Viking

This post is a continuation of a previous post, Leadership lessons from ancient Greece. You’ll want to read that first if you have not already. Let’s pick up our discussion on leadership tactics, this time inspired by Tides of War, the story of the mercurial leader of Athens and Sparta, Alcibiades.

1. Challenge your team members

When he [Alcibiades] wished to honor a man of the fleet, he dispatched meat or wine with his compliments to that officer’s mess. He distinguished others by inclusion at his table.  But to those he wished most to esteem, he sent not boons but trials. He singled them out for the most perilous duties, for in these, he said, he sent out lieutenants and got back captains. [Tides of War, p. 258]

When you have tasks to be done, as a leader, don’t think “how quickly can I get this done?”, think, “can I use this opportunity to develop someone?”. The corollary to “challenge your team members” is “teach, don’t do”. When times get busy, there’s a natural tendency to want to move quickly and just “get things done”. Fight it. The second implication of this rule is that you have to let people do things their own way, and possibly make mistakes you could have prevented. The CEO of my first company, Dave Evans of Evans & Sutherland, had a great saying. He’d say: “There’s two ways to do things, my way, and the wrong way.” And then he’d pause, his eyes would twinkle, and he’d say: “And if you want to get anything done, you have to let people do things the wrong way.”.

The next two rules go together hand and glove.

2. Don’t give orders; make suggestions or ask questions.

[Alcibiades speaking]:  …if force must be employed with a subordinate, take care that it be minimal. If I command you, “pick up that bowl”, and set a swordpoint to your back, you will obey but no part will own the action. You will exculpate yourself, accounting, “He made me do it, I had no choice.” But if I only suggest and you comply, then you must own your compliance and, owning it, stand by it. [Tides of War, p. 258.]

Your goal as a leader is to get people to own problems and not rest until they’ve cracked it. The more you give orders, the more you own the problem and the less they do. Further, you deny them the growth and plain fun of figuring out the right thing for themselves.

3. Assign the goals, not the means.

Corollary to the principle of minimal force was that of minimal supervision. When Alcibiades issued a combat assignment, he imparted the objective only, leaving the means to the officer himself. The more daunting the chore, the more informally he commanded it….

Always assign a man more than he believes himself capable of. Make him rise to the occasion. In this way you compel him to discover fresh resources, both in himself and others of his command, thus enlarging the capacity of each, while binding all beneath the exigencies of risk and glory. [Tides of War, p. 259]

A common refrain I’ve heard (and said!) is “let me do my job!” – the best people want to be free to choose the best means at hand to accomplish the objective, and not have it all presented to them. And the more you make a particular kind of decision, the more you’ll have to continue to make those decisions. When Alcibiades is offered the kingship of Athens, he replies, “Tyranny is a splendid roost, but there is no step down from it.”. Once you start deciding things, even trivial things like what pizza is for lunch, people will expect you’re going to continue to make those decisions. Don’t make decisions you don’t want to keep having to make.

4. Don’t hoard your person.

As he chastened men with banishment from himself, so he rewarded them with access. He loved to have his officers about him, particularly late at night as he worked. “Bear in mind, my friends, that access to your person is a mighty incentive to those in station beneath you. A smile, a kind word, a nickname spoken with affection…Don’t hoard your person, gentlemen. Money cannot buy the prize of your attention, and the men know it.” [Tides of War, p. 260]

In the fray of conferences, meetings, financings and customer visits, it’s easy to get caught up in “working”, and not spend time with people. Particularly if you have introverted tendencies, as many software people do, there’s a natural tendency when time gets short or events overwhelming, to retreat a bit and need “alone time”. Fight this urge. Spend less time doing things (delegate that), and more time working and talking with people. Don’t be that CEO that nobody ever sees, but is “off doing things”. People don’t follow ghosts.

