It was 1843, and Charles Dickens’ latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewait, was not selling well–at least not by Dickens’ standards. So for another project to make some money, Britain’s most popular author wrote A Christmas Carol and got it to the market fast. It didn’t sell wildly, but made its author a little. More importantly, it established an important tradition: the Dickensian Christmas, and over twenty years of Christmas books and stories.

The next year Dickens wrote The Chimes, as he had A Christmas Carol, seemingly in off moments between his regular novels being written chapter by chapter just in time to be serialized, and rushed it to print. It is the story of Toby “Trotty” Veck, a day laborer/porter, aged into his sixties. He spends every day on the streets, in the shadow of a church, waiting on someone to have him deliver a letter or small package for six pence, or maybe a shilling.

From the church the chimes peal, keeping Toby company and speaking to him according to his mood. Toby Veck is poor, and almost alone. His young adult daughter, Meg, is the only one close to him. She brings him a hot lunch of tripe and potatoes, and they sit on the doorstep of Alderman Cute for Toby to eat. The gentleman passes out his door with two equally corpulent friends. They upbraid Toby for eating tripe–“the least economical, the most wastefull…consumption”–and finish what’s left on Toby’s plate. The, as Richard comes, the man Meg has just said she it to marry on new Years Day, the alderman advises Richard he can do better and not to marry Toby’s daughter. He does, however, engage Toby to deliver a letter to the local Member of Parliament.

The book then follows Toby’s actions that day and a dream he has that night. Toby delivers the letter to the MP, learns it contains orders to incarcerate a certain Will Fern who is down on his luck, meets and encourages that man and befriends him. He makes a midnight visit to his beloved chimes, and while among them falls into a trance, or perhaps a dream. He see things in Meg’s future, in Richards’ future, and his new friend’s future, and even his own future. The book ends with “all’s well”, as Meg and Richard marry on New Years Day, Toby’s new friends–Will Fern and his adopted daughter–come to live with him.

Although counted as a Christmas book, Christmas is never mentioned. All events look forward to New Years Day, which is close at hand. After reading A Christmas Carol many times, and seeing umpteen dramatic presentations of it, plus the many modern adaptions, almost anything else Dickens wrote about Christmas will be a let-down. And this one was. I found it difficult to follow Toby’s dream/trance, and all that was happening. Perhaps I didn’t read it as closely as I needed to. The language is slightly archaic, and the physical and social circumstances unfamiliar to a 21st Century American. None of these badly so, but perhaps they added up to hinder understanding.

The characters are not as well developed as in other Dickens books. The alderman and the MP are bad guys. Everything they do works against the poor, yet they call themselves the friends of the poor and justifying various anti-poor actions as being in favor of the poor. Each one makes a single appearance in the novella, so perhaps Dickens did not have enough space to fully develop them. This book is much more social commentary than A Christmas Carol, something Dickens put in many of his books. The rich and powerful are bad, the poor and downtrodden are good. No in between, no mixtures, no offsetting qualities. I haven’t read much Dickens (that is reserved for retirement), so I don’t know if his novels have better developed heroes and villains than this one.

Should you read this? Probably, if you can find it without plunking down a bunch of money. It should be in any collection of Dickens’ Christmas writings, and is probably available on-line. It’s good to branch out from his best known Christmas story. Next Christmas: The Cricket on the Hearth.

I’m not sure where I acquired this book, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, Whitaker House, 1981, ISBN 0-88368-095-5. Perhaps at a garage sale, for it does not have a resale shop sticker. I bought it because of the subject matter, not from prior familiarity. Who wouldn’t want to read about those who went before us in the faith, and who suffered the ultimate price for that faith?

John Foxe wrote this record of the saints’ suffering from about 1550 to 1563. He continued to modify it for years after until his death in 1587, adding anecdotes and more stories. These were difficult times in England. King Henry 8th took his nation out of the Roman Catholic church when the pope wouldn’t grant him a divorce. His heir, the boy king Edward VI, continued on the same Protestant path under the influence of regents, but died at age sixteen. His half sister Mary became queen in 1553, and for the five years of her short reign through domestic affairs into turmoil as she restored Catholicism and attempted to purge Protestantism with threats, coercion, imprisonment, and execution.

Foxe lived through this, though he spent the Mary years in exile. So the book is concerned mostly with the martyrs of that era. One long chapter covers martyrs of the first three centuries of Christianity. The next covers Constantine–not because he was a martyr but because of his impact on Christianity. John Wycliff is next, again not for martyrdom but for persecution and impact.

After this are chapters covering the martyred and the persecuted of the late 15th and 16th centuries, a parade of names both familiar and not: Oldcastle, Huss, Tyndale, Luther, Hooper, Taylor, Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer. Some chapters cover a number of martyrs in short fashion, such as those from Scotland and those many burned at the stake at Smithfield near Newgate.

