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You might remember the name Theodore Judson from my review of his incredible book Fitzpatrick’s War. It’s one of my favorite books, and I would call it a must-read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi, except that the book is insanely expensive. I thought I paid a lot when I bought it for 12 bucks; as it turns out, that was a steal.

Ever since, I’ve had my eye on The Martian General’s Daughter. (BTW, that sentence shows you why italics matter. Otherwise you might get the wrong idea…) The only thing that kept me from snapping it up right after finishing Fitzpatrick’s War was the fact that some of the reviews were… less than glowing.

But, once I got a few spare coins in my pocket, so to speak, I picked up a copy. After all, the critics just had to be wrong. The man who wrote an epic like Fitzpatrick’s War couldn’t let us down, right?

I’m sad to report that it’s an “honestly great call from the haters” situation.

The Martian General’s Daughter is supposedly set in the late 23rd century, at the height of the Pan-Polarian Empire. It is narrated by Justa, the illegitimate daughter of General Peter Black, an old soldier loyally serving the Emperor, Mathias the Glistening. Emperor Mathias is a wise philosopher-king, whose teachings of self-denial and stoic wisdom are totally ignored by his handsome son, Luke Anthony, who is a sadistic madman obsessed with violent gladiatorial games. So when Mathias dies, and Luke assumes the purple, things start going to hell in a hand-basket.

Okay, I know most of my readers are knowledgeable sorts, so you probably already see the issue here, but just in case you don’t think about the Roman Empire multiple times a day, let me give it to you straight:  “Mathias the Glistening” is a dead ringer for Marcus Aurelius. And Luke Anthony is a carbon copy of his son, Commodus. (You can remember them by the handy mnemonic, Marcus had an aura, but when his son took over, everything went in the commode.)

Almost everything that happens in the story is just thinly-disguised episodes from the history of Rome. Occasionally stuff about rockets or guns or various other high-tech stuff gets thrown in, but it is immaterial. Almost literally, because there is also some sort of vaguely-described plague of metal-eating nano-machines that obligingly reduces nearly everything to Ancient Roman levels of technology.

I mean, seriously, beat for beat, the story is straight outta Gibbon. I’m not an expert on the period, but even I could see the really obvious parallels. The only time this becomes even slightly amusing is when an actor recites a heroic saga based on the deeds of the mythological hero, Elvis.

In his defense, Judson isn’t the first sci-fi author to do this. Isaac Asimov flat-out admitted to it with his Foundation series. But even he at least took some effort to change names and put some kind of novel spin on the whole thing. This  one is pretty much at the level of “this is Mr. Hilter” in terms of an effective disguise. I am not even kidding. Commodus’ favorite mistress was named Marcia. Luke Anthony’s mistress is named… wait for it now… Marcie.

Now, I suppose if you somehow don’t know anything at all about the Roman Empire, you might enjoy this book. Because no one can deny it’s a good story; the husk of a great nation, collapsing with the rot engendered by its own prosperity. The once-virtuous populace now amusing itself to death with festivals, cults, and gambling on sporting events; the leadership of the formerly august institutions handed to depraved criminals and perverts. A story full of debauchery, sex, and violence, underpinned by a longing felt in the heart of the few remaining noble souls for the memory of a better time. Perhaps Judson’s point in writing all this was that these are unending cycles which humanity is doomed to repeat forever. That’s the theme of Fitzpatrick’s War, too. Only in that book, it’s conveyed with subtlety, wit, and above all, originality.

It gives me no pleasure to write these words, and indeed, I debated whether to even post this review at all. I never post negative reviews of indie writers, and typically reserve my harshest critiques for well-known and successful authors. Judson is in a murky middle ground between the two–he’s not a household name, but Fitzpatrick’s War was published by a fairly large publisher, and over the years has acquired something of a cult following. As well it should.

What ultimately made me decide to write this was the reviews on Amazon. Particularly the ones that make the same points as I made above and then say that reading this made them reluctant to try another Judson book. That’s a mistake. Fitzpatrick’s War is fantastic, and I hate to think of anyone passing it up just because they were unimpressed by The Martian General’s Daughter. To make matters worse, this one is available on Kindle, but Fitzpatrick is not. Which raises the possibility that modern readers will base their opinions of Judson on this book, and that would be a shame.

If you really want a good story of intrigue and political machinations in a collapsing empire, check out something by Patrick Prescott or Eileen Stephenson. If you absolutely love their books, then you can read this one too. Despite everything I’ve said, it’s not actually bad, and if Judson had just made it straight-up historical fiction about Rome, I would have said it was an enjoyable enough read. But as it is, it’s very disappointing, especially from a writer who is obviously capable of great work.

Oh well. As Marcus Aurelius himself might well have said, “omnes vincere non potes.“

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To recap the previous episode: when we left our hero, Daniel J. Boorstin, he had just discovered that the foundations of the U.S. government were under threat from competing narratives of pseudo-events, which flood the public discourse and make getting a true understanding of political reality from the news effectively impossible.

A lesser man might have turned away at this point, unable to face any further horrors. But not Boorstin! No, he had to know it all.

Having defined the pseudo-event, Boorstin proceeds to document how every aspect of life is becoming more and more dominated by images, facsimiles, reproductions and imitations. Travel, once truly an adventurous activity, is reduced to tourist packages that offer pre-planned experiences. Celebrities have taken the place of heroes; instead of being famous for great deeds, they are famous because they are famous. Images have replaced ideals as the ultimate goal of people, organizations, and nations.

Among the many aspects of American culture that Boorstin analyzes, I want to highlight some of his thoughts on the literary industry that may be of interest to my fellow authors. For example, this remarkable passage on machine translation:

What Thomas J. Watson Jr., president of International Business Machines Corporation, calls the ‘Information Explosion’ is having an ever wider and deeper effect on the form in which we are willing to have our ideas expressed. And incidentally, it cannot fail to affect the respect we show for literary or any other kind of form. Translation, until recently, has been among the subtlest, most difficult and most respected of literary arts…

Now, in order to make available the increasing printed resources in other languages, the new data processing industry has perfected a machine translator. The Mark II machine, developed jointly by IBM and the Air Force, can take a passage of Russian and translate it into what IBM calls ‘rough but meaningful English.’ Here is a sample product of the machine when applied to a passage of Russian literary criticism:

United States appeared new translation immortal novel L.N. Tolstago ‘war and world / peace’ Truth, not all novel, buttony several fragments out of it, even so few / little, that they occupy all one typewritten page. But nonetheless this achievement. Nevertheless culture not stands / costs on place. Something translate. Something print. Truth, by opinion certain literature sceptics, translation made enough / fairly ‘oak.’

