Literature – Into the Woods

Privilege (and the lack of it)

Virginia Woolf. Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

We live in an era in which privilege and wealth are squandered on obscene levels of consumption and on domination and destruction — of institutions, of norms of justice and fairness, of ecosystems, of all the fragile things that we all hold in common. Things have not always been that way. Once upon a time, privilege could be used to build and sustain a shared culture, not to strip-mine it or to burn it all down, to strengthen institutions rather than to reduce them to instruments of profit and power.

What happened?

Watching the 2022 film “Benediction” left me very curious about the life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). That curiosity led me to a long biography of Sassoon (526 pages) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson published in 2003. I had expected that this book would become more a reference than something to read cover to cover, because the biography is a who’s who of an important period in English literature.

That’s the period of the Bloomsbury Group — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. Even more important (to me) than the Bloomsbury Group were the Inklings, of which J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were core members.

I find that I have continued to work my way through this biography of Siegfried Sassoon because so much of what’s intriguing is how these privileged people, who didn’t have to work, used their time. It was very different from how privileged people use their time today. Back then, privilege could be used to buy time, learning, and the freedom to take intellectual and moral risks.

Yes, much of that time was used for a constant, and sometimes exhausting, stream of socializing, some of it superficial. But it also meant that they met a great many people, and sometimes lasting friendships developed — Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. That kind of time and friendship did not exist in a vacuum. It was protected and made possible by institutions, especially the universities.

Another factor that stands out is how the privileged today and the privileged then used the great universities. Today the privileged use the universities to leverage their privilege to gain more money and more power — finance, law, and tech. Back then, two universities in particular — Oxford and Cambridge — were like engines that converted privilege into culture. Today, degrees in the humanities are at risk of going extinct, while universities are increasingly pushed toward creating wealth.

These failures amplify one another.

At the same time as the privileged few have become cultural toxins rather than cultural creators, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever greater. Back then, a D.H. Lawrence, who was the son of a coal miner, could find a path to recognition through hard-won education and patronage. Today, millions of families can’t afford to feed their children, let alone educate them or give them the time and the tools to develop their human potential. While the privileged run wild, the unprivileged never have much chance of coming to understand the causes of their condition or learning how to work together to do something about it. Nor do the privileged want them to understand the causes of their condition or to learn how to work together to do something about it.

For all their anger and discontent, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century still imagined better worlds, whereas our own moment seems preoccupied with just avoiding catastrophe. Dystopias make good literature (and movies) today, and for good reason.

I ask myself where the connections are between privilege (and the lack of it) and creating dystopias versus creating a better world. The only idea I can come up with is that the wrong people are running the world to suit themselves, while the rest of us are just trying to get by.

Yes, the writers of the early 20th century were privileged. But they also were builders, and they were on the top layer of their society. They foreshadowed and helped shape the precious few decades of human progress after World War II. Today’s elites are not cultural builders because the systems that reward them no longer value the things that an E.M. Forster, a John Maynard Keynes, or a J.R.R. Tolkien valued.

Privilege once made world-building possible. It was possible to very much like those privileged, world-building artists. Today, the privileged are all about owning the world and making the world better only for themselves. And they don’t have to care whether we like them.

Siegfried Sassoon

Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in “Benediction,” 2022

From Oscar Wilde to the present, there has been a continuous line of gay writers, all of them considered to be degenerate criminals until relatively recently, and all of them now vindicated as bravely many years ahead of their times — impeccably civilized in their subversiveness. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the lesser known of these writers. The 2022 film “Benediction” has given Sassoon some of the attention he deserves.

The Scottish actor Jack Lowden, of course, is River Cartwright in the brilliant and ever-so-entertaining series “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Many of these writers knew each other. Gay writers living today are only a few degrees of separation from Oscar Wilde. These early 20th Century gay writers lived in dangerous times. Wilde’s trial started a dark cultural shift that lasted for sixty years. Scholars estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were charged with crimes up until decriminalization in 1967. There was surveillance, entrapment, trials, prison, exile, and suicide. Alan Turing, who was charged with “gross indecency,” the same charge that was used against Oscar Wilde, was only one of these. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice was not published until 1979, nine years after his death.

Armistead Maupin and poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard knew Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood and W.H. Auden were lifelong friends. Isherwood knew E.M. Forster. Siegfried Sassoon knew Robbie Ross (who was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde until the very end). Siegfried Sassoon never met Isherwood, but he certainly knew of him. As a war poet during World War I, Sassoon was critical of Isherwood because he thought Isherwood was avoiding military service by remaining in the United States. Isherwood knew Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

Though almost all them were born to great privilege, they were not all of equal character. Lord Alfred Douglas, who betrayed Oscar Wilde, became an even greater jerk after Wilde’s death. E.M. Forster, on the other hand, would qualify as a saint, were it not for the Catholic church’s clock running about six thousand years slow. Christopher Isherwood was no saint — as is clear if you read Christopher and His Kind or watch the film “Cabaret” — though Isherwood lived a very different life after he came to the U.S. in 1939.

Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden, 1939. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After watching “Benediction,” I bought a copy of a 2003 biography of Sasson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. I doubt that I will read the entire book; it’s a very detailed 526 pages. But it’s an excellent reference with a valuable index and large set of notes. “Benediction” doesn’t flinch at the gloom and embarrassing failures of Sassoon’s later years. I found it interesting, by the way, that my copy of the book, which I ordered from the U.K., had a previous life in the Hobson Library of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which trains members of the British military.

I have known poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard for more than fifty years. He is my oldest friend. Gavin lived in Hollywood for a good many years. Isherwood lived in Santa Monica. Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and died of it in 1986. Below are two photos that Gavin took while visiting Isherwood during Isherwood’s last years.

⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

⬆︎ Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Bethania, North Carolina, c. 1979. Photo by David Dalton. (For years, Gavin and I preferred twin-lens reflex cameras such as Yashicas and the Mamiya C330, which use square 620 film.)

For Gabriel

When you were an angel and I was a god,
Earthly-fair were the paths that we trod;
You, from your heaven of Saints at the Throne,
Banished, to wander, gold-haired and alone;
And I, from my pagan Paradise hurled,
Thro’ sun-shot cities of cloud to the world.

Humble you came, with your calm, clear eyes,
And parted lips; but your spirit was wise
With raptures of music and light that you’d lost …
So we loved and were happy, nor counted the cost.
For the gates were barred, and the way was hard
Up to the bastions of Heaven proud-starred;
And I was a god no more. But you sprang
To the peace of my arms … and an angel sang.

Unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon, dated 20 November 1918, included in Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 2003.

At last, a new novel by John Twelve Hawks

To be published in April 2026

I’ve posted several times in the past about John Twelve Hawks, who, as soon as I read him, became my favorite living science fiction author. His most recent novel until now was published in 2014, so his fans have been waiting for a long time.

The new novel is Certainty, to be published by Penguin Random House/Doubleday in April 2026. The Penguin Random House page is here, and the Amazon page (you can pre-order it) is here.

For a good twenty years, it has been hard to find the kind of science fiction (new science fiction, anyway) that I like. Please pardon my political incorrectness, but trends in the publishing industry have not been favorable for writers who are straight white males whose writing is lucid and vigorous (as opposed to literary) and whose themes are something other than social themes. Maybe John Twelve Hawks had a 12-year fallow period. But I can’t help but wonder, actually, whether those trends in the publishing industry shut him out for a while as too male, insufficiently literary, and too political.

When I say, “insufficiently literary,” that, to me, is a compliment to John Twelve Hawks’ writing. To me, the story is the point, not the writing. So it’s clean, transparent, cinematic writing that I like, writing that lights up our visual circuits rather than putting heavy demands on our language circuits. That such writing is facile is just plain wrong. It’s actually very hard to do.

John Twelve Hawks has occasionally posted on his Facebook page during the past 14 years. His official web site has rarely been updated. He remains anonymous (John Twelve Hawks is, of course, a pseudonym) and reclusive. I’m sure I’m not the only fan hoping that, when this next book is published, he’ll do more interviews, publish more articles, and become more heard in the marketplace of ideas during these nightmare times in which we’re all living.

The awful 17th century

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Witch Wood. John Buchan, first published 1927.

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. Francis Young, Cambridge University Press, 2025. 432 pages.

The history of witch-burning in Scotland is horrifying. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland, far more than in England. The trials continued into the late 1600s, but the panic over witches had pretty much subsided by 1707.

How in the world do we understand how a century of witch trials in Scotland was so quickly followed — in the very same Scotland! — by a century of the Enlightenment? How was it that these prominent elements of Scottish history were mirrored so quickly in America?

I am no historian, and I don’t have any thorough answers for these questions. For one, the history of Scotland is bafflingly complicated. By comparison, it seems to me that the histories of England and America are much easier to get one’s head around. But I do think I can see just a glimmer of how the sudden transition from witch trials to the Enlightenment unfolded in Scotland.

I often read two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction. By coincidence, I was reading John Buchan’s Witch Wood at the same time I arrived at Chapter 4 of Silence of the Gods. (A hat tip here to Chenda, for recommending this book.) That chapter is about the 17th Century, with the title “Antiquarians and Witch-Hunters.”

Silence of the Gods limits itself to places farther north and more remote than Scotland. But it’s clear that, though Scotland excelled at burning witches, the witch panic was everywhere in Christendom during the 17th Century. But it’s only in Scotland where a particular zeal for witch-burning was immediately followed by the work of the Enlightenment. Surely one set the stage for the other, in some strange way?

I had a long discussion with ChatGPT about this. ChatGPT’s bottom line was: Religious zealotry built the roads that the Enlightenment ran on.

There are a couple of key points to understanding this. The first is that, during the 17th Century, Scotland’s kirk had far too much civil power. That is, as we Americans would understand it, there was very little separation between church and state. Scotland was divided by religious conflict and was in great turmoil. In ways that I don’t understand very well, the deposition of James VII, followed by William III and Mary II (1689) set the stage for important changes in how Scotland was governed. The Settlement of 1690 preserved the church but handed civil power in Scotland back to civil authorities.

Americans learned an important lesson from this. To quote ChatGPT: “Seventeenth-century Scotland showed what happens when a church (whether presbyterian or episcopal) fuses with state power—persecution, ‘enthusiasm,’ and civil strife. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who emigrated carried that memory and became key allies of Baptists in the push for disestablishment in the states (notably in Virginia).”

John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a fictional account of what village life was like in Scotland in 1644. Buchan knew this history. At the time he was writing Witch Wood, he also was writing a biography of James Graham, the 1st Marquess of Montrose, who figured prominently in Scotland’s religious conflicts of the 17th Century.

Buchan probably expected his readers of a hundred years ago to know much more about Scottish history than most of us do today. That lack of knowledge of Scottish history makes Witch Wood harder to appreciate. One thing that strikes me about Witch Wood, though, is Buchan’s harsh treatment of the kirk, its theologies, and the zeal of the men who held power in the church. To put it coarsely, Buchan did not find it necessary to kiss the church’s feet, which makes me think that by 1927 Scotland was well along in losing its religion. That draws our attention to yet another mystery about the problems of America: How was it that England, Scotland, and even Ireland lost their religion, while Americans are now dealing with an attempted takeover by Christian nationalists? In disturbingly many ways, what’s happening in America today resembles what happened in Scotland in the 17th Century (bitter, even violent division with the empowerment of fanatics), fused with some political innovations developed in Germany in the 1930s.

I’m only halfway through Silence of the Gods, but one thing is perfectly clear. The Christianization of the far north — Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania — was just as violent and ugly as what happened to the south.

All of this is horrifyingly relevant today, because it’s still going on, in America at least. What will it take for people to remember that to be governed by zealots is to be governed by the devil?

Witch Wood, Chapter 2. Click here for high-resolution version.

Leakey’s Book Shop

Click here for high-resolution version.

I’m back from Scotland. On this trip, I spent two days in Inverness. The first stop after checking into the hotel was Leakey’s Book Shop, which is said to be the largest seller of used books in Scotland.

It would take all day, and then some, to explore the entire store. I made do with the literature section, looking for older editions of Scottish writers, books that would be pretty much impossible to find in the United States. I bought two novels by John Buchan and a copy of Nigel Tranter’s Man’s Estate that had been signed by Tranter — a steal at £30.

I’ve written a great deal here about Sir Walter Scott, and I already have a complete set of the Waverley novels, a gift from Ken that he schlepped all the way from Scotland, in a box, as checked baggage. I bought only three books at Leakey’s, no more than I could fit into my suitcase. Scottish novelists, I suppose, have always had to live in the shadow of Sir Walter Scott, and none have achieved Scott’s fame. I will have a separate post soon on John Buchan. Nigel Tranter, like Buchan, must be on any reading list of Scottish fiction.

The inscription in the book makes me think that Dorothy was a friend of Tranter’s, as opposed to someone who bought the book after a bookshop reading by Tranter.

I have a ton of photos from Scotland, including castles, castles, and more castles, and of course some food and seascapes. I’ll post some of them during the next week or so.

Click here for high-resolution version.

John Buchan

John Buchan (right) and Roy Tash looking through the viewfinder of an Akeley camera. Source: Library and Archive of Canada, c. 1937.

Discovering just one new extraordinarily good writer a year is a wonderful thing, though all my bookselves are full, and, once again, teetering stacks of unshelved books are forming on the table beside my bed. Last year that writer was C.J. Sansom and his series of seven Shardlake novels. This year it is John Buchan.

Though connoisseurs of spy novels always include Buchan on their lists, I am not a connoisseur of spy novels. (If I am a connoisseur of anything, it’s novels that are not set in the here and now.) It was ChatGPT that made me aware of Buchan after I asked for book recommendations. That particular ChatGPT discussion was about how writers who came out of Oxford tend to have a rare confidence with the English language. They’re elite and they know it, thus they have no need to show off or — heaven forbid — experiment with language. Thus they write in the plain, lucid, transparent Anglo-Saxon that is, in my opinion anyway, the best kind of language for storytelling in English.

Many of Buchan’s novels are more than a hundred years old. But the writing is entirely modern. This puzzled me until I realized that plain Anglo-Saxon English changes very little from century to century. Whereas florid writing styles that draw heavily on the Latin side of English go out of fashion quickly. This, I suspect, is the main reason why hardly anybody reads Sir Walter Scott anymore (more on Sir Walter Scott below). Scott loved the Scots language and records it faithfully. But ironically Scott’s English is so wordy, congestive, and archaic that it demands too much of today’s readers.

Buchan is best known for The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie in 1935. After I read The Thirty-Nine Steps, I rented the movie for $2.99 and couldn’t finish watching it. It was just too primitive. Plus Hitchcock fiddled with the story to dumb it down. Hitchcock wanted to make a movie of Greenmantle, but I read that Hitchcock and Buchan’s heirs couldn’t agree on a price for the rights.

But forget Hitchcock. Moviemaking technology in Hitchcock’s time was too primitive to match the vividness that comes through in Buchan’s storytelling. After Greenmantle, I will read Witch Wood, which some readers say is Buchan’s masterpiece.

Sir Walter Scott

Buchan was a prolific writer, and not just of fiction. He wrote a biography of Sir Walter Scott that was published in 1932. On eBay I bought an American edition of that biography that also was published in 1932. It will be a nice reference book to have. The definitive biography of Sir Walter Scott, by John Gibson Lockhart, was published in seven volumes in 1837 and 1838. Those books would be almost impossible to find outside of university libraries, and as far as I know the Lockhart biography has never been digitized.

Buchan was born in Scotland. He was Governor General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940. On December 7, 1923, Buchan was the speaker at the annual dinner of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. The text of his talk is available on line. Buchan and I seem to agree on something I have often said about Scott’s novels — that though Scott was fascinated with kings and queens and the famous figures of Scottish history, Scott is at his best when the story involves Scottish peasants. From Buchan’s talk:

My last example is Sir Walter’s treatment of his Scottish peasants. His kinship to the soil was so close that in their portraiture he never fumbles. They are not figures of a stage Arcadia, they are not gargoyles mouthing a grotesque dialect, they are the central and imperishable Scot, the Scot of Dunbar and Henryson and the Ballads, as much as the Scot of Burns and Galt and Stevenson. He gives us every variety of peasant life – the sordid, as in the conclaves of Mrs Mailsetter and Mrs Heukbane; the meanly humorous, as in Andrew Fairservice; the greatly humorous, as in Meg Dods; the austere in Davie Deans; the heroic in Bessie McClure. It is this last aspect that I want you to note. Because he made his plain folk so robustly alive, because his comprehension was so complete, he could raise them at the great moment to the heroic without straining our belief in them. No professed prophet of democracy ever did so much for the plain man as this Tory Border laird. Others might make the peasant a pathetic or a humorous or a lovable figure, but Scott could make him also sublime, without departing from the strictest faithfulness in portraying him; nay, it is because of his strict faithfulness that he achieves sublimity where others only produce melodrama. We are familiar enough with laudations of lowly virtue, but they are apt to be a little patronising in tone; the writers are inclined to enter “the huts where poor men lie” with the condescension of a district visitor. Scott is quite incapable of patronage or condescension; he exalts his characters at the fitting moment because he knows the capacity for greatness in ordinary Human nature. It is to his peasants that he gives nearly all the most moving speeches in the novels. It is not a princess or a great lady who lays down the profoundest laws of conduct; it is Jeanie Deans. It is not the kings and captains who most eloquently preach love of country, but Edie Ochiltree, the beggar, who has no belongings but a blue gown and a wallet; and it is the same Edie who, in the famous scene of the storm, speaks words which, while wholly and exquisitely in character, are yet part of the world’s poetry.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ The first page of Greenmantle. Click here for high-resolution version.

Writing that manipulates and exploits readers

Above: An anecdotal lede, a method of infantilizing readers that was developed back in the 1980s.

It’s not just clickbait headlines that try to manipulate our attention. Web sites also measure how long readers stay on a page, as part of their “engagement” bean-counting. Thus writers and editors are under pressure from bean counters to withhold the key point (if any) of an article for as long as possible, to keep you on the page.

How often does this happen to you?: A clickbait headline promises something interesting. You click, and you keep reading. But you never seem to reach whatever interesting thing it was the clickbait headline promised.

Once upon a time, in a now-lost galaxy far away, there was the belief that writing served the reader. An important factor in serving the reader was not to waste the reader’s time. The inverted pyramid was the rule — the key facts, or one’s main point, came first. The details followed.

The concept of starting a piece with a trivial detail (the anecdotal lede) would have been incomprehensible, if anyone had thought of it. When someone did think of it, I think the idea came from the teaching of “creative writing,” and the notion that techniques used in fiction could somehow improve the writing in, say, newspapers. It was a horrible idea, and I’m convinced that it frustrated readers and drove them away, rather than delighting readers and sucking them in, as it claimed to do.

Consider the anecdotal lede in the photo above. What is the story about? Thirty-four words in, you have no idea — nor will you, until maybe the fourth or fifth paragraph. Did the writing delight you? I didn’t think so. Rather, the lede infantilizes you by supposing that you need to be babied with some “telling details” to “pull you into” the story. In my years as a newspaper copy editor, I called hogwash on this a thousand times. Nobody listened.

In that now-lost galaxy, the reader’s attention belonged to the reader. There was no attempt to hijack and control the reader’s attention. You didn’t baby the reader. But it was inevitable that, once it became possible to monitor, measure, and monetize everything that readers do, readers would be abused and exploited. The kind of writing that exploited readers in the online world quickly migrated to the world of print, where reader behavior cannot be monitored, but you get babied and manipulated just the same.

This battle is lost. There is no going back. But standards, once set, continue to exist, even if hardly anyone honors them anymore.

I would argue that, in the long term, these new methods of reader exploitation are self-defeating because they drive readers away. There are a great many publications that once were respected but that are now clickbait factories that are failing but that crank out clickbait in their desperation to survive — the New Republic, Slate, Popular Mechanics. On average, people spend far less time on Facebook than they used to. People caught on to how they were being manipulated by Facebook, and they didn’t like it.

Even if video “reels” are the new attention sinks, and even if artificial intelligence convinces a great many young people that they no longer need to learn to write because AI will do it for them, nevertheless somebody has to learn to write, even if reading and writing become something done only by a high-information elite. Artificial intelligence can recycle the writing of humans, but it will never produce anything original until it can explore, experience, and move around in the world using senses and powers of its own.

We’ve all seen the articles about how children don’t read for fun anymore, and how even elite college students balk if asked to read an entire book. I have no idea what, if anything, can be done about that.

But I do feel very strongly that, even if reading well and writing well are to become elite activities for only a few, these elite readers and writers must not allow bean counters and the sorry crews who work for them to wipe out the high standards that once applied.

One can at least speak for such standards and keep them alive among those who still care. Meanwhile, my guess is that standards of writing and editing will get even worse, not least because so few of today’s young people will ever learn how to write.

Words that are never the right word

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

What might he have said about the wrong word? I’d say that the wrong word is something like a train wreck. It screeches, lights the page on fire, and everything comes to a stop.

Years ago I started a list of words that a good writer would never use. Among them:

alacrity
celerity
myriad
plethora
cacophony
akimbo
acrid
stentorian
erstwhile
comprise
staccato
pulchritude
mellifluous
sanguine
lugubrious
vicissitude
recondite
effulgent

Most of these are show-off words. Bad writers think that such words make them sound smart or something.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up alacrity and celerity. Useless words just don’t stick in my memory. I finally was able to remember what alacrity means because it’s related to an Italian word used in music, allegro. As for celerity, I finally figured out that it’s related to the word accelerate, so that will help me remember that one.

Most of these useless words have Latin or Greek roots, though akimbo comes from Old Norse. The proper language of fiction is plain old Anglo-Saxon. That’s one of the many reasons I love Tolkien’s writing so much. He wrote in Anglo-Saxon English, rarely resorted to words borrowed from French, and, as a philologist, he always used the right word. Imagine alacrity at Bilbo’s birthday party, or celerity in running from orcs.

Thesauruses have a purpose, but mostly, I think, they’re abused. Sometimes, when writing, one knows that there is a lightning word for what one wants to say, but the word refuses to come to mind. A thesaurus can help find it.

It’s pure abuse, though, when someone uses a thesaurus to find an uncommon word with the idea that it’s lazy to use the common word, as though all synonyms are equal. For example, not wanting to describe a shirt as green, the word verdant is lifted from a thesaurus. A variant of this I call “silly synonyms.” In my years as a newspaper copy editor, I tried to break reporters of it, but I never succeeded. That’s the idea that, having referred to a dog, the second reference must be canine, or blaze after fire. How many times have I complained, pencil in my hand, “It’s always dog, dog, dog, damn it.” The words canine and blaze are two of the best marks of a hack that I can think of.

This is on my mind because, with the help of an AI, I’ve been trying to discover authors that are new to me that I might like. Googling for book lists hasn’t worked well for me. Working with the AI’s suggestions, I’ve downloaded many Kindle samples. I fling most of the samples, because it’s apparent that the writing is poor or that the writer is just cranking stuff out. I recently read Ken Follett’s The Evening and the Morning and realized that Follett is a crank-it-out author. I strongly suspect that some of these popular writers have ghost writers who help them crank it out. For example, I suspect that S.J. Parris tried to capitalize on the popularity of C.J. Sansom. But Parris is lazy writer who is just cranking it out.

It seems that the older I get, the harder it is to find fiction that I like. Maybe that’s not surprising. There’s only so much good stuff, and after decades of reading I’ve already read a big chunk of it.

C.J. Sansom

I never thought I’d find another postwar novelist whom I like as much as I like Winston Graham (the Poldark novels). But I now put C.J. Sansom in that category, and, as with Winston Graham, I’ve read almost everything he wrote.

In only a few months last year, I read all seven of Sansom’s Shardlake novels. (I wrote about the first novel in that series, Dissolution, here.

There are many things that Winston Graham and C.J. Sansom have in common. For one, they were both superb writers, writers who see writing as only a transparent vehicle for story, as opposed to inflicting upon us some contrived notion of “style.” Their characters are complex, with rich (if conflicted) inner lives. The relationships between the characters are similarly rich and complex. In the Shardlake novels, even Shardlake’s horse has a personality and perhaps an inner life. The plots are superb. The settings become part of the story (Cornwall in the Poldark novels, England from the channel to York in the Shardlake novels). Sansom was a trained historian. His Shardlake novels make the reader feel immersed — hungry, cold, nervous — in Henry VIII’s Tudor England.

Sansom’s Dominion is set in the early 1950s. It’s an alternate history in which Lord Halifax (who wanted appeasement with Germany), rather than Winston Churchill, succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. Instead of going to war with Germany, this alternative Britain forms a lopsided alliance with Germany in which Britain steadily descends into fascism. Churchill is still there. But he is a leader of the resistance, hunted by the government as a traitor, and goes into hiding.

Dominion was published in 2012. Barack Obama, you will recall, was elected president of the U.S. in 2008 and won a second term in 2012. The United States was not flirting with fascism in 2012. In Britain, David Cameron was prime minister from 2010 until 2016. Though a liberal like me would find many faults with Cameron as prime minister, it’s safe to say that the U.K. was not flirting with fascism at the time any more than the U.S. was. Thus Dominion doesn’t seem to have been written as some kind of warning, like 1984. Rather, Sansom was interested, I think, in what might have happened in 1940 if the proponents of appeasement with Hitler had stayed in power.

Sansom was well aware that there are always fascists among us. This novel really ought to make a comeback — or be made into a movie — because it totally nails the rise of Donald Trump and what fascists do as soon as they get the power to do it. It’s very disturbing reading, really. There were a couple of moments when I had to put the book down for a while and recalibrate my grip on reality, because what happens in the book tracks so closely with what is happening in the U.S. today.

I have only one complaint about the novel. It’s that the denouement was too short, ending as soon as the plot is wrapped up. Many good books need a longish denouement. When we bond with characters, we need a little time to say goodbye to the characters and see them content with what they struggled so hard to gain. I have no idea why Sansom got this wrong in Dominion. Maybe he underestimated just how real and how lovable his characters really are.

Writers worth remembering

The Prisoner of Zenda was published in 1894. But it was very popular and went through many editions. This appears to be a book club edition, published, I think, in the 1920s. There were movie versions as late as 1979.

In every generation of writers, there are only a few writers who write classics that remain in demand and are kept in print. Everything else falls into obscurity. These books, some of which may even have gone through multiple editions, continue to exist only in the surviving copies, which no doubt become fewer and fewer decade by decade.

I am hardly the first to complain that I find the fiction that gets published these days to be pretty much unreadable. On June 25, the New York Times ran a piece touching on this, Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear? David Brooks’ column on July 10 was When Novels Mattered.

When looking for fiction to read, I rarely find book lists helpful. This neglected fiction is not on anybody’s radar screen, and besides my taste in fiction matches poorly with that of people who compile book lists. But I have found that an AI can be very good at finding neglected fiction to read, if you explain in detail what you like. I have been using ChatGPT’s 4.1 model for this. My to-be-read stack, which was empty for a while, has been replenished.

⬆︎ The Thirty-Nine Steps was published in 1915. Alfred Hitchcock based a movie on the book in 1935. The copy above was a Reader’s Digest book published in 2009. Though it’s a Reader’s Digest book, it contains the complete text.

⬆︎ Sword at Sunset was a bestseller after it was published in 1963. It’s one of the fortunate old books that has been reissued in Kindle format and a new paperback edition.

⬆︎ It seems that the biggest bookstore in Scotland for used books is in Inverness, not Edinburgh. That’s Leakey’s Bookshop. I will be in Inverness for a couple of days in late September, so Leakey’s definitely will be one of my stops. Before I go, I’ll ask ChatGPT to help me make a list of books and authors to look for.

⬆︎ I have been greatly enjoying Slow Horses, which can be streamed on Apple TV+. There have been four seasons so far, with a fifth and sixth season in the works. The TV series is based on a series of novels, Slough House, by Mick Herron. It seems there is no end to the humiliation heaped on Slough, a town about 20 miles west of London. I wrote about Slough in a post in April 2024, The magical threads from nowhere to somewhere. Be sure to read the comments!

⬆︎ I ran into a friend a couple of days ago who told me that he has completely cut himself off from the news, to protect his mental health. I don’t advocate going that far. But I do think that we need to keep our heads above it and realize that what we’re living through is a disgusting pig circus directed by idiots. The New York Times lifted the lid just a little in a recent guest essay, The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller. In this piece, someone is quoted as saying that Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, doesn’t know or care much about policy and that “She’s producing a reality TV show every day.” In the photo, that’s Trump, of course, with Jeffrey Epstein. Though we know that Trump flew on Epstein’s plane seven times, we’re expected to believe Trump’s denials that anything naughty or illegal happened.