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The Last Tsar
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The Last Tsar the Life and Death of Nicholas II by Edvard Radzinsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I wrote in an earlier review about the apocalypse that the Russian revolution must have been to Christians who lived through it, those who had come of age in a self-consciously, imperially Christian nation finding themselves citizens of an atheistic regime in active and open revolt against the structures of the faith. But what about the ruling family themselves, the Romanovs? This book is a portrait of the life of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, focusing on the tragedy of his final months and his ultimate execution, along with his family, at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Radzinsky is apparently one of Russia’s most well-known playwrights and has written multiple volumes of popular history, of which this is one. He has given the book a strange format: we get glimpses of the author working through the archives of the royal family and various local Soviet archives (many recently declassified) as he pieces together his story. We also see old soldiers or Soviet officials coming out as glasnost takes hold, sharing with the author their recollections or letters of what happened in those final days. Overlaid on this background is the historical narrative itself, episodic to the point of being fragmentary and dramatized by the playwright’s eye. Knowing how the story ends, everything is foreshadowed by the conclusion, and ominous forebodings are read backward into the first days of the Tsar’s reign and even further, into his courtship and childhood. Radzinsky also often adds his speculations and reflections to the documentary material as the story is being told, giving a view of matters that if accurate still seems sensationalized.
The events of the book though are dramatic enough on their own, and my primary frustration was not the author’s style so much as the book’s lack of scope. It was apparently written for those who already knew Soviet history and who were trying to fill a very specific hole: what exactly happened to the Tsar, his wife, their daughters, and the heir in those chaotic last days. It was written for a Russian audience during a time in which new information was coming to light, but it meant much of the background was assumed.
This was especially apparent in the book’s first half, before the scope collapsed down to the Tsar’s family in their last house of imprisonment. Before this, documenting the last days of the Tsar’s reign, the casual Western reader is faced with a farrago of names unfamiliar and events for which he or she doesn’t have the context. I was still left clueless as to how exactly the Russian forces dissolved along the German front during the First World War and how Russian society turned up-side-down so quickly that the autocrat and commander in chief became a criminal and prisoner in his own palace. The Bolshevik Revolution was a tide that swept him and his family– and an entire social structure– away, and though we are treated to the surreal reversals (the disappearing guards, the palace that becomes a prison) through the eyes of the Tsar’s journals, the broader context is never outlined. For a reader already familiar with Russian history, the tight focus would be fine. For me, it meant I was as lost as Nicholas for much of the work.
The second half, once the old world had been swept away, was an easier read in this respect, and the foreboding and foreshadowing language the author used at times to the point of distraction during his survey of the Tsar’s reign now falls away as Radzinsky can focus on the grim details of their final imprisonment. He has the preoccupations of a playwright here as well: outlining their final setting like a stage, fussing with getting the characters of the final assassins outlined and pinned down, spinning out speculations and motives in the final political maneuverings before the royal family’s deaths. He is deeply sympathetic to the Romanovs, presenting their final attitudes as ones of stoic, Christian resolution and even– especially in the case of Nicholas– self-sacrifice and martyrdom for the greater good of his nation.
My fear was that with the sensationalism of earlier portions of the work, Radzinsky would focus too much on the grisly detail of their execution, but here he takes a circumspect, investigative approach. This was especially interesting in his exploration of events following the execution, as he works with records and clues to reconstruct their burial and reports on subsequent investigations regarding the recovery of the bodies. He lingers as well on the legends that sprang up regarding the possible survival of one of the daughters and the heir, Alexei Romanov, himself. The legends are easy to entertain (though they’ve since been disproven), because the entire story is told through the long, shadowy lens of decades of secrecy and Soviet rule. In some ways, this may be the most effective aspect of the book: illustrating not simply the nature of the regicide itself but the effort it took to piece together the details so long after the fact.
Mysterion
Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith by Donald S. Crankshaw
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I was interviewing for a place in the graduate program for the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame, there was a dinner attended by prospective students and a few professors. We had all gone through the interviews and met several of the faculty, and one of the senior professors at the meal that night asked if we had any remaining questions. I had one: I wanted to know about the relationship between the program and the university’s Catholic identity. “What does it mean,” I asked, “that this program is at a Catholic school?”
The professor seemed to appreciate the question. He paused for a minute, and then he gave what I thought was a great response. He said something like, “It means that we take religion seriously. It means we don’t discount it as a significant factor in history.” It did not mean that everyone I took a class from would be a Catholic or a Christian, and it did not mean that Christianity would be the dominant theme in every (or even very many) lecture. (Though it did mean there would be a crucifix hiding somewhere in every room.) But I appreciated his answer, and I thought it largely accurate.
Mysterion is a new anthology of science fiction and fantasy (featuring one of my stories) that takes a similar approach to Christianity. It is not a collection of stories by Christian authors, nor is it a collection of what I would consider “Christian fiction” (fiction written from a Christian perspective with the intention of inspiring or instructing or converting).
Rather, Mysterion is a collection of stories that take religion seriously as a feature of the world in which the fiction lives. The editors, as they explain in their introduction, recognize that Christianity is a big, messy, dynamic, fruitful thing, and one that, as the title of the anthology suggests, still harbors a multitude of mysteries. Rather than tidy, systematic modes of thought or practice, this anthology suggests (and I think the editors were trying to show) that Christianity—as a living, ancient tradition—can be a starting point for good fiction, and likewise good fiction can be an effective lens for examining and even questioning such a tradition.
