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Wolfproof by Maureen McQuerryIT’S UP! LISTEN TO A FABULOUS AUDIOBOOK READING BY SYLVIA DORHAM OF MAUREEN MCQUERRY’S WOLFPROOF, NOW ON CATHOLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL.

Great news for Idylls Press readers and audio/bibliophiles: Maureen McQuerry’s Narnia-esque fantasy, Wolfproof, has begun to air on Catholic Radio International. New chapters will appear on CRI’s Cover to Cover program every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, so check back regularly to listen to the next segment!

zenda.jpgzenda.jpgby Anthony Hope

Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda is a classic swashbuckler in the fun-loving tradition of Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, Scaramouche). The book’s enduring success has led to several stage and screen adaptations, including a popular version from 1937 starring Ronald Colman.

It’s easy to see why Prisoner has captured so many imaginations. Hope, in highly readable prose, delivers a thrilling yarn of mistaken identities, doomed romance, daring rescues, and stylish nemeses. There’s a hero named Rudolf, a princess named Flavia, a castle named Zenda, and a moustache-twirling villain named Black Michael. All that one could hope for.

Read the following Amazon.com plot summary. Whether it makes you groan or giddy should tell you all you need to know:

Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling romance transports his English gentleman hero, Rudolf Rassendyll, from a comfortable life in London to fast-moving adventures in Ruritania, a mythical land steeped in political intrigue. Rassendyll bears a striking resemblance to Rudolf Elphberg who is about to be crowned King of Ruritania. When the rival to throne, Black Michael of Strelsau, attempts to seize power by imprisoning Elphberg in the Castle of Zenda, Rassendyll is obliged to impersonate the King to uphold the rightful sovereignty and ensure political stability. Rassendyll endures a trial of strength in his encounters with the notorious Rupert of Hentzau, and a test of a different sort as he grows to love the Princess Flavia.

As deeply as I love serious writers like Joseph Conrad and Walker Percy, one cannot live by brood alone. Prisoner of Zenda is old-fashioned fun, swift and sharp as an Errol Flynn-wielded blade.

Decline and Fall (1928)

buy from AmazonBy Evelyn Waugh

The Satirical Rogue

Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall, his first book, at the age of twenty-five. Most young writers compare the giddy throes of that initial burst of creativity to a kind of drunkenness—young, brash, and brimming with authorial enthusiasm, they are intoxicated by the thrill of artistic discovery.   

Well, Evelyn Waugh was by all accounts a mean drunk, and Decline and Fall is a hilariously mean-spirited book.

Mean-spirited, perhaps, but undeniably full of spirit. Like PG Wodehouse’s mischievous younger brother—the one who pulls wings off butterflies and fries ants beneath a magnifying glass—Waugh tears into British hypocrisy and human stupidity with something like joyful exuberance. While most of us repent our sin and frailty, Waugh revels in fallen human nature. 

The story is a skewed bildungsroman, that ever-popular genre of fiction wherein a young hero or heroine embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Our hero is Paul Pennyfeather, an affable young student at Oxford who is wrongly (well, sort of wrongly) accused of indecent exposure when he is separated from his trousers in a case of mistaken-identity hazing.

Like Nicholas Nickleby before him, Pennyfeather must make his own way in the world and soon lands a position as a teacher at a boys school of questionable repute (Waugh had also taught at a private school in ). He is assigned to give organ lessons despite having no musical ability whatsoever. “Do the best you can,” is the headmaster’s helpful advice. Pennyfeather is a quick study; his method for keeping a classful of unruly prepubescents occupied is quite ingenious: a reward of half a crown to whoever writes the longest essay, irrespective of quality.     

A fringe benefit of his position is an introduction to high society vis-à-vis his students’ parents. One over-sexualized dish, a Miss Margot Best-Chetwynde, takes a fancy to Pennyfeather and hires him as her son’s personal tutor. Thinking himself “rather smart” for capturing the wandering eye of Margot, Pennyfeather soon discovers that there is a high price to pay for attempting to scale the social ladder.

As the names “Pennyfeather” and “Best-Chetwynde” imply, Decline and Fall features a roll-call of Dickensian caricatures: Lady Circumference, Lord Tangent, and Captain Grimes are a few more of the colorfully nomenclatured characters that Pennyfeather encounters along the way. None are wholly convincing humans, they seem more like medieval allegories of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Folly, Lust, Sloth, etc. This is characteristic of satire as a genre, however, and Waugh manages to make the drink-sodden polygamist Grimes, for example, a vivid presence (if not exactly three-dimensional, he is at least as striking as a figurine from a pop-out book.)

Pennyfeather is an empty shell of a hero. He bounces like a pinball from place to place, always acted-upon and rarely doing anything. He even moderately enjoys a stint in prison—he feels “free” because he never has to make decisions for himself. That’s part of the point, I think. Pennyfeather’s hapless civility is essential to his character make-up, and the fact that no one takes much notice of him helps bring the story round full circle in the last act (in a plot device oddly similar to Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho—a story that depended on its “hero” being indistinguishable from most other privileged young men.) 

With PG Wodehouse there is always affection for his characters, however dumb, brutish, vain, or insipid. With Waugh there is only sneering disdain. One is grateful that the unforgiving Waugh, though later a Catholic convert, would never sit in judgment of his fellow men except for in his fiction. For as Hamlet said, “Use every man after his desert and who should ’scape whipping.’      

Though I prefer to ’scape whipping in my own life, witnessing Waugh whip others can be maliciously amusing. Decline and Fall is a lightning fast read—flashy and crackling with energy. Waugh takes aim at so many targets so indiscriminately (British class systems, educational institutions, prison life, brutalist German architecture, conspicuous consumption, and loose society women for starters) that one can’t blame him if a few are only glancing blows. Sketchy, scattershot scenes tumble one after the other in a mad cinematic rush, and Waugh is on to the next target before you can stop to assess the damage to the last one.