5. Command emulation (and by the way, drink!).

Three and half years later, before Byzantium, I attended a nightlong drinking bout. Someone had put the query “How does one lead free men?”. “By being better than they,” Alcibiades responded at once. The symposiasts laughed at this, even Thrasybulus and Theramenes, our generals. “By being better”, Alcibiades continued, “and thus commanding their emulation”. He was drunk, but on him it accounted nothing, save to liberate those holdings nearest to his heart. “When I was not yet twenty, I served in the infantry. Among my mates was Socrates the son of Sophoroniscus. In a fight the enemy had routed us and were swarming upon our position. I was terrified and loaded up to flee. Yet when I beheld him, my friend with the grey in his beard, plant his feet on the earth and seat his shoulder within the great bowl of his shield, a species of eros, life-will, arose within me like a tide. I discovered myself compelled, absent all prudence, to stand beside him. A commander’s role is to model arete, excellence, before his men. One need not thrash them to greatness, only hold it out before them. They will be compelled by their own nature to emulate it.” [Tides of War, p. 250]

Now, does this mean that every software CEO should be writing software on a day to day basis? No. But people should believe that you *could*, if you needed to. And at the same time as you can discuss the ideas behind a key algorithm, if you can talk about market dynamics or business techniques, your best people will be inspired to seek a similar breadth of knowledge. If you can’t do those things, your team should at least believe you are interested in the details [and to paraphrase my good friend Mike Troiano's comment on establishing warmth [http://scalableintimacy.com/how-to-sell/], if you want people to think you are interested, it helps to be interested]. Model those traits you wish people to exhibit, and they will as well (or at least, most of them).

And by the way, drinking with your team or with particular individuals is a time-honored way of really getting to know them, what they care about, and what they really think (and vice versa). That kind of bond, and that kind of knowledge, isn’t gotten in meetings.

6. Build leaders; don’t hire them.

Alcibiades: As we seek to make our enemies own their defeats at our hands, so we must make our friends own their victories. The less you give a man, and have him succeed, the more he draws his achievement to his heart. Remember we may elevate the fleet in two ways only. By acquiring better men or making those we have better. Even were the former practicable I would disdain it, for a hired man may hire out to another master, but a man who makes himself master stays loyal forever. [Tides of War, p. 259]

and

When Panegyris and Atalanta were mauled at the Nine-Mile Cove and their trierarchs blaming themselves had made their spirits disconsolate, he called the pair to his tent and, stripping before them, commanded them to regard the many wounds upon his body. “I’d rather have a man who has closed with the foe and bears the scars than all the bronze-and-brightwork of the regatta. I can find unscathed captains anywhere. But where will I get brave men like you and your crews?” [Tides of War, p. 260]

As you are growing your company or team and hiring, it’s tempting to look for the senior people who have all the answers and all the experience, and bring them in to leadership positions. And in fact, sometimes that is the right or necessary thing to do. But wherever you can, hire smart, passionate people early in their careers and have them led by the team that’s gotten you to where you are.

7. Write to people (real writing, not emails) – and include families where you can.

Correspondence. He [Alcibiades] posted a hundred letters a day. Entire watches were consumed with this, amid rotating shifts of secretaries, often through night and morn and into the next night….To him these letters were not chores but men. There were other missives, the main in truth, whose lines he dictated late or scrawled in his own hands. These were the widow letters, the commendations for the maimed or fallen – then, twenty, thirty a day. He directed these personally to the recipient himself if he were still alive, but often as well he had the rolls dispatched to the father or mother or wife without the honored man’s knowledge. [Tides of War, p. 257]

Email is impersonal. Words are cheap. But a handwritten note – you don’t get many of those. And it means the person who wrote it took the time to sit and write it. If someone has been through a tough project, or achieved something impressive, write them a note. Ideally, mail it to their house so family members might see it. At Endeca we had one particularly grueling project (we had the customer disaster and the project wouldn’t die and every day there was a new showstopper bug and….you get the picture). The “all-hands-on-deck” phase lasted months. When we finally drove the stake through the heart of the release, I took the team out to dinner, and gave them a copy of Gates of Fire (which seemed symbolically appropriate), along with a personal note recognizing the particular part that person had played in making the release happen. Two years later one of them mentioned how much that meant to them, and how great the book was. Email doesn’t work like that.

