would stop buying his books if they knew they were written by a man.

The best books of his that I read were a couple of thrillers, The Seraphim Code and The Brandywine Exchange. Both were paperback originals and neither was a bestseller, but I liked them and gave them good reviews. One of them, however, contained perhaps the most embarrassing mistake I have ever found in a book, and it was weird being the one to tell the author about it.

Louise Fletcher

The book makes a reference to "Nurse Fletcher" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I had read the Ken Kesey novel as well as seen the movie, so I knew the character's name was actually Nurse Ratched. She was played by Louise Fletcher in the movie, and she won an Oscar for that performance.

I can remember the shocked look on Bob's face when I told him this, his smile turning quickly into a frown. It was a silly mistake that both he and his editors missed. Perhaps it was an understandable mistake, revealing just how closely Louise Fletcher was identified with that character. I don't think she ever had another notable role.

I doubt that the novel ever had a second printing, meaning that it was a mistake that could never be corrected or apologized for. Perhaps I shouldn't have told him about it.

Living other lives

The quantum multi-universe theory that physicists like to talk about has been explored by novelists, especially Matt Haig. Peng Shepherd considers the possibilities in her 2024 novel All This and More.

Shepherd imagines a reality TV show in which a 45-year-old woman named Marsh, with a marriage that has lost its spark and a talented daughter who seems to be growing apart from her, is given a chance to explore different lives. She once fantasized about joining a circus, being an actress and so forth. Now she is given a chance to actually live these lives.

Marsh isn't the only one who gets choices. Readers, too, can decide which path they want her to take. Or so it seems. A believer in the sanctity of marriage, I chose paths that promised a second chance with Dylan, her husband. Yet each of these lives quickly led to Ren, a high school boyfriend who hasn't given up hope.

Marsh tries life after life, seemingly finding all the happiness that was missing from her real life. As women always seem to think the men in their lives need improvement, most of the changes in her life seem to be motivated by her desire to make small changes in Ren.

Yet one thing is always true about reality shows. They aren't real. There are all those cameras, for example. And just as the readers' choices seem manipulated, so do hers.

Marsh must eventually face the question of whether a perfect life is what she really wants.

Reading All This and More can be confusing. And it doesn't seem consistent with quantum theory. If you could move from one universe to another, would you remember your life in other universes, as Marsh does? Yet her daughter doesn't — and doesn't even seem aware of all those cameras.

The novel reminds us, as Matt Haig's The Midnight Library does, that the life we have may not really be so bad after all.