He would hone his skills as a satirist in the years to come—Decline  and Fall is more cudgel than scalpel—but it is a quick and amusing read. As an opening salvo to Waugh’s career, it certainly proved loud and attention-getting; a full-frontal assault. No doubt British society felt pummeled by Waugh’s Blitzkrieg.

 

Home Truths (1999)

By David Lodge

reviewed by John Murphy

Home Truths is a bite-sized country manor comedy of manners adapted from the novelist’s stage play. Its theatrical origins are apparent in the three-act structure, the closed-in location (a country cottage), and the dialogue-heavy scenes. Considering how closely it resembles the script for a stage production, one wonders why Lodge felt compelled to turn it into a novella. In any case, it’s an amusing little farce—a truffle, a trifle, from an author who has written profounder works.

The curtain opens on the country cottage of Adrian and Eleanor, an ex-novelist and a ceramics artist, respectively, living in semi-reclusion. Enter Sam Sharp, an old university chum of Adrian’s, who is now a slick Hollywood screenwriter. Sam is upset over a “hatchet job” interview in that day’s Sunday Sentinel—an interview that paints him (probably accurately) as a preening peacock with an unfoundedly high opinion of his work and his sex appeal.

“How do you feel about it?” said Adrian.

“I feel as if I’ve been shat on from a great height by a bilious bird of prey,” said Sam.

The “bird of prey” is Fanny Tarrant, a celebrity journalist of the vulture-variety that no-doubt inspired J.K. Rowling’s delightfully skeevy Rita Skeeter in the Harry Potter series. Tarrant makes her living writing exposés of the Rich and Famous and Sam is her latest meal. (Though Lodge never makes it clear why Tarrant would interview a writer, of all people—when was the last time you saw William Goldman or Steven Zaillian on the cover of a celebrity gossip rag?)

Sam wants Adrian to help him exact revenge on Tarrant by pretending to be interviewed by her while covertly gathering material for a “piss-take profile” in another paper. “Turn the tables on the bitch! Interview her when she thinks she’s interviewing you! Dig into her background. Find out what makes her tick. Why the envy? Why the malice? Lay it all out. Give some of her own medicine. Wouldn’t that be brilliant?”

Not quite brilliant. Adrian agrees, but it’s not for naught that Tarrant is the best in her own sleazy biz. In the tug-of-war that ensues between Adrian and Tarrant, both parties end up confessing more than they intended, leading to some dramatic third-act revelations.

Lodge constructs tales where the outside world suddenly, almost rudely, breaks in on a self-contained universe. Just as Souls and Bodies ended with the election of Pope John Paul II, Home Truths ends with the death of Princess Diana, tragedy that became a media circus and a history-moment that prompted questions about the nature of celebrity, the culture of gossip, and the paparazzi-fed media machine. What worked so well in Souls and Bodies feels here like a cheap gimmick, an inorganic cop-out that lets the protagonists’ off the hook while still furnishing them with a Road-to-Damascus style conversion.

Despite the contrived wedging of Princess Di into the proceedings, Home Truths is a sometimes witty toss-off from a talented writer who is clearly coasting. Taking the piss out of celebrity journalists and self-important novelists isn’t heavy lifting for a writer as accomplished as Lodge. I would even say that Rowling’s Rita Skeeter is a far more imaginative and incisive caricature of celebrity-obsessed culture than Lodge’s tamer (but no more convincing) Fanny Tarrant.

I suppose you can’t hold it against Lodge that he composes an occasional etude between meatier compositions, but it is his own fault for setting the bar high with his other, more substantial work.

The Colour of Blood

By Brian Moore

reviewed by John Murphy

The Colour of Blood is a tight, page-turning Catholic thriller in the Graham Greene tradition. The opening sequence hits the ground running: Cardinal Bem, head of the Church in an unnamed Soviet bloc country, is being chauffered back to his residence when

“He saw, peripherally, a black car racing very close to his. He turned to look. The driver, a woman, wore a green silk scarf tied around her head. Beside her in the passenger seat, a bearded man, holding a revolver in both hands, raised it, aiming at him.”

That’s just the first page. The rest of the book follows the Cardinal as he flees from unknown captors and attempts to discover what organization was behind the assassination attempt—the Secret Police, who are antagonistic to the Church, or could it have been a fringe organization within the Church, who feel that Cardinal Bem has compromised too often with the Communist government?

Written in limited third person, Cardinal Bem is in every scene of the book, on every page. He is a compelling, interesting hero—determined to do the right thing, to perform his duty to his country and to his Church, but crippled by self-doubt. Is he enough of a leader? Has his role as functionary of the Church confused his faith, made murky what should be a pure devotion to Christ? Bem is a loyal servant of Christ, but his increasingly desperate circumstances leave him pondering God’s silence.

Part of Bem’s journey strips him of his trappings as Cardinal, forcing him to confront the realities of the underworld without the armor of the Church. He has only the armor of God. This element is reminiscent of Graham Greene’s Whiskey Priest in The Power and the Gloryanother pursued cleric who finds faith when he sloughs off the dead skin of surface piety to plumb the depths of grace in the darkest hour.

Brian Moore’s writing has textbook clarity: limpid, economical, and unfussy. The Colour of Blood was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize in the U.K, and was awarded the Sunday Express’ Book of the Year. Well-crafted, suspenseful, and deeply orthodox, Moore’s exciting novel is an exemplar of its genre, the Catholic thriller.

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