Cool Things That Caught My Eye

Like the title says; interesting articles/posts to read or things to spend money on that caught my eye this week.

First: The Viking Trilogy by Henry Treece - In the comments over at Jim Cornelius' Frontier Partisans in a discussion of the Dark Mountain Project (among other things), I mentioned author Henry Treece and his Celtic Quartet (I've reviewed The Dark Island, Red Queen,White Queen, and The Great Captains at Black Gate) and how I want to read his Viking Trilogy, but it's hard to come by.

Well, no longer. Tooling around Amazon to see how much it would cost to get paperbacks of some of Treece's books, I saw a pre-release notice for YA The Viking Trilogy on kindle coming in July. I will buy it the moment it's available and am hoping it's a portent of a widespread release of Treece's work in e-format.

Treece started as a poet and a founder of a short-lived school of writing called the New Apocalyptics. He and his fellow Apocalyptics believed that poetry had become stale and too focused on realism. Reading through a 43-year old Ph.D. theses, I learned Treece put together a manifesto with four points:

1) That Man was in need of greater freedom, economic no less than aesthetic, from machine and mechanistic thinking.

2) That no existent political system, Left or Right; no artistic ideology, Surrealism or the political school of Auden, was able to provide this freedom.

3) That the Machine Age had exerted too strong an influence on art, and had prevented the individual development of Man.

4) That Myth, as a personal means of reintegrating the personality, had been neglected and despised.

I've never read any of his poetry, but I can see elements of the manifesto in his historical novels. The three I've read are set all set in bloody hinge moments of British history. They are also set on the edge of realism and the supernatural. Some events are clearly supernatural while others All three depict points of rupture in the old order, when the world its characters have assumed would continue forever is destroyed. In each, the beauty of the land, its mystery, is the set against destruction and death. Order falls to chaos and the world moves in a new, unforeseen direction. 

I only have one more to read in the quartet, The Golden Strangers. It's set in Britain's distant past when tribes with bronze weapons arrive to the detriment of the island's less advanced natives.

Second: A History of Violence - Tom Breihan of the AV Club has started a series on the history of modern action movies. For each year he picks what he considers the best film. He also discusses briefly several other genre movies from the year in question. So far it's been a smart, insightful series that's already got me trying to track down two movies I haven't seen in a long time. I hope he manages to stick with this long enough to chronicle the evolution from the more tough-guy movies of the seventies thru the pumped up eighties of Schwarzenegger and Stallone to the hyperactive present. 

For reasons he explains and I'm willing to go along with, he starts with 1968's Bullitt. For those who haven't seen it, it stars Steve McQueen in one of his most iconic roles and features one of the first great modern car chases. 

For those raised on the hyper-kineticism of modern action scenes, it may be a little slow, but the chase is a model of automotive choreography and editing. Unlike most modern action films, it has a fairly complex and involved plot and some actual characterization. 

His 1969 choice is Sam Peckinpah's blood-drenched masterpiece, The Wild Bunch. It stars William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson.  If you haven't seen this and have any interest in Westerns, action movies, or just plain old great movie making, you should see this.

Finally, for 1970 Breihan chose The Chinese Boxer starring Jimmy Wang Yu. Before this he starred in classic, One-Armed Swordsman, its sequel, Golden Swallow, and several others. I'll have to see if I can get a copy. 

He says the movie is considered the first pure martial arts movie, focusing on hand-to-hand fighting and choreography.  I haven't seen this one in years and have almost no memory of it, but Wang is one of the martial arts movie greats. 

It should be fun to see what Breihan choose in the weeks to come. If you have an interest in action films, this should be a weekly stop for you.

The Matter of Britain, Pirates, and Tough Guys

Statue of Boudica in London

I'm diving back into Henry Treece's Celtic tetralogy for Black Gate this coming week with Red Queen, White Queen. It's set during Boudica's bloody uprising against the Romans in 60 AD. Instead of the bloody queen, the book's perspective is from two soldiers, one Roman and the other a Briton. Where Artos and Medrawt in The Great Captains (reviewed at Black Gate) were building the great myths themselves, the protagonists here are only mortal moving through a legend-wreathed and spirit-haunted world.