This goes on, but you get the idea. Basically, they have been working on AI literature for way longer than you thought.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Boorstin sees going wrong with the literary industry:

The expression ‘best-seller’ is, of course, another by-product of the Graphic Revolution. It is an Americanism (still not found in some of the best English dictionaries) which first came into use in the United States at the beginning of the present century… the word ‘seller’ in England had originally meant a person who sold; only around 1900 did the word come to mean a book (later any other item) that sold well. This subtle transference of ideas was itself interesting, for the very expression ‘best seller’ or ‘seller’ now implied that a book somehow sold itself: that sales bred more sales.

And so:

Best-sellerism has thus come to dominate the book world. Leaders in the book trade themselves often attacked it. In his Economic Survey of the Book Industry in 1931, O.H. Cheney called best-sellerism ‘an intolerable curse on the industry.’ But, he explained, there was (and there remains) a substantial commercial basis for the institution: one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one. Then many potential book buyers ‘want to join the thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of the inner circle of the readers of the book.’… A buyer going into a bookstore is apt to ask for a best-seller; even if he doesn’t, he is apt to be urged to buy a book because it is one…

…One of the most interesting features of the institution is how flimsy is the factual basis for calling any particular book a best seller. To speak of a best seller—to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items—is, of course, a logical contradiction. But the bookstores are full of ‘best sellers.’

In Boorstin’s view, basically everything is like this; manufactured and carefully-curated simulacra replacing real experiences. And how desperate are we for something that seems genuine to cut through all the public relations verbiage and artificial hype of pseudo-events?

Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

I’m convinced that part of the reason for the celebration of Luigi Mangione is that his crime was something unexpected and unplanned, and thus instantly attention-grabbing in a world of ads and social media memes.

There’s more—much more—but I can’t quote the whole book, now can I? After all, it would be particularly ironic to confuse the map with the territory in this, of all cases!

Suffice it to say, Boorstin saw the post-Graphic Revolution world as full of images that loom larger than the things they are meant to represent. And just as pseudo-events beget more pseudo-events, so do images beget other images, endlessly refracting until the underlying reality is a distant memory.

In other words, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the modern world is not only faker than we suppose, it is faker than we can suppose. Everything is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, to where even what we think of as “real” is actually only a really thick shadow.

There is only one sphere of life that Boorstin does not excoriate for its replacement of reality with image. Not because he didn’t see it—it is inconceivable that he did not—but probably just because he was too classy to mention it. Well, I like to think I run a family-friendly blog, even if that family is the Addams Family, but I simply can’t ignore this particular issue.

The topic I am thinking of is, of course, sex. Now, even in Boorstin’s day, sex and media had already intermingled to quite an extent, and it is no doubt only the good librarian’s conservative sense of propriety that kept him from mentioning Playboy etc. But modern life has seen the Sexual and Graphic Revolutions combine to bring forth some real monstrosities.

The examples are endless, but I am thinking of one particular social media controversy from last year. Someone on Twitter modified this poster for the Amazon Prime series Fallout, probably using AI to do so. The modified poster gave the central figure tighter pants and a more toned backside. The person who modified it believed the woman wasn’t eye-catching enough in the original depiction. Naturally, there was a backlash, and a resulting discussion about sexism, male gaze, etc. etc. etc.

Now, what part of this whole sad episode is fake? Haha, trick question: it’s fakery all the way down! It is a poster for a television show adapted from a video game, further modified by machine to resemble a more visually striking conception of the female form. Literally everything about it is fake, and to become emotionally invested in arguing about any aspect of it is to lose oneself in shadows to the nth power.

Indeed, image so dominates modern concepts of sex that it poses a real danger to human reproduction. Does this seem impossible? Did you ever hear the tragedy of Julodimorpha bakewelli, a species of Australian beetle whose males are so attracted to discarded beer bottles that they mate with them instead of the females of their kind? Could a similar fate befall humanity, with the proliferation of things like AI romantic partners and virtual reality erotica? I don’t know, but I think we’re trying to find out.

None of this would come as a surprise to Boorstin, who in 1962 saw a world awash in shadows and illusions. To the extent it has changed, it has been a change in degree, not in kind. Influencers may have replaced movie stars, and social media may have replaced the nightly news, but it is just a more refined version of the same problem.

So what, then, is the solution? It may be impressive that Boorstin saw and understood the danger of trends that now permeate the society you and I inhabit. But that is of no help to us, unless he can offer us some way out, some hope of finding something real to grasp.

Here is Boorstin’s closing statement. It wasn’t enough to save us in 1962, but maybe, just maybe, we can for once harness the power of the internet to promote something true. Marshall McLuhan, whom Boorstin references more than once, said that “the medium is the message.” I am praying he was wrong. We’ve got the medium, now Dr. Boorstin supplies the message:

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions… One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure’. There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning. 

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

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Imagine this: one day you are wasting time scrolling through political Twitter in an election year. Amid all the angry ranting, the stupid jokes, the obligatory posturing, the bots, the polls, etc. you see some rando post a cover of a book, saying something like, “this will explain it.”

The book looks interesting, so you make a note of it. It’s expensive on Amazon, so instead you wait to get it from the library. Meanwhile, politics continues. The election happens. A great deal of pixels are expended by people writing about the election, the transition, and the meaning of it all. Social media is the epicenter of all these different sources of opinion, competing to emit the “hottest” of all possible “takes.”

Finally, you read the book. The book is over sixty years old. Indeed, it’s older than one of the candidates in the election. Most of the media we are familiar with today did not exist when it was written. Innumerable technological and cultural changes separate the book’s era and the present day.

So you know that whatever agenda the book’s author had, it can’t possibly have had much of anything to do with the current controversies. He didn’t have any type of modern “derangement syndrome”. Any such hang-ups he may have had are entombed with him. After all, you know what happened between 1962 and today, whereas the book can ipso facto only make educated guesses.

You might expect the book to feel outdated or quaint or charmingly naive. After all, many books from these bygone eras evoke nostalgia for their time, and what American hasn’t occasionally felt wistful for decades past? On the other hand, you might expect the book to feel like a relic in another way, to be offensive, or to expound views of the world that we find at best laughable or at worst repugnant. There are certainly a lot of old books that do that, too. When you read old books, your reaction is usually, “Ah, the good old days!” or “Oh, how far we have come!”. There is also a third category, which is “<sigh>, nothing ever changes…”

The Image is different. It does occasionally evoke all three of these feelings in various places. But none of them form your dominant reaction. Instead, it’s more like…

Well, put it another way: when you read an old book you expect to know more about your own time than the author of that book. That’s not to say you’re “smarter” than the author in any way; just that you are aware of facts that they are not. You read old books, generally, to either understand Universal Truths, or else to learn something about a particular period in the past.

This Daniel J. Boorstin, though… he understands our time perfectly. And he knows us—better, methinks, than we know ourselves.

JFK was still alive. Watergate not only wasn’t a scandal yet, but the place hadn’t even been built. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were just names on a map to the average American. And the nearest thing to “social media” was fan clubs.

