Correcting the past

That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

How can you travel into the past without changing the present? That question lies somewhere in most time-travel novels, but few writers deal with it as directly as Connie Willis does in her 1998 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog. Another in her series of novels about historians of the future studying history by going back into the past, this screwball comedy of a story has as its main focus an attempt to correct missteps made by other historians that might affect the outcome of World War II.

Seemingly incidental events can have big consequences, and so historians Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are sent back to 1880s England to return a cat and to see that the cat's owner, a girl named Tossie, marries the right man, a mysterious Mr. C. They know from a diary fragment that she is supposed to meet Mr. C on a certain date, but how can they bring them together when they don't know who Mr. C. is, especially when she is already engaged to marry another man?

This all gets very confusing for anyone who is not Connie Willis, but she maintains the comedy and the banter at such a high level that readers shouldn't mind too much. Not as satisfying as her later comic novel Crosstalk, this is nevertheless an enjoyable romp through time, with stops in the Coventry cathedral during the 1940 bombing, a medieval dungeon and elsewhere along the way.

The novel is filled with literary references to William Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other writers. Ned even sees the three men in a boat that inspired Three Men in a Boat.

Willis also dips into metaphysics. Religion has been ruled nonessential by Ned and Verity's time — sort of how most governors and mayors regard it during the present virus — yet time itself becomes a mystical force that rules the universe. The "continuum wanted those things to happen," we are told.

Willis makes the same mistake made by a number of authors writing about the future — George Orwell, for instance — by not setting her story far enough into the future.  Our historians are from the year 2057, time travel was invented between 2013 and 2020 and cats became extinct in 2004. Apparently she never imagined people would still be reading her novel in 2020 and finding those dates laughable. That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.

A mismatch made in heaven

The problem with book critics — and at a minor-league level I guess I am one — is that they tend to think they know better than authors how they should have written their books. You can imagine the possibilities, both comedic and dramatic, when a literary scholar marries his favorite author. Michael Frayn does exactly this in his 1989 novel The Trick of It.

Frayn tells his story in a series of letters from Richard, a professor in England, to his friend in Australia. Richard has made himself an authority, even the authority, on the author he refers to as JL, and sometimes as MajWOOT (major writer of our time). She accepts his invitation to speak at his college, they wind up in bed together and sometime later are married. Then the real problems begin.

Richard has no interest in teaching any other writers, yet lecturing about and writing about his own wife's novels has become awkward, eventually causing him to accept a teaching position in Abu Dhabi, of all places. JL follows him, though unhappily, on the assumption that she can write anywhere.

The bigger problem is that JL, who has never even read anything Richard has written about her, won't take his advice. He is convinced he knows how she can improve her writing, but she refuses to listen. Her popularity increases when one of her books is adapted for a television miniseries, while his own small place in the literary universe evaporates — except perhaps for those letters.

Frayn's novel makes amusing, and sometimes confusing, reading. Many readers will be put off by its showy narrative style, but I am not going to suggest how he might have made it better. I found it a delight.

Slow down and think

 "Books slow me down and make me think, and the Internet speeds me up."

Student, quoted in Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf

That student, whoever it might be, has already learned something important. Books slow us down. Books make us think. Both are good things.

Most of us, because we are busy or just impatient, usually want to do more more quickly. We try to do two or more things at once. We speed through one task in order to move on to the next one. Even in leisure time, most people today have their phones in their hands when watching television or even when engaging in conversation. This need for speed is not necessarily something new — some of us remember Cliff's Notes, which made it possible to get the gist of a book without having to actually read the book — but technology has made it easier to speed up our lives. Not just easier, but all but unavoidable.

It has become difficult to slow down even when we want to, as with a good book or, for that matter, a leisurely walk in the park. I try to spend a few hours each day reading books, yet even with this habit formed over the years, I still find it difficult to focus, especially on difficult books, for more than a few minutes at a time. I am always eager to take a break for a cup of tea or a game of Spider. So I can easily understand why books, not e-books but real books, have become more of a challenge for anyone who spends a lot more time with their phones or tablets each day than I do.