Caractacus faces the Romans

The remaining books in the quartet are The Golden Strangers and The Dark Island. The first is set during the invasion of Britain by bronze using proto-Celtic tribes and their conquest of the stone age natives. The second is about Caractacus' war against the Romans.

I continue to be enthralled by the myths and history of early Britain. Even though my own roots are with the Saxon invaders, these stories have suffused the earth of the island itself and imprinted themselves on to all its inhabitants, including me through my ancestors. British resistance to foreign domination, be it Spain, France, or Germany, feels like it has its roots in the battles of Caractacus, Boudica, and Arthur. The seemingly endless struggle to bring a modicum of justice in times of chaos that lies with those stories as well.

I just finished off Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood books: Brethren of the Main, Captain Blood: His Odyssey, Captain Blood Returns, and The Fortunes of Captain Blood. I'll go into more detail on them later (with Howard Andrew Jones - the worst instigator of book buying around these days). For now, just let me say that they, are rollicking, swashbuckling adventures of the first order.

I've also gotten back into some good hardboiled books as well. I finally picked back up and polished of Bait Money, Max Allan Collin's first Nolan book. The reason I hadn't finished it was it wasn't grabbing me. Nolan's a little too nice and the caper wasn't shaping up as something too thrilling. I think part of the problem was that years ago a friend told me Nolan was nothing more than a Parker knockoff and I went in expecting something more brutal and cynical than it is.

While inspired by Richard Stark's master criminal, Collins had his on take on that archetype and explains it afterword. He wanted to look at that sort of a man in the later years of his career as well as exploring Collin's own baby boomer generation through the character of Jon. But when I first started reading the book I was expecting something different.

Well, I'm glad I returned to it. The end is explosive and a great setup for the sequel, Blood Money. And don't get me wrong, there's a fair amount of cynicism, it's just tempered compared to what you find in the Parker books.

I'm also in the middle of Fast One by Paul Cain. I'd never hear of Cain until seeing him included on Jones' (Chris Hocking's actually) list of hardboiled books the other week. In keeping with its title, this is one of the most fast-paced books I've ever read. Within a few pages it's like getting hit by a train, a bloody, booze-soaked train. Not done yet but great so far.

Based on that list I also bought The Mouse in the Mountain by Norbert Davis, The Complete Casebook of Cardigan: Vol. 1. by Frederick Nebel, Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer, and The Name of the Game is Death by Dan Marlowe. All look like a lot of fun, but I have to admit I bought the Davis book because it's got a big dog in it.

There are really a lot of similarities between hardboiled fiction and swords & sorcery. Both are tougher, more cynical and feature heroes more concerned with staying alive or getting the money than fighting evil. Richard Stark is to Agatha Christie as Karl Edward Wagner is to Prof. Tolkien. This has been talked about before (can't find the links, but trust me, people have discussed this), and reading the Cain and Collins only reinforces this belief in me.

So that's what's going on off the pages of Black Gate for me bookwise. I'm not even sure what heroic fantasy book I'm going to pick up next. I think I need to find something truly odd and from off the beaten track (of course, lazy as I am, I probably won't make the effort and I'll just grab something I've read already).

Historical Adventure

   From its beginnings , swords & sorcery has been closely tied to historical adventure stories. Robert E. Howard showed it was really only a short step from Harold Lamb's stories to his own Hyborian tales. Broadly speaking, both genres are action and adventure oriented and usually set in some exotic or war torn land.
   Two of my most recent Black Gate posts were about historical novels (ok, Battle in the Dawn's caveman stories are pushing it a little). I've really enjoyed them and have been hoping to read more of them for some time now. That's got me thinking I'll probably read one every month or so. It'll mix things up and give me an excuse to catch up on a lot of books I really should have read already.