Also, families are important – they’re your support infrastructure, and after all your team is working to support them. Find ways to include them at dinners or parties, and to recognize people in front of them.

Last: Laugh.

It is that peculiar soldier’s humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship…..The more miserable the conditions, the more convulsing the jokes become, or at least that’s how it seems. [Gates of Fire, p. 68]

Find ways to laugh a lot. There’s a certain kind of black humor that soldiers have, and you see variations of it in software companies too. I encourage it. The main thing is to laugh and have a bit of fun. In the end we’re not fighting a war, we’re doing something we love and it should be fun! A little bit of laughter solves a lot of issues. If you don’t have a sense of humor, hire somebody with one.

I’ve lived with these rules informally for some time, and more recently have tried to approach them in a thoughtful, planned manner. Here’s a few last things I’ve learned.

These rules work best if you hire the right kind of people. In the end, a lot of being successful boils down to hiring well. Soldiers can be ordered around; employees don’t take so well to it, at least for long. Hire people who have demonstrated initiative, achievement and curiosity, and the skills (for example what programming languages they know) will take care of themselves.

Remember you are optimizing for the long run. Following many of these principles means accepting suboptimal execution in the short run for the longer term gain of higher performing teams. Trust that it will pay off down the road. If you are trying to adopt some of these principles and you are in middle management, make sure your manager understands what you are doing and why you are doing it. I once had one of managers prepare and perform a high stakes presentation as part of their growth strategy. I later learned that my (new) manager at the time thought I was either lazy or lacked vision myself, as I had one of my managers do it. Communicate upwards, especially when you’re taking risks.

Fictional characters make a tough bar to live up to; aspire to that level of performance, even if you can’t actually do it, and one day you’ll wake up realizing you are that thing you aspire to.

These last two posts wouldn’t have been possible without a few people. Thomas Jensen introduced me to these books, and has been a friend and mentor for 25 years, and reviewed a first draft. Jim Fell and Ed O’Donnell also reviewed an early draft. Thanks also to Jim Baum, Steve Papa and Andy Palmer for teaching me a lot on the subject over the years. Thanks all!!

I am a huge fan of the novelist Steven Pressfield. His novels bring the people and events of Ancient Greece to life in a way few others have. He has a particular talent for capturing the essence of war and military life, both its leaders and foot soldiers. His two best novels are Gates of Fire, which tells the story of 300 Spartan warriors sent to defend the pass of Thermopylae, knowing full well they will all perish fighting the Persian invaders, and Tides of War, chronicling the battle between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. Each book has an array of memorable characters and has much to teach about discipline, courage under fire, sacrifice and the deep bonds formed between people sharing difficult circumstances.

I want to focus on the two leaders in the books. Leonidas is King of the Spartans and the leader of the band of 300 in Gates of Fire. Alcibiades is the mercurial leader of Athens in Tides of War, until he becomes too powerful and flees to Sparta to avoid being arrested and killed – whereupon he becomes a leader of the Spartans and attempts to retake Athens.  Each is a study of the nature of leadership, its demands, requirements and practices. The chapter in Tides of War entitled “The Intersection of Necessity and Free Will” alone is like a mini-MBA in leadership tactics.

I’ve lived with these books for more than a decade.  They’ve taught me a number of things that have become part of my framework for approaching leadership and management. It’s tough to live up to fictional characters: startups are not war, and companies are not the military. But they share enough key ingredients that they can inform a management style.

I’ve distilled some key leadership principles from the novels.  I share them below, along with some examples of how I’ve put them into practice. There are as many ways to manage as there are managers; these reflect my personal style and underlying value system.  They may not be for you, and I sometimes forget them myself. Some of these work better in larger organizations; some of them are mandatory in startups but harder to make work in a bigger company. In this first post, we’ll look at Gates of Fire and see what it has to tell us; in the second post, Tides of War.

