Book Review

Thomas Cobb is one of America’s grotesquely underrated national treasures. He is the author of Crazy Heart, which was made into a movie with Jeff Bridges (who was also an underrated national treasure until Crazy Heart, when he finally won a long overdue Academy Award, one of two for the movie, and one of the three nominations the movie received), and the almost unheard of novel Shavetail, which is about as close to perfection as a novel can get. A possible reason why Cobb is not as well-known and revered (and rich and famous) as he should be is that he that he breaks a lot of rules in his story-telling, and judging by some of the negative customer reviews he has gotten, this rule-breaking is caviar to the general. I’m not sure why. Faulkner, Steinbeck, McCarthy all broke (break, in McCarthy’s case) a lot of rules, and I believe all of them ended up affluent and well known.

With Blood in Their Eyes is a paradigm of rule-breaking. The story opens with the dramatic climax and bounces backward and forward from there. The heroes are unlovable villains, the villains are on the side of truth and justice and the American way (at least as the American way was in 1918) and the most sympathetic character is killed on the first page. If you want William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy triumphing over the forces of evil sequentially from A to Z, this is not the book for you. If, on the other hand, you want a meticulously researched account of a historical miscarriage of justice, transformed into unforgettable fiction by a master, sit back and enjoy.

The Power Brothers’ shootout was the single bloodiest shootout in Arizona history, an event that left the entire Graham County Sheriff’s Department dead and resulted in the largest manhunt in Arizona history. That’s the surface story of With Blood in Their Eyes, but it is the story behind the facts that Cobb brings so deftly to life. History is always written by the victors and our view of events is shaped by them. Cobb’s careful research reveals a different point of view, one far more complex and compelling than the basic historical facts, and his ability to breathe life into all his characters, lovable and unlovable alike, results in an unforgettable novel of courage and endurance and the ambiguity of right and wrong.

In case you are put off by references to Faulkner or McCarthy, I should point out that while Cobb’s plot structure is fluid and bounces back and forth in time, his writing is much closer to Steinbeck in his straightforward use of language. Straightforward, but immensely evocative:

“There was a clatter and ringing of bells as horses rushed past them. McBride threw himself to the side of the trail and let the horses get by. They must be Power horses, he thought, spooked by Haynes, who had fallen behind him. ‘Throw up your hands,’ McBride heard, and knew that it had all gone bad.”

Thomas Cobb understands both the mythology and the reality of the place and time we call the West. He also understands that our vision of the reality of the past is touched by its mythology and made bigger by it, unforgettable. And oh so readable.

Richard North’s The Many, Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain, is a fresh new look at one of the most storied and romantic chapters of World War Two.

The official contemporary view of the Battle of Britain was summed up by Winston Churchill’s famous statement, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” This has now become part of the popular history of the Battle of Britain. Unfortunately, since the “few,” in this case, refers to the aristocratic and well-educated officers who constituted England’s Royal Air Force, the statement implies ipso facto that all those who were not aristocratic and well-educated were nothing more than huddled and terrified masses helplessly waiting to be rescued by their betters. Richard North presents ample evidence of the fallacy of this portrayal. The huddled and terrified masses were in fact the millions of civilians who endured with grace and humor the appalling lack of preparedness of the British government (the few). They were the millions of ordinary workers who kept the country’s factories and businesses, docks and rail lines, hospitals and mines, the whole infrastructure of their society, running as smoothly as possible against incredible odds. And they were the same workers who rebuilt that infrastructure almost as fast as the Nazis could damage it. If their contribution to the war was less glamorous than that of the few daring young men in their flying machines, it was every bit as critical. Mr. North: “Without doubt, the Battle of Britain was a victory of the people of Britain, those who endured a most grievous and terrifying assault, held fast and survived, without tearing down their government and crying for peace.”

But Richard North also brings to light the cynical use of propaganda that the British government borrowed, wittingly or unwittingly, from the Nazis. Joseph Goebbels’ most famous quote is: “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can only be maintained for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” It was a philosophy adopted wholesale by Winston Churchill’s Minister of Information, the impeccably aristocratic Duff Cooper. Misleading reports of damages and casualties might have been attributed to confusing the enemy, but they were also intended to “keep up morale” among the many, the same many who were keeping the country running. That might be forgivable within the context and framework of war during that time. But concealing the government’s lack of preparedness comes much closer to Goebbels’ conclusion: “…the truth is the enemy of the State.” And worst of all were the penalties (fines and/or imprisonment) that were enacted for expressing any doubt about the war or repeating any information about any German success. This last is a page right out of Hitler’s playbook. Toward the end of the war, when the tide was irrevocably turning against the Nazis, German officers were ordered to summarily shoot anyone who said anything that might be interpreted as defeatist.

This extraordinary look at the, ah, less noble aspects and behaviors of Britain at war, are succinctly summed up by Mr. North: “Government is a poor master. But it can be an adequate servant, if forced to be so.” It’s an observation all Americans ought to memorize.

I have never been a particular fan of General George Armstrong Custer.

In another life, another career, another part of the country, long, long ago, I made a movie at West Point, one of the few the Army ever allowed to actually be filmed right there at the school. I was really into creating a life for my character, and I was naturally interested in the history of this most illustrious military academy, so I soaked up as much as possible while I was there—the history, traditions, trivia, lore, rumor, whatever. In my free time, I hung out with the real cadets, did some weight training with them, and tried to glean as much as I could about the reality of their lives. It’s been forty years now, and memory is always tenuous, warping and bending in the dry air of time, so cut me some slack if I have misremembered some things, but certain tidbits stuck in my mind and made certain famous graduates especially intriguing for one reason or another.

General Robert E. Lee: one of the few cadets ever to graduate without a single demerit, famous for his military skill as much as for his dignity and his sense of honor, famous too for his all too human sentimental attachment to people and places (the last time he was passed through Alexandria, Virginia, he took the time to climb the brick wall around his childhood home to see if the snowballs were in bloom in the garden).

General George S. Patton: patrician, gifted horseman, Olympic athlete, probably the most colorful general in American history, famous for his profanity-laced aphorisms (“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”), famous too for his boast that in all the years it took him to graduate, he never once set foot in the library. (And the army proved that it does have at least some sense of humor, because among the row of statues of illustrious graduates looking out over the parade ground, Patton’s is directly in front of the library and is the only one turned away from the parade ground, looking at the building he never entered.)

General William Westmoreland: one of the most able and honored cadets during his time at the academy, the man who led a team of his fellow cadets out one night and managed, undetected, to hide the much-hated reveille canon in the top of the bell tower. They did it in one night. It took the Army Corps of Engineers two weeks to get the thing back down.

The unknown—or unremembered by me—cadets who somehow dug up the reveille canon, after the academy had sunk it into a block of cement following Westmoreland’s stunt, and absconded with it, leaving a large hole and a huge mound of earth. The army searched for weeks and was unable to find the canon until finally, some officer realized the hole in the ground did not correspond to the location of the canon. But the mound of dirt next to it did.

And then there is Custer: last in his class, famous for his prodigious courage, prodigious athletic ability, the prodigious violence of his temper, and above all his prodigious luck.

Evan S. Connell opens Son of the Morning Star with a detachment of cavalry under Lt. James Bradley discovering the remains—literally—of the famed Seventh Cavalry littering the valley of the Little Bighorn. It seems at first an odd way to start a history, but on reflection, everyone knows the story well, and by starting this way Connell (who only died this past January at the age of eighty-eight) manages to convey the shock and horror, not only of what Lt. Bradley’s men found, but what it meant for the army and for the nation, “nation,” in this case, referring exclusively to whites, not to the original inhabitants of the land. Custer and his Seventh Calvary were thought to be invincible, and to find their naked, scalped, and mutilated bodies was almost more than anyone could believe or bear. Men from all over the country, including many recently defeated (in part by Custer) Confederate soldiers, volunteered to go after Sitting Bull and his alliance of Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other tribes. And go after them they did. There are no heroes on either side in this segment of American history.

And that is part of Connell’s genius: like the snippets above, better than the snippets above, he manages to capture the essential personalities of even the most minor and little known players in this tragedy. With extraordinarily painstaking research, frequently using their own words, he brings people to life (the bibliography alone runs to thirteen pages), and makes their success and failures understandable results of their character.

In Custer’s case, he paints of portrait of a man who allowed his arrogance, ambition, and ultimately his belief in his own press, to destroy him and almost all his men. And yet, even as he does so, Connell show why Custer was such a national icon, and why his defeat captured America’s imagination in an unprecedented way, a way that still endures.

If this dark corner of American history is of interest to you, or if you just want to revel in a tale told by a master, read Son of the Morning Star.

The writer Tom McIntyre (The Snow Leopard’s Tale, Dreaming the Lion, Seasons & Days), once made a comment to me to the effect that he couldn’t bear to read any of the current crop of ballyhooed, hip-and-happening young authors because they had all grown up in relatively well-to-do urban or suburban homes, gone to good schools and good colleges and then to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and from there to New York, without ever doing anything, and then they all wrote immense dusty tomes about the terrible stresses and neuroses of growing up in relatively well-to-do urban or suburban homes and going to good schools and good colleges and then on to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and from there to New York, without ever doing anything. This may be an unfair assessment on Tom’s part, since he is doubtless contrasting their experience with his own, and he has done an incredible number of adventurous things in the old-fashioned, two-fisted Hemingway tradition, but it’s also a criticism that has a good deal of truth to it.

Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, grew up in a well-to-do home in Kansas City, went to good schools and a good college (University of Kansas), got her master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern, and went to New York. Gone Girl is about a young married couple who grew up in well to do homes, went to good schools and good colleges…

So, for the first part of this three-part novel, we are in the familiar territory of (fill in the name of practically any successful and critically acclaimed American author of the last fifteen or twenty years), exploring the well-chronicled joys and stresses of marriage, love, passionate sex, compromise, the shades of growing estrangement, all the familiar stages of modern matrimony. But Gillian Flynn has transformed this routine fare into a marriage of the damned seen through a series of distorted fun-house mirrors, so that just about the time I started wondering, as I have with (fill in the title of practically any critically acclaimed book by practically any…etc.), why the hell I was wasting my time reading this, the first hints began coming, pale, faint adumbrations of something slightly off, distortions in the mirrors. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make me stick with it, and hoo-boy! I’m glad I did.

The second part of this book is where Ms. Flynn takes us behind the mirrors. Since I would not be doing you or her any kindness to spoil the surprises that come, I will only say she paints as convincing and chilling a portrait of a sociopath as I have encountered in a long time. I once had the misfortune to become enmeshed with a sociopath myself, and I count myself lucky to be alive; Ms. Flynn’s creation makes the sociopath in my life look like a Sunday school teacher. She has created a thing of icy, implacable, ruthless narcissism that is like a real-life super villain—unstoppable, indestructible, a terminator, something that cannot be killed, because it has no life to begin with, a thing without a heart, without a soul, a thing concerned only with its own needs and wants and desires, a human version of the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors: “Feed me, Seymour!” If you are married, or have any hope of ever becoming married, don’t read the second part of this book.

Actually, if you’re married, or have any hope of ever becoming married, don’t read the third part of this book either. Again, I don’t want to spoil things, so let me just say that Ms. Gillian turns the screw, slowly, from unusual and unexpected angles, and she ends the book in a way that… No. I’ll leave it there.

Is Gone Girl a perfect book? No. Readers with working familiarity of police procedure will recognize certain liberties taken, and there are some gaps in the plot, but you probably won’t notice these until long after you’ve put the book back on the shelf. Besides, Raymond Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock both managed to entertain us very well even as they took enormous liberties. Did I come away with a richer understanding of the human condition? If you include inhuman sociopaths as humans, yes, but otherwise, no. On the other hand, that isn’t why I purchased the book. I wanted to be entertained, and I was. I also had nightmares. One last comment: if I were married to Gillian Flynn, I would be very, scrupulously, uxoriously polite to her. She is a seriously demented puppy.

There is a wonderful 1985 film by Lasse Hollström called My Life as a Dog, about a little boy whose life is turned upside down by one tragedy after another. He survives by constantly comparing his circumstances to others, including the dog sent into space by the Russians, and the refrain he keeps repeating throughout the movie is, “It’s important to compare.” In the spirit of “It’s important to compare,” I recommend We Die Alone, by David Howarth (Lyons Press).

We tend to think of World War Two as taking place on the battlefields of Europe and the islands of the Pacific, but in reality it was far more global than that, justifying its name. One of the lesser known areas where the Nazis worked their tender mercies was Norway, where they launched a Blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940, with an eye to controlling strategic northern Atlantic ports.

In March of 1943, a team of twelve Norwegian commandos set sail from northern England and landed in Nazi-occupied arctic Norway. Their mission was to organize, aid, and supply the Norwegian resistance, but due to a freak coincidence they were betrayed. All but one of them were killed immediately. We Die Alone is the true story of the lone survivor’s epic struggle to survive and escape in the face of insurmountable odds. Wounded, frostbitten, blinded, and crippled, Jan Baalsrud simply refused to die and, aided by courageous villagers who risked their lives to help him, finally managed to survive and to escape.

I don’t want to give the unbelievable details away, but after reading We Die Alone, when my hands start to go numb with cold while cleaning horse manure in the snow, or when I feel like whining about this ache or that pain, I think of Jan Baalsrud and remind myself, “It’s important to compare.”

There are two kinds of history.

One is the dusty, desiccated version written by dusty, desiccated intellectuals and taught by dusty, desiccated professors. This is the history that teaches us empires rose or fell because a particular currency fluctuated by a particular percentage within a particular period, causing an already strapped and stressed middle class to be unable to purchase the grain that had been imported from overseas because trade tariffs had resulted in an embargo that made economic recovery impossible when it looks like Cindy Chapman isn’t wearing a bra and my God she’s got the best looking breasts of any girl I have ever seen, not to mention a tush that makes blue jeans the greatest invention since… What? Oh. I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t hear the question.

The other is the version that teaches us that empires rose or fell because of the brilliance and daring, or the tragic flaws and weaknesses, of real people. Everyone knows the successes and failures of Robert E. Lee, but his refusal to fire on Ambrose Burnside’s headquarters at Chatham during the Battle of Fredericksburg because Lee had met his wife in that house, that makes Lee real and vulnerable. Everyone knows Richard the Lionhearted was the bloodiest and most violent soldier of a bloody and violent age, but the fact that he made a point of pardoning the archer who fired the arrow that ultimately killed him from gangrene, that makes Richard real and human. (Of course, the order to forgive was ignored as soon as Richard died, and the unfortunate archer was flayed alive.)

It’s the human factor that makes history come alive, and nowhere is that more brilliantly illustrated than in Lars Brownworth’s Lost to the West. The history of Byzantium, for most people, is a dimly known period that took place, uh, well, in the middle east somewhere. We know that for eleven hundred years an empire flourished (with concomitant ups and downs) from Spain to current-day Iran, and from north Africa to the Balkans, and that it lent its name to our synonym for “intricate” or “devious,” but beyond that, the center of Orthodox Christianity and the seat of some of the most spectacular art and architecture the world has ever known remains for most people an obscure afterthought to Roman history and a vague precursor to the Renaissance. Lost to the West brings those eleven hundred years into entertaining and colorful focus, and Brownworth achieves this by making use of the human factor.

Consider Justinian I, also referred to as Justinian the Great, known as the emperor who restored and expanded the empire, conquering vast swathes of land from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, the man who codified and modernized Roman law into a form that is still used in many places today, the man who inspired a cultural flowering and transformed Constantinople into an architectural gem, crowned by the renowned Hagia Sophia. All admirable stuff and well worth knowing, but how much more fascinating and human he becomes when we learn he married a lowly (and very young) performer named Theodora who, “…seems to have specialized in a particularly obscene form of pantomime involving geese…” Wow. The imagination reels. But just in case you think Justinian was just another dumb and randy male who allowed his judgment to play second fiddle to his hormones by marrying the child actress, give another thought to his judgment, because it was she who rallied her terrified husband and his senators and kept them from fleeing an angry mob:

“Every man who is born into the light of day must sooner or later die; and how can an Emperor ever allow himself to become a fugitive? If you, my Lord, wish to save your skin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, and there too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will not regret that you did not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: royalty makes the best shroud.”

Now that’s a wife to be proud of, never mind what she may have done for a living.

Consider this tidbit about the Persian king Chosroes II who was not noted for his tolerant understanding of failure on the part of his subjects. When his general, Shahin, was unable to destroy Constantinople and the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, the general decided suicide was preferable to his king’s tender mercies, “…but Chosroes II had the body packed in salt and transported to the capital. When it arrived, he had it whipped until it was no longer recognizable.”

Okie, dokie. Little wonder that when Heraclius’s army closed in on Chosroes II, and that courageous worthy called for women and children to defend him, his subjects turned on him: “Chosroes II was flung into the ominously named Tower of Darkness, where he was given only enough food and water to prolong his agony. When he had suffered enough, he was dragged out and forced to watch as his children were executed in front of him. After the last of his offspring had expired, his torment was finally brought to an end when he was shot slowly to death with arrows.”

Golly. I do wish we could make Lost to the West required reading for our congress and the current administration. They might learn some valuable lessons. They would also be richly entertained by this wonderfully written history that transforms eleven hundred years of bloodshed and beauty, religion and opulence, triumph and despair, into something as entertaining as a damned good novel.

The period between Christmas and the New Year is traditionally supposed to be a time of reflection, when we all look back at the things we’ve done, the various screw-ups we’ve committed, and resolve to do better. Since I might well die of old age before I could list all my screw-ups, I decided to simplify things and go straight to step two. I resolved to take reasoned and practical steps to boost my book sales. I decided to start by taking the advice of someone who was doing better than I.

I had a marketing brainstorming session with a successful self-published author of romance novels who told me, among many bits of excellent advice, that my blog should focus on certain key subjects designed to attract potential readers of my books. (She said it all much better than that; I’m just putting it in baby talk for purposes of simplification.) It is, actually, advice I’ve been given before, and it goes along with the advice given to me, both by my romance writer friend and others, to stick to a single genre with my books. Build up a reputation as a Western writer, or as a mystery writer, or—presumably—a romance writer, or whatever. It’s sound advice, and the proof is reflected in statistics of book sales by category.

So, just to show that I have absolutely no business savvy whatsoever—or practical commonsense, or the good sense to accept good advice, or even the strength of character to stick to my own resolutions—I intend to branch out even further. I’m going to start reviewing books that I especially like. I’m not going to try and mold myself into a critic. I won’t review books I don’t like because if I really don’t like a book I almost certainly won’t finish it, so why bother saying anything negative about something I haven’t bothered to read? But going on the premise that people who read this blog are almost certainly people who like to read, why not tell them which books have really excited me?

With that in mind, I’m going to start with Shavetail. I don’t remember how I stumbled across Thomas Cobb, but I wanted to see how he had handled something in one of his books, and I ordered With Blood in Their Eyes, his chilling and meticulously researched fictionalized account of the bloodiest and deadliest shootout in Arizona history. I’ll review With Blood in Their Eyes later, but for the nonce, suffice it to say I liked it so much I ordered his other two novels, Shavetail, and the one he is most famous for, Crazy Heart. That one I’m sure you’ve heard of because it was made into an Academy Award-winning movie with Jeff Bridges.

It’s a wonderful thing to discover a writer whose work is so compelling that you can’t wait to lay your hands on everything he’s ever done. That’s how good Thomas Cobb is. It’s like the first time you read anything by P.G. Wodehouse: you steal money from your mother’s purse and rush out to buy everything he ever wrote which, in the case of P. G. Wodehouse, means you have to steal quite a lot of money. Wodehouse was prolific and lived to be ninety-three, writing right up to the end. Thomas Cobb has only written the three novels, so I didn’t have to mug any of the local elementary school children to buy his books. I’ve already written a review for Amazon, so I’ll just copy it here:

Shavetail has been characterized as a Western, but to paraphrase the great Duke Ellington, there are only two kinds of books, the good kind and the other kind. Shavetail transcends the good kind to peak in the rarified air of great novels. This is a story of redemption and coming of age in a brutal world where all the romance and mythology of the West have been deconstructed into a reality as confused and uncertain and frequently terrifying as today’s news. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Unforgiven, this novel takes place behind the façade of honor and courage and legend. Writing in exquisite prose, both lean and elegiac, Thomas Cobb gives us unforgettable characters, all of them running away from those things that can never be run away from. It takes place in some of the harshest land in the West, in 1871, and there are heroes and villains, cavalry and Apaches, horses and a girl, all the ingredients of the traditional Western, but in Cobb’s hands those things become mixed with the ambiguity of reality, so that nothing is what it seems. The line between good and evil is as blurred as it is life, where good intentions and bad intentions frequently have the same result: “If the United States can’t kill someone with a twelve-pound howitzer, they’ll throw money at him until he’s dead. It’s the way the government does business, and all that the government does is business. Look around at what’s here. What ain’t spoiled is what the government hasn’t had the time to spoil. And you know what we are? We’re the spoilers…”

It’s hard to say if the themes that parallel some of today’s issues were intentional or a subconscious choice by an author who grew up in the Vietnam era, but two things are beyond dispute: All of Cobb’s characters—his young hero, the well-intentioned men his young hero admires, the ill-intentioned man he fears but must work with, even characters who never actually appear in the story (I don’t want to give too much away)—are as real and far more unforgettable than any you have read about in a long time. They are so singular and so memorable that they achieve a kind of Dickensian, prototypical stature.

The other indisputable thing about Shavetail is that you will not be able to stop turning the pages. To quote the great character actor Pat Buttram, who became famous as Gene Autry’s sidekick in a very different kind of Western: “If you don’t like this, you don’t like chocolate cake.”