In his highly anticipated follow-up to "Cold Mountain," Charles Frazier explores 19th century America's brutal program to expel Indians. As a richly imagined historical novel, it draws out the best and worst of literary fiction.
In publishing circles, the runaway success of Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel “Cold Mountain” is often declared to be puzzling; the book is so resolutely old-fashioned, so unsexy, so solemn. The answer lies in the novel’s unusual appeal to both sides of the ever-dwindling readership for literary fiction. There’s war and travel for the men (you can get some men to read about the Civil War who will ordinarily read about nothing else) and an epic love story for the women. The novel’s ostensible ancestor is the Odyssey; it depicts a Civil War deserter’s journey home to the woman he left behind in Carolina hill country. But the less exalted secret ingredient is a healthy dash of “Little House on the Prairie.” Echoes of the Laura Ingalls Wilder children’s classic can be found in Frazier’s loving descriptions of how Ada, the woman waiting back home, learns to run a cabin, raise and dry tobacco and turn a crop of apples into the valuable commodity of hard cider.
Frazier’s second novel, “Thirteen Moons,” is both more accessible than “Cold Mountain” and somewhat less likely to catch on. “Cold Mountain” was stonily committed to its 19th century setting. You either submitted to the stately pace and rural preoccupations of that earlier time or you were repelled by the surface of the novel’s prose and became one of those people who pled mystification at its popularity. Those of us who could adjust to Frazier’s style, though, found ourselves genuinely transported — something historical fiction can rarely achieve — into the mental rhythms of a far less jittery and overstimulated way of life.
“Thirteen Moons” is also set in the Smoky Mountains, but it’s really a western masquerading as a faux memoir. The voice — first-person narration from one Will Cooper, an orphan adopted by the chief of a dwindling Cherokee village who goes on to become a lawyer, a state senator, a colonel in the Civil War, and most important, the defender of the Indians’ last shred of their old life — is pure frontier raconteur. Cooper is roughly based on William Holland Thomas, a famous Carolina figure who led a company of Cherokee fighters in the Confederate Army.
Despite the widely held notion that irony is an affectation uniquely beloved by postmodern smartypants, you can find plenty of 19th century American writers who relished the device, especially when describing life on the nation’s ragged Western edge. They got a kick out of applying the decorous language of the Victorian establishment to the brutal reality around them. Frazier adopts their tone when he has Cooper observe, while lingering by the Mississippi, that “little brown frogs lived in the mud of the riverbank, and pink-headed buzzards fell in drunkard angles from the sky and stepped through the mud to eat them, and sometimes the commerce between the two parties went on right at the legs of my table.”
Although Cooper is no less a man of his time than Inman, the hero of “Cold Mountain,” the Twainian humor he uses in telling his story is an element of the American style that’s stuck with us. Autobiography, which is what “Thirteen Moons” pretends to be, is the signature narrative form of the moment. As a result, Cooper’s voice feels more familiar and congenial than the third-person narration of “Cold Mountain,” and contemporary readers should slip into Frazier’s second novel more easily. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a concession to the marketplace, since you could hardly expect a fellow like Cooper to recount his life in the somber, mythic mode of “Cold Mountain,” but “Thirteen Moons” still lacks the fierce, uncompromising quality that made “Cold Mountain” so striking.
“Cold Mountain” had the air of a book written by a man holed up in a house in the woods, aiming to please no one but himself; “Thirteen Moons” is a novel with a relationship, albeit an uneasy one, to the world. This is most evident in a passage where Cooper — a great reader, like Ada in “Cold Mountain” — scoffs at an essay in a journal decrying the “state of recent fiction. Its judgment was harsh, on the grounds that we live in a happy, beautiful, virile age. And yet our stories are unnecessarily glum. We do not want sighs or tears. We are all seeking happiness, whether through money or position. It is our privilege to resent any attempts to force unhappy thoughts on us.”
Whether or not Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and the Arts ever ran such a piece (I’m not convinced that the term “recent fiction” was common currency in the mid-1800s), this is a flagrant dig at the philistines who objected to the gloomy ending of “Cold Mountain.” Frazier borrows the credibility of his likable, no-nonsense narrator to take a pot shot at his own critics, a self-serving anachronism the author of “Cold Mountain” would never have stooped to. Cooper’s reply to the critic’s complaint is to wordlessly take a couple of swigs from his flask; it’s too stupid to merit any further response.