1. Lead by serving.

They could see their king [Leonidas], at nearly sixty, enduring every bit of misery they did. And they knew that when the battle came, he would take his place not safely at the rear, but in the front rank, at the hottest and most perilous spot on the field. [Gates of Fire, p. 69]

I will tell his Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the hardest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him. [Gates of Fire, p. 350]

What might this mean in “real life”? People will give you more in effort than you can ever compel, if they believe you care about them and a shared mission. The leader’s job, in the end, is to make sure the objective is clear, and that the team is as productive as possible. This means clearing roadblocks instead of doing “fun stuff”. There are a million menial tasks to getting a startup off the ground and keeping it running. At goby, we keep a pretty good stock of food, drink, snacks, and office supplies. These are my responsibility; every other weekend or so, I drive to a nearby BJs warehouse store, load up on low cost drinks and snacks, and stock the kitchen with them. In this way, I send a message that no task is beneath me, and it shouldn’t be beneath anyone else either. In addition, people who do the real work of building things can spend their time on that, rather than on errands assigned out by the CEO.

2. First to rise, last to bed.

It was the standing order of my master on campaign that he be woken two hours before dawn, an hour prior to the men of his platoon. He insisted that these never behold him prone upon the earth, but awake always to the sight of their enomotarch on his feet and armed. [Gates of Fire, p. 228]

Your team should believe you are as or more dedicated than they are (and you should be!). They should never have reason to question your effort or work ethic – you are a model for them to emulate. While simply being in the office doesn’t guarantee anything gets done, there’s no substitute for your team to see you, day in and day out, working as hard or harder than they are. This is a place where the demands of modern life and the “real world” can clash with fictional or heroic stamina. The demands (and joys) of family, friends, and outside interests can prevent you from being the first one in the office and the last one to leave every day. If you can’t do both, you should pick either the beginning or the end of the day, and consistently be first (or last). My practice is to be first in the office.

And don’t leave your team alone during the tough times. If your people are working weekends, so are you. Long nights too. There may not be anything for you to do, but be there. Do QA, bring food, do busywork, clean the coffee machine. Whatever. You may think this isn’t noticed. It is. At one of my previous roles we were completely redoing the user interface of a ten year old product. It was a massive undertaking and something of a “death march” project. At one point someone came to me to resign; he couldn’t take the demands of the project. But he told me that he really appreciated how I didn’t ask anything of people that I wasn’t willing to do myself. [Note: this isn't really the way you want to run projects - death marches are to be avoided - but if your team is on one, you better be there 8)].

3. Lead by example.

Simultaneously, work was begun on rebuilding the ancient Phokian Wall which blocked the Narrows. This fortification, when the allies arrived, was little more than a pile of rubble….A wry scene ensured as various engineers and  draughtsmen of the allied militias assembled in solemn council to survey the site and propose architectural alternatives….Leonidas simply picked up a boulder and marched to a spot. There he set the stone in place. He lifted a second, and placed it beside the first. The men looked on dumbly as their commander in chief, whom all could see was well past sixty, stooped to seize a third boulder…With a cheer the troops fell to. Nor did Leonidas cease from his exertions….”Nothing fancy brothers”, the King guided the construction. “For a wall of stone will not preserve Hellas, but a wall of men”. [Gates of Fire, p. 219]

It sounds trite, but really, it’s important, and not that hard. Lead by example – even (especially!) in the mundane things. It’s easy for an organization to become cynical. One of the quickest ways is to have an organization where “the rules don’t apply” to the leaders.

It’s important that your team do things together, and not just fun things. At goby we do the usual, go out for drinks etc. But there’s nothing like handing everyone a hammer and a hex wrench and having everyone assemble their own desks from IKEA on the first day you open a new office. The sore backs, the bitching, the busted knuckles, builds a team like no round of drinks can do. Find ways for your team to share hardship as well as fun, even if it’s mild hardship.