Foxe, in his narratives, concentrates on the period after arrest of the “heretic”–the subsequent attempts to turn the prisoner to the Catholic faith, perhaps some words in defense or the refusal to recant, then the actual execution. Almost nothing is included about what led to the arrest, or of the martyr’s earlier life. That’s probably as it should be, but it leaves me a bit unsatisfied. I’d like to know more about how these men and woman developed the beliefs and convictions that allowed them to face the flames without fear and with joy.

I left the book having disgust for Queen Mary, and sadness that such things as trans-substantiation and the mass and the authority of the pope were once thought important enough to kill for. The most uplifting part was the testimony of the saints, who maintained confidence and steadfastness in their beliefs, who joined the ones that an ancient writer declared “faced jeers and flogging, …were chained and put in prison, …stoned, …sawed in two, … put to death by the sword…went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated.” For all of these received something better, planned by God.

Is this book a keeper? I’m not sure at this point. It is almost source material for other writing. But I think probably not. Should you read it? The language is archaic, as is the organization (lack of subheadings, extremely long paragraphs), so it is a difficult read. But, yes, if you have an opportunity, read it and be enlightened.

I came of age during the Watergate era, both literally and politically. In November 1972, helped along by a national law that lowered the voting age in national elections, I stepped into a voting booth in Cranston RI and cast my first vote for president. I voted for Richard Nixon. The Watergate scandal was a gnat buzzing in people’s ears, pushed about by a press that hated Nixon. It was not till five months after the election that it erupted to the point where heads rolled, and it was another year and then some before Nixon resigned.

Out of this scandal was the fight over Nixon’s presidential papers. The courts wanted them. The press wanted them. Defendants wanted them–even more so than prosecutors in some cases. Yet history had said that a president’s papers from his years in office were his own, to be done with as he saw fit. Destroy them, put them in a library, suppress them, edit them. They were his. The need for Nixon’s papers caused a long legal battle that was not resolved until 1987. The papers became available in 1988.

Bruce Oudes began the process of going through the released Nixon papers, which went into his book From The President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files. Oudes’ title is almost yellow journalism. The files were not secret because they all contain salacious material that showed what bad dudes Nixon and his cronies were. They were “secret” simply because Nixon thought they belonged to him, as those of his predecessors had belonged to them. But Congress passed laws, the courts upheld them, and Oudes and countless like him got the papers.

The lengthy Introduction to the book is excellent. Oudes describes the fight for the papers and how the national mood was pretty much to give nothing to Nixon. Oudes describes how the files amounted to 1.5 million pages, which he culled through to produce a book of 640 pages. It was a massive work, and obviously everything could not be included. With such abridgement, achieving a fair balance is difficult if not impossible. The editor’s prejudices must show through.

The papers focus heavily on Chuck Colson and the political maneuverings he orchestrated. In fact, the papers as a whole are mostly political. A small minority deal strictly with governing. The China trip, for instance, is covered in memos that discuss the political ramifications of the trip but not many that discuss what that trip would mean for the world and for US interests. The years 1973 and 1974 are under-represented, 1974 badly so. It was as if the Administration quit producing memos on January 1, 1973.

Despite these faults, I found the reading fascinating. It was sort of like the business correspondence I read every day. Seeing how the Administration sought to manipulate the press was eye-opening. The reaction to a bad press consumed many memos. The Vietnam War was the backdrop to everything, but the memos described the happenings on the home front, not the battle front.

I was disturbed to see White House employees–Coulson, Buchanan, Haldeman, and others spending time producing memos purely about politics and the 1970 and 1972 elections. I was not pleased to see how my tax dollars (well, mostly Dad’s tax dollars) go to politics rather than governing. Perhaps it is not possible to achieve a complete separation of staff so that some work on politics, some work on governing, and each is paid by monies from an appropriate source. Still, it was bothersome.

It’s a good book, and well worth the $2.00 I paid for it used at our local thrift store. If you have a chance to find it, read it. The memos themselves are unfiltered history–original source material–though of course the selection of the memos make the book a highly filtered flawed history. This one is not a keeper. It will be in the next garage sale, where I hope to make back half my investment.

I’ll just add a few more things to what I wrote in yesterday’s post.

I always look for faults in book, either in the writing, the organization, the failure to communicate–anything–and report them in my reviews. I’m hard pressed to find any in this one. If there is one, it may be that it paints Lincoln as a man with almost no faults.