There is a conviction in our culture today that students who do not have a personal computer in their classrooms are somehow disadvantaged. Perhaps the real disadvantage falls on those who do not spend enough time each day with books they can hold in their hands and turn the pages one by one. Compared to reading — or skimming — on the Internet, this seems slow. But, as the student said, it makes us think, and by pausing to turn pages it gives us time to think. Books make it easier to reread interesting passages, to underline if we are so inclined, to bookmark our place, and to remember what we read.

Changes in the reading brain

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic — whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers.

Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

In her 2018 book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf cites a number of scientific studies indicating that while people may be reading more each day on their smartphones and computers than ever before, their ability to comprehend what they're reading has decreased. They can't stay focused on one thing for long. Their reading usually involves a lot of skimming and skipping, not concentration on a single subject.

Yet what really convinced Wolf was when she tried to reread Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, a novel she had loved when she was in college. Now she found it difficult to focus her attention on it for more than a page or two at a time. "The rapid speed to which I had become accustomed while reading my daily gigabytes of material did not allow me to slow down enough to grasp whatever Hesse was conveying," she writes.

If Wolf, an authority on reading and former director of the Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research, finds this to be true, imagine how true it must be for the rest of us, and especially for children who spend much of their day on computers, even while in the classroom.

Children and their education are major concerns of Wolf, who is also an expert on dyslexia. She is a big believer in reading to children, including those too young to actually understand what is being read to them. She is enough of a realist to know that turning back the clock on the digital age is not possible, but she does advocate for exploring ways to use computers to increase, rather than decrease, attention spans.

The implications of this dumbing down of readers of all ages are vast. "Sometimes we outsource our intelligence to the information outlets that offer the fastest, simplest, most digestible distillations of information we no longer want to think about ourselves," she says. It was once thought that the Internet would make possible an even greater diversity of thought and ideas, yet as sites such as Google, Facebook and YouTube have become more powerful and have begun to censor ideas they disapprove of, the opposite has become true. Those incapable of seeking truth on their own could become sheep easily led.

Shyness doesn't sell books

 I've often wondered how I would have managed if I'd been born with a stammer or chronic shyness. The modern writer has to be able to perform, often to a huge audience. It's almost like being a stand-up comedian, except that the questions never change and you always end up telling the same jokes.

Anthony Horowitz, The Word Is Murder

Neither a stammer nor chronic shyness should be a handicap for a writer, and until recently it wasn't. Many, if not most, writers have been at least somewhat introverted. It can be difficult for extroverts to sit alone in a room for long periods of time and write. They want to get up and go somewhere and do something with other people. Instead of writing about their lives, they just want to live them. Introverts live their lives, then want to take time to think about their experiences and their ideas. Sometimes these thoughts come out in written form.

Lewis Carroll was shy. So was E.B. White, Joan Didion and so many, many others. Other writers have probably had stammers. It didn't matter. Nobody stammers on paper, and it is on paper where writers are most themselves.

What Anthony Horowitz is referring to in his novel The Word Is Murder is how in today's publishing world authors are expected to sell their own books. In the old days money was set aside for publicity campaigns, and ads ran in many major publications. I can recall when a large ad for an Anthony Grey novel called Peking ran in Sports Illustrated for several weeks in the 1980s, and the novel has nothing to do with sports.

Most newspapers of any size carried book reviews. Today there are fewer newspapers, very few of which still carry book reviews. There were literary critics, such as Alfred Kazin, who were almost as well known as the writers they wrote about, and to be written about by one of these critics was all the publicity necessary to sell quite a few copies.

Those days are gone. Now writers can't just finish one book and start on the next one. In between they must go out in public and sell that book. That means doing signings in bookstores, making speeches at book fairs and festivals and often sitting behind tables covered with their books for entire weekends talking with readers. They are also expected to make videos to promote their books. On YouTube you can find several videos featuring Horowitz talking about his various books. There is no sign of either shyness or a stammer. Lucky for him. But think of those writers, and there must be many of them, who cannot speak as fluently as they can write. This part of their job must be a torment for them.

J.K. Rowling is one shy contemporary author who has managed to sell a great many books. Most of those like her are not as fortunate.

Like true crime

Making fiction sound like fact is the goal of most novelists, but few writers succeed in this objective better than Anthony Horowitz in The Word Is Murder (2018). The story seems so real that readers will be tempted to double-check the cover to make sure it really does say "a novel."