If the common thread in each of these stories is some form of serious engagement with Christianity, this still leaves for an incredibly broad sweep of approaches, from the brutal (James Beamon’s “A Lack of Charity”) and the grim (Mike Baretta’s “The Physics of Faith”) to the straightforwardly inspirational (Laurel Amberdine’s “Ascension”) or the subtly powerful and historical grounded (Sarah Ellen Rogers’ “Horologium”). The pieces in here represent everything from hard science fiction to humorous fantasy to surrealist and (I’m excluding my own, though you can read a nice review of it here) are for the most part strong and stirring, asking deep questions and sounding some interesting depths.
Whether or not your own background or perspective is informed by the Christian faith, if you’re a fan of the likes of Lewis and Tolkien, some of these themes will be familiar. If you’ve ventured in the deeper waters of Swanwick, Wolfe, or Lafferty, you may have a few additional signposts for this voyage. But the stories stand on their own, regardless of the context of faith. None of them need a grounding in Christianity to work, in other words. For these stories, with the exception of one or two, the faith angle is not the only angle.
The anthology is lovely as a book as well. The volume is solid, weighty, and impeccably edited. I didn’t catch a single typo on my read-through. There’s a helpful short bio for each author in case you’re interested in searching out more of their work, as well as a thoughtful introduction by the editors. The cover art doesn’t seem to correlate with any specific story but rather with an overall aspect of the theme: narrow is the doorway and rough is the path that leads Elsewhere. (Look closely at the rune on the top of that doorway.)
I won’t go through each of the stories, as that would obviously spoil some of the fun of diving into them yourself, but I will offer some highlights. The volume opens with a strong piece by Daniel Southwell entitled “The Monastic,” about a religious hermit on an island in the midst of Lake Superior and of some of the ancient things that still linger there. “Forlorn,” by Bret Carter is a great ghost story with a unique telling that builds toward a satisfying twist.
“Golgotha” by David Tallerman, along with “This Far Gethsemane” by G. Scott Huggins, may have been my two favorite pieces in the volume. “Golgotha” tells the story of an earnest missionary’s encounter with a pagan deity who is more than witchcraft and rumors. It is told in the language of the day with a voice of a sympathetic narrator who provides a balance between the puritanical rigidity of the missionary and the stark reality of what he encounters. And it asks an interesting question about the cost of proselytizing, about what things are lost and what are gained with Christianity and civilization, but from a perspective other than simple post-colonialism. Rather, what if it’s the old god himself asking these questions?
“This Far Gethsemane” reminded me the most of any story in this volume of golden-age science fiction with the trope of introducing a new species and then using it to explore interesting questions about our own. In this case, the trope is pulled off expertly as Huggins tells the story of a human grad student horrified to find that missionaries have already arrived at the planet where she is doing her studies and moreover that some of the local lifeforms have accepted this religion. Even worse, some of them are willing to take the tenants of Christianity to their logical conclusion, even when it flies in the face of their own biology.
There were several good pieces here, and I could easily add to this list F. R. Michaels’ whimsically disturbing “Cutio,” Rachael K. Jones’ haunting “St. Roomba’s Gospel” (a reprint of a story first published in Diabolical Plots), Joanna Michal Hoyt’s timely historical piece “Cracked Reflections” and two I’ve already mentioned, the grimly apocalyptic (and effective) “The Physics of Faith” by Mike Barretta, which would have left a dusty taste in the mouth of one finishing the volume if it weren’t the lovely “Horologium” by Sarah Ellen Rodgers, which was an excellent piece to finish on, leaving one pondering the mystical and historical roots of devotion as well as its costs.
Mysterion is a collection of stories that take Christianity seriously, and as such explores the implications (and not simply the positive implications) of the faith. Whether or not that aspect of the anthology is compelling to you, the stories succeed in showcasing a variety of voices and offering a satisfying read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy, one for your local library, one for your pastor, and one for all your friends.
Hypnos 5.1
I tell myself I don’t like scary stories. I definitely don’t like gore. I don’t watch horror movies. I don’t like walking away from a novel or collection of stories feeling like I need to give my mind a shower.
And yet I do love a good ghost story. When I was in grade school, my notebooks were filled with stories of monsters hiding in the dark. Years later, my first novel was born in a science fiction short story. And my most recent published story, “Bone Orchard,” found a home in the latest issue of Hypnos, a journal of the macabre.
Hypnos is horror with class. It has a certain sophistication (my story’s inclusion notwithstanding). As the magazine’s website explains, it wants to be a publication that highlights the strange and the weird lurking beneath the everyday and ordinary. It isn’t horror for the sake of shock value or goresplatter. Rather the stories in here are finely-wrought pieces (for the most part) with the twists and the subtle unsettling wrongness of Lovecraft or Victorian horror. This is about the thing in the attic, the thing in the woods, the thing almost forgotten in the past—not about the serial killer down the street.