Maybe it’s just that he was so adept at managing his cabinet (which is, after all, the purpose of the book) that it appears he did so faultlessly. If from reading this it appears Lincoln had a fault, it might be that he was too slow to act in many instances. However, that could also be seen as a virtue, depending on your point of view. Today we might all wish our president moved a little slower on some issues. Lincoln sometimes seemed to move agonizingly slow on some things. As Doris Kearns Goodwin says, he tended to be a good judge of popular opinion and not move far ahead of it. He waited for popular opinion to catch up with events and with what he wanted to do. Then, when he made his move, the public would seem to be behind him.

The role of the press is carefully brought out in the book. Today, with all the talk of media bias, we tend to forget that in Lincoln’s day newspapers were biased and unashamed of it. The Democrats had their newspapers and the Republicans theirs. Each reported in a partisan way. Between them, the balance was struck.

One lack I felt as I read the book, which could not be helped due to the limitations on the subject, was being totally cut off from what was going on in the South during the war. We are presented the North’s side of things, but have no idea what the South was doing, thinking, feeling, wishing. That cannot be helped, for the South was not the subject of the book. Still, I might rather the book had run 50 pages longer and we had a few more paragraphs now and then about the Southern viewpoint and activities.

The last chapter, which deals with Lincoln’s assassination, brought me some new information. I had no idea that this was a plot among several people and that Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson were also targets, and that Seward’s assassin was almost successful. I thought the book well pointed out how Lincoln’s death was a tragedy for the South. The same plodding forbearance Lincoln demonstrated during the war would have served the South well during Reconstruction, and possibly eliminated much of the animosity that even now exists between the two regions.

Edited in on 26 June 2009: Kearns has an odd way of handling notes for sources. Well, to me it is odd; possibly it is a standard method for this type of publication. The book is heavily dependent on a large number of independent sources. Rather than use footnotes, Kearns uses endnotes, not at the end of the chapter but after the end of the story. However, she does not provide a superscripted note reference at the location within the text. Rather, where the notes are, she quotes a short piece of text, eliding much, and indicates the source. This, I suppose, is less distracting then those having those superscripts. A typical page of text would have ten endnotes. However, I like footnotes, even more so than endnotes. I would rather have the superscripts on the page, letting me know this material was taken from some primary source. I am more likely to check the note than with the method Kearns uses. This, of course, is an incredibly picky comment.

As I said in my last post, the book is well written, highly readable yet scholarly, and did not at all seem as long as the page numbers indicated. Read it. You will be better for it.

On Friday I finished Burnt Sienna, 2000, Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-51964-2, a novel by David Morrell. This is the second of Morrell’s novels I’ve read. The first was The Totem. That was a medical thriller. This was…I’m not sure what genre to put it in. A thriller, I guess.

Chase Malone had been a soldier, having piloted helicopters in the Panama invasion of 1989 and come away from that scarred. Yes, he was wounded, but more importantly he wound up with a dislike for authority of any type. Thus he left the military and took up painting–not houses, as a landscape artist. In ten years he won some renown, and some collectors would pay as much as $200,000 for one of his works. He lived in Cozumel, right on the ocean.

Derek Bellasar, who lived in France, tried to hire him to paint two painting of his wife, one a facial shot and one a nude. Malone turned down the commission, because of his problems with authority. Malone didn’t know Bellasar was a powerful dealer in illegal munitions. Bellasar quickly began interfering in Malone’s life, closing his favorite restaurant and buying his property out from under him. One of Malone’s ex-army buddies showed up. Now working for the CIA, this man talked Malone into accepting the commission, going to Bellasar’s estate near Nice, France, and finding out more about his operation.

The other part of Malone’s assignment was to get Bellasar’s wife out of the compound. It seemed that Bellasar had had three prior wives, all as beautiful as the current one, named Sienna, but they all died in mysterious circumstances about the age of 30, when the bloom of youthful beauty first began to fade. Right before each of them died Bellasar had hired famous artists to paint them, facial and nude.

The story began somewhat predictably. I found myself trying to anticipate the plot (the curse of a wannabe novelist) and being successful at it. I predicted Malone would fall for Sienna, that he would get her out, and how he would get her out. However, all this happened by about the middle of the book; obviously I had miscalculated. Morrell continued to weave his story, giving additional predicaments for Malone to work his way out of. I won’t say much more so as to not give away more of the plot.

The book is an amazingly easy read. Chapters are short, typically two or three pages. Sometimes a chapter break is not even a scene break. Morrell’s writing is spare of excess verbiage, except perhaps in some of the weapons scene. He keeps the story moving. He keeps the plot twists coming. He avoids gratuitous sex and violence. I read it in a little over a week, despite the limited time I had to give to reading. The twenty-five pages a day I had set as a goal was too easy, and I did more than that most days.

I recommend this book to any who like thrillers. It has a few swear words, but it they are sprinkled in very naturally, not gratuitously at all.