This is because Horowitz makes himself the narrator and a major character, and he goes into some detail about his career as a novelist (The House of Silk) and as the writer of the Alex Rider books for children and Foyle's War, shown on BBC and PBS. He even makes characters out of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson when he has a conference with them about a movie script he has been working on. The line between truth and story becomes something of a blur.

A former police detective named Daniel Hawthorne comes to Horowitz with a proposition. He asks Horowitz to write a true-crime book about a murder he is investigating as a police consultant. He wants Horowitz to be the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes, in other words.

Hawthorne was fired for reasons he declines to explain, but because of his exceptional skill he is hired whenever a difficult case comes along. Such a case is the murder of Diana Cowper just hours after she had made her own funeral arrangements. Horowitz doesn't like the idea of writing a true crime book and sharing royalties with someone else, and he likes Hawthorne even less, yet the case sounds too intriguing to pass up.

Ten years previously Diana Cowper had been the driver in a hit-and-run accident in which one boy was killed and his brother permanently disabled. Does her murder have something to do with this? Or is it somehow related to her son, Damian Cowper, a major Hollywood star? Like the cops, conducting their own investigation, Horowitz has his own theories about the murder, and like the cops he is always wrong.

Horowitz has written novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, and now he gives Hawthorne Holmes-like abilities. Mystery lovers will enjoy this tale, and they will be happy to know Hawthorne returns in The Sentence Is Death.

Saving the great horses of Europe

If you attend a performance by the Lippizzan stallions, as I have on at least three occasions, you are likely to hear a story about how Gen. George Patton saved these horses at the close of World War II. The whole dramatic story, in which Patton played a small but important part, is told in The Perfect Horse (2016) by Elizabeth Letts.

In 1941, the U.S. Army decided horses no longer had a role to play in modern warfare, and the cavalry switched entirely from horses to tanks. Not so most European countries already mired in war. Horses were still important. The German army, for example, used an estimated 2,750,000 horses, mostly to pull wagons and guns. Most of these horses became casualties of war. As the war made food scarce, horses became an important food source, especially for the advancing Russian army near the end of the war.

And so the threat against the Lippizans at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, as well as against other prized horses in Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe, became intense. Betts details the efforts of various people, including some German officers, to protect the most valuable horses. Yet the greatest threat came near the end of the war when these horses, which had survived the Nazis, were now threatened by the Russians.

Fortunately the U.S. Army still had officers, including Patton, who rode horses earlier in their military careers and continued to appreciate them. This led to a daring rescue of many valuable horses just before the end of the war, saving them from the Nazis, the Russians and the many hungry people in Eastern Europe.

Many of these horses were shipped to the U.S.,  where the Army, now out of the horse business, didn't know what to do with them. The horses were mostly unregistered and, despite their excellence, were not in great demand when the Army tried to sell them. So the ending of this story is not as as upbeat as we might wish. Yet the Spanish Riding School in Vienna was saved, and Arabian horses, such as the great stallion Witez from Poland, became recognized as the one of great horse breeds.

Wrapping up Toby Peters

Mildred Pierced (2003) was the 23rd of the 24 Toby Peters mysteries written by the late Stuart M. Kaminsky. Like the others, it is Hollywood-based, featuring real movie stars, and outrageously funny, in addition to being a good mystery. This time Joan Crawford witnesses a murder and hires Toby, a private investigator, to keep her name out of the papers.

Toby has another reason for his interest in the case, namely that Sheldon Minck, the hapless dentist he shares an office with, stands accused of murdering his wife, Mildred, while supposedly practicing archery. He doesn't know why Sheldon loved Mildred, but he knows he did. So there must be something else going on. Besides, he knows Sheldon couldn't hit the side of a barn from inside the barn, unless he was aiming at something else.

One can sense during the course of the novel that Kaminsky is wrapping up the Toby Peters series. Not only does Mildred Minck, a continuing character, die, but so does the wife of Toby's brother, a Los Angeles cop and a frequent Toby ally and nemesis. By the end of the novel, the brother has left the police force and joined Toby's detective agency. And then Sheldon comes into a lot of money when one of his outlandish inventions actually works. So either the series must be ending or it must be taking off in a new direction. Unfortunately it was the former.