4. Stay in control – your team will react to adverse circumstances the way you do.

This I realized now watching Dienekes rally and tend to his men, was the role of the officer: to prevent those under his command, at all stages of the battle – before, during and after – from becoming “possessed”. To fire their valor when it flagged and rein in their fury when it threatened to take them out of hand…..His was not, I could see now, the heroism of an Achilles….He was just a man doing a job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those whom he led by his example. A job whose objective could be boiled down to a single understatement, as he did at the Hot Gates on the morning he died, of “performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions”. [Gates of Fire, p. 112]

If you’ve been managing for long, or been in software for any period of time, you’ve seen the train wrecks. The customer disaster, the release that you can’t seem to finish, the big product launch that’s gone sideways because your site keeps crashing because that big TechCr­­­­unch article keeps driving people to your site. You’ve seen these, and you know you’ll get through it. It doesn’t lessen the urgency, but you know you’ll get through it. That calmness will prevent worse problems. If you’re working with a younger team, they may not have seen these disasters before, or know how to act or react. You need to stay in control, and be seen staying in control. Bark if you need to, but stay in control.

[Leonidas speaking] “You are the elect of Hellas officers and commanders of Lakedaemon, chosen by the Isthmaian Congress to strike the first blow in defense of our homeland. Remember that our allies will take their cue from you. If you show fear, they will be afraid. If you project courage, they will match it in kind….above all, the little things. Maintain your men’s training schedule without alteration. Omit no sacrifice to the gods. Continue your gymnastics and drills-at-arms. Take time to dress your hair, as always. If anything, take more time. [Gates of Fire, p. 225]

In times of stress, it’s important to stick with your patterns. In sports, they say “you play the way you practice”. You should have repeatable, established ways of doing what you do. At goby, it’s agile development, short development sprints followed by a product release. One of the things I was most proud of as goby came to a close was that even as we were weeks away from running out of cash, we were doing our two week sprints followed by product releases. “Performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions” indeed.

5. Equal pain for all.

The army was at the Oaks…on an eight-nighter…[the army] had marched out into the high valleys and drilled in darkness for four nights…drilling day and night. No amenities whatever were brought. Conditions are shared by all. [A joke amongst the men]: “What’s the difference between a Spartan king and a mid-ranker?”. “The king sleeps in that shithole over there, we sleep in this shithole over here”. The purpose of the eight-nighter is to drive the individuals of the division, and the unit itself, behind the point of humor. It is when the jokes stop, they say, that the real lessons are learned and each man, and the mora as a whole, make those incremental advances which pay off in the ultimate crucible. The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. [Gates of Fire, p. 67]

There is nothing more corrosive to team spirit than a nasty task that only half the company is working on. There’s a particular kind of task that sometimes arises when you are converting legacy code for example, or test cases, where there’s really no way to automate things, or substitute for doing things by hand. In those kinds of situations, it’s tempting to assign those tasks to “QA”, or “junior people” or some similar subset of the team. Don’t. Everybody helps. In one of my former roles, we were converting to a new user interface paradigm. We had literally thousands of automated tests and no way to convert them. Every single person in a very large team (hundreds) was assigned some tests to rebuild or convert (including me). Everybody bitched; but the work got done and done well. Bitching and Camaraderie are two sides of the same coin, if everyone is bitching about the same work.

6. Sometimes you lose; give it everything you’ve got and do it with class.

As the Spartans go to battle with the Persians on the day they will all perish, Leonidas gives a speech. Here’s the end of it:

A thousand years from now, Leonidas declared, two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may for their private purposes make journey to our country. They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks prize forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today. [Gates of Fire, p. 356]

Projects fail; startups fail; established companies fail. When we fail, people are watching; our coworkers, potential future hires, potential future investors, business partners, and they are learning as they watch. Unlike the Spartans, when it happens to us, we have the chance to get up and do it again. You’ll be remembered as much or more, for how you fought the fight, than whether you won or lost.

In the next post, I’ll dive into Tides of War, and its treasure trove of leadership strategies. You can find it here.

On a trip to Phoenix recently, I pulled out Crossers from Philip Caputo for an airplane companion. It’s the story of Gil Castle, a 9/11 widower who retreats to the old family ranch in Arizona, near the Mexican border, to recover from the loss of his wife. There he reconnects to his family, to the Seneca he draws consolation from, and finally to himself. Then he stumbles across a Crosser, a Mexican making the crossing from Mexico to a hoped-for better life, and the trouble begins.