Yet, though he was writing in the oft-romanticized era of a supposedly more innocent America, Boorstin saw, with terrifying clarity, the shape of things to come. Like a prophet of old, he inveighs against evils that 1960s America must have seen as remote and unfathomable, but are now familiar to the citizens (prisoners?) of the internet age.

The pervasive alienation of modern life; this strange world of propaganda, manufactured controversies, of information warfare, where elections turn on social media ads, and celebrity influencers shape the course of geopolitics… this is the world that anyone my age or younger has grown up in, and which, if we are to lead happy, fulfilling lives, we must somehow navigate. Or perhaps even escape.

Of course, just as a fish cannot know what water is, having never known its absence, it is hard for us to clearly see the pseudo-world that surrounds us. That is Boorstin’s other great advantage: he knew the other world, the one that came before… and so he is well-suited to be our Virgil, guiding us through post-modernity.

I know, this seems like a tall order for a simple book. And make no mistake, I’m not saying that reading it will instantly solve all our troubles. Like the famous quote from The Twilight Zone says, it will not end the nightmare… it will only explain it.

Let’s begin, shall we?

***

Boorstin starts off innocuously enough with a definition of “pseudo-event”: i.e. a manufactured event that exists solely for the purpose of making news. The quintessential example is the press conference, when politicians and other public figures speak to reporters. Any one who has ever watched a press conference knows there is an inherent artificiality to them, and yet they remain major topics of discussion among pundits. As Boorstin puts it, “demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world’s deficiency.”

Once you’ve read Boorstin’s description of pseudo-events, you start to realize that the news is full of them. On a typical day, there are far more pseudo-events than real ones in the headlines. And one pseudo-event can spawn more. A good modern example would be when President Obama, after a controversy surrounding a clumsily-worded answer to a question at a press conference, held a “beer summit” to try and smooth over hurt feelings.

Increasingly, politics has come to be dominated by those most adept at generating pseudo-events. To use one of Boorstin’s examples, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s great talent was his ability to manipulate the press–many members of which despised him–into providing breathless coverage of his flamboyant announcements of names and lists of alleged communists.

As Boorstin explains, in the era of modern media, even a politician doing nothing at all can be “news”, e.g. Senator so-and-so’s silence on a given issue can spawn a whole series of speculative articles. The entire category of news known as “current events” is completely saturated with pseudo-events that it takes a truly spectacular development for reality to break through.

Pseudo-events are one epiphenomenon of what Boorstin calls “The Graphic Revolution”: the logarithmic increase in the transmissibility of, and demand for, news. This revolution began with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and continues to the present day.

One consequence of the Graphic Revolution, as the name implies, is the proliferation of images. Whereas before people learned information about the world primarily through wordy descriptions, either spoken or textual, beginning in the 19th century, images could now be readily created and reproduced. This change in how information was transmitted began to slowly redefine how people perceived reality, to the point where images could actually overshadow the real thing they were meant to represent.

(It’s not billed as such, but on top of everything else The Image is a fantastic chronicle of American history. Boorstin concisely narrates the flow of major technological and cultural changes that have shaped the country’s growth.)

Boorstin gives example after example of how pseudo-events can be staged to seem more interesting to viewers on television than those witnessing the event in person (e.g., a parade for General Douglas MacArthur’s return to the United States) or how a minor comment by a senator can be blown up into a full-fledged controversy. Real events are later re-enacted for the cameras, and so the reenactment rather than the reality forms the dominant image in the public mind.

Summing up, Boorstin says that, “our ‘free market place of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them.” With the rise of pseudo-events, which are neither wholly true nor wholly false, Boorstin argues, “the American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality.” Which has frightening implications for America’s democratic institutions. When a government is built on the idea of a well-informed populace, what happens when the very concept of what it means to be “well-informed” becomes blurry?

So, by now I hope you are saying to yourself, “Well, this sounds like a very intriguing book. Perhaps I shall have to see if I can acquire a copy.”

Reader, I have not finished summarizing the book yet. What I have described above is only Chapter 1.

The Image is not just about the collapse of America’s governing institutions as a result of our increasing inability to discern lies from truth. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, “nothing as trivial as that.” From here, things are going to get much weirder, much darker, and much more personal. What we’ve covered so far is like the titular play in the book The King in Yellow: where reading the seemingly-innocuous first act sucks you in, and only once your eyes fall on the opening lines of the second act do you descend irrevocably into madness.

Except, of course, in reverse. Obviously, I think that reading The Image is actually a path to sanity, to making sense of an increasingly mad world. Then again, Hildred Castaigne would say the same thing about the play The King in Yellow, so it really is all a question of trust.

I make a pact with you, dear reader: you check out the free sample on Amazon, and see if you’re intrigued enough to want to read the whole thing. Then come back here in, oh, I don’t know–shall we say two weeks? Two weeks it is! And there will be no more shadows between us, only truth, as exists between master and apprentice blogger and reader.

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I know, I know; most of you aren’t here for non-fiction. I actually was planning to have a fiction review for you this week. I was! But then… things got busy, and my internet was down for much of that time, which caused me to fall behind on other work, and, and… well, you get the picture. “Excuses, excuses,” you say. “Next he’ll claim a dog ate his book review.”

But I ought to give you something as a reward for your loyally showing up here. So here is a review I wrote, but didn’t really plan to publish, of yet another Napoleonic history book.

As the title implies, this book is actually history of two separate events, 129 years apart, both of which occurred in the same place: Borodino, a place in Russia on the outskirts of Moscow. In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Armeé finally confronted the Russian Army after a long and frustrating game of cat and mouse across western Russia. In 1941, the German army met a strong Soviet defense, fanatically determined to keep the invaders from the gates of Moscow.

The author interweaves accounts of both battles, to build an almost eerily symmetrical story of how each developed.  Of course, the combatants in 1941 were aware of the historical significance of the 1812 battle, and noted the ominous feelings the word “Borodino” evoked. (Ironically, many of the monuments to the earlier conflict had already been destroyed by the Soviet government, who saw them as symbols of the Tsarist era.)

The 1812 battle, while technically a French victory, has got to be one of the worst moments for Napoleon as a strategist and as a tactician. The book is unsparing in its assessment of the Emperor’s many errors. While Waterloo will always be The Battle that ended Napoleon’s career, it’s pretty clear to me that his single worst miscalculations as a general came at Borodino. (Indeed, it’s tempting to wonder if the doomed last charge of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo was partially in reaction to his failure to deploy the Guard at Borodino.)

As for 1941; it’s hard to even get into things like tactics. Two technologically advanced, fanatically indoctrinated, tired, hungry, and desperate armies were hurled together into an unbelievably brutal slugfest in snow and ice. Nowhere is the relentless march of technology made more apparent than in the contrasting of what “artillery” meant in the Napoleonic era versus in World War II.