Before his death in 2009, Kaminsky wrote several more mysteries in his other series, including the Abe Lieberman books and the Inspector Rostnikov books, but just one more Toby Peters mystery. They are all great fun, but Mildred Pierced, along with A Fatal Glass of Beer (featuring W.C. Fields) ranks among the best.

Serious crime

Richard Stark and Donald E. Westlake may have been one and the same person, yet their books are dramatically different. True, both wrote about crime, but Westlake's criminals, especially his Dormunder gang, were mostly harmless and mostly hapless. Nothing ever went right for them. It was all about the comedy. Stark, meanwhile, wrote about Parker, a hardcore professional who leaves few clues, and fewer laughs, behind.

The Outfit (1962), one of the earliest Parker novels, finds him with a new face, thanks to plastic surgery, but still with the same lifestyle. In the opening chapter he's in bed with a woman when a hitman breaks in to kill him. Parker gets the upper hand and discovers the hit was ordered by the head of the Outfit, a nationwide crime network.

Parker decides to take on the Outfit. First he writes letters to all the freelance criminals he knows, telling them that if they have ever considered striking one of the Outfit's operations, most of them involving illegal gambling, now was the time to pull off those jobs. Meanwhile, Parker himself, aided by a semi-retired associate, goes after the head of the Outfit.

As usual in these novels, the action is fast-paced, and other, even worse criminals, not innocent civilians, are the only ones who get hurt.

Actually this Parker novel does have one thing in common with the Dortmunder novels. Parker enters a bar where the restrooms are labeled "Pointers" and "Setters." This same gag, among the few ever used by Richard Stark, would later be used by Donald E. Westlake in most of the Dortmunder adventures.

Art and morality

It is neither the responsibility nor the purpose of art to make us better human beings.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

In the essay called "Ten Things That Art Can Do," found in her book What to Read and Why, Francine Prose also mentions one thing art can't do or doesn't necessarily do, namely "make us better human beings."

Among those things art can do, as itemized by Prose, are to make us smarter, to give us pleasure, to expose us to beauty and to move us emotionally. But can it make us better in the ethical sense?

The lingering idea left with me by the movie Girl With a Pearl Earring is how lacking in moral conviction are the artist Vermeer and the man who so admires Vermeer's paintings that he almost single-handedly supports the artist and his family. Their appreciation of great art doesn't translate into concern for others or, at least in the sponsor's case, even basic decency.

Art, music and literature are taught in most schools for many of the reasons Prose mentions, but moral education is probably not one of them. A person who admires Vermeer is not necessarily a better human being than one who favors a velvet Elvis or a painting of dogs playing poker.

Yet certain questions nag at me. Why were so many cathedrals, church, temples and mosques made to be so beautiful? Why so much religious art? What's the point, if art doesn't make us better human beings?

Perhaps there is one way in which art can make us better, and that is if it is viewed, as one might view  a gorgeous sunset, a rainbow or a mountain landscape, as a sign of God's grace. When we feel blessed by God, inspired by God, forgiven by God, we might, who knows, actually strive to become better human beings, our way of returning God's favor to us.

Knaves in space

On our Earth, we've perforce learned all the knavery there is to know.

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade

Contrasting advanced civilizations with more primitive ones has long been a staple of fantasy fiction. Mark Twain set the standard with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Most time-travel stories are of this sort, in whichever direction the time traveler goes. Eric Flint's 1632 and its sequels explore this theme, as do any number of other books.

One of the classics is Poul Anderson's 1960 novel The High Crusade. Here the plot revolves around space travel, not time travel. A spaceship from a distance planet lands in 14th century England. The Wersgorix empire, having already conquered many other planets, is scouting out Earth as another possibility for expansion. They plan to turn Earthlings into slaves.

Sir Roger, about ready to set out on a Crusade to the Holy Land, takes over the spaceship, but then is tricked into loading virtually the entire village, including horses and livestock, into the ship, which instead of taking them to France, as Sir Roger believes, heads out to the planet Tharixan.

Yet Sir Roger is not defeated yet. The Wersgorix may have sophisticated technology and weaponry, but they are no match for Sir Roger's knights on horseback and especially his knavery. Sir Roger and his men prove more capable of understanding Wersgorix technology than the Wersgorix are of understanding close combat with swords and spears. Instead of the Wersgorix conquering Earth, the tables turn in the opposite direction.