   In a recent e-mail conversation this very subject came up as did number of titles that I would like to read over the next year or so. Last summer, M Harold Page had a great post about the books of Ronald Welch. Paul R. McNamee recommended Tim Willock's Tannhauser books and I know lots of people love Bernard Cornwell's various series.  And of course it doesn't only have to be Crusaders and Vikings. There's plenty of reputedly great swashbuckling novels I haven't read either as well as some old Howard Pyle I've got sitting around.

So here's my prospective list for the next twelve months.

Frans G. Bengtsson - The Long Ships
H. Rider Haggard - Eric Brighteyes 
Harold Lamb - Swords from the West
Robert Low - The Whale Road
Talbot Mundy - Tros of Samothrace
Henry Treece - The Invaders, The Dark Island and Red Queen, White Queen
Arturo Perez-Reverte - Captain Alatriste
Tom Willocks - The Religion
Rafael Sabatini - Captain Blood

   Looking at the list, it's a lot of Vikings (and I'm planning to reread Hrolf Kraki's Saga pretty soon, so that's even more Norsemen in my future), so I think I need to mix it up a bit. Let me hear any titles you recommend or comments on any of the above.

 This week I'm reading Harpy's Flight by Megan Lindholm, aka Robin Hobb. I really liked the story "Bones for Dulath" featuring the novel's heroes, Ki and Vandien, and I thoroughly enjoyed her Soldier's Son trilogy, so I've got my hopes up.

Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus

Just reviewed Henry Treece's The Great Captains over at Black Gate. My dad had Treece's The Crusades lying around, but it was only when I got Moorcock and Cawthorn's Fantasy: 100 Greatest Books that I had any sort of real understanding of who Treece was. 

Great Britain has a vast literature, much of it fantastic, that examines the island's real and mythical history. Sometimes it's about the very land itself and how the actions of the waves of people migrating to or invading Britain have left imprints that still resonate today.  I'm not totally sure why it appeals to me as much as it does. I trace a quarter of my ancestry to England, so maybe there's something going on there, some part of my deepest Jungian-type race memory's being tickled. When I read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood I felt like I was reading the pre-history of my own English antecedents. I was brought up deeply aware of my English roots. If my Dutch background had been emphasized would these stories hold the same appeal?

   Much of the literature specifically called the Matter of Britain and deals with the mythic (or at least mythic versions of) the kings of Britain. I'm not that familiar with the older stuff like the Historia Brittonum, only the modern. 

I'm a big fan of the Arthur stories. I love T. H White's The Once and Future King as well as its spin-off, Camelot. I also find that magnificent wreck, Excalibur, riveting. The whole struggle to fight against "might makes right" and stave off the impending long night appeals to our hope to see justice done. One claim about all the kingly literature is that it was written to establish a body of patriotic myths for the land. Well, you really can't do better than Arthur Pendragon. The Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle makes the story more poignant, humanizing a potentially demi-god-like character. 

   Other authors who've dug into Britain's past that I can recommend include Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. Garner, more than any other author I'm familiar with, has dug the deepest into the mythic history of Britain. Keith Robert's Pavane and The Chalk Giants are also favorites, exploring some of the same subjects, but in sci-fi settings.

Being a fairly young country with no real

connection between the original myths of this continent, America doesn't have the same sort of body of literature. That we're also immigrants from all corners of the world only makes the a unifying myth harder to create (you could argue about the Founding Fathers holding that place, but I don't think the deist ones would appreciate it). Maybe that's why I'm so enthralled by these stories. While my roots go back to this country's founding, they really go back much further, to another land. Maybe there's something buried deep in the bedrock of my cultural/genetic past that calls to me from back down the years.

   Reading The Great Captains put me in the mood to cue up some Jethro Tull albums. In particular, Thick as a Brick and Songs from the Wood got lots of play. I haven't listened to the latter that much in a long time. Does liking Jethro Tull make me hopelessly uncool?

My next Black Gate post will be a review of October's short stories from the usual suspects. After that I it's either de Camp's The Fallible Fiend or the new Deepest, Darkest Eden from Miskatonic River Press. As to music, I just put on Manowar's Battle Hymns. Overused as it is, the only word is AWESOME!