Aside from the occasional lapse, Cooper is good company. His adventures in the uncharted Indian Nation, where his relatives sell him into indentured servitude working as a clerk at an isolated trading post, and his later exploits in Washington and traveling along the Mississippi make for amusing reading. From his adoptive father, Bear, he learns what’s left of the Cherokee ways, and this comes with ample dollops of classic village humor, mostly about the humiliating situations men get into on account of sex. The structure of “Thirteen Moons” is necessarily episodic — that’s how life happens, as Cooper explains at one point — with a few recurring themes.
First among these themes is the passing away of the Indians’ world. Some of the best scenes in the novel take place during the “removal” of 1838, President Andrew Jackson’s brutal program designed to expel all Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi River. Bear and the small community he presides over manage to elude the infamous Trail of Tears thanks to a considerable amount of wheeling, dealing and deed accumulation on the part of Cooper. The fate of a less fortunate Cherokee, an aged patriarch known as Charley, as he tries to hide his clan in the mountains, serves as the novel’s grim centerpiece.
The other, less effective motif in Cooper’s story is his thwarted, lifelong love for Claire, a girl he wins in a poker game from a part-Indian horse thief and plantation owner named Featherstone, and then loses again when Featherstone reneges on the deal. Later on, the two young lovers conduct a largely al fresco affair featuring enough good wine, sunburned buttocks and discussions of Byron’s poetry to suggest that Frazier wants to wrassle novelist Jim Harrison for the title of official Lusty Yet Cultured Old Coot of American literature. Cooper and Claire are kept apart for reasons not always entirely clear, so he gets to go on and on about how he’s never forgotten her, keeps an old coat in the attic that might still harbor a little of her scent, and much, much later receives mysterious staticky calls on the newfangled telephone in which he thinks he hears, faintly, her voice.
This relationship is pretty notional and not in the least bit interesting or believable. I suspect it was tossed into the mix to make Cooper seem sweeter and more romantic. (William Holland Thomas, the historical figure on whom Cooper was based, had a wife and children, a far more intriguing scenario.) Cooper goes on to do his share of whoring and courting, coming close to marrying once or twice, but he insists that “had Claire been fully mine since I won her as a boy, I would have lived a life of utter fidelity.” A nice sentiment, and one conveniently untested by the events of Cooper’s life as Frazier constructs them. But why be so scrupulous about sticking to the rambling, unnovelistic structure of real experience and then turn your hero’s love life into the stuff of a Hollywood movie?
The love story in many novels — especially historical novels — is a lot like the explosions in the better action movies. It may not be what you came to see, but a certain portion of the audience requires it to feel satisfied, and it’s easy enough to sit through while you wait for the better parts. In Frazier’s case, the best parts are the ones that hark back to Laura Ingalls Wilder, describing the stock of the frontier trading post and the intricacies of commerce in a place where currency is rare, the matrimonial and wintering practices of the Cherokee, the fact that a single deer’s brain contains exactly enough of the right ingredients to cure a single deer’s hide, the details of the spells conducted by the local medicine woman and the operation of the Wayah community under Cooper’s leadership.
The Indians and local woodsmen are mostly trading in hides and ginseng at the time Cooper arrives at the post. A man who arrives to ship the takings east tells the boy “the ginseng went all the way around the world in sailing ships and was sold to Chinamen, who ate it and believed it made their jimson stand up straighter. So I was just the second man in a long chain of people working to make that Chinaman stiff.” There’s more romance in that notion than in all of Cooper’s dreams of Claire, and I would rather read 10 pages of Frazier’s descriptions of trailside cookery (detailed enough that you could re-create the meals, and vivid enough that you want to) than any of the passages in which the two lovers cavort through streams and fields.
Frazier has an instinctive understanding of small-scale capitalism as just an intensified form of domesticity, and his depictions of both are usually the most absorbing aspects of his books. There are bear fights and wilderness ordeals aplenty in “Thirteen Moons,” too, but these, after all, are the sort of stories we’ve heard a hundred times, whereas I’ve never encountered a recipe for yellow-jacket soup before. Likewise, it’s the tobacco curing and the cider brewing that I remember best from “Cold Mountain,” not the obligatory battle scenes.
If only Frazier hadn’t adopted so many of the dreary mannerisms of today’s literary fiction since writing “Cold Mountain.” Exhibit A is the book’s pervasive and ill-fitting tone of elegiac melancholy, beginning with an introductory scene in which the elderly Cooper takes up a pen to record his life, ponder his decrepitude and grouse about such modern intrusions as electricity, movies and the phone. Railroads, he grumbles, “are ruinous noisy machines that hold no reference to anything in the green world or to the past in general.” I can’t see much reason for this framing device, except that it explains how the story is being told (a consideration that never troubles, say, “David Copperfield”) and it effectively stifles the possibility that a reader might take some vulgar pleasure in wondering how it all turns out. (Memo to young novelists: If the phrase “As I look down the misty corridor of time…” could be applied in any way at all to the opening pages of your book, cut them.)
At the heart of this is the implication — telegraphed in that passage concerning idiots who complain that “recent fiction” is “unnecessarily glum” — that art should not be too energetic or entertaining. By this logic, literature is in fact necessarily glum. The suggestion that it might be otherwise rates only a snort and another pull of whiskey, because, as all truly literate people know, great writing is an earnest business entailing the contemplation of the eternal verities of existence — all of which boil down to the fact that life is very, very sad.
Frazier is far from alone among contemporary literary novelists in believing that the only appropriate theme for serious fiction is the pitifulness of the human condition, the inevitability of loss and decline, the inability of people to get what they want, the torments of memory and so on. You can find the same attitude in writers as different from him as Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace. Granted, this is an understandable response to the relentless demand in pop culture for positive lessons, happy endings and uplift. But, being a reflex, it usually winds up feeling as trite as the stimulus.
Placing his narrator at death’s door allows Frazier to favor us with such reflections as the following: “My future is behind me”; “We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people. It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living”; “When all you know is lost and gone forever, does it become sweeter in the mind?”; “You find yourself exiled in a transformed world, peopled by strangers.” This is meant to be deep, the seasoned thought of a man who’s lived long enough to know better than to consider himself wise. But it’s really just a higher class of clichi (easily recognizable as such by anyone who doesn’t subsist on a literary diet of Oprah picks) and in such large servings, it’s tiresome. Some fine novels have been written about old age. (One recent example is “A Slight Trick of the Mind,” by Mitch Cullin.) They succeed by treating it as a subject of infinite complexity, rather than just the occasion to slap a patina of gravity on a story in danger of being taken too lightly.
There is, of course, a real tragedy at the core of “Thirteen Moons,” which is the erasure of the Cherokee by the European-Americans. But it must be said that every aspect of this tale, from the depredations of smallpox, to the tribes’ fables about the once-noble animal spirits who have fled their land, to the Indian villages plowed under by corn farmers, to the glimpses of vanishing traditions and reminiscences of the days “before the arrival of the Spaniards and their metal hats,” feels very familiar. It’s not clear that it urgently needs to be told again, at least not in this particular incarnation.
“Thirteen Moons” arrives in the year after Civil War novels won the Pulitzer Prize (“March” by Geraldine Brooks) and the National Book Critics Circle award (“The March” by E.L. Doctorow), and a World War II novel (“Europe Central” by William Vollmann) took the National Book Award. Some critics have ventured to call historical fiction the defining literary mode of our day. Perhaps they’re right, and if so, alas. It’s as if literary fiction can only carry us backward, to a world whose conditions and moral dilemmas can, with the advantage of hindsight, be tidily comprehended and easily weighed. In “Thirteen Moons,” Frazier is double-shielded from the present. His hero recoils from innovations, like railroads, that, in our day, have already become the stuff of nostalgia. The ones we can’t imagine living without, like electricity and telephones, are cast as the first encroachments against the book-centered culture in which Cooper is steeped. It’s as if literature itself were, like the Cherokees, being inexorably pushed out of its rightful kingdom.
Frazier and many others surely believe just that, and not without cause. No wonder a book like “Thirteen Moons,” for all its humor, feels so mournful. In their view, the novel, like Cooper, is on its last legs and so prefers the candlelight that falls more kindly on its wrinkled face. Better to retreat to its room and reminisce than to grapple with the new world being made by telephones and movies — let alone cable TV and the Internet. Not every reader agrees. There are those who think that all this despair and — yes unnecessary glumness is a bit premature, who still believe that the novel has plenty to say about life in this jangled, vital, frantically mutating and always exciting world before it lies down and dies. We’re the ones way out in Indian Country.
“Bring Up the Bodies,” Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, “Wolf Hall,” is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form — by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted — but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we’re sharing with them.
As with “Wolf Hall,” the central character in “Bring Up the Bodies” is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from “Wolf Hall” declares, “He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”
This is, incidentally, Cromwell’s own assessment, but he’s saved from vanity by the fact that his confidence is not just well-placed but precisely placed; he is the ultimate realist, and he possesses that most potent of assets, an excellent knowledge of himself. In the thousands of fictional retellings of Henry’s reign — most of them focused on his ambitious second wife, Anne Boleyn — Cromwell is typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. He got rid of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when Henry wanted Anne, and he got rid of Anne, too, when the time came. The first ejection led to the foundation of the Church of England and the second to the execution of six people.
As Mantel tells it — she describes the novel as “a proposal, an offer,” rather than an assertion of historical truth — Cromwell represents the vanguard of a new era, one in which ability trumps noble birth. He can countenance any number of insults from the arrogant aristocrats he works with because he knows that “chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and the kings are their waiting boys.”
He would never dream of voicing such thoughts, of course, and part of the marvel of Cromwell the character is his self-control. “I never forget myself,” he tells the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire at a moment when his temper has been sorely provoked. “What I do, I mean to do.” The style Mantel employs to write about this exemplar of the will is declarative to the point of bullishness; her voice is his. The character’s allure lies in his energy and his resilience, and it’s thrilling to hitch your readerly perspective to a man who can seemingly do anything and furthermore has the nerve to try.
But if Cromwell is a man of action, he’s also, at age 50, prone to reflection and haunted by the dead. “Bring Up the Bodies” opens with falconry in the picture-book English countryside during the king’s summer “progress” (a sort of nationwide tour) of 1535. Cromwell’s falcons are named after his two daughters, who, with his beloved wife, died in London’s intermittent epidemics. He hasn’t forgotten them, but it’s significant that he’s memorialized them as birds of prey. Above all, Cromwell nurses a grudge against all who participated in the downfall of his mentor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Yet, he is not without warmth. A conscientious and covertly tender householder, he presides over the lives of assorted dependents from various social classes. His carefully concealed soft spot for distressed gentlewomen and exiled court figures like Catherine and her daughter, Mary Tudor, leads him to make small but largely unappreciated efforts on their behalf.
We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue. His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up. Some of the more notorious highlights of Cromwell’s career — the dissolution and sacking of monasteries and other Church property and the execution of Thomas More, depicted in “Wolf Hall” — are cast in this light: England’s riches should belong to the state, not to Rome, and be utilized for the benefit of her king and people. Like a modern Labor Party politician, Cromwell tries to pass poor laws and work programs in the face of mighty resistance from Parliament and the aristocracy.
Throughout the first two parts of “Bring Up the Bodies,” this is the Cromwell we accompany. He is the king’s most valued councilor and is effectively running the country. His enemies are preening, scornful and often foolish noblemen, out to promote clannish interests or reconciliation with Rome. Anne Boleyn, his former ally, has turned on him, and turned off the king. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist,” Cromwell thinks. “He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does,” yet she has overestimated her own security. They are two of a kind, perhaps, but unlike him, she has let her success go to her head and will, in consequence, lose both.
Discouraged by Anne’s inability to give him a son and harried by the vixenish ways that once enthralled him, Henry falls for Jane Seymour, “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.” It becomes Cromwell’s job not only to clear the way for Jane to become Henry’s third wife, but to make the king feel that he is justified in discarding a second spouse. Cromwell pursues this goal in the conviction that sooner or later Anne would have come after him and his friends.
That’s the setup, but as the interrogation and trials of Anne and her alleged lovers commence, Mantel carries the reader into harrowing territory. Cromwell tricks a foppishly romantic musician into boasting of having slept with the queen (Mantel does not endorse the view that the man was tortured into this admission) and conducts a series of interviews with the four doomed noblemen accused of being her lovers and of plotting against the king. The four also happen to be Cromwell’s political enemies and, furthermore, key participants in a satirical court entertainment that depicted Cardinal Wolsey being dragged to hell by devils. “He needs guilty men,” Cromwell tells himself. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
Political horror is not a new literary mode — you can find it in the New Testament as well as in such 20th-century works as George Orwell’s “1984.” However, the protagonist in those stories is invariably the victim. “Bring Up the Bodies” devotes 270 pages to developing its hero, investing the reader in the superiority of his personality and cause, and then ushers him into the interrogator’s chair. Cromwell is contriving to send these people to the scaffold for crimes they quite possibly did not commit, however “guilty” they may be of others. Because he is our man ever bit as much as he is Henry’s man, we are, in some obscure way native to the laws of fiction, implicated. These are not easy chapters to read, although they are magnificently realized.
As assured as her implacable protagonist, Mantel walks the edge of a very sharp knife in the last part of “Bring Up the Bodies.” I don’t believe she cuts her feet on it, but sometimes it felt as if she were cutting mine. It’s impossible to repudiate Cromwell, but embracing him has become infinitely complicated. Of all the many fictional depictions of the moral quandaries involved in the exercise of great power, this may be one of the most disturbing. It comes much closer than any I’ve ever encountered to letting you know how it must feel to manage the fate of a nation: how intoxicating and how very, very perilous.
Yes, “Game of Thrones” has dragons and ice zombies and giant clairvoyant wolves, but for every viewer (or reader) who climbed onto George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy bandwagon for the magical stuff, I suspect there are two of us who are in it for the palace intrigue. Velvet sleeves concealing jewel-encrusted daggers, scheming eunuchs with networks of spies, parvenue commoners outwitting the supercilious aristos and totally, utterly ruthless power plays — what’s not to love?
Martin has always maintained that he’s been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called “A Song of Ice and Fire”) are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.
It would probably surprise several generations of British schoolchildren to learn that the dynastic politics of the late 1400s could be transformed into anything coherent, let alone entertaining. (“It’s worse than the Wars of the Roses!” Lucy Pevensie cries in dismay when someone tries to explain a particularly complicated bit of Narnian history in “Prince Caspian.” She speaks for many.) This, however, hasn’t kept many novelists and historians from trying.
It’s not that there aren’t fabulous characters and nefarious doings in the Wars of the Roses — Secret marriages! Mad monarchs! Vanishing princes! This is a story that concludes with one of the players being drowned in a barrel of wine, after all. But keeping the Wars’ family trees, convoluted legalistic arguments and perpetually shifting allegiances straight is enough to give anyone a headache. It certainly doesn’t help that all the male principles seem to have the same three names (Henry, Richard or Edward) or that they are forever gaining or losing and then gaining again the titles that serve to distinguish them from one another.
For fans who wish to investigate further into the real-life inspirations for Martin’s characters, one of the most lucid popular histories of the conflict is Alison Weir’s “The Wars of the Roses” (originally published as “Lancaster and York”). Some of Martin’s references to the Wars are easy to pick up. For example, the two dueling clans in “Game of Thrones,” the Lannisters and the Starks, have names that resemble those of the two sides in the Wars of the Roses. Like the Yorks, the Starks are northerners, while the Lannisters, like the Lancasters, are famously rich.
Both English families were branches of the House of Plantagenet who vied for the throne after the deposition of the last Plantagenet king, Richard II, in 1399 and before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between the characters in “Game of Thrones” and actual historical figures, but Martin was clearly inspired by Edward IV in creating, say, Robert Baratheon, the great, strapping warrior who became a stout, ailing king. There’s a dash of Edward, too, in Rob Stark, a brilliant commander who makes an impetuous, disadvantageous marriage.
Cersei Lannister, Robert’s ambitious, conniving widow, is thought by many to have been inspired by the hot-headed Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, the king Edward IV helped depose. Henry’s bouts of insanity left him frequently unable to rule, and Margaret, a leading Lancastrian, fought ferociously against those she saw as threatening her family’s hold on the crown. Historians view her as a prime driver in the Wars of the Roses, just as Cersei is substantively responsible for the War of the Five Kings in “A Clash of Kings.” Cersei also resembles Isabella of France, an earlier medieval English queen, who conspired with her adulterous lover to dethrone, and possibly to murder, her (bisexual) husband, Edward II, in the 1300s.
Cersei is a crude, incompetent politician, however, which cannot be said of Isabella. Although unpopular in England, where she was nicknamed “the She-wolf of France,” Isabella has acquired some sympathizers over the years, including the indefatigable Alison Weir, who wrote a contrarian biography of her in 2006, “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Weir has also written novels about various women in the Tudor era, no doubt aspiring to the success of Philippa Gregory, whose romantic historical novels routinely land on the New York Times Bestseller List.
For her own part, Gregory has already published three books in a series set during the Wars of the Roses, “The Cousins’ War” (an apt title, given the intricate blood relationships among the many combatants). The most recent of these, “The Lady of the Rivers,” may even be infused with enough magical elements to appeal to some “Game of Thrones” readers: In it, the character of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, possesses psychic abilities (the real duchess was tried for witchcraft by her political enemies) and is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by her first husband. For those who prefer a more grounded view, Gregory collaborated with two historians, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, on a nonfiction book, “The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother,” published last year.
You may have noticed that most of these books are about women, despite the fact that, with very few exceptions, the women of the Middle Ages had little power. Much of today’s popular historical fiction about the rulers of the Middle Ages is read by women who are primarily interested in the lives and problems of women. Since the historical record contains next to no information on this topic, fiction has stepped in to fill the breach.
Another, more manly, popular contemporary historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell, has set a series of novels, “The Grail Quest,” during a slightly earlier period. His hero, an archer named Thomas of Hookton who gets caught up in the Hundred Years’ War, is an entirely fictional commoner in search of that fabled relic. What Cornwell’s novels lack in historically based, Machiavellian aristocrats they make up for in action-packed, blood-soaked battle scenes.
For the ultimate in medieval scuttlebutt, however, you can’t do better than Barbara Tuchman’s prizewinning 1978 history, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” This account of the Hundred Years’ War centers around the life of a French nobleman who married an Englishwoman, but it’s more expansive than any novel, taking in such fascinating details as the bizarre fashion for long-toed shoes in court (so long, they had to be tied up with strings and were inveighed against by puritanical clergymen) to the legendarily brutal rampages of British mercenary John Hawkwood through Italy. If you really want to know how the peasants fared while their rulers skirmished, the peculiar challenges of sewage-management in a stone castle, what the real agenda was behind the Crusades, or just how dastardly the highborn and royal can behave when it suits them, then look no further.
Despite the heavenly perfection of the free market, Hollywood, mysteriously, refuses to provide family-friendly entertainment that is, shall we say, correct, politically. While it may seem like the entertainment industry is devoted to profit above all else, and is therefore engaged in giving the people what they want, the truth is those show business freaks are shoving their liberal values down America’s throat, as evidenced by “Glee” and Lady Gaga’s appearance on “American Idol.”
Thankfully the Tea Party has decided to produce its own entertainment, just like it produced its own history. If the grand liberal conspiracy theory of Hollywood is correct, underserved Real Americans will flock to Tea Party entertainment options in droves, forcing every film and television studio to produce appropriately conservative fare or go out of business entirely.
The first big offering from “Colony Bay Productions,” the Tea Party-affiliated studio, is a TV show called “Courage, New Hampshire.” It has not yet been picked up by any network, so the studio just released it on DVD and is selling it on its website.
“Courage, New Hampshire,” disappointingly, is not the story of a grizzled Manchester homicide detective named “Danny Courage.” It is, instead, a soapy period costume drama about the fictional town of Courage in the days before the American Revolution. The first episode, “The Travail of Sarah Pine,” is the story of a colonial “grizzly momma” named Sarah Pine. Pine is a slow-witted, slightly deranged young woman who is convinced that a caddish British soldier who knocked her up a year ago will return to marry her. When the soldier, Sgt. Bob Weedle, returns to Courage for some other reason, a year later, he is arrested by the town’s principled, honorable justice of the peace, Silas Rhodes, played by some guy. (Not sure why they couldn’t get Jon Voight — he would’ve been perfect.) (Oh, wait, this guy is the co-founder of Colony Bay Productions.)
As proof of the producers’ commitment to historical accuracy, the British are all evil and speak with British accents, while the colonists are mostly good and speak with (wildly varying) American accents. (Well, one of them sort of has an Irish accent.)
So, Weedle is apparently under arrest for “fornication,” though, oddly for colonial days, no one seems to have punished Pine for bearing a bastard child.
Then there is a great scene where Weedle chops the same piece of wood over and over again, seemingly without successfully splitting it, while having an odd conversation with Sarah Pine.
Pine: “You know what the Word says about men in your station.”
Weedle: “I confess, I do not know.”
Pine: “Protectors of the innocent, bearing the sword against evil. Rewarding those who do good, who love God.”
Pine: “I’m a KINGSMAN, Sarah! I eat the king’s bread, I do the king’s bidding. I always have, and I always will!”
Pine, to her baby: “That’s why God made your poppa so strong, little lamb. To put his arms around us.”
So, she’s not all there, as you can see.
Someone named “Simian Trout” (I think?) shows up to act as Weedle’s lawyer, and he is great. Trout is played by longtime minor character actor Basil Hoffman, who is acting all over this show. Trout was sent by the governor, who does not want to upset the king, on account of how many soldiers there are in Boston, but Rhodes insists on trying Weedle, because of justice. (“One law for England, and another for us? Is that what it is, Simian? Not while I’m justice!”)
Most of the rest of the episode is a gripping courtroom drama.
Once the defense attorney begins cross-examining Pine, there is a montage implying a lengthy, exhausting questioning. But then the montage ends and Rhodes says: “Mr. Trout, for the last time, you will ask a question of the witness or not, but you have tried this court’s patience long enough.”
Then he cruelly cross-examines her by accusing her of lying to her aunt and fornicating with a guy, and everyone gets so mad, even though this is basically the exact tale she told before, when the prosecutor questioned her. (As you can see in the clip above, Rhodes is not happy with this line of questioning.)
Trout calls some drunk person, for comic relief. Is he the best part of the movie? You be the judge!
But Pine’s attorney has a surprise witness! Some redcoat from Weedle’s regiment! The redcoat confirms that Weedle not only impregnated Pine, but he also — unlikely as it may seem — said he totally loved her and wanted to marry her.
Why did he decide to give this testimony? “Because I know what it is … to be called a bastard.” Shocking twist!
(Also I thought his regiment was days away in Boston or something, because Weedle kept claiming that they would show up and burn the whole town down and shoot everyone if the didn’t let him go? Unfortunately, this never happened. No one fires a single musket.)
But then they declare Weedle innocent, because there was no such thing as DNA testing back then. But Weedle shocks everyone by abandoning the king’s army and deciding to raise his child with Sarah Pine. He moves out west, to steal land from the Indians.
Then the Boston Massacre happens (off-screen, in Boston). And Rhodes and his redcoat friend decide not to send the militia after Weedle and his wife until after breakfast. The end. A tour de force! All I could think at the end was, that was amazing, but why was none of it about taxes?
I can’t wait for the next episode! What’s in the hatch? Liberty? Is Liberty in the hatch?
“If you thought the portrayal of John Adams as a chubby, bald, Italian indie actor was proof that the liberals who run Hollywood hate our Founders, you’ll love the guy who wrote and stars in ‘Courage, New Hampshire.’” — Me.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Earp’s many brothers are known to most of us as they have been shaped successively by sensationalist journalism, dime novels, movies, and TV series. Though biographies of varying degrees of seriousness have also been written of most of these men, their lives might best be suited to fiction; only it can adequately convey the animating tincture of myth that has made them momentous.
This, at least, is the thought that comes to me upon finishing Mary Doria Russell’s “Doc.” This extraordinary novel, whose central figure is John Henry “Doc” Holliday, is both a work of reclamation of the man from his legend as a coldblooded killer and an inspired evocation of a mythic quintessence. That fundamental aspect of Doc’s life is announced from the start: “The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath, howling for his delayed demise.”
Though set chiefly in 1878 in Dodge City, the story begins with John Henry Holliday’s early life as a man beset by misfortune. The son of a Georgia planter, he was born with a cleft palate, later repaired by innovative surgery. His mother, a woman “educated in excess of a lady’s requirements,” devoted herself to the arduous task of teaching him to speak clearly. She also taught him to play the piano and supplemented his formal education, sharing with him her love of the classics. She died of tuberculosis when he was 15, leaving him in life-long mourning. She quite possibly left Holliday with her disease as well — the tuberculosis that eventually killed him two decades later.
Holliday trained as a dentist in Philadelphia, returned to Georgia to set up a practice, but soon the dread malady began to show itself. He traveled west to ply his trade in an atmosphere supposed to be more salubrious than Georgia’s miasmic swelter. Texas was first, then Dodge City. Here, in this “small, bright hellhole in the immense, inhuman darkness that was west Kansas,” we have the heart of the book and the entrance of a familiar set of characters. Among them are Bat Masterson, flashy dresser, some-time lawman, and future newspaperman who greatly embellished the old West’s already lurid history; James Earp, saloon-keeper and husband of a former prostitute, now running a brothel; Morgan Earp, lawman and the sunniest of the brothers; Wyatt Earp, lawman, straight arrow, and taciturn lover of horses; and Mary Katharine Harony, well-born Hungarian, educated in the classics, and now an enterprising, if bibulous, prostitute known as “Big Nose Kate.”
Kate and Doc are brought together by sexual attraction and a sense of camaraderie arising out of the mutual exchange of pithy quotations from the classics. Kate, who is, not to mince words, a termagant, has no patience for Doc’s desire to relieve the suffering of others by the practice of dentistry: He can, she scolds him, make vastly more money by gambling. And this he increasingly turns to as his constant, wracking cough — and the whiskey he takes to subdue it — makes delicate work progressively more difficult.
Russell brilliantly conveys Doc’s psychological predicament as a genteel, educated Southerner who has been foiled by an unlucky disease and thrust into the life of a hard-drinking gambler. Doc reflects ruefully that the courtesy he shows everyone, regardless of race or condition, is no doubt mistaken as stemming “from an admirable democratic conviction that they were every bit as good as he was. In reality he thought himself no better than they: a significant distinction. It was not a surfeit of brotherly love that informed John Henry Holliday’s egalitarianism. It was an acute awareness of the depths of disgrace into which he had fallen.”
Much of the story is an imaginative, perceptive re-creation of the personalities of real characters drawn from the whiskey- and blood-soaked annals of the Western frontier. A number of fictional persons are also at large, among them a mixed-race youth, Johnnie Sanders, who is murdered — maybe for money or maybe by destiny: “The sad truth was,” broods a melancholy, resigned Wyatt Earp, “that a half-Indian colored kid like Johnnie was asking to get killed by standing there in his own skin, minding his own business.” The mystery of this death adds more poignancy than suspense to the book, for oddly and quite wonderfully, the real dramatic tension arises elsewhere: out of the state of Doc’s lungs, the repair of Wyatt’s front teeth, a few hands of poker, and the chances and mischances that drive the actors toward the notorious event that propelled them into history and legend.
That, of course, is the gunfight at the OK Corral of 1881, in which the three Earp brothers and Holliday took part. Nonetheless, it stays over the horizon, a conjunction toward which the actors are stumbling, small incident by incident, seemingly by chance. It is, as one might say, no accident that Doc and Kate, the two spouters of Latin axioms on the nature of fortune, are fingered as central to that celebrated shootout, a neat dovetailing of classical fatalism and Western myth. “If he hadn’t talked Kate into going back to Doc,” ruminates James Earp, some three years hence, shortly after the deadly confrontation, “that damn street fight in Tombstone never would have happened. Wyatt only got mixed up with Ike Clanton after Kate got mad at Doc one night and then got drunk enough to tell Sheriff Behan that Doc was in on the stagecoach robbery that touched the whole thing off. Her story was horseshit of the highest order, and as soon as she sobered up, she took it back.”
In an “author’s note,” Russell says readers will wonder, “How much of that was real?” Her answer is “not all of it but a lot more than you might think.” To which I will add that what is “real” includes, paradoxically, what she so deftly transmits: the luminescent aura of a tragic myth.
The History Channel: not just for documentaries about Hitler anymore. In an effort to appeal to those millions of Americans who would rather watch contestants eat dung in a jungle with Jeff Probst egging them on than watch another documentary about something that happened before they were born, the channel has brought in reality show producer Mark Burnett to create a 12-hour scripted drama about the Bible. Previously, Burnett’s biggest shows to date have been “Survivor,” “The Apprentice” and “The Voice”… all of which sound like Sunday school stories themselves when you stop to think about it.
But just in case putting Bible stories on the History Channel makes you feel a little icky, don’t worry. The series will be entirely free of historical context, according the network’s president.
The Bible has its own layers of interpretation, of course, but Ms. Dubuc said the series would not try to impose any kind of historical context to events like the Flood. “It is just the magnitude of the book itself,” she said. “We’re not stepping back to examine anything that could be called a controversy. We are just telling the stories that are in it.”
Ms. Dubuc said researchers are already at work and theologians will be consulted.
Where else should a non-historical show go than on the History Channel? And good luck finding that non-controversial story from the Bible. I think it’s somewhere between the part where God (if he/she/it exists) says “Let there be light,” and when Jesus Christ rises from the dead (still up for debate).
Of course, the ultimate irony of Burnett’s Bible series is that it is the first scripted History program since “The Kennedys” was canceled, with the channel claiming that “the mini-series did not live up to its standards of accuracy.”
Lena Headey in "Game of Thrones" 
Pre-Tea Party tea people 
Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Earp’s many brothers are known to most of us as they have been shaped successively by sensationalist journalism, dime novels, movies, and TV series. Though biographies of varying degrees of seriousness have also been written of most of these men, their lives might best be suited to fiction; only it can adequately convey the animating tincture of myth that has made them momentous.
And in the beginning, there was Richard Hatch. 