Anderson's plot has a few twists and several interesting characters, and 60 years later the novel still makes amusing reading.  It was one of the author's most popular books, and one can see why.

Writing like we talk

They fell for each other when she was in London and love has been burgeoning ever since, if burgeoning means what I think it means, until they felt they could bear being separated no longer.

P.G. Wodehouse, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

P.G. Wodehouse

One of the running gags in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen and other Jeeves and Wooster novels is Bertie Wooster's desire to sound more intelligent and better educated (never mind that he attended Eton) than he really is. And so he searches for impressive words and literary quotations, usually depending upon his man Jeeves to fill in the blanks.

Many of us, though we lack a Jeeves in our lives, are much like that, in our writing if not in our speech. My wife, when writing letters, would often ask me for a fancier word to say what she wanted to say. I usually told her the everyday word she had in mind would work perfectly well. Even so I understood her compulsion to find more high-sounding language. I often suffer from the same malady.

In her book What to Read and Why, Francine Prose talks about the papers written by her college students. "I have never heard a student use, in conversation, the words attire, surmise, or, especially deem ('the story can be deemed as being ironic,' 'her face could be deemed as kindly'), but these words recur, almost every year, in the first papers they write for my classes," she says.

Notice that she wrote "first papers," for after this she tells them "not to write anything that they wouldn't say." In other words, write the way you talk. I assume she refers to basic vocabulary, not youth slang or phrases like "you know" or the incomplete sentences many of us use in our speech.

The other day I wrote that John Simpson, when hiring people to work on the Oxford English Dictionary, rejected anyone who used the word hone in interviews. That may have had something to do with the pretentiousness of the word as it is so often used. I feel much the same way about the word craft, as when actors accepting Oscars use the word.

Prose writes, "It's remarkable how rapidly students' writing improves — how much clearer it becomes — when they feel liberated from the burden of forcing their ideas through the narrow channel of 'thus we see,' the constricted passageway of 'furthermore, the man's attire could the deemed characteristic of his gender and social status.'" We write better when we write like people talk.

One question nags at me, however. How does one explain the literary success of the likes of James Joyce, William Faulkner and Henry James?

The last of Bertie

Bertie Wooster's life is beset with the usual challenges in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974): an aunt, of course; young lovers with obstacles on their path to matrimony, and gruff older men, who usually provide those obstacles. But this time there's a newcomer to the plot, a cat.

Published when P.G. Wodehouse was in his 90s, just a year or so before his death, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen is more reflective of the time in which it was written than most Jeeves and Wooster novels. There's a reference to Billy Graham, for example, even if the Billy Graham of the novel is a poacher, and there's a passage about leftists throwing bottles at police officers that reads like it could have been written yesterday. But demonstrations, sometimes turning violent, were also commonplace in the early 1970s.

When Bertie finds his body covered with spots, his doctor suggests rest in the country, and his Aunt Dahlia offers him a village cottage that seems ideal, especially because Jeeves happens to have an aunt living in the same village. This aunt takes Jeeves away for most of the story, leaving Bertie on his own, which always means trouble.

Bertie's aunt has a ulterior motive for her invitation to her nephew. She wants him to hide a stolen cat.   The cat pacifies a certain horse about to race against another horse on which Aunt Dahlia has placed a great deal of money. Bertie, showing a stronger sense of ethics than usual in these tales, objects and hires Billy Graham to stealthily return the cat. The cat, however, likes Bertie and keeps coming back.

Meanwhile Vanessa, the daughter of the man with the horse and the cat, happens to be the bottle thrower. She is also a young beauty who once rejected Bertie's marriage proposal, to his great relief after he came to his senses. Now, after a fight with her boyfriend, she tells Bertie she will marry him after all, and she begins immediately to start reforming him, reminding him of why it was such a great relief when she previously turned him down. So Bertie is stuck with both a cat and a fiancee he doesn't want. Where is Jeeves when he needs him?

Wodehouse may have been a very old man when he wrote this novel, but it shows no sign of a decline in his ability. In fact, this is better than the earliest Jeeves and Wooster stories. It's pure delight from beginning to end.