The author mostly does a very good job of weaving the two campaigns together, highlighting both the changes as well as the broader point that, well, as Ron Perlman would say, “War. War never changes.” There were a few points when I would be reading an account and honestly I wasn’t sure which battle they were in for a few sentences. (And the names are no help; there are men with Polish names fighting for the French, French names fighting for the Germans, and German names fighting for the Russians.)

Is it a good history? I think so. But what makes a good history? After all, even if you knew literally nothing about either battle, just by reading this far you have got a reasonable summary: Napoleon invaded Russia, and he lost. Then later Hitler invaded Russia, and he lost too. Bam, there’s your history! When we have the quiz, you should be able to ace it. Now, we can safely say that we have covered both campaigns when it comes time for our standardized tests.

But perhaps, if you are an inquisitive sort, (a rare thing these days!) you suspect there is more to this story. Maybe there is; but first, a trademark Ruined Chapel-style non-sequitur!

Hey, didja guys hear about the Galactic Starcruiser? It was some sort of Star Wars-themed mystery dinner-theater LARPing experience. But it lost a bunch of money and had to be shut down. Some vlogger on YouTube did a four hour show about how disappointing it was. (Apparently, it was insufficiently immersive.)

I was recently reading David Foster Wallace’s hilarious essay, Shipping Out, about his experience on a cruise ship, and how, eventually, no matter much luxury it provided, it was never really enough:

In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable-infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough, after a few days of delight and then adjustment…, the Pamper-swaddled part of me that WANTS is now back, and with a vengeance. By Wednesday, I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the A.C. vent in my cabin hisses (loudly).

That was in the ’90s. Wallace didn’t even have a smartphone!

Compared to any other point in recorded history, we in the modern West live lives of unparalleled luxury. Kings and queens of yesteryear had not 1/100th of the amenities available to modern people today. And are we happy? No, we are not! We are righteously dissatisfied that the quality of our entertainment is not as good as we imagine it could be. I’m as guilty as the next guy. I write a whole website dedicated to critiquing entertainment.

Which brings us back to Borodino and the book in question. The sheer, unrelenting, all-encompassing amount of horror and suffering described by the accounts of those who went through these battles are difficult to even comprehend. The modern middle-class American, which I am, struggles and fails to appreciate the sheer misery of men marching first in dry heat, and later sub-freezing cold, only to fight and die horribly hundreds of miles from their home. Civilian farmers, old men, women, children driven from their homes by the violence of these same starving soldiers and totalitarian regimes, people ruthlessly gunned down merely for expressing fear in the face of hopeless situation, or refusing to work as slave labor for an occupying enemy force.

It is Hell. It is the stuff of nightmares. I literally cannot, on a visceral level, understand how anyone survived these experiences. What would a soldier, shot with grapeshot and bleeding to death while buried in snow, even say if he could see the modern world, if he could see me? It’s the sort of question that haunted me while reading this book.

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You know I don’t often review non-fiction books. What am I supposed to say? “This guy’s life should have been different to be more dramatic.” But sometimes I read a non-fiction book that’s just so good, I can’t resist.

Remember when the Napoleon movie came out, and people were like, “it’s not accurate,” and Ridley Scott was like, “Were you there, bro?” Well, Captain Blaze was there! Admittedly, he wasn’t at the big battles, such as Austerlitz, Borodino, or Waterloo. But he was wounded at Wagram, and took part in many Napoleonic campaigns in Poland, Germany and Spain. As such, he is in a position to speak with authority on these matters.

Not that he purports to be telling us an authoritative history of the period. No, Captain Blaze’s manner is much more casual and friendly, as he tells interesting stories of things that happened to him throughout his military career. The feeling is rather like you’re sitting at a bar, knocking back a few with him while listening to his war stories.

This is how I like to learn history. It’s not random lists of names and dates; it’s things that happened to real people. Captain Blaze is witty, human and relatable. Well, mostly. He does have a few old-fashioned attitudes towards some groups that may strike some readers as offensive. But when we study the past–or at least when I do–I want to study the whole past; even the ugly parts. No sense in sugarcoating it.

Still, for the most part, Blaze is actually quite likable and self-deprecating, as when he says that the best battle he was ever in was one that he was able to observe through a telescope from the safety of a church steeple. It was the “best” in his view, because he was out of harm’s way.

Most interesting are Blaze’s insights into human nature. He has little use for people claiming that the French soldier was inspired by love for the emperor. While Blaze has a certain admiration for Napoleon, he makes no bones about why they fought:

“How often has it been asserted in print that the soldiers fought for the emperor! This is another of those current phrases, which many people have taken up and repeated without knowing why. The soldiers fought for themselves, to defend themselves; because in France, a man never hesitates when he sees danger on one side and infamy on the other…

…show them the Prussians, the Russians, or the Austrians, and whether they are commanded by Napoleon, Charles X, or Louis Philippe, you may be sure that French soldiers will do their duty.” 

But again, he respects Napoleon. Or rather, he respects General Bonaparte. His victories early in his career are what Blaze values most highly, for as he reasons:

“The glory of Bonaparte will never be eclipsed by that of Napoleon; for the means of the emperor were more vast than ever general had at his disposal. When a ruler drains a country like France of her last man and her last crown, when he renders an account to no one, it is not surprising that, with a well-organized head, he should accomplish great things; the contrary would be much more astonishing.”

I’ve really just scratched the surface here. I could go on quoting passages from this book for a very long time. Capt. Blaze is insightful, clever, and, above all else, very funny. Yes, while he never shies away from the horror and tragedy of war, he also has a knack for recounting humorous incidents he witnessed or was told about. He makes a jolly guide to what must have been a rather grim time.

Of course, not being able to read French, I’m going by the translation. I also was unable to find much more information about Captain Blaze, and I was obliged to use a Google-translated version of his French Wikipedia page. Apparently, he went on to a career in writing after his military service. Quite an interesting fellow.

Dear readers, we live in a strange and unsettled world. Last week, a controversy broke out over edits on the Star Wars wiki to a page about a minor character, to bring them into line with something that happens in one of the innumerable new Star Wars productions. It escalated to death threats. As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”

My purpose here is not to relitigate Star Wars-related controversies. There are no good guys in Wookiepedia edit wars. But what has this world come to, when people care more about the biographies of fictional aliens than real people who actually existed? Maybe once Captain Blaze has an English-language wiki, and a few of his other published works are available online, then we can worry about what is considered “canon” in a fictional universe. Or, better yet, not.

This powerful electronic network we’re using houses vast repositories of human knowledge. Yet we ignore that and use it instead in the pursuit of the most trivial inanities. People are always prone to recency bias, but c’mon; this is pathetic. This is worse than destroying the Library of Alexandria. At least the Romans were in a war. What’s our excuse?