Crossers is deeply evocative of a time and place in history, much as Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel does for southern France, or Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park does for post-communist Moscow. Like those novels there is a deep nostalgia for the way things were, as well as a recognition that those times are best not gone back to. The novel does a great job of conveying what it means to be a rancher in Arizona, to love the land, and to be bound to it in a way that money can’t buy.

The book is equal parts No Country for Old Men (comparisons to Cormac McCarthy are inevitable) and CNN news headlines. Most of the atrocities described in the book are factual or near so. The grim realities of those dying attempting to cross the desert and the border, and the horrific violence brought on by the drug trade, combine to produce a level of death and destruction that feels like it belongs to a medieval era in some other country, not 21st century America. The hierarchy of crime in Mexico also feels medieval – drug runners have guns & more money, and so determine who gets to traffics drugs or people along which route. They dominate the coyotes and the engranchadors that run human trafficking of illegal immigrants to the US, much as a feudal lord might direct a lower life form.

Interleaved with the current day story line are interleaved tales of Gil’s grandfather Ben from the turn of the century border – a time when men pretty much enforced their own law, and lived by a code that often coincided with the law (but often did not). Ben dominates the novel – a self-reliant cowboy who participates in Mexican revolutions, sheriffs on the American side, and constantly battles his inner demons and shifts between good and bad. I found the descriptions of that era, and it’s characters, as (or more) compelling than the modern story line. A quick snippet:

“Tibbets looked the part. Handlebar mustache, cat’s whiskers at the corner of his eyes, two pearl-handled Colt revolvers, and the air of someone who could summon up reserves of unpleasantness if the situation required it.”

Crossers is a powerful novel. If you have any interest in the reality of life on our southern border, read it. Whatever your perspective on the solution for that problem, Crossers will give you something to think about.

What would it be like to have the best tour guide in Rome give you a guided tour through the city, giving you the history of every building, the cultural context, the events and emotions that transpired there? That’s what Empire (and its predecessor Rome) is like. Saylor has lived his entire professional life in ancient Rome and knows it like the back of his hand. Rome & Empire are very different in format to his Roma Sub Rosa detective series; they are much more episodic “food tastings” from different periods. The history and context are wonderful. But they’re not always a fictional “meal”. Characters do not live for the entire novel, but come and go as the tapestry is woven. Almost all the characters die offstage, and so the novel rarely strikes deep emotionally. But it’s wonderfully informative.

Covering the period from AD 14 to 141, Empire shows us the madness of Caligula and the architectural passion of Hadrian. The scenes with Caligula are salacious yet horrifying, and bring home the reality of an infamous period of history. Many familiar characters and stories make their appearance (Nero “fiddling” while Rome burns, the stammering Claudius first popularized by Robert Graves). The early rise of Christianity is present as well. There is an ironic and amusing nod to our current military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Apparently Emperor Trajan had an “Ask not, Tell not” policy towards Christians, who were viewed with suspicion by Roman society.

Empire is half fiction and half history lesson. As a history lesson, it goes down easily and is far more consumable, if less serious than, say, The Fall of the Roman Empire. As fiction, it’s enjoyable, but doesn’t truly strike deeply. And it is a tome – weighing in at 600+ pages. I think the novel could profitably have been edited down. Still, it’s enjoyable, engaging history; but to my tastes not nearly as enjoyable as the Gordianus novels.

(Reviewed for the Early Reviewers Program)

Kem Nunn is a genre unto himself. Starting with Tapping the Source and leading up to “The Dogs of Winter”, perhaps his best work, Nunn has blazed a trail with “surfer noir” – down on their luck old surfers, looking for that one last wave to bring them to redemption. Tijuana Straights is his most recent novel. Fahey is the aging surfer, living in Tijuana River Valley near the Mexican border, remembering the time he rode the Mystic Peak wave before he went wrong. Nunn rages about the destruction (environmental and psychological) wrought by the factories constructