Tuesday, August 30, 2011

William Kent Krueger’s matter-of-factly Catholic action hero

By Steve Weatherbe William Kent Krueger is a Minnesota writer responsible for an enjoyable series of detective thrillers, all featuring “Cork” O’Connor, the part-Ojibway, sometime sheriff of the resource-turned-tourism town of Aurora. He’s an appealingly flawed hero, an impulsive hothead, briefly an adulterer but generally faithful, doting father of three, and an on-again, off-again Catholic. His latest book, just out and as-yet unread by me, is Northwest Angle, the title being the name of a remote corner of Minnesota cut off from the rest of the state by Lake of the Woods (down the middle of which runs the international boundary) and by the Canadian landmass. Like many of the series, a lot of the action takes place in the “Boundary Waters” (title of another book in the series) that lie along the Canada-USA border and was a canoe route for the French and Scottish Canadian voyageurs and fur traders from Montreal to Winnipeg and the prairies (the Pays d’en haut as the voyageurs called it). I know all this because as a young man I padded along the same canoe route from lake Superior to Winnipeg over hundred of portages and along many creeks, rivers and lakes, providing nourishment for thousands of mosquitoes, black flies and no-see’ems. Doing some back-filling, I just read an earlier book in the series, Heaven’s Keep, in which Cork’s wife goes missing along with a small plane full of Indian leaders (she is lawyer for the local tribe). Typically, Catholicism features incidentally in the plot: a priest provides a crucial link in the chain of evidence that leads Cork to his wife; an important meeting with two others looking for kinfolk on the plane is scheduled for “after mass” –through Cork’s subsequent attendance at mass with his son is taken for granted and not described. His family’s faith is sometimes just background; at others, such as when Cork’s wife goes missing, it is challenged. Some in his family pray; others lose faith. One will go on to become a nun. I expect Cork will someday go down to Nicaragua to investigate her murder or someone else’s murder at her behest. In the next book in the series, with his children grown and moved away, he has stopped attending church, but showing continued interest in native spirituality—dreams, quests and so on. So without making a big deal of it, Catholicism is presented as a legitimate means of dealing with the spiritual dimension, and one not in conflict with native religion. But it is not preached as a certainty by the author, but merely included as part of the makeup of some of the characters, and as a feature of life, mostly positive. I don’t think any non-Catholic or non-Christian readers would be turned off. Meanwhile, the writing is good: brisk, with good description punctuated with hot action, that together move the stories forward in a pleasing rhythm. There are plenty of interesting characters, and heartwarming and realistic family interactions. I recommend the series. A decade later, the series went on and its hero lost his Catholic faith, replacing it with Native American animism. I'm neither impressed nor convinced but such a shift is far from implausible.The author's writing skills are undiminished, although his plots do run out steam before the story is over on occasion. The author turns to not be a Catholic at all but writing about the faith from afar. In one novel he describes how some faithful Catholics have that faith weakened when they pray for delivery fro peril and it apparently comes not. I hope Christians of all varieties have deeper fate than that, and pray more often than that. Krueger has written some very well novels set in the Depression with youthful heroes which treat faith healers sympathetically, and one with Cork O'Connor himself as a youth, helping his sheriff father solve a crime that threatens to pit the local white and native communities against each other. read them all.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Heroism within a Christian moral code



Allan Mallinson’s Matthew Hervey series

Reviewed by Steve Weatherbe

My purpose in creating my own Christian fiction blogsite and in writing for Catholic Fiction is not to exercise my own wit or to amuse others with it but to recommend writers and books whose works I enjoy because of their mastery of a particular genre I enjoy and because of their Christian world view. For me, the Christian content need not be in the foreground. Nor need it be the theme or the subtheme. It is enough that it be the philosophical framework, unstated, for the work, and therefore tends to support rather than undermine the Christian beliefs of the reader.
I am happy to recommend the Hervey series to all who enjoy military or naval series such as those of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series about the British navy during the Napoleonic wars ( on which the movie Master and Commander was based).
There are many such series and the so-called Age of Fighting Sail provides a perfect framework because its hero can fight for a lifetime against the French, starting in 1759 if the author chooses, and ending only in 1815.
Mallinson selects a more difficult period seemingly, by starting his hero’s military career with the Battle of Waterloo, at the end of the Napoleonic era. But this is the beginning of the golden age of the British Empire, and young Hervey advances slowly through the ranks of the British cavalry while pushing the Empire into India, Africa and British North America, fighting Indians, Red Indians, Zulus and such.
Far more than Cornwell’s Sharpe series, whose hero is also an army officer, Mallinson is attentive to the conventional responsibilities, preoccupations and pleasures of his protagonist’s class and rank. This is surely because Mallinson was himself a British Army officer, who commanded his own regiment for several years retired as a brigadier, though I doubt he actually commanded a brigade at any time. The regiment is the heart of the British Army (as the division is the heart of the American army) and Hervey’s goal throughout the series is to command his home regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons.
In Cornwell’s novels such questions as who looks after the horses after the battle id over are simply ignored. Mallinson not only lovingly details the care of the horses, such care often forms a subplot, and indeed the hero’s relations with his horses carry on from book to book. The officer’s responsibilities for his men, as well as his personal relationships with many of them also carry on through the series. This is an aspect of the hero’s character which distinguishes him from some fellow officers (who make a point of not knowing their men) but not from others.
Mallinson’s treatment of Hervey’s character is what differentiates the series from many others. He is the son of a High Anglican cleric who wrestles with moral and theological questions and seems to be moving slowly towards Catholicism (I have just finished the 11 and most novel and the topic has only been explicitly raised for the first time).
Mallinson himself trained for the Anglican priesthood before stumbling more or less into his military career. I wonder naturally whether he has “poped” as the Anglicans put it.
Hervey’s social life is interesting: he has dalliances and a genuinely romantic and healthy marriage that ends tragically and grotesquely (wife tomahawked by American Indians!) and a second marriage that, after three books, I am still not sure has even been consummated. I think Mallinson is intentionally mimicking Victorian conventions in leaving his hero’s marital problems to our imaginations while describing in detail, for example, the artery-clogging seven-course meals he consumes with his friends.
But I recommend the books because the action is well-described, the historical, social and moral context for that action is also well-told and seems authentic, and because the moral and theological framework for the writer and the hero is Christian.