Oh, well. Let me quote once more from Blaze himself, from a bit later on in the book. To set the scene a bit, he has been talking about the tendency of people to romanticize war and soldiers after the fact, exaggerating the dashing and adventurous element far beyond what existed before peace came.

“I was talking one day on this subject with a publisher of lithographic prints, and was beginning to prove what I am here advancing. ‘You preach to one who is already converted,” said he at the first word: ‘I am well aware that all this is not true, but such things sell. In trade, “such things sell” is an unanswerable argument…'”

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I was patient this summer, when all the internet was abuzz with fascination over the pink doll movie and the nerd scientist movie. I was biding my time, waiting for the moment when cinema-goers’ eyes would turn to the tale of the Corsican artillery officer.

It’s been a while since I’ve been actively anticipating seeing a movie. It brought back memories of when I was a lad, waiting for Star Wars I – III to premiere. Of course, I am not comparing Napoleon to the prequel trilogy.  Those films are about a gifted but emotionally unstable young man, trying to balance his military and political ambitions with his turbulent love life, while all around him a dying republic is giving way to an authoritarian regime. Whereas Napoleon… hey, wait a second! Maybe my tastes haven’t matured as much as I thought.

But seriously, folks; who doesn’t love a good sweeping epic, with massive battles, steamy love scenes, all telling a tale of destiny and struggle, heroism and villainy, and all the different shades of poetical feeling that form the kaleidoscope of the human experience? And who better to direct it than the versatile Ridley Scott, the director of such classic films as the sci-fi masterpiece Alien and the historical opus Kingdom of Heaven?

Then again, he has also directed such turkeys as the inane sci-fi mess Prometheus and the historical snoozefest Exodus: Gods and Kings.  Would we be getting Good Ridley or Bad Ridley for this outing? It only added to the suspense.

In case you can’t tell by now… this is going to be long. If you want a quick review, or even a moderately lengthy review, look elsewhere. Here at Ruined Chapel, we believe reviews are meant to be a little bit winding, even meandering. There’s nothing wrong with taking the long way.

Napoleon begins in the French Revolution, with the grisly execution of Marie Antoinette. In a bit of artistic license, the young officer is witness to the morbid spectacle. Unlike the jeering crowds, he seems rather put-off by the whole thing.

We then see him bravely leading the French against the British forces at Toulon, for which he receives a promotion to brigadier general and catches the eye of Josephine de Beauharnais, a striking widow with whom the youthful officer quickly falls in love.

Okay, pause right there. I said “youthful” because Napoleon was 27.  Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Napoleon, is 49. I’m not in favor of this business of “de-aging” actors, but it’s pretty disconcerting to see a middle-aged man portraying a brash young officer who is becoming infatuated with a woman who is supposed to be six years older than him, but in fact looks about 15 years younger. (Because the actress is.) I’m not saying it ruins the movie or anything, but it’s odd.

Oh, well. That’s why they pay these actors the big bucks, right? To play someone they’re not. I won’t get mired down by a little detail like this. There are much more important things by which to get mired down.

Like the already-infamous pyramid scene. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it treatment of the Battle of the Pyramids, the film shows French artillery blasting the top off one of the iconic monuments. This didn’t happen. It is seemingly a riff on a story that French soldiers shot the nose off of the Sphinx, which also didn’t happen. Ridley Scott, however, claims it’s a fast way of communicating that Napoleon took Egypt. And Lord knows he wants to be fast, because this movie gallops along at an insane pace. Hardly are Josephine and Napoleon married before she’s cheating on him with another officer while he’s in Egypt, so then he has to come back from Egypt and confront her, but then they make up, sort of, and then…

It’s a tall order to compress 20 years of history into a 2.5 hour movie. Which is one reason I would have been in favor of not doing it.

The famous director David Lean once said that a mistake filmmakers make when adapting a book is to try to give audiences a little sample of everything in it, but the end result is no one aspect gets its due. The better approach, Lean said, is to find the core of the story, and tell that as richly and fully as possible. I’d argue this applies also to adaptations of historical episodes generally, not just particular books.

Lean directed a number of historical epics, including Doctor Zhivago, A Passage to India, Ryan’s Daughter, and, oh yes, a little picture called Lawrence of Arabia, which I consider to be one of the greatest films ever made, and certainly the bar against which all historical epics must be judged.

Now, in all fairness, Lawrence of Arabia is close to four hours long, and Scott plans to release a cut of Napoleon that will exceed even that. But Lawrence covers only a period of a couple years, whereas Napoleon is attempting to cover the entire career of one of the most accomplished soldier-statesmen in history. It would take 50 hours to do justice to the period Scott is tackling.

Or… it would take judicious thought about what the story really is.  I know we’re only a little way into the synopsis yet, but it’s not too early to ask the question: what is Napoleon about?

Well, obviously, it’s about the titular emperor. But what about him? What we want to know is why he did the things he did.

The film has an answer. Sort of. But it hasn’t given it yet, and meanwhile, we’re getting scenes of Napoleon bit by bit working his way up the ladder in France. First, it’s a coup against the French Directory, then it’s his coronation as Emperor of the French.

About this coronation: indulge me while I tell a little story not depicted in the film. Originally, Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated his third symphony, the Eroica, to Napoleon. (BTW, it’s an absolutely gorgeous piece and in my opinion old Ludwig van’s second best, trailing only the incomparable Ninth) But when the composer got word of Napoleon declaring himself Emperor, he just about had a fit, and angrily struck Bonaparte’s name from the score, supposedly saying:

“So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of Man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!”

Man, when you’ve lost Beethoven, you know you’re in trouble. More seriously, this quote points us towards discovering the theme of Napoleon’s story. Namely, that he rose to incredible heights, and then lost it all.

And it’s worth pausing to reflect on how he rose to those heights. As the film depicts pretty clearly, the French Revolution was a disaster. While on paper it may have been for liberty, equality, and fraternity, in practice, it was a hellish orgy of psychopathic mass murder and weird cults. Anyone with a good head on his or her shoulders, (something the revolutionaries tried their best to eliminate) would obviously prefer being governed by the competent administration of a successful military officer to the so-called Committee of Public Safety.

To seize control of a society that has essentially collapsed into anarchy takes a certain level of drive and will and energy, all qualities which Napoleon possessed. Whenever I am accused of harboring unduly pro-Bonapartist sympathies, it is to this period in his career that I will point. Someone had to govern France. And frankly, in such a dire situation as that, it is quite believable that no amount of committee meetings or parliamentary votes would do the trick. The state of nature, Hobbes tells us, is a state of war; and who better than a daring officer to win a war?

So, we can see why Beethoven admired Napoleon up until his coronation. Even more interesting, though, is the fact that Beethoven instantly recognized that this moment signified a seismic shift in Bonaparte’s career, and not for the better. Events were to prove his instincts exactly right.

