The Adventures of Skew

 The Adventures of Skew and The Foxes Hunt

As a child, I loved this book, and read it several times. It is a fairly short book, with two stories. The Adventures of Skew is about a china horse who longs to be a real horse, and one day hls fairy godmother comes and tells him that he will be allowed to be a real horse one day of the month, at the new moon, and if he is good enough he might be allowed to be real permanently.

The Foxes Hunt is about a family of foxes who are tired of being hunted and make plans so that the next time they are hunted they can turn around and hunt the hounds. 

It seems to be a fairly rare book -- it doesn't seem to appear in the GoodReads catalogue. I inherited it because my father was a chemist, and had a chemist friend, Bill Buchanan, who worked at Klipfonein Organic Products near the Modderfontein dynamite factory. The name sounds rather ironic nowadays, because some people speak as though "organic" products means they have no "chemicals", but the products of Klipfontein Organic Products were mostly poisonous -- insecticides and the like. One of them was Bexadust, which we used for killing ticks on our horses, which is perhaps appropriate in a story sparked off by a story about a horse. 

But, sadly, Bill Buchanan died, and they were living in a company house on the grounds of Klipfontein Organic Products (KOP) and the house was needed for Bill's replacement. So Bill's widow and children came to stay with us until they could find a place to live. 

Alan, the older child was 15 and at boarding school (Michaelhouse in Natal), so I only saw him during school holidays. Rosemary, the younger child, was 13, and rather pretty, I thought, but I was only 8. 

Rosemary brought The Adventures of Skew, and when they left after a few weeks she left some of the books behind, presumably because she was too old for them. I remember one of the others, which has since been lost, which was called Tick Tock and was about a Professor Postlethwaite who had an underground laboratory that controlled the seasons, and woke up the bulbs when it was time for them to flower, and sent spiderlings away on gossamer parachutes when they hatched. This one was even rarer than the Skew book, and no search engine seems to be able to find it. 

Grace Buchanan and her children eventually went to live in Pietermaritzburg, in Jesmond Road, Scottsville, next to the golf course, where we visited them when travelling to Durban. Grace Buchanan was later the lady warden of the women's residence of the Natal Teachers Training College. Rosemary married someone called Sutton. 

 

The Zombification of America

 Last week a headline read:

Columbia University agrees to Trump administration demands to restore funding

Among other things Columbia University agreed to empower 36 campus officers with the power to make arrests. The university also agreed to stricter controls over its Middle East studies department, which will now be overseen by a new senior vice provost who "will conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East" (Eye Witness News, 22 March 2025).

Similar reports from other places indicate that institutions like universities in various parts of the USA are complying with the demands of the Trump regime without protest, even if the executive demands have no legal basis. They have, in effect, decided to play it safe and be politically correct. They are like burrowing apparatchiks, submissive to those they see as having more power, and bullying those (like their students) who have less power. 

This is a sad contrast to many South African universities, which, when the National Party government sought to impose apartheid on universities that had open admission policies, staff, students and university administrations stood together in protest. They stood together for academic freedom. That was after the National Party government had been in power for 11 years. In the USA the Trump regime had been in power for barely two months when universities and others were seen to capitulate to demands for political correctness.

In South Africa it was after 11 years of National Party rule. After 21 years, or 31 years of civil repression, protest was more muted, but was still there. Some did not bow the knee to Baal, and mindlessly capitulate to unjust demands, without questioning them. 

And it is this mindlessness that is the mark of the zombie. A zombie is a corpse that is reanimated by a witch to be a servant that does the witch's bidding. Since it is a corpse, the zombie is literally brain-dead. It has no living brain so it cannot question the witch's orders. 

More recently there has been a huge uproar in the media about the leaking of a US government plan to bomb Yemen. People are going on and on about how terrible it is to talk about it, especially in the hearing of someone who is not in the inner cabal itself.  Hardly a word is said about the morality of the bombing itself, that people are actually going to die. The talk about the deed is taken more seriously, and seen as more evil than the deed itself. They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. 

It's yet another sign of zombification, which is well expressed in the Cranberries' song Zombie. Click on the link, listen to it, and weep.

Abyss by Paul Bryers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I discovered, after taking this book out of the library, that it was the third book in a trilogy, and I haven't read the first two, so I've missed much of the backstory, and I'm not really qualified to review it. What drew me to it was reading the blurb and seeing that it was more or less in the same genre as most of the books I've written and am writing, so I was interested in seeing how other people do it.

In this story Jade runs away from her boarding school in Cumbria, England, just before being expelled, and her foster mother Emily meets her, and they are then chased by Jade's real father, Kobal, and escape from him with some difficulty, and they are joined by a Benedict, a long-lived member of a miliary monastic order. Benedict believes that Kobal wants to use his seven children, by seven different mothers, for an evil purpose. He had gathered six of them, but Jade had escaped (presumably in one of the earlier books) and Kobal was looking for the seventh. So the three of them set out to travel to Romania, where they hope to find the seventh child.

It was quite a pleasant read, with lots of adventures during the travels, though the denouement was a bit over the top.

One of the things I found rather disappointing is that Jade, the main character has superpowers. In this case it was integral to the plot in that she was bred for this by her father, who wanted to use her and her siblings for nefarious purposes, so she was not altogether happy about having these powers, and would probably have been happier without them, and in the earlier part of the story she rather regretted use them against bullying school fellows.

It may be just me, having this aversion to superpowers, at least for my main characters. Perhaps that is what  most readers want. Perhaps they like to picture themselves as having superpowers, and that is the attraction of such books. I suppose I was a bit like that as a teenager too. Up to the age of 12 most of my reading was of things like Biggles and Enid Blyton's adventure stories. Biggles & Co had one super skill, which made them different from most people, and that was the ability to fly aeroplanes, but it was a skill that anyone who really wanted to might be able to learn. Enid Blyton's characters were ordinary children who got into trouble and ether got out of it by their own ingenuity or by the intervention of adults.

When I was 13, however, we stayed with friends whose son, then a university student, had a huge collection of comics which he had been dumped in the garage. There was a run of Hotspur covering several years, so I was able to read complete runs of several serial stories, with each weekly episode followed by the next. Several characters in those stories either had superpowers, or access to gadgets which, like Aladdin's lamp, gave them superpowers while the possessed it. Some of the plots involved how they lost and regained possession of the gadgets. And so I pictured myself, like Jade in this story, having such a gadget, and picturing myself using it as protection or revenge against schoolfellows I feared or disliked. It was really a kind of excuse for misanthropy. A couple of years later, when I was about 15, I got similar satisfaction out of reading Gulliver's Travels, a kind of "the more I see of some people, the more I like my horse kind of thing. But it seems there are some people who never grow out of the desire for superpowers, and I wonder if they grow up to be people like Elon Musk.

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The Comedians

The Comedians by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A group of travellers who meet on a ship sailing from New York to the Caribbean find their lives entwined long after they step ashore in Haiti, under the dictatorial rule of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his dreaded secret police, the Tonton Macoute.

Brown, the narrator, is a hotelier, returning from an unsuccessful trip to New York attempting to sell the hotel, which he had inherited from his mother. Among his travelling companions are Mr and Mrs Smith, vegetarians hoping to establish a vegetarian centre in Haiti, and "Major" Jones, who turns out to be a con man. The Smiths stay at Brown's hotel, and make it their base for preaching the benefits of vegetarianism.

These expatriates are the comedians of the title, and at many points in the story I was reminded of Jean Genet's play The Balcony, where the setting is a brothel, and the clients are given an opportunity to act out their fantasies. So the comedians play their roles in a society in which everything seems unreal, like a stage set. Over it all hovers the spectral figure of Baron Samedi, the Voodoo lwa of the dead, who functioned (in real life as well as in the novel) as the evil genius of Papa Doc Duvalier.

Brown, who is having an affair with a diplomat's wife, wants to elope with her, but is trapped by, among other things, the corrupt bureaucracy of the authoritarian state, whose ministers tend to disappear when they fall out of favour, and whose bodies disappear even during their funerals.

Graham Greene manages to convey the atmosphere of an authoritarian state well, with the ruthless elimination of those perceived as enemies of the regime. Some of his descriptions of encounters with the Tonton Macoute reminded me of encounters with the South African Security Police 50-60 years ago. and actually contemporary with The Comedians. There are similarities between all authoritarian states, but there are also differences. One of the differences is ideology. Some totalitarian states have an official ideology, such as Communism in the USSR, Nazism in Hitler's Germany, Fascism in Mussolini's Italy. In South Africa the ideology was Apartheid, which grew out of Christian Nationalism. Apartheid didn't begin as an ideology. Under Dr Malan it was an election slogan and a principle to be opposed to that of the previous United Party government. Under J.G. Strijdom it was a policy. It only developed into a fully-fledged ideology under Verwoerd, after which the tendency was simply towards naked power.

In Haiti the progress toward naked power was more rapid and far-reaching, because the ideological roots were weaker. Papa Doc Duvalier doesn't make a personal appearance in The Comedians, but his ministers do, and what is most obvious about them in the book is the insecurity of their positions. They disappear, and their bodies are not found. The comedians of the title are the expatriate characters, but it could just as well be the whole society, the regime and its opponents.

And reading it now, when Donald Trump and his minions are doing a Papa Doc on the USA. makes the story more relevant. There is little ideology, other than a distorted vision of neoliberalism, And the model seems to be that of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: "the question is, which is to be master -- that's all." Like the apartheid regime, the Trump regime has the support of Christian Nationalists, but Christian Nationalism is not the ideology of the regime. Perhaps it is that Baron Samedi has migrated to the mainland, and is one of the few immigrants who is not in danger of deportation.
 
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The Drawing of the Dark

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have often expressed the wish to be able to read more novels of the kind written by Charles Williams and various people have been recommending books by Tim Powers, telling me that they are a similar genre. After searching in vain in bookshops and libraries for years, I was given some money and got the ebook version of this one. and yes, I can say it is in the genre of Williams's novels, which means that in writing about this one, I'm inevitably comparing it with Williams. Another book one could say is in a similar genre is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I tried to read and didn't finish.

In The Drawing of the Dark Brian Duffy, an Irish mercenary soldier of the 16th century, is down-and-out in a port town somewhere in southern Europe (I've forgotten the name of the town, and Kindle won't let me page back to look it up, perhaps it was Trieste or Venice) when he is recruited by a strange character as a bouncer for his pub in Vienna. Duffy travels to Vienna to take up his employment, with several strange adventures on the way.

On arriving in Vienna, he is not welcomed by the manager of the pub, but is pleased to meet an old girlfriend. Epiphany, who had married someone else, but her first husband had died, giving him something to hope for. When his employer eventually arrives in Vienna, Brian Duffy discovers that being a bouncer is only the start of his duties. The year is 1529 and Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople is preparing to send his army to capture Vienna. His object however, seems to be not so much the city itself as a certain barrel of beer, which it is said, will revive the Fisher King of Arthurian legend and give magical powers to those who drink it. The army of the Sultan approaches, the city is besieged, but behind the conventional battle to attack the city walls, there is a magical battle for control of the beer, with rival magicians on each side seeking to control armies of supernatural creatures.

There are physical battles with swords and cannons and mines and sorties, so there is plenty of action in the story. There are also the magical battles between the rival magicians and characters channelling Merlin and King Arthur. But though the elements are there, Charles Williams it isn't. The appearance of the supernatural creatures is described, but they don't seem to mean anything. In Williams's story the supernatural creatures are significant in themselves, but in The Drawing of the Dark they are simply tools in the hands of the rival magicians. And the ending was disappointing -- the title suggested it would end with the drawing of the dark beer, but that happens offstage, as it were, if it happened at all. The dark is never actually drawn.

In Charles Williams's novels, "magicians" of the kind portrayed here are usually evil, with evil intentions, the prime example being Sir Giles Tumulty. I don't know about Tim Powers, but Charles Williams seems to have moved in circles of magicians or would-be magicians, and his portrait of them in his novels is not flattering. The world of Tim Powers seems to be driven by Renaissance magic, and so this book, at least, seems to resemble Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell more than anything Williams wrote. Merlin and Ibrahim are magicians or witches rather than wizards.



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Fantasy Adventure Stories for Kids

I've written a series of three fantasy adventure stories for kids. They are not a trilogy, and not a series, or at least they don't have a series title, though if anyone who as read them has any suggestions, I'd be open to them. 

The books feature four children who are unrelated to each other, but become friends, partly through sharing adventures together, though sometimes their friendship is strained. The stories are also historical novels, being set in the mid-1960s. The first two, Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove, are set mainly in the southern Drakensberg of South Africa, where the apartheid system dominated the lives of people, and this is reflected in the lives of the children too. In the third book, Cross Purposes, the scene shifts, though the background is no less authoritarian.

Now the first book in the series, which went under the title Of Wheels and Witches, is out of print, but a second edition is in the press now. One of the things it needs is a cover illustration, and I was thinking of how to describe the kids for an illustrator. I started by describing them to an AI app, and after about 7-8 attempts it came up with this, which represents fairly accurately how I and some of the readers pictured the kids. 

The children are shown oldest to youngest, their ages as in the first book. 

On the left is Sipho Mdluli (12), grandson of a peasant farmer in the foothills of the Natal Drakensberg. His father has been banished to the Northern Transvaal by the apartheid government.

Next is Jeffery Davidson (11), son of a Johannesburg businessman, whose parents have sent him to stay on a farm that takes children as guests while they go gallivanting overseas. 

Then comes Janet Montgomery (10), daughter of a rich white farmer on a farm next door to the one where Jeffery is a guest. 

On the right is Catherine Kopirovsky (9), whose grandparents were refugees from Bolshevik Russia. She is an orphan, as her parents were killed in a car crash, and she stays with an aunt and her grandmother in Oxford, England, but has come to South Africa to stay with another aunt, Irene Sanderson, who runs the farm where Jeffery is a guest. 

After writing three books about them I've grown quite fond of them, and haven't abandoned them completely. Some of them appear as minor characters in other books I've been writing. So it's nice to have a picture of them, more or less as I saw them when writing the books, and I hope that the picture can be used by whichever illustrator gets to do the cover picture. 

They don't have to be shown walking. They could be running from the villain(s), who, in the first two books include the apartheid police and a witches. Or they could be riding horses, or having a picnic by a river, or exploring caves in the mountains.

Here's another of the AI app's attempts at picturing them. I don't like it quite as much as the top one, but I hope it would be enough to give the illustrator an idea.

One of the reasons for posting this is that the use of so-called AI in book publishing is quite controversial. 

Some people, it appears, use AI to write and illustrate stories, with virtually no human input at all. I've seen apps and web sites advertised that claim to be able to do this, and you can submit 10 or 20 books to publishing sites like Amazon KDP every day. 

But AI is a misnomer. It may be artificial, but it isn't intelligent. The creators of AI bots just pour millions of written texts into the machine to make word salad, and it analyses them to try to rearrange the words in a way that make sense to human readers. They don't make sense to the machine, they don't have to.

I haven't tried to do that. I think there are uses for AI in book production, but mainly in research and providing models, as these pictures could be models for an artist doing a picture to illustrate a book or book cover. It could possibly be used for abstract pictures but really it's better producing models. For text, what I might try asking an AI bot to produce might be something like a letter written be a farmer in Scotland, or a clergyman in the English Midlands (would it nick stuff from Trollope, I wonder?) and hope to have a model, though one would still need to be wary of anachronisms, like sneaking in a "snuck". 

Anyway, meet my characters. And if you'd like to read about them, see here, or here.
 
 

The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A historical novel for children, The Dragonfly Pool is set at the beginning of the Second World War. Tally Hamilton is the daughter of a doctor in a poor area of London, and war seemed increasingly likely she is given a scholarship to a boarding school in Devon, where her family think she will be safer from the expected air raids.

Tally goes reluctantly, especially when her snobby cousins tell her what their posh boarding school is like, but she discovers that it is quite different. It's a kind of progressive school where the children have a lot of freedom, and tally really enjoys it, and makes some good friends. She persuades the school to enter a folk-dancing competition in an obscure East European country threatened with a Nazi takeover, and Tally and her friends find themselves in a position to attempt to foil a plot against Prince Karil, who find the free English school children a refreshing change from stuffy court protocol. But the danger is real and they have to find a way to escape it.

Author Eva Ibbotson was herself a refugee in a similar position, and also attended a school similar to the Delderton School in her story, and so her descriptions of the setting and events ring true, and gives the reader a feel of what it was like to be there.

There was a point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, where it felt as though some of the descriptions were overdone, and at that point I was thinking of giving it four stars, but it recovered again towards the end. 

Though it was just a book I picked up randomly in the library, I found it quite absorbing, not least because if overlaps at some point with a genre of books I myself have tried to write -- historical novels for children, though mine are set mainly in the apartheid era in South Africa, and have more of an element of fantasy. The war, which begins in the middle of the story, remains in the background, but the menace is always there, though my 11-year-old self would probably have preferred to see some more military action.

I see Eva Ibbotson has written several other books, so I'll be looking out for them, as this one was certaingy a good read.  

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Two very different books: Mr Mercedes and 1001 Nights

I've just finished reading two very different books, one a crime novel by Stephen King, which I finished in less than a week, and the other an anthology of short stories compiled about a millennium earlier, which took me nine months to read.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bill Hodges is a retired detective, bored with his retirement, facing the question "why kill time when you can kill yourself" when a letter drops into his mail box, claiming to me from the perpetrator of one of his biggest unsolved cases, a mass murder in which a stolen car was driven into a queue of job seekers.

Bill knows he should take the letter to his old colleagues in the police, but the letter invites him to an internet chat site, where the killer taunts him, and he turns private detective, seriously seeking to catch the killer before he kills again. And the closer he gets, they more it becomes clear that only he, and his associates, a young black student and a middle-aged woman with mental health problems, will be in a position to stop the killer before he kills again.

It's not a whodunit, since the reader knows who that is all along, but rather the story of a race against time to find where the killer is going to strike next, and to stop him.

Tales from the Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book one hears about long before one actually reads it. I saw it in the library and thought such a book of short stories would be nice to read before going to bed.

I'd read bowdlerised versions of some of them as a child, such as the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, which has found its way into children's anthologies of short stories, as have some of the others, such as those concerning Sindbad the Sailor; actually he wasn't a sailor, he was a businessman who chartered ships to carry his merchandise, but the ships invariably got wrecked, casting him up on a strange shore, where after some hardships he usually acquired more merchandise, and restored to prosperity, returned home.

Most of the stories have the same or similar tropes, which can be summarised by the song from Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera "The Mikado" --

Taken from the county jail
By a set of curious chances
Liberated then on bail
On my own recognizances
Wafted by a favouring gale
As one sometimes is in trances
To a height that few can scale
Save by long and weary dances
Surely never had a male
Under such-like circumstances
So adventurous a tale
Which may rank with most romances.

And many of the romances that it may rank with are those in this book.

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Phil Rickman, Charles Williams, and Powers of Evil

Phil Rickman, the British author, died on 29 October 2024 and the Phil Rickman Appreciation Group on Facebook suggested that people read his novel December during the month of December as a kind of memorial tribute to him.

I started rereading it. I first read it about 3 years ago, and found it a rather difficult read -- see my review here. This time I read it more slowly. It is a complex book, five parts with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Don't skip the Prologue! If you are reading it for the first or second time, I recommend re-reading the Prologue at the beginning of each part.

I first came across Phil Rickman when I was browsing in a bookshop in 1999. The title of a book, Crybbe intrigued me, so I took it off the shelf and read the blurb, which made him sound like a cross between Charles Williams and Stephen King, so I bought the book, and was not disappointed. 

I went on to read most of his novels, all the ones I could find, anyway. Somehow they didn't all seem to make their way into bookshops, or else they were sold out quickly. December was published only a month after Crybbe, but it was 20 years before I found it, in a secondhand book shop.

At one level, this is a ghost story. Charles Williams wrote one ghost story, All Hallows Eve, told from the point of view of one of the ghosts. December is told from several points of view, with so many switches that it is sometimes bewildering, but never from the point of view of the ghosts.

In this story five rock musicians have a contract to produce a record in a ruined abbey in south Wales. Four of the musicians are thought to be psychic, and the producers think that this, combined with the setting, should produce an interesting album that will sell well. The story begins with one of the musicians, Dave Reilly, being spooked by the sudden appearance of thirteen tallow candles in the studio and running out to take refuge under a tree. There he has a vision of dying outside a large building, and later the news comes over the radio that John Lennon was killed at that exact time, and he is haunted by the ghost of John Lennon. Three of the other members of the group are also haunted, each in different ways, and the group splits up. 

Fourteen years later they are called back together to complete production of the album, which had been abandoned, and they somewhat reluctantly agree. One of the members, Tom Storey, is approached through his wife's business partner, Martin Broadbank, who organises a dinner party for them to meet.  Broadbank's housekeeper cum concubine, Meryl, who is a spiritualist, and has a vision of most of the people at the dinner party suffering a violent death.

Later in the story Meryl finds herself in the company of Tom Storey, and tries to find out more about his psychic experiences, which, as a spiritualist, she sees as glamorous and exciting. But as events develop she comes to realise that she is out of her depth. She looks at herself in a mirror and

In the glass she sees not the old smouldering allure in the mysterious dark-eyed one who looks beyond the horizon, but plain perplexed apprehension in the unpainted eyes of an ordinary middle-aged woman.

And she longs to be back with Martin, for whom the only unknown forces are market forces. With whom she can safely be a believer in Other Spheres, a confidante of ghosts, and it doesn't matter because she's the only one, an exotic eccentric in a world of businessmen and socialites.

Meryl has been bound up with her perception of "unknown forces" as weird, mysterious, exotic and spooky, and perceives things like market forces as safe and ordinary and part of everyday life. Yet in the story the market forces are perhaps the most unsafe of all. It is market forces that are driving businessmen like Max Goff and Sile Copesake who in this story represent the money behind the music.

Also central to the story is the death of John Lennon, shot to death in New York City on 8 December 1980. But in December 2024, when so many Phil Rickman fans are reading his novel December, another businessman is shot in New York city. Some of this seems to have an uncanny application to Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, alleged to have been shot by Luigi Mangione. As Max Goff and Sile Copesake are to music in December, so was Brian Thompson to health care in everyday life. And Max Goff also makes an appearance in Crybbe.

Phil Rickman hints at a theological point here. Meryl looks for the unknown spiritual forces in all the wrong places, when all along they are right under her nose, the market forces driving the behaviour of the guests at her dinner party.

Another theological point is evident in the case of Brian Thompson. Attacking the flesh and blood representative of spiritual forces is ineffective. Brian Thompson  was replaced in his office the very next day. As St Paul says:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of wickedness in the heavenlies (Eph 6:10-12).

And he says elsewhere that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Flesh and blood oligarchs can be replaced. The real enemy is the spiritual power of the ideologies that drive them.

Dean Koontz comes closer to Charles Williams

Brother Odd by Dean Koontz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Odd Thomas can see dead people. His ability to see dead people has sometimes caused him to get into trouble in the past, which is why he is now a guest at a monastery in the Sierra Nevada of California, hoping to find some peace and tranquillity.

But, because his ability to see dead people allows him to see the ghost of a monk who is thought to have committed suicide, and now occasionally rings the church bells, Odd Thomas also has keys that allow him access to most parts of the monastery and the nearby school for disabled children. Odd Thomas also has the ability to see bodachs, shadowy harbingers of death, whose gathering in the rooms of some of the children in the school suggests that they may be under threat of death. As a snowstorm builds up, and a monk disappears, Odd must try to discern the nature of the threat, so that it can be neutralised.

Dean Koontz has written many books. I have read four of them, and of those four this is by far the best. This one is the third of a series of books featuring Odd Thomas, a young man who has had a difficult life, and earns a living as a cook in a fast-food restaurant in a desert town in the western USA, where he has helped the police chief to solve puzzling crimes with the aid of his ability to see dead people.

I read the second book of the series, Forever Odd, and was not very impressed (see my review here), but was intrigued by the description of this one, and the fact that it was set in a monastery. This setting, I thought, might give me a clue to the worldview of Dean Koontz, and to get an idea of where he was coming from, and what some of his theological presuppositions were, because those discernible in Forever Odd seemed rather strange.

Since the Jonestown massacre of 1978 there has been a tendency in fiction to portray Christian groups and organisations in a bad light. There was a precedent for this in early Gothic fiction of the late 18th and early 19th century, which often portrayed Roman Catholic monasteries in a very bad light, and since Dean Koontz write in a similar Gothic genre, I wondered about that. But his portrayal of most of the inmates of the monastery and its associated school is very sympathetic.

I wondered whether, in view of the religious setting, Brother Odd might be comparable with the novels of Charles Williams whose book All Hallows Eve featured two dead girls.

Koontz uses some of the same ingredients in his novels, so that his books could be described, like those of Charles Williams, as "supernatural thrillers". Some of the same tropes are there -- a supernatural blizzard, ghosts, the temptations of power. In most of Koontz's books, however, the ingredients seem to be clumsily put together, and the theological implications are obscure. Here they are much clearer, and one of the tropes is an interesting analogy with a current concern: just what is the nature of the "intelligence" that we debate about when we talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

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Notes from Underground: 19th Blogiversary Post

Today is the 19th anniversary of the start of this blog. It was named for Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name, and since this morning I read an interesting critique and description of the novel on Facebook, what better way of celebrating the anniversary of this blog is there than sharing it here: 

Classic Literature 

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a groundbreaking work that delves into the darkest and most conflicted aspects of human consciousness. Widely considered one of the first existential novels, this novella, published in 1864, explores themes of isolation, free will, and the human tendency toward self-destruction.

Plot and Structure 

The novella is divided into two parts. The first, “Underground,” is a philosophical monologue in which the narrator, known as the “Underground Man,” grapples with his disdain for society, his sense of superiority, and his scorn for the rationalism and optimism of his time. Here, Dostoevsky presents a scathing critique of the emerging social ideals of the 19th century, questioning the notion of human perfectibility and the idea that rationality alone can guide human behavior. In the second part, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” the Underground Man recounts a series of personal encounters that showcase his intense insecurity, emotional turbulence, and spite. His interactions, particularly with a young woman named Liza, reveal his inability to form meaningful relationships, his desire for control, and his overwhelming self-hatred. His actions oscillate between cruelty and vulnerability, illuminating the tension between his need for connection and his self-imposed alienation.

Themes and Analysis

At its core, Notes from Underground is an exploration of human freedom, especially the paradoxical desire to act irrationally, even to one’s detriment. The Underground Man embodies the tension between intellect and emotion, revealing how individuals can choose to suffer and reject societal norms simply to assert their independence. Dostoevsky’s probing into this psyche reveals the complex motives driving human behavior, from pride to self-loathing, and forces the reader to confront uncomfortable questions about autonomy, morality, and the need for meaning.

Dostoevsky’s critique of utilitarianism and “enlightened self-interest” — the popular belief that people act in ways that maximize their own good — challenges the reader to considenr the limits of rationalism. The Underground Man rebels against the idea that humanity can be entirely understood, or improved, through logic alone. His desire to make choices purely for the sake of rebellion suggests a deep-seated need for freedom that defies logical categorization, prefiguring existentialist thought.

Writing Style and Tone;

Dostoevsky's writing in Notes from Underground is intense, introspective, and laden with irony. The Underground Man’s narrative voice is sharp and caustic, giving readers an unfiltered look at his bitterness ahttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17881.Notes_from_Underground_The_Doublend cynicism. The novella’s fragmented and sometimes contradictory prose reflects the narrator’s chaotic inner world, creating a feeling of immediacy and intimacy. Dostoevsky’s use of direct address, as the Underground Man often speaks to an imagined audience, implicates the reader in his tirades and heightens the story’s impact.

Reception and Legacy

Upon publication, Notes from Underground was seen as a bold and unsettling work. Its exploration of moral ambiguity, psychological complexity, and existential themes has made it one of Dostoevsky’s most studied works. Often cited as a precursor to existentialism, it has influenced countless writers and thinkers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Albert Camus, who admired Dostoevsky’s ability to probe the darker facets of human freedom and responsibility.

Final Thoughts

Notes from Underground is a challenging yet rewarding read that delves into the paradoxes of human nature and the conflicts inherent in modern consciousness. Its themes resonate just as powerfully today as they did in Dostoevsky’s time, as it forces readers to confront questions about individuality, freedom, and the inherent irrationality of human behavior. With its psychological depth, raw emotion, and philosophical insights, Notes from Underground remains a seminal work, essential for anyone interested in the darker corridors of the human psyche.

The book: Notes from Underground.

Why the blog?

I called the blog "Notes from Underground" because it was intended first of all to be a rather cynical and detached view of the world around us, but secondly, and finally, all human observers of human frailty are themselves subject to frailty and so their observations need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The blog started here on Blogger, and you can go and look at the first post if you like. But the people at Blogger kept thinking of ways of making the editor more clunky and difficult to use, and at one stage it became so difficult that I moved it to a different blogging platform on Wordpress, which you can see here, and so most posts between 2012 and 2020 can be found at Notes from Underground on Wordpress.

For several years Blogger and Wordpress were in competition to see whose blog editor would be the clunkiest and most difficult to use, but in February 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic, Wordpress won by making theirs impossible to use, and since then I've done most of my blogging here, clunky editor and all. 

Telepathy and its Malcontents

Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Doro, an immortal being who has lived for thousands of years, moving from body to body of hosts he kills, has a breeding programme which eventually produces Mary, at telepath who has powers almost equal to his own. She discovers, or creates, the Pattern, which enables her to draw others to herself, and creates a kind of community. But Doro seeks to inhibit its growth.

This belongs to a subgenre of the science fiction I read in my youth, most of which was written in the "psi boom" of the early 1950s. These stories featured people who had "psi-powers", such as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, precognition and the like. Mind of My Mind deals mainly with people who are telepathic, and thus able to read other people's minds. When young, this ability is latent but those who have it undergo a rather traumatic transition to become "active", which causes many of those who have the ability to go mad or die.

Over the years the subgenre has broadened and extended to fantasy literature, where characters have a much wider range of "superpowers" available to them, over and above the traditional psi powers.

I was introduced to Octavia Butler's work by Prof David Levey, of the English Department at Unisa (University of South Africa). Before the Covid pandemic we had a monthly coffee klatsch, where we would get together to discuss books, and Octavia Butler came up at one of these gatherings. But it was another five years before I found one of her books in a book shop.

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Western civilisation and Christian values

Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tom Holland's thesis is that the moral and ethical values of Western Civilisation have been shaped mainly by Christianity, and in this book he tries to follow and explain the process by which this happened. He covers a broad sweep of Western Christianity, sometimes illuminating particular historical events and periods as he does so.

I think it is a book that would be useful for most Christians to read; Western Christians, because it is about them and their history; Orthodox Christians living in the West, or in any society where Western values are influential, to help them to understand the society in which they live. It would also be useful for Orthodox Christians not living in the West, because the West is influential even in places where its values are not dominant. It will be useful to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia, especially those colonised by the West, to see what Western values are based on.

For an example of the last point, Holland makes some interesting comments on how the Western concept of "religion" came to be applied outside the West. In a sense the British East India Company applied the concept of "religion" to India. This concept had been shaped by the history of Christianity in the West, especially in the Early Modern period, and it could be said that the British East India Company invented Hinduism as a religion. Holland could, however, have said a little more about how the concept had developed in the West before being applied to India. He does point out that in the premodern period "religion" referred primarily to those who had taken monastic vows or something similar, but modernity has changed this understanding. A useful book on this topic, for those who would like to know more, is "Religion" and the Religions in the English Enlightenment by Peter Harrison.

Tom Holland is not himself a Christian, as he makes clear in the last chapter, but he acknowledges that his values are based on Christian presuppositions. In general I agree with most of what he says; I might, however, differ from him over what he does not say.

He appears to give a survey of the history of Western Christianity, but there are significant lacunae. Some of the gaps seem to have things that do not support his thesis, or that might cause readers to modify it. He does not, for example, mention the Great European Witchhunt, in which large parts of Early Modern Christendom appeared to revert to pagan values with regard to witchhunts. He should have at least made some attempt to explain such a dramatic reversal in terms of his theory. For more on this, see my article on Christian Responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery.

Another gap that stood out for me came in the penultimate chapter, dealing with fairly recent events. He describes events of the annus mirabilis 1989, when authoritarian regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa and a wind of freedom blew through the world.

Holland notes that both Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk tended to interpret South Africa's liberation, and that of many communist countries, in 1989/90 in biblical terms, as the writing of God's finger on the affairs of state. loving enemies etc. But Western leaders tended to see it differently. As Holland puts it:

This, however, was not how it tended to be seen by policy-makers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx turned out instead to be closer to a hell emphasised the degree to which the true fulfilment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Confucian, or Muslim, or Hindu. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived (Source: Holland 2019:489)

Secularism, liberal democracy and the concept of human rights are all values which, according to Holland, the West derived from Christianity. I don't quibble with him there. But I don't think they were the values the "policy-makers in America and Europe" thought most important. Those policy-makers included people he did not name, and those who dominated in the 1980s were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose chief values were enshrined in the ideology of neoliberalism, which they had been pushing for the previous eight years and more.

The Neoliberalism they pushed for very strongly, and applied in their own countries, has continued to dominate the world economic system, and may seen as a watered down version of the ideology propagated by Ayn Rand, an atheistic despiser of Christianity and its "altruism". That ideology has been influential in the West since the 1960s, and certainly was held by some people in Reagan's administration, if not by Reagan himself.

In the five years since Holland's book was published, however, events have shown that the West is rapidly abandoning any traces of Christian values that remain.

According to Holland:

That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance and shelter and refuge from persecution:these were never self-evident truths.

The Nazis, certainly, knew as much -- which is why, in today's demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they -- because communism was an expression of concern for the oppressed masses -- rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless society.

But in the five years since Dominion was published, Tom Holland's thesis has been completely overturned. The mass murder precipitated by racism in Gaza in 2023-24 has not been seen as at all abhorrent by Western governments, as can be seen by their frequent protestations of support for the perpetrators. The Western values that Holland says are based on Christianity, like human rights, and concepts like "crimes against humanity" are safely stored away in the musical banks described in Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon.

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Living at the Edge of the World

Living at the Edge of the World - Winter by S.J. Barratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two children from London are sent by their parents to spend a few months with their great-uncle in the Shetland Islands.

Tabitha and Timothy Brown are twins, but though they share the same birthday, their interests are very different. Tabitha is at home in the bustling capital, has a wide range of social media contacts, and is appalled at the prospect of living in a remote rural area with iffy WiFi. Timothy seems on track to become a zoologist, reading up about the flora and fauna of the island before he gets there. Though he does find a few aspects or rural life surprising, he is adaptable and more willing to learn than his sister.

Great-uncle Tamhas welcomes them, and the story is about how they adapt and learn about the local culture, the slower pace of rural life, farm animals, and living in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. They go to the local school, where to the local children they seem like exotic foreigners, but they are not the only ones, and one of their fellow-pupils is a Syrian refugee.

I found it easy reading, and though it isn't very exciting or dramatic, I was interested in its description of how the townies adapted to rural life. It was a little bit rough in the beginning, where some of the dialogue seemed rather stilted and didactic for twelve-year-olds, even if they were trying to impart information, but once into the story it moved more easily.

It reminded me in a way of my own childhood; when I was 7 my father got a new job, and we moved from Westville, just outside Durban, to Sunningdale, just outside Johannesburg. Westville was suburban: no WiFi back then, but we did have urban conveniences like mains electricity and a telephone (landline).  In Sunningdale we didn't have such things. We lived on a smallholding with cows and horses and chickens. So as in the story, we had fresh eggs and milk and butter. But we used paraffin lamps, a paraffin stove for cooking, an icebox for keeping stuff cold, and we had to start a diesel motor to pump water. In my recollection I adapted to the rural way of life pretty quickly, and missed it when we had to leave when I was 13. But that experience made made it easy for me to identify with Tabitha and Timothy in the story.

The problem I found with it, though, is that was billed as an "adventure", but nothing really exciting happens. There are no real villains. It's just about urban kids discovering what rural life is like, and that is partly what makes it seem didactic. There were some points at which it seemed possible that an adventure could happen. The children were told about selkies, the seal people and I thought of Alan Garner's children's stories, where 12-year-old twins go to stay on a farm and have the same experience of rural life, but are not only told about creatures from folklore, but actually meet them.

The book was quite short, however, and the "winter" in the title hints at a sequel, so maybe spring and summer will be more adventurous. Tabitha's transformation seems to be the opposite of the problem of Susan in the Narnia stories, but at least Susan has some real adventures.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

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Cults: what's good and what's bad about them

 In some circles, it seems, the word "cult" denotes something that is automatically assumed to be bad, and some people who make this assumption use it to denigrate groups that they don't like, while others seem to think that the word should not be used at all because they see it as derogatory. 

I find this attitude rather strange, and it seems to be difficult to discuss it. The people who think like this seem to simply take the line "It's a bad word, don't use it. End of discussion," or "it's a bad thing, so I'm just calling a spade a spade."

So what is a cult?

Is it a useful word for describing a bad thing, or a bad word used to indoctrinate people into thinking that something good or neutral is a bad thing?

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "cult" as follows:

cult n. system of religious worship; devotion, homage, to person or thing (the ~ of)

To determine whether any given phenomenon is a cult, therefore, one must determine whether it is a system of religious worship, or whether it involves devotion to a person or thing. These are fairly objective criteria, and it should be easy to determine whether a phenomenon is a cult or not.

When one has established that a phenomenon is a cult, determining whether it is good or bad is far more subjective. That would depend on whether one thinks that what is worshipped, or what receives the homage and devotion, is worthy of it.

For example, there are two books that I would like to read on the cult of the saints. One is The Cult of the Saints by St John Chrysostom, which is a series of sermons on the lives of Christian saints, and the other is The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter Brown.

In both these books the word "cult" is used in its proper and legitimate sense, and it is in no way pejorative. St John Chrysostom, in particular, regards the cult of the saints as a good thing. I too regard the cult of the saints as a good thing.

I do believe, however, that there can be, and are, bad cults. A few years ago I discussed the cults of two unscrupulous businessmen who became politicians, one living and one dead. I discussed the cults of Cecil Rhodes and Donald Trump in the course of reviewing a book called The Cult of Rhodes.

In my view these cults were bad, because I did not think that Cecil Rhodes or Donald Trump were worthy of such homage or devotion. Your view may differ. You may think that one or both of them were saints, or, even if not actually saints, at least worthy of homage or devotion. So opinions on whether the cults of these men are good or bad may differ.

But opinions on whether the adulation of these men, Trump while he is still alive, and Rhodes after he died, constitutes a cult also seems to be a contentious matter.

The word "cult" has, mainly in the 2nd half of the 20th century, been misused to describe "new religious movements", "minority religions" and various other groups of people. A recent book dealing with this misuse is 'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century, and the description on the GoodReads site is as follows:

This book focuses on how 'cult rhetoric' affects our perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs).

'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century explores contemporary understandings of the term 'cult' by bringing together a range of scholars from multiple disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Ranging from the 'Cult of Trump' and 'Cult of COVID', to the campaigns of mass media, contemporary 'cult' rhetoric has become hybridised and is common vernacular for everyday people. The contributors explore these issues by analysing how NRMs have developed over the past decades and deconstructing the language we use to describe these movements.

I can see several problems in the description, but there's no way I can afford to buy the book. and owing to bureaucratic bunglings at the Unisa Library I no longer have access to an academic library so I can't get hold of it that way.

Religious organisations and groups, whether new or old, usually have cults, which they practise, but it is rather misleading to say that they are cults. All Christian bodies, for example, practise the cult of Jesus who is called Christ. Some of them practise the cult of the saints, mentioned earlier.

Cults may be either good or bad, depending on whether you judge the object or person worshipped or to which or to whom homage and devotion are paid is worthy of it. But it is high time we stopped using the word pejoratively, or demanding that it be banned simply because it assumed to be pejorative.