There were some genuinely creepy bits in here. We Shall All Eat of the Tree by Lawrence Buentello was horrific in a monstrously Lovecraftian way, and The Spider by Hanns Heinz Ewers was also genuinely frightening. There were stories dripping with atmosphere, with the setting itself providing the depth and unnerving aspects, like Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb and Old Dominion by Michael Gray Baughan. Especially impressive (to me) though are those stories that can take on the tone and time of another place or culture seamlessly, like Edward Lucas White’s Lukundoo in Africa, James M. Preston’s Dr. Price in colonial America, and Ralph Adams Cram’s Dead Valley in Scandinavia.
There were also a handful a pieces that, though they were still rich and creepy, didn’t feel quite like they had the depth of atmosphere of these other pieces and rather would have been at home in a contemporary magazine where the shadows didn’t lay so heavy. In particular I’m thinking about I Baked Him a Cake by Samantha Kolesnik, Way Station by Jamie Killen, and The Cold Girl by Michael Fassbender. Almost all of the works in this volume were solid, and only one or two felt amateurish by comparison. The issue concludes with a reprint of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil.
It’s an enigmatic production, thick and perfect bound with a cover that makes it look almost like a historical journal. There is no context to the authors within, no bios or links to websites or funny quips about how they live in a cottage in Kentucky with seven cats. They’re all anonymous wanderers who have stepped in out of the storm for a moment to tell their tales. If you want to know more about these writers, you’re going to have to do some digging on your own. Even the editorial that opens the volume, which discusses the comparative influence of Poe and Lovecraft, makes no mention of them.
But perhaps because of this, the issue (and assumedly the proceeding volumes as well) captures an overall tone or mystique more effectively than other speculative magazines I’ve read of late. But trying to define exactly what that tone is is more difficult: an unease, a chill, but one that doesn’t simply frighten with raw horror. Rather a richer experience, a ghost story told around a fire on a perfect evening, with the story lingering over the details of the place and time itself, giving a thick context for the central horrific element.
Take a look. Leave the light on.
The Man With the Aura
The Man with the Aura: The Collected Short Fiction by R.A. Lafferty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Who is the weirdest writer? Obviously that’s a huge question, and the answer will be contingent on both your definition of the word and the scope of who you’re reading. There are probably more than a few unpleasantly strange or shockingly bizarre authors writing fiction right now, though mainstream publishing seems to do a pretty good job of shutting them out for popular audiences. But if you were looking for an author who managed to squeeze in for a while and who isn’t so much macabre or grotesque (though he is certainly that more than occasionally) and rather more like just wonderfully, rollickingly weird, you wouldn’t have to look farther than R. A. Lafferty.
Lafferty is a puzzle, and I’ve written about him on the blog several times before without getting into much deeper analysis. (If you want deeper analysis, check out Feast of Laughter.) I keep writing reviews about him as though I’m writing for an audience that’s never read him. That’s okay though, because that audience is still far too large, and Lafferty seems to bring out the evangelizing tendencies of his readers.
Lafferty’s work– which flourished in scifi and fantasy magazines at the weird height of the New Wave– doesn’t so much straddle all the borders of speculative fiction (horror to fantasy to weird western to science fiction) so much as it seems blissfully unaware that such borders exist. His stories are tall tales, whether set in outer space, the far future, or the living room. They create lumbering, larger-than-life characters with a language more akin to a Native American story-teller (which is why his work does so well read aloud) than prose satisfied with sitting quietly on the page.
The problem with Lafferty though is that you have to look for the guy. His collections are out of print and hard to find. His novels are hit and miss at least on a first read. What’s rescuing him from obscurity at the moment– besides the eloquence and enthusiasm of devotees far more well-spoken than me– is yet another obscurity: the small press. Centipede Press to be exact, which is in the process of releasing all his collected works. (I’ve reviewed volume 1 previously.)
So what does one find in this second volume? For one thing, don’t worry if it’s the only volume you can find, as the stories appear in these collections in no particular order or chronological progression. This volume (like the first) is a grab bag so that, as the editor explains, a reader new to Lafferty can experience him as readers in the sixties, seventies, and eighties did: a large, bright voice stumbled upon in stories scattered through magazines and collections of the decades in no apparent order.
The volume itself is a significant, lovely edition, polished enough to give Lafferty a worthy place on the shelf yet weird enough to fit the contents. There are, however, still some editorial mistakes (or teases). For example, in the section listing first publication info for each story, there’s story listed that doesn’t actually appear in this volume. (The first story slated for volume 3?)
What about the stories themselves? What does one stumble upon in this collection? Wide open vistas. And jokes. In fact, looking down the list of the table of contents for this volume, I’m struck that this might be a common theme here. Not that these stories aren’t serious or well-written, but rather that each of them (or at least most of them) contain a central hidden hook, something that you only catch looking at you and winking when the story has wrapped up. I can’t tell you the punchline for each story (and in at least one of them I simply didn’t get the joke) but I’ll highlight a few of my favorites.
“Land of the Great Horses” is a good place to start. It’s a mosaic tale, told from a variety of perspectives, including a fictional encyclopedia article, about the reappearance of the lost homeland of the Romany, shot through with Lafferty’s celebration of language. Then there’s “Ride a Tin Can,” which combines music with folk anthropology to give a tragic, grotesque, and hilarious first contact story against the background of economic exploitation in the worse sense possible. Another favorite in this collection is “Hog-belly Honey,” which illustrates Lafferty’s unique ability to combine aspects of hard science fiction with a homespun, raggedy narrative voice and give it all the feel of genuine folk medicine and showmanship. Finally, I loved the piece “Great Day in the Morning,” which pokes fun at some of the assumptions of the modernist paradise but doesn’t flinch to go all the way and take such assumptions to their ludicrous conclusions.
I saw a spectacularly disheartening graphic the other day that proposed to break the art of the story down to its component pieces, outlining the different types of general characters and plots and settings like you’d pick them off a menu and use to build your own narrative value meal. The graphic also reminded helpfully of the basic narrative arch: the character experiences conflict or a problem, this conflict goes through climax and resolution, and then the story ends with the character changed in important ways. This is all useful enough, but Lafferty is the sort of writer who reminds that to do really interesting things it’s better to just ignore helpful narrative flowcharts altogether. Or rather, Lafferty turns the narrative flowchart on his head, because it’s not his characters experiencing this arch– it’s his readers.
You start a Lafferty story and immediately realize something is off or strange. This isn’t the world you were expecting. The sense of uncertainty grows as you read it, but you’re drawn along by his voice. And then at some point you abruptly get it: the concept or the punchline or the up-side-down world snaps into focus and the reader (never mind the main character, who might well be dead, dismembered, or eaten at this point) leaves the page changed in important ways.
Yet even that approach is a model Lafferty can discard whenever he sees fit. Some of the stories are simply straightforward and lovely, like the pseudo-biographical piece, “Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence,” which is in the strain of the very best Bradbury. Another, the final in this volume, is a post-apocalyptic tale that may be Lafferty’s world building at the most compelling I’ve seen. In the space of a short story he spins out a tiny kingdom, characters, and ecological tangles that seem in some respects as contemporary as The Hunger Games and as haunting as Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
I continually find when I reach the end of reviewing a book by Lafferty that I haven’t really done it justice. Well, then you read some of his stuff and try to explain it. Or rather, imagine this. Imagine a man who no longer exists, maybe your great-grandfather or maybe the person you always hoped your great-grandfather was. Someone a little strange but who has been places you never have (because most of them no longer exist either) and who tells spinning, staggering stories with the voice of an older generation. Someone who has one foot in the American West with its tall tales and the other in the technology that was sprouting like mushrooms at the height of the Space Race. And this man tells stories, and no one ever told him how he was supposed to tell them, so he tells them like he wants.
There you go. Lafferty is a little bit like that imaginary man, raised to the third power, at least.
Through the Language Glass
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It started with a conversation with a student, who said he had read an article explaining that the color blue never appeared in ancient Greek writings. That led to some internet searching, and I quickly found this book, which claims to be a treatment of this puzzle and turns out to be an explanation of the way language shapes the way we see the world. Do people who speak different languages actually see the world differently? Or in other words, how much does the structure of our language mirror or constrain the structure of our thought?
Deutscher– a linguist who doesn’t mind going against some of the contemporary views in the field– starts the exploration of this question with its most interesting manifestation: color. The realization that there was something strange going on in ancient accounts of color goes back to the philhellene and sometimes Prime Minister William Gladstone who noticed that blue never appears in Homer’s writings. The sea and sky are not referred to as blue, and other colors are also used in questionable ways. Other researchers into ancient texts discovered similar things: many ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue. Indeed, there seemed to be a order of appearance in which “primitive” languages (and the author offers examples of some contemporary languages as well) distinguish between dark and light and lump all colors together as reddish. Eventually words for yellows and browns appear and finally terms that distinguish between greens and blues. The differentiation of blue usually comes last, and there are still signs of this, for instance, in the fact that in old Japanese the word for blue and green is the same.
What does this mean? Early theories speculated that there was an actual physiological evolution taking place, that as humans became less primitive their eyes developed to perceive a wider spectrum of colors. Modern genetics and tests on speakers who languages currently lack certain color words has disproven this. Ancient Greek eyes were the same as ours. But did their lack of names for certain colors shape the way they perceived the world? This is the crux of the author’s question: do we really see things if we don’t have words to express them? I explored this once in a story published in Daily Science Fiction. Does naming something make it more real or at least more readily apparent?
Part of the argument for color goes something like this. In primitive civilizations color doesn’t matter a whole lot, and certain colors are rarely perceived on their own. Red is the color of blood, so a word to distinguish this comes fairly early in most cultures. But there are no large blue animals, few blue flowers, and blue dye was very difficult to make and unknown in many cultures. (Egypt was an exception, and apparently ancient Egyptian had a word for blue.) Because of this, there was no social or linguistic need to distinguish or name this hue. But what about the sea and the sky? The sea rarely looks straightforwardly blue, and the sky– when completely clear– was simply the sky. Since there was no cultural need to distinguish its color, it was simply the sky.
The first half of the book is an investigation of the history of the color question, and if you’re not quite satisfied with the answer I’ve given (and I’m not sure I am), you might not be satisfied with this portion of the book. For Deutscher though, color simply sets up the bigger question: how do we determine– and then empirically test– whether language actually shapes our perception and our thought processes? Are certain concepts (like “The sky is blue”) simply inexpressible in some languages? Does this mean speakers of those languages are unable to conceive of certain statements and concepts? Deutscher’s answer is no to these last two questions but a cautious yes to the first.
An older, stronger claim would answer the final question of the above paragraph in the affirmative: language constrains thought. Because the Hopi Indians, for instance, have no verb tense in their language or expressions of time, they cannot perceive time as linear. Because other Native American languages do not distinguish between verb and subject, speakers of these languages have a more monistic, unified of nature. Deutscher disagrees and takes obvious pleasure in demolishing these claims, maintaining instead that any concept can be expressed in any language. His alternate claim is more subtle: it’s not that some languages make it impossible to perceive or conceive certain things; rather, his claim is that certain languages obligate speakers to always be thinking of certain things.
Again, what does this mean? The author provides three examples. The first is that of a particular well-studied Australian aboriginal language that does not possess an egocentric coordinate system (i.e. behind, in front, left, right) but only an absolute system (north, east, south, west). Every positional expression voiced in this language, from things as simple as “There’s a bug beside your foot” have to be given in terms of cardinal directions. (“There’s a bug north of your foot.”) This means that speakers of the language always have a sense of these directions from a very young age, and their experiences and memories are seen through that directional lens. The author discusses a variety of experiments in which it’s shown that speakers of this language can recall details in this coordinate system, recounting orientations of experiences from years ago. (To put this in perspective, try calling up a particularly vivid memory and expressing it in terms of cardinal directions. Were you standing to the north or south of your spouse when you got married?) The language obligates its speakers to always have cardinal directions in mind and thus shapes their perceptions of the world accordingly.
Languages with no egocentric coordinate system though are comparatively rare, so the author’s second example is closer to home: languages like German or Spanish or many more with a developed gender system. In English– at least since the century or so after the Norman Conquest, as the author points out in a fascinating historical treatment– does not oblige its speakers to assign genders to inanimate objects. Yet many other modern languages do. Not much study has yet been done, according to Deutscher, on how this influences the thoughts of speakers of these languages, but he illustrates some of the implications with an example of the role this plays in translation and the subtle nuances and relations that can be lost moving from a gendered to a largely non-gendered language.
Finally, he returns to color. Does our language’s names for colors– and the fact that these names don’t exist in certain other languages– influence the way we perceive the world? Recent studies, the author argues, indicate that yes, it does. He takes the case of light blue and dark blue, which in Russian have separate names. An English speaker would perceive these as shades of the same color. For a Russian speaker they would be separate colors. If this was indeed the case, one could expect that this linguistic obligation (that of the Russian speaker to give these separate hues different names) would allow Russians to more quickly distinguish between similar shades of blue if they lay on opposite sides of this distinction, in a similar manner to how an English speaker could more readily distinguish between greenish-blue and bluish-green than a speaker of a language that does not differentiate between green and blue. The author relates in detail the set-up of experiments to determine just that, which show the language-processing region of the brain active even when actively naming the hues was not part of the experiment. Russian speakers consistently differentiated between close shades of blue more quickly than English speakers.
This all comes back to the central claim of the book, that languages, by obligating their speakers to pay attention to certain things in their structure, can function as a lens by which their speakers perceive the world.
Consider this analogy (not given in the book): if your language has several different expressions for snow, so that each time you talk about snow you’re obligated to take into consideration things like whether it’s falling or on the ground, how long it’s been on the ground, what its thickness and consistency is, then when you look at snow (or call up a memory containing snow) you’re going to have a richer perception of the object than an English speaker who encapsulates all the varieties of snow under a single word. That doesn’t mean that an English speaker can’t conceptualize or express these nuances of snow. It just means her language doesn’t habituate her to these perceptions.
In these (possibly over-simplified) terms, Deutscher’s argument seems almost self-evident, but the richness of his treatment comes in the historical and linguistic background he provides while exploring this idea and especially in his explanations of the rigor and structure of the experiments devised to verify such apparently straightforward claims about language and how it shapes our perceptions of the world.
Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius
Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown da Vinci by Avril Pyman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
We seem to have a fascination with imagining the end of society. We like to talk as if we’re at the end of an era, the twilight of Western civilization or something similar. This appears in our rhetoric, but it also appears in the glut of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies and books of late. I often find myself wondering if the Byzantines felt the same way in the late 1300s, or the early Britons in the face of the Norman invasions, or anyone at all during the long twilight of Rome.
The truth seems to be that society goes through transitions– some quite painfully abrupt and others so gradual as to be unapparent until years or centuries later. For Christians, ideas about these collapses or transitions often take the form of fantasies of persecution or monastic retreat. We wonder what the Church might look like, how it would endure or be transformed, in such transitions. Ironically though, we forget that we have examples from the recent past of what the Church looks like when society collapses or transforms abruptly beyond recognition. Besides the more relevant example of Christianity in the Middle East today, we have the story of the Orthodox Church in Russia. It’s a story that I still don’t know all the details of, the collapse of an old order and the transition from one form of civilized society to another very different. What did the Bolshevik Revolution mean for the practicing faithful and for the institutional Church itself?
Pyman’s book doesn’t answer all these questions. In fact, it assumes the reader already has the context in which to situate the story she’s telling: that of the life of Pavel Florensky (1882 – 1937), a Russian scientist and intellectual, a father, a priest, and ultimately a declared enemy of the Soviet state. This was one of my primary frustrations with the book: I was dropped into a narrative that I still don’t have enough bearings to navigate. Pyman discusses Florensky’s early work in a plethora of Russian names I don’t know, and when the drama of the cataclysmic revolution that would have such an effect on the Church and Florensky’s life within it take place, again the reader is assumed to already understand the contexts of the events being alluded to. It’s difficult to understand the nature of Florensky’s role and reactions to these transformations if, for instance, you don’t already have a grasp on the role the Church played with respect to the government under the last Tsar and a basic knowledge of its hierarchical structure. All this knowledge is assumed. Indeed, not having much of the context of late Tsarist and early Soviet Russia made Florensky’s eventual brushes with the Soviet authorities seem to me perhaps as arbitrary and obscure as they must have to the new Soviet citizens who found themselves in a wash of acronyms, bureaus, committees, and police services that seemingly sprang up overnight.
But Pyman is not writing a book about social transformation or the plight of the Church after the revolution as it found itself in an increasingly and militaristically atheistic society. (If someone could recommend such a book, I would be interested.) Rather, Pyman’s book is about a man, Pavel Florensky, who came to age in the flourishing of the pre-revolutionary intellectual and literary scene and shocked many of his avant-garde social circle by coming to faith and ultimately joining the Church, an organization thought to embody many of the oppressive, traditionalist forces the young guard were rallying against. His first major work, The Ground and Pillar of Faith, which I have not read, is an intellectual apology for faith (something along the lines of a Russian Mere Christianity) lived in the life of the Orthodox Church and still influential today.
Florensky was also recognized and highly regarded as a scientist, and when the theological schools at which he taught were closed after the Soviets came to power, he worked and published extensively as an electrical researcher on behalf of the state. He ultimately lost his parish and in many ways his priestly vocation, but he famously retained his beard and cassock working and lecturing on science in an increasingly hostile environment. His life is the story of intense learning and service, but also of a rear-guard action, a long defeat, trying (for instance while serving on the board of antiquities for Russia’s most revered monastery) to save the traditions and artifacts of the Church (even, according to this account, smuggling away the head of a saint whose tomb was to be desecrated) in an increasingly grim time.
It’s the story of a long failure, as Florensky is finally arrested, does more scientific work for a time in a Siberian camp, writes his wife and children beautiful letters from a crumbling monastery converted in a labor camp and prison on the North Sea, and is ultimately shot on obscure charges and buried in a mass grave outside Moscow. It is in these final days that Pyman’s account becomes most poignant, balancing a despairing narrative of the wearing away of individuality in the gulag archipelago with passages of hope from Florensky’s letters home.
I’m stuck by the deep Christian heritage there is to draw upon in the Russian tradition. Florensky the scientist and father was a contemporary of the Athonite monk St. Silouan, whose work I’m also reading now. Silouan represents a deeply contemplative, mystical approach to faith lived out in obedience and humility in a Russian monastery on Athos. Florensky, on the other hand, was an intellectual (though also with a mystical bent), a family man, with a wife and five children, writing and teaching in the tumult of Moscow. Florensky and Siouan lived very different embodiments of the common faith, and Florensky’s life gives some hope in the possibility of living in grace in the context of home and science.
As far as Florensky’s actual scientific contributions, Pyman does a good job documenting his career and giving summaries of his theological work, but her treatment of his mathematical and scientific works are less satisfactory. We’re told he was a great mathematician, that he anticipated certain developments in quantum mechanics even, and that he drew on this to construct some kind of theology of number, but none of this is expounded on, and as far as his context among Russian science in general, very little is said. This is likely due to the writer’s background, but it leaves the true extent and lasting influence of Florensky to be taken on faith by those outside the Russian scientific sphere. (The question of Florensky’s influence is one I would have liked to have heard more about. The narrative stops abruptly with his death, offering no discussion of the fate of his family or how his writings and influence began to make themselves felt during the long Soviet thaw.)
For those who are trying to practice a life of faith lived out in writing, in intellectual dialogue, teaching, and service– and this in the spheres of both family and asceticism– the account of Florensky’s life, successes, and long fading will be inspiring and poignant. They will recognize a kindred spirit. And for those who bemoan the uncertainty of the times, the transitions or dissolutions of the culture, and the fate of the Church within all this, they will find an example of what a life of faith looked like played out in a “post-apocalyptic” society.
Take heart, little flock.
Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy
The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy by Victor-Lucien Tapié
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I like to read epics. When I was younger, these were multivolume fantasy novels a la Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. More recently, when I find myself wanting a grand, sweeping narrative I tend to turn to history. There are plenty of epics here, rises and flourishing and falls, and at the end of whatever I’ve chosen I’ve learned a bit more about the shape of the larger epic we’re all still moving within.
In a historical epic, you want a good balance between detail and scope, something you don’t tackle for in-depth analysis but rather for a broad outline and a good, accurate story. In this genre I’d classify successful pieces like Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Norwich’s (abridged) History of Byzantium as well as Keegan’s The First World War. Part of the appeal of reading works like these is that there’s no exam at the end; you can read a story that doesn’t have any direct bearing on your research of academic discipline. This gives just a bit more freedom to let the narrative wash over you, to get caught up in it like a good novel and enjoy it for the way the historians tell their tale.
My latest historical epic was an English translation of a French historian’s Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy, and it didn’t quite hit that perfect balance. We had recently spent some time in Gorizia and Trieste, so we had touched a small corner of this history. The Habsburgs, ruling house of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries, offer a sort of bridge between the regalia and imperial splendor of the late Middle Ages and the rise of nationalism and modernity into the 1900s. They were a shaping force in central Europe for hundreds of years, with an empire that united Austria and Hungary along with lands now including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, parts of Poland, and into the Balkans and Italy. It also united dozens of linguistic groups and cultures and provided a buffer between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe. It was in its height and glory that its capital, Vienna, became the cultural jewel from which things like the Vienna Circle and the work of Wittgenstein sprang. And yet its growing instability with the rise of nationalism helped trigger the First World War, during which the entire edifice crumbled abruptly.
Certainly a lot to cover in a single-volume treatment, and plenty of epic scope.
What we have in this volume though is a bit more crunchy, a lot more political history than one might want. We get loads of data about populations in Hungary, Austria, and Transylvania over the centuries, the development of agricultural production, economic details, and an in-depth examination of the political structure of these three kingdoms. Tapié spends a good deal of time highlighting the mechanics of how the three primary sections of the empire were united and stayed that way. He also focuses on art, architecture, and music of the empire over its development. For Tapié, as likely for the citizens of the empire, the monarchy was equivalent to the political union of these kingdoms, and vice versa.
The characters of the various Habsburg monarchs don’t make much impression on the pages as individuals. They come and go and are remembered for their policies, with only a few like Maria Theresa or Francis Joseph making a mark as human characters in the narrative. They seem there primarily to fill specific roles, sometimes roles that only seem given in retrospect, such as the assassinated heir presumptive the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, whose death at the hands of Serbian radicals set off the dominoes of the World War.
For an attempt at understanding wide swaths of the history of Europe, as well as the patchwork of languages and ethnicities that were bound up for a time together and now have become the various states of central Europe, this is a hefty journey. It doesn’t simply give you the exciting portions, and Tapié’s discussion of wars in particular become confusing morasses of names and places. Rather, it’s a study in the politics of empire– not people but institutions– and how unity was maintained among diversity for hundreds of years.
Feast of Laughter 3
Feast of Laughter 3: An Appreciation of R.A. Lafferty by Ktistec Press, R.A. Lafferty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Welcome to the feast of laughter. The banquet has been set, the feast is open, endless, varied, and delicious– if you want rich fare and strong drink. Yet the banqueters are few. One of the opening (reprinted) essays of this, the third volume of a festschrift of sorts to the wild, wonderful, and largely neglected author R. A. Lafferty, sets out the imagery: those (in this volume and elsewhere) who have discovered and celebrate Lafferty’s works are the Family of the Empty Hall.
If this is true, I’m struggling to find a metaphor for what the third volume of Feast of Laughter is. It’s more than a toast given in one of the echoing corners of the hall. It is, perhaps, a congregation of fellow discoverers gathered around a table, in the light of a sputtering flame, discussing, sharing, tasting what they have found.
Feast of Laughter is now in its third volume, and rumor has it the indefatigable editors are putting together a fourth. Once was an event and twice a happy coincidence, but three times seems to imply we’ve struck a vein of precious ore (to abruptly switch metaphors here) and are following it out, mining it through, bringing to light as much of the rich writings and life of the spooky old man from Oklahoma as possible.
So what have we found this time around? Here we have another (thicker) collection of essays, analysis, correspondence, interview, and imitation of Lafferty. Some of it, as with previous volumes, is original, some reprinted from hard to find sources. Most all of it is pretty good.
Yet it’s also for a closed audience, of sorts. That’s not to say there’s anyone who would be unwelcome to the feast. But it is to say if you’re new to Lafferty you don’t necessarily want to start with this (though the volume does include two of Lafferty’s own stories, including “The Configuration of the Northern Shore,” which I’ve always found especially haunting). Rather, you want Lafferty himself first un-distilled and uninterpreted (perhaps by dipping into one of the three or four collected volumes of his fiction out or forthcoming from Centipede Press). But if you’ve read him and are bemused or enchanted, maybe a little confused or delightfully bewildered, and you want to get at his work from other eyes and angles, this is where you want to be.
Literary analysis is not necessarily my thing, and I find often find myself most annoyed with essays that repute to explain the deeper meanings of some of my favorite authors (some of the recent work on Gene Wolfe immediately springs to mind). But what I enjoyed about this volume is that several pieces focused on Lafferty’s novels, including interpretations or reprinted forwards for The Devil is Dead, Fourth Mansions, The Annals of Klepsis, and at least a few on Past Master, I found these quite helpful in approaching works that have seemed (and sometimes remain) a bit of a tangled thicket to me, even as I’m enjoying pushing through them. Reading these pieces helped me catch the things I had missed and see overall structures and themes click into place.
As far as the included correspondence and interviews, these are priceless and help Lafferty come alive, especially useful for those of us who discovered him after his time. The exchange with Alan Dean Foster, brief as it is, reveals much of Lafferty’s character and whets the appetite for the rumored forthcoming biography.
And then there is the part where people do their own stories inspired by the master. These are a nice garnish to the main course, but not really central to the feast (and I of course include my own contribution in this judgement). The two that stand out are “People are Strange” by Christopher Blake, which to me felt most clearly like a Lafferty homage, and J Simon’s “Bone Girl,” the best original piece in this collection, which could have easily found a home in any professional market and here really makes the rest of us look better just by being alongside it.
Flip the magazine over. There, on the back cover, is an image of the famous Door to Lafferty’s office. There’s a lot to be said (and a lot probably will be said) about this particular door, but this image alone is what you need to know about the man if you need to be convinced his words (and books like this filled with words about his words) are worth you time. It’s covered with clippings of art, diagrams, stickers, captions, and paintings in a contained sort of organized fractal. But totally covered so you can barely see a single spot of wood. Imagine walking down a hallway of doors (I don’t actually know where Lafferty’s office was– home or business or whatever) and seeing one like this.
Imagine the kind of guy who would be waiting on the other side.
Crack the cover, and come on in to meet him . . .
TF:MTMTE volume 9
Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye, Volume 9 by James Roberts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
James Roberts knows how to make monsters. What makes this series great though, and what keeps it feeling fresh after almost fifty issues, is where the monsters come from. We’ve had four million years of warfare between sentient robots who can form their bodies into vehicles and weapons, so there’s a lot of history to draw on, and Roberts mines it deep. But he doesn’t pull his monsters from where you would expect: treacherous Decepticons against heroic Autobots. His monsters come from all sides, from every angle, keeping you constantly guessing. And many of them are genuinely frightening, often in ways you don’t expect.
If you’ve been following this series for a while (or even my blog, where I’ve reviewed each volume so far), it shouldn’t be a surprise that Roberts revels in switching things up and making battle lines grey and messy. In this volume though, it seems to come through even stronger. Of course, re-branding (literally) Megatron as an Autobot several issues back, and following through with what this meant internally for the former murderous dictator, was a very big thing. But this volume asks the question, apart from the titans like Megatron, what do swaps like this and the weirdness of a new peace after millions of years of hatred mean for the little guys? In this volume we get two sides of the coin: we get the return of our favorite Decepticon misfits being heroic and even empathic, and we get Autobots plotting treachery to do what they think needs to be done to bring Megatron to justice.
Let’s take the Decepticons first: along with the Decepticon Justice Division (the series’ primary true “bad guys”), early on we were teased with the Scavengers, a crew of pathetic soldiers made up of the rejects from the bottom of your toy drawer. Early on they met up with a damaged Grimlock and were introduced to a ship full of creepy mysteries. Since then these characters have been shelved for much of the series. Their return in this issue gives a look at what the peace has meant for the average Decepticon. Roberts uses his characteristic skill to bring this group together, making them seem real as a team, even as they tackle issues like human (okay, sentient robotic) trafficking and the psychological wounds of war with a (usually) light touch that doesn’t trivialize the fact that Roberts is tackling big issues with giant battling robots. The first two chapters in this volume give us a self-contained episode that returns us to these characters and sets them on a new trajectory, while simultaneously opening up an old mystery that Roberts has been dropping clues about for a while.
On the other side of the sigil, we get conspiracy and manipulation by Autobots who want Megatron to get his due. Roberts thrives creating heroes out of assumed villains and vice versa, and the work of portraying rotten Autobots is believable and chilling. In addition to this though, we get another genuine monster, and here it’s simply wonderful to see the sort of creatures Roberts can fashion to haunt the universe he’s created and the mecha-physiology he’s devised for the Transformers. (At the same time though, the precedents set here are going to make certain things pretty easy: now that we know it’s possible to access memories by sight and transmit thoughts and data directly from brain to brain, this opens up a host of shortcuts for a deus ex machina any time a plot point needs to be resolved.)
I’m the worst kind of fan though: one who takes the content and the characters quite seriously. The kind of guy who is the first to maintain that comic books can be literature but has to keep reminding himself that they’re also magazines. That is, More Than Meets the Eye, as much as I’d like it to be, is not a self-contained graphic novel. It’s a serialized comic, which means in some ways it still functions as a magazine, selling advertising (though I don’t see those in the trade volumes I get) and keeping readers pulled along. It means it’s constantly raveling, winding on, with additional twists, turns, and scope of characters added layer upon layer.
For the most part this is fine, especially when it has to do with the plot. It starts to feel like a soap opera though when these additional tangles and coils have to do with relationships between characters. They are giant fighting robots. Yes, they have pathos and depth now and time for exploring what peace means. Four million years of warfare probably didn’t leave much time for love, but I really don’t want it now.
I’m also pretty spoiled by Alex Milne’s artwork, enough that I tend to throw a fit if he doesn’t do the majority of the issues in a volume. In this one he does only the first two, but the artists who do the other issues actually do a pretty fantastic job, with the exception of a few awkward panels here and there. They’re not Milne, and they don’t bring his depth and detail, but the artwork here does not detract from the story as it did in a few early issues when Milne stepped away.
In all, this series is still going places and doing incredible things with my favorite characters. The next volume (volume 10!) will include the fiftieth issue of the series, and Amazon has the drop date listed as right around my birthday.
They know me, guys . . .
Stephen Reid Case 