The coronation is the great turning point, and the film indeed uses it as such. Not least because it’s the last time in this movie that we get to see a glimpse of color. Enjoy those red robes and glittering jewels, because after this, we slide straight into blue-gray filter hell. They actually did the meme.

What has happened to modern filmmakers? Where does this absolutely hideous palette come from? Personally, like so many of our present social ills, I blame it on the Harry Potter films. They made a ton of money with this horrible washed out aesthetic, and now all the studios unthinkingly copy them. Talk about a situation where we need a heroic figure to break the fetters of unthinking consensus! Where is the brave director who will stand up and give us once more the vibrant hues of color cinema?

Anyway, back to Napoleon. After the coronation, things go wrong in a hurry. It does have a certain Faustian irony to it: the point the film makes consistently is that Napoleon loves Josephine; that she is the main guiding force in his life. And yet, when he “finds the crown of France lying in the gutter, and picks it up with his sword,” his political ambitions ultimately lead him to distance himself from the one person he cares about most. In his quest for an heir, he divorces Josephine and marries Marie Louise of Austria, who bears him a son. In a very telling moment, and possibly my favorite scene in the film, when Napoleon gets his heir, the first thing he does is run off and show him to Josephine.

From there, the inexorable downfall begins, as Napoleon learns that the Tsar is cheating on his continental embargo against English goods. Naturally, in Napoleon’s mind, the only reasonable thing to do is raise a massive army and invade Russia.

You know, I’m not as much of a free trade absolutist as I was in my younger days, when I bought unreservedly into what the Econ books told me. I think there can be good arguments for restricting trade. Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to understand the Ricardian arguments against barriers to trade. And it’s especially worthwhile, if you find your barriers to trade can only be maintained by marching across Europe and into the desolation of Russian winter, to ask yourself whether the whole thing needs to be rethought.

And this is where I want to say a word about the little-heralded heroes of the story: the French Army. We don’t see much of the ordinary French soldier; they’re just a mob of extras that the Emperor directs with waves of his hands. Yet, once you realize that those gestures could be translated into deeds only by the well-practiced discipline of thousands of men, all drilled to work together as a unit in the face of gruesome death, do you understand the sheer awesomeness of his army. Whether it’s overthrowing the Directory, crushing the Austrians at Austerlitz, or the iconic moment on the road to Grenoble, the French soldiers loved their commander, and they came through for him time and time again. Napoleon may have been nothing without Josephine, but he was also nothing without his soldiers. If there isn’t anything else that may serve as evidence of his greatness, I think the fact that he had the loyalty of these men right up through Waterloo says quite a lot.

As Napoleon’s final words suggest, the three things he loved most were France, the Army, and Josephine. And here again we see the tragic irony of his life: France was left weakened at the time of death, its army shattered after the losses in Russia and at Waterloo, and its great enemy Britain ascendant. Josephine died during Napoleon’s first exile, without even being able to call herself his wife. Everything that Napoleon loved, he unwittingly destroyed.

By the time the film is slogging through Waterloo, which takes place in some sort of Mordor-esque hellscape with, again, NO COLOR, you can feel the weight of the inevitable bearing down. It feels like a chore, not helped by the one-dimensional and hammy performance of the actor playing Wellington, who seems like a sneering British aristocrat from central casting. Christopher Plummer did so much better in the film Waterloo.

Waterloo feels more like a doomed last gasp than a legendary clash of great generals, and so in short order, Napoleon is packed off to St. Helena to ponder where it all went wrong.

And where did it all go wrong? I found myself musing, if I could go back in time and give Napoleon some advice, what would I tell him? (Curiously, this is also the premise for an episode of I Dream of Jeannie.)

Remember how I said that it takes a gifted individual of tremendous talent to build something out of nothing, to craft a working society out of an anarchic horror show like the French Revolution? Well, I very much believe that’s true. But the corollary to that is, after the functioning society has been built, it takes more than one person to maintain it. Once the rule of law and order has been restored, and peace and stability established, it is beyond the abilities of anyone, no matter how supremely gifted, to keep it all running for long.

And this is where you need to have a good succession plan. I once read in some philosophy book somewhere about the importance of a great leader having a good officer corps; someone to whom he can hand off what he has built. Napoleon wanted to do that with his heir, which is why this became such a fixation for him, but this was because he had fallen into his enemies’ way of thinking. He was still in the mindset of the European aristocracy he so despised, believing that this was the only way to ensure his posterity.

What if, instead of crowning himself emperor, he’d just retired to the countryside with his beloved Josephine, secure in the knowledge that he had saved his country, and turned over the administration to the most capable hands in his officer corps? Probably the allied coalitions would have tried to crush France anyway, but maybe a true republic, governed by the people who had fought alongside Bonaparte for the security of France, would have been more robust, and better able to cope with the threat. And Napoleon could have gone down in history as a man who knew when to hold ’em, knew when to fold ’em, and knew when to walk away.

Well, c’est la vie. Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy to say all this from the viewpoint of an armchair historian 200 years later. I’m sure at the time, there were good reasons why Napoleon did what he did. It’s hard to stop once you’re riding the tiger.

The movie is good to the extent it makes the audience ponder questions like these, but too often, it just gets lost in trying to show all the highlights of Napoleon’s career, and ends up not giving you enough time to process it before we’re on to the next thing. Vanessa Kirby is fantastic as Josephine, and Phoenix does a solid job as Napoleon, but it’s all so hurried it’s hard to get to know them as characters. Maybe the Director’s Cut will be better. Maybe with the miracle of modern science, they will even discover a way to capture the full spectrum of visible light.

Ultimately, everything hinges on whether this movie is the beginning or the ending of your study of the Napoleonic era. If everything you know about Napoleon comes from this movie, then I’m sorry to tell you you’ve just been given a wildly distorted version of history. But if it sparks your interest to learn more about the story of the Corsican officer and the woman he loved, then it’s well worth the time and money.

Making a film is rather like building an empire, come to think of it. It takes a director leading a motivated crew to make it in the first place, but it is ultimately up to the masses to determine whether it has any lasting impact.

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This book is about what we would today call a “conspiracy theory,” although the events in question actually predate the use of the term “conspiracy theory” by several decades. It’s based on the idea that Marshal Michel Ney, one of Napoleon’s greatest officers, faked his execution and fled to America, where he lived under the name Peter Stuart Ney until his real death in 1846.

The book examines, in great detail, how this might have happened and what it would have required in order to be true. In broad outlines, it paints Ney’s supposed escape as a slap in the face to the restored Bourbon King by the Duke of Wellington, in retaliation for the king’s ingratitude to England’s Iron Duke.

Ney is portrayed as brave and heroic, unafraid to repeatedly face death. Which, by all accounts he was; with some saying he actively hoped to be killed on the field at Waterloo, only to somehow, by some devilishly ironic miracle, survive the carnage.

I have to admit, the notion that Ney’s execution was faked undercuts one of the most hardcore stories of his bravery: that he gave the orders to his firing squad himself. What kind of courage it would take for a man to look down the barrels of loaded rifles and order them to be fired! Obviously, if it was all a sham, this lessens Ney’s mystique.

Speaking of lessening mystique, I want to discuss how this book portrays the Duke of Wellington. Wellington is kind of a divisive figure. The British, of course, love him and say he’s one of the greatest commanders in history. Bonapartists, on the other hand, tend to view him as a merely mediocre fighter who happened to get lucky against a vastly superior opponent.

There are plenty of facts one can cite to support either viewpoint. But the way this book portrays him, despite the fact that his actions help the heroic Ney, Wellington seems cold, aloof, snobbish and arrogant. Admittedly, you can see how someone called “the Iron Duke” is probably not a warm fuzzy guy, but nothing about him says “great leader.” He seems tough and smart, but without any great vision or charisma.

I guess the easiest way to say it is, imagine Wellington in a situation analogous to Napoleon on the road to Grenoble. (See dramatization here.) I wonder if a British infantryman, hauled from some workhouse and flogged into obeying the regulations of His Majesty, might not have tried a shot?

But, I’m going off-topic. Wellington and Napoleon aside, Ney is certainly a fascinating historical figure, and the mystery of his possible escape is an interesting one. If you forced me to offer an opinion, my guess is that it probably didn’t happen, and he really did die by firing squad. But I can’t say it with certainty.

I enjoyed this book very much, and am grateful to Pat Prescott for recommending this author, which is how I learned about it. Mace has a number of other intriguing historical novels as well, which I plan to read in the future.

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I read somewhere about Richard Harding Davis, who was a journalist during the Spanish-American War and a major supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s political career. He was one of those rough and tumble, vigorous living types, and so when I read he’d written an adventure novel, I had to check it out. What could be better than a tale of adventure and combat and danger, written by a man who had experienced same? I settled in for a rollicking story of action and thrills.

What I got was not that, but something much more interesting.

Oh, to be sure, there are plenty of battles in this book. The hero of the story, Robert Clay, is an engineer for a mining company in South America. He just wants to build mines, but local politics keep it from being so simple. President Alvarez and his wife are plotting to dissolve the small republic and reign as monarchs. Meanwhile, the ambitious General Mendoza is plotting to oust them in a coup and establish himself as dictator. All the while, the people prefer the Vice President, the gallant General Rojas.

In this volatile mix, Clay finds himself trying to run a lucrative mining operation sure to be disrupted by a political revolution. When the mine’s owner, Mr. Langham, comes to visit, he brings his daughter Alice, the star of the New York social scene, with whom Clay has been obsessed for years.

As an aside, there is all this talk early on about “debutantes” and “seasons” and whole social structures which I don’t understand at all. This is kind of embarrassing, but I still don’t really have a handle on what a woman making her “debut” is. I felt like I was reading about an alien civilization.

And this leads me to what was surprising about this book: there is far, far more focus on relationships and conversations than I was expecting. For an adventure book, it has a great many dances and conversations about feelings.

For instance, at one point, after a visit to the mines, Clay is disappointed Alice doesn’t show more interest in his work, and she is disappointed he didn’t take a more active role in showing her around:

“I wanted to hear about it from you, because you did it. I wasn’t interested so much in what had been done, as I was in the man who accomplished it.”

To which Clay replies:

“But that’s just what I don’t want,” he said. “Can’t you see? These mines and other mines like them are all I have in the world. They are my only excuse for having lived in it so long. I want to feel that I’ve done something outside of myself.”

This is the sort of honest conversation about feelings that is important in all relationships. The fact that these two are able to talk things out this way clarifies things and saves much heartache down the line.

That’s what impressed me most about the book: how straightforward everyone is, particularly Clay. I know that I, the master of the long-winded, rambling, convoluted blog post, am a fine one to talk, but when it comes to serious matters of interpersonal relationships, directness is quite valuable.

The book places a much heavier emphasis on relationship details like this than I expected, and you know what? That’s a good thing. It makes the characters feel interesting and alive. True, those expecting non-stop action will be a little disappointed, although there is one big battle sequence at the end that is really well done.

Now, a word about covers. The one pictured above is the cover for the edition I read. I hate it. It looks like a Warren Zevon album. It’s got guns and money; all that’s missing is the lawyers. And while both this book and the Zevon song are indeed about danger and crime in South America, this is just the wrong vibe for a book written in 1897.

Then we have this cover for a paperback. It is… odd. Clearly, it depicts a modern soldier, but in the style of Classical artwork. It’s a striking image, but unfortunately this book is from neither the modern nor classical periods.

Next we come to the hardcover version. This is probably the best at capturing the book accurately. We have a handsome soldier, his young girlfriend, a plausibly South American setting… it’s not bad. A solid B+ entry, I’d say. Alas, this version costs $22.

And finally, there is the Classics Illustrated comic book edition. This, I admit, is tempting. From glancing at the Amazon preview, it’s clear they have taken many liberties with Davis’s story, but still, it looks interesting all the same. Doesn’t the central figure look a bit like David Niven as Phileas Fogg?

As a final note, just to reiterate, the book was written in 1897, and therefore has some language and depictions of characters that may disturb some readers. It’s actually pretty mild by the standards of the day, but nevertheless, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that.

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William Gilmore Simms at National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Artist unknown.

I had never heard of William Gilmore Simms until a few weeks ago. Apparently, he was a prominent name in American literature in the first half of the 19th century. Edgar Allan Poe called him one of the greatest American novelists. Naturally, I had to find something he had written.

I found this story in an anthology of his works, but you can also read it here. It’s a short ghost story, told through multiple framing devices. The introduction is just a killer:

The world has become monstrous matter-of-fact in latter days. We can no longer get a ghost story, either for love or money. The materialists have it all their own way; and even the little urchin, eight years old, instead of deferring with decent reverence to the opinions of his grandmamma, now stands up stoutly for his. He believes in every “ology” but pneumatology. “Faust” and the “Old Woman of Berkeley” move his derision only, and he would laugh incredulously, if he dared, at the Witch of Endor. The whole armoury of modern reasoning is on his side; and, however he may admit at seasons that belief can scarcely be counted a matter of will, he yet puts his veto on all sorts of credulity. That cold-blooded demon called Science has taken the place of all the other demons. He has certainly cast out innumerable devils, however he may still spare the principal. Whether we are the better for his intervention is another question. There is reason to apprehend that in disturbing our human faith in shadows, we have lost some of those wholesome moral restraints which might have kept many of us virtuous, where the laws could not.

The effect, however, is much the more seriously evil in all that concerns the romantic. Our story-tellers are so resolute to deal in the real, the actual only, that they venture on no subjects the details of which are not equally vulgar and susceptible of proof. With this end in view, indeed, they too commonly choose their subjects among convicted felons, in order that they may avail them selves of the evidence which led to their conviction; and, to prove more conclusively their devoted adherence to nature and the truth, they depict the former not only in her condition of nakedness, but long before she has found out the springs of running water. It is to be feared that some of the coarseness of modern taste arises from the too great lack of that veneration which belonged to, and elevated to dignity, even the errors of preceding ages. A love of the marvellous belongs, it appears to me, to all those who love and cultivate either of the fine arts. I very much doubt whether the poet, the painter, the sculptor, or the romancer, ever yet lived, who had not some strong bias-a leaning, at least,— to a belief in the wonders of the invisible world. Certainly, the higher orders of poets and painters, those who create and invent, must have a strong taint of the superstitious in their composition. But this is digressive, and leads us from our purpose.

That out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft, it does! What a nice way to start a story. Also, note how it would so not get published today. We’re two long paragraphs in, and we haven’t even met any of the actual characters yet. That’s no way to hook readers. Of course, Simms was writing in an era when having time to read must have seemed like an almost decadent luxury.

The story goes on to relate a tale told to the narrator by his grandmother, of an experience which she was in turn told about as a young girl traveling through the Carolinas in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

The whole setting is rich with references to the early United States and the recent revolution, as a party of travelers encounters two very different persons in the forests and swamps of the south.

Here’s the funny thing: the actual story is pretty mundane and straightforward, but the way it’s told adds layers of interesting complexities to it. And the ending! It’s perfect as far as I’m concerned. It offers the reader two possible explanations for the events they have just read, and lets them choose which they prefer. In my opinion, every ghost story should end that way.

Above all, the story gives a great sense of how profoundly hard life was then. As a matter of routine, the characters are described doing more difficult physical work than I do in a month. It really brings home to you how tough day-to-day existence must have been. Just for the visceral sense of setting alone, it’s worth reading this.

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Did I not say, in my end-of-year post for 2022, that I intended to review a greater variety of books? Well, this is an example of what I mean. Never before on this site have I reviewed a comic book. I haven’t even read a comic book since I was about 12 years of age.

But, last year, my friend Joy Spicer wrote about of her favorite comics, including Wonder Woman. Joy’s post about WW features the 1987 reboot of the character, illustrated by George Pérez, and I highly recommend reading it. That post was what inspired me to write this.

At first, I thought I’d start with the same comic that Joy highlighted. But you know me, I prefer to start a series at the beginning. Or close to it. The real beginning of Wonder Woman is actually in All-Star Comics #8. But this is her second-ever appearance and, well, Sensation Comics #1 is free on Kindle, whereas All-Star Comics #8 costs $1.99. Yes, I’m cheap; I admit it.

One sees instantly that the art of comic books evolved greatly in the years between ’42 and ’87. Compare the lavish artwork by Pérez with the, um, less lavish ones we find here:

Another thing which I did not expect, though perhaps I should have, was that this plot was already known to me.

You see, I know Wonder Woman from the 1970s TV series starring Lynda Carter. The pilot episode for the first season is a fairly faithful adaptation of this comic, albeit with more subplots interwoven.

The basic plot is this: Wonder Woman rescues American pilot Steve Trevor, and takes him back to Washington, D.C. Entering the “world of men,” she draws much attention, first for her appearance and then for foiling a bank robbery. She is hired to perform her feats of super-strength by a sleazy impresario, who attempts to flee with the revenue, but is of course thwarted.

Trevor, by this point recovered, attempts to fly a mission but is shot down by an enemy plane. Wonder Woman rescues him and together they find the bad guys’ hideout and defeat them. Wonder Woman then assumes the identity of a nurse at the hospital named Diana Prince.

As you know, I’m not big on rules of writing, which is good, because this comic definitely breaks some fairly basic guidelines for dramatic storytelling. You know, things like “don’t randomly give your characters new powers transparently for the purpose of advancing the plot.” That sort of thing. And frankly, I was okay with this. People nowadays take everything too seriously and want even their superhero stories to conform to dramatic conventions. But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of daft fun now and then.

But perhaps there is more to Wonder Woman than just fun, after all. Wikipedia informs us that:

William Moulton Marston… struck upon an idea for a new kind of superhero, one who would triumph not with fists or firepower, but with love. ‘Fine,’ said Elizabeth. [Marston’s wife] ‘But make her a woman.'”

[Note: I highly recommend reading Marston’s wiki. It’s one of those “impossible-to-predict-the-next-sentence” things.-B.G.]

Marston ran with Elizabeth’s idea, writing:

“Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”

And of course, if you’ve seen the show, you must remember the theme song:

Make a hawk a dove / Stop a war with love / Make a liar tell the truth.

Which is why it’s hardly surprising that in both this comic and the TV show, Wonder Woman solved problems through conversation and empathy rather than fists and force.

LOL, psych! That’s not what happens at all. She pummels baddies left and right. She doesn’t, say, fly the invisible plane to Germany and slap the golden lasso around Hitler. I mean, that might have saved some trouble, right?

You know, there were real people, even in the 1940s, who tried to “stop a war with love.” I recently finished reading Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, a book which, through chronologically cataloging first-hand accounts and contemporary news reports, tells the story of the global pacifist movement during the beginning of World War II. And it ends on December 31, 1941. Which means if you read Human Smoke and then read Sensation Comics #1, you’re effectively reading primary sources of World War II in chronological order.

Human Smoke is perhaps the single most depressing book I’ve ever read. Going from it to a comic book that sold for 10¢ in drugstores to amuse children is a uniquely bizarre and downright discomfiting experience. But you see, I love history, and Wonder Woman is surely as much a piece of history as any other document printed in the 1940s.

Needless to say, the real-life efforts at stopping war with love went down to defeat. Perhaps it is for the best. There are plenty of moral justifications for the use of force, and World War II is literally the textbook example. Not to go all Lt. Col. Dubois on you, but perhaps Wonder Woman is simply acknowledging the need for controlled violence to prevent uncontrolled violence. The proper role of the state, most philosophers would say, is to use its monopoly on violence to uphold the set of standards which produce civilization. A matriarchal society, as Marston apparently envisioned, would obviously need something to act as guarantor of its authority. Ultima ratio reginarum, you know…

Ah, but you see? I’m doing just what I said not to do, and taking things too seriously. That’s what happens when you read an unsparing catalog of all the human sins and miseries that led up to a global war of annihilation, and then follow it with what amounts to cotton-candy for the brain. But as the Ancient Greeks would follow their tragedies with satyr plays, so I feel compelled to follow something dark with something light. “If one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all its aspects…”

Or something like that. Anyway, Wonder Woman is an iconic character, and as silly and quaint as her early incarnations may look to us today, when you put them in the context of their time, you realize they must have served as a welcome dose of hopeful idealism and light entertainment in a world gone mad.