Category: Literature

Leakey’s Book Shop


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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.


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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.


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⬆︎ 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.

Reginald Dalton


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John Gibson Lockhart, 1794-1854, is best known as the author of a seven-volume biography of Sir Walter Scott. He married Scott’s oldest daughter, Sophia. Scott died in 1832. Lockhart, 23 years younger than Scott, died at Abbotsford, Scott’s home in the Scottish borders.

In addition to the biography of Scott, Lockhart also wrote four novels. Because my surname is Dalton, I was very curious about his third novel, Reginald Dalton, which was published in 1823.

Unless I missed something, Reginald Dalton has been out of print since 1849. (As with many old books, there are some low-quality facsimile editions.) The novel has become obscure, and when it is mentioned, the criticism is fairly harsh. I’m only about a third of the way through Reginald Dalton, but I think it’s going to be a better novel than some people have thought it to be.

Reginald Dalton is the son of a vicar in northern England. He’s about 15 years old when the story starts. He has never been far from home until, at the age of 18, he’s sent off to Oxford. The novel is said to be a comedy. I’m not really seeing that so far, though clearly some of the conversations and incidents (such as a stage coach overturning on the way to Oxford) is clearly meant to be funny. I understand from what I’ve read about the novel that Reginald is going to have some misadventures at Oxford.

Anyway, for a long time I have been on the lookout for an out-of-print public-domain book that deserves to be brought back into print through my micro-press, Acorn Abbey Books. This is a lot of work. It means using optical character recognition (OCR) to recover the text, then proofing and cleaning up the text from the many OCR errors that are inevitable. This novel is quite long. It was published in three volumes. It’s almost 200,000 words.

And the plot thickens.

I have scans (made by Google) from the 1823 first edition as well as scans from a reprint edition from 1849. I was conflicted about which edition would be the best source. That’s an academic question. I Googled to try to find a Lockhart scholar, and I quickly found one. He happens to be an American, Thomas Richardson, who is Eudora Welty professor of English at the Mississippi University for Women. Richardson is editing a series for the Edinburgh University Press, the Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart. A part of that series will be a new edition of Reginald Dalton.

When I learned this from an email from Richardson, my first thought was that an Acorn Abbey edition would be redundant. But then I realized that the Edinburgh edition probably will cost at least $130, like the Edinburgh editions of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Whereas Acorn Abbey Books can produce an affordable edition for casual readers, and maybe even ride the wave if the release of Edinburgh University’s books rekindles some interest in John Gibson Lockhart and Reginald Dalton.

In any case, as I said to a friend, I pat myself on the back for realizing that Reginald Dalton deserves a revival.

A few first editions of Reginald Dalton are for sale here and there. I found all three volumes for sale at Bagatelle Books in Asheville. I have no idea how the books came to be in North Carolina, but old notes left inside the books suggest that the books came to the U.S. through Toronto.

I hope to have Reginald Dalton back in print before my next trip to Scotland, which I think will be in September. I probably will have more to say about the book once I’ve finished reading it.


<Click here for high-resolution version.


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First, let’s talk about a sonnet


⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116. I asked Open AI’s 4o engine to modify it for modern spellings. I have typed the text with an IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. Click here for high-resolution version.

The most thrilling news I came across today is that a somewhat different version of Shakepeare’s Sonnet 116 has been discovered in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The New York Times wrote about it here, and an academic paper about the discovery is here.

This is one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets. As the New York Times points out, the new version has an almost scolding tone aimed at those who deceive. The words “heretic” and “mountebank” are used, words that do not appear in the version with which we are familiar.

Sonnets were meant to be read aloud. Note that the word “fixèd” is two syllables.

Contempt for lying mountebanks! Now there’s a thought for the day.


⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116, with the text from the copy in the Bodleian Library.


⬆︎ Sonnet 116 as we have long known it. This page was scanned from the A.L. Rowse edition of the sonnets published in 1964.


⬆︎ I made a trip to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s this morning. I wasn’t in the market for eggs, because a neighbor has given me some nice big double-yolk eggs. At Whole Foods the egg shelves were pretty much empty.


⬆︎ Even Whole Foods’ most expensive eggs — $13.99 a dozen — were sold out.


⬆︎ I’m guessing that this truck probably cost at least $60,000. It’s also very likely that parts of it were made in Canada and Mexico. When these fools get what they deserve there will be a great feast of gourmet Schadenfreude. But what’s sad is that things will be much worse for people who don’t drive around rolling coal in $60,000 trucks.

Writers who tried to warn us

The zone is completely flooded with you know what. From liberal sources and liberal friends I am hearing two categories of responses. The first boils down to red alert, Defcon 1, all hands on deck. The second is more restrained, and cautions us against wasting our efforts and our mental health on feints, distractions, and smokescreens. This second group points out that many of the outrages of the past two weeks have quickly fallen flat, and that Trump is not as powerful as he wants us to think he is. As someone wrote on Facebook, “Be careful, folks…. Is the constant freak-out to wear us down? … Keep your powder dry till you see the whites of their eyes.”

We don’t know — can’t know at this point — what they actually will be able to do.

But we do know what they want to do, and we do know what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is to make a reality out of everything that science fiction and fantasy writers have been warning us about for many years.

I have zero patience for centrist chumps who keep telling us that we must “reach out” to them and “try to understand them.” We do understand them. We have understood them for a very long time. There is a huge body of literature, some of it fiction, some of it history and social science, telling us what they are.

Things that have happened before obviously are not impossible and can happen again. We already had a civil war in this country, and historians such as Heather Cox Richardson have made it quite clear that what is happening now comes from the same roots as what happened then. We already had a war on this planet against fascism. No one today is talking about ovens and genocide, but they are talking about ethnic cleansing with forced displacement, offshore prisons, and what would amount to concentration camps. They are cutting off food and medicine to millions of the planet’s poor. People will die. Even if Trump floats an idea and subsequently has to walk it back, they’re telling us what they want, and they will do as much of it as they can get away with.

What they are trying to do is a petrifying mix of pretty much everything that writers of dystopian fiction have tried for many years to warn us about. I’ll try to list some of them.

The Hunger Games: This is where oligarchy leads. It’s about the ugliness and ridiculousness of those who want to rule us. It’s what happens when there is no democracy, when oligarchs have all the power and the little people have none. It exposes the sadism that we can see quite clearly in MAGA, in Trump, and in Trump operatives like Stephen Miller. Hunger Games actually was very popular with the deplorables, who seem to lack the imagination to apprehend who they themselves are in the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale: This is where Christian Nationalism and Project 2025 want to take us. And let’s remember that it’s not just women who pay the price. In this story, African-Americans are forcibly relocated, and it’s implied that there was a total genocide against Native Americans. There are always scapegoats. The rest of us are just natural resources to exploit.

Fahrenheit 451: This is about the importance of ignorance. It’s about censorship and what happens to those who resist the lies that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about not forgetting the things that we once learned at great cost.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: This is about the tools that totalitarian regimes use to install and preserve themselves — surveillance, the suppression of dissent, and, as in Fahrenheit 415, the lie-enforcing systems that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about what happens to us when they flood the zone.

Star Wars: This is about the close connections between autocracy and empire. It’s about how rebellion is inevitable. It’s also about the difficulty of rebellion, when autocracy and empire are entrenched and vastly rich. It’s about the corruptibility of formerly democratic governing bodies. It’s about our need for heroes, for hope, for bravery, for perseverance. It’s about how oligarchs and empires hate diversity, equity, and inclusion; and it’s about how rebellions depend on it.

The Children of Men, The Road, Lucifer’s Hammer: In a dystopia, survival is Priority 1. Oligarchy and totalitarianism have an inherent tendency to lead to uncontrolled pandemic, environmental disaster, famine, and violence. They don’t care about us. To resist, first you must survive.

Wool: This is about mass deception, its consequences, and the difficult process of slowly figuring things out.

The Lord of the Rings: This is about the power of evil, the ugliness of evil, the strange sameness of evils wherever they appear, and the importance of alliances in resisting evils. It’s about how having kings and armies in the resistance is a great help, but also about how the little people can, and must, stand up for themselves.

The Lord of the Flies: This is about how people who are not fully developed human beings — that is, the deplorables — can so easily regress into primitive and inhuman behavior, if someone or something winds them up in a certain way. It’s about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s about how power and authority can lead people who are cognitively and morally stunted not just to illiberal ideology but all the way to cruelty and violence.

Fugue in Ursa Major: Here I must apologize for promoting not my own self-published books, but rather my ideas. The number of sales of my novels is next to nothing compared with the above. But I believe that, ten years ago in 2014, I correctly called a great deal of the chaos of today. It’s that it’s the billionaires who finance the engines that overpower the arc of justice. It’s that, ultimately, the billionaires and oligarchs want all the power. Being that rich is deeply corrupting and corrosive, and wealth at that level provides the ability to buy the power to do what they want to do. They finance the so-called think tanks that develop the propaganda, they own the machinery that retails the propaganda, they corrupt our elections and our governing bodies with money, and they have led us to a situation in which the richest man on the planet actually has his hands on the infrastructure of our government. Just months ago, that would have seemed too crazy even for fiction. But here we are. My novel also is about the importance of knowledge and the intelligentsia. JD Vance was entirely right when he said that (from his dark perspective) the universities are the enemy. If corruption and autocracy depend on lies, then the enemy of corruption and autocracy is knowledge and truth. A Frodo may lack the knowledge of a Gandalf, but a Frodo can know enough to do what needs to be done, as long as he can distinguish between who is lying to him and who is not.

We know what we’re up against. We know who they are. We know what they want. We know what they’ll use against us. We know what we have to do to try to stop them. I never guessed that they would get this far this time around. I thought the institutions would hold. I thought we’d learned our lessons about these people. We all got the memo. But 77,284,118 of us were too foolish to read it.

Pathos vs. tragedy


Source: Gutenberg.org

I have long remembered an English professor, Emily Sullivan, elaborating on the distinction between pathos and tragedy. Pathos, she said, is merely sad. Pathos has no meaning. Pathos has none of the edifying characteristics of tragedy, such as a character’s downfall because of a fatal flaw.

If at that time I had read The Old Curiosity Shop, I think I would have asked her if the novel’s pathos made it a bad novel. I think she would have had to say yes, and I think I would have agreed.

Clearly Oscar Wilde would have agreed, too. He famously said that one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the ending. I’m paraphrasing Wilde so as not to have a spoiler, in case you don’t know how The Old Curiosity Shop ends.

I love Charles Dickens, and thus it is hard to find that I hated The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) in much the same way I hated Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and for the same reason — endings that combine cruelty and pathos with no redeeming meaning. That sets up an interesting discussion about whether the ending of Wuthering Heights (1847) is mere pathos. I would argue that for some mysterious reason Wuthering Heights rises above mere pathos, as though Catherine and Heathcliff were ghosts all along. But that’s a discussion that could go on for an hour or two, over a bottle or two of ale.

Still, I admire 19th Century readers, even though they loved The Old Curiosity Shop. They were patient, and they were smart. But their lives were harder than ours, so maybe it was easier for them to go along with stories in which bad things happen to good people. Here I should add that the villains in The Old Curiosity Shop all got their just deserts.

One sometimes hears people defending bad stories by saying, “But that’s the way life is.”

I detest that argument. Stories are stories precisely because they don’t have to be — shouldn’t be — like life. And any writer who gives heros and heroines anything other than their heart’s desire, and villains anything other than their just deserts, needs a good hard talking to. Therein is the key to tragedy. Tragic heroes fail to get their heart’s desire, because of a fatal flaw. That we understand and accept. But Nell Trent and Tess Durbeyfield did not have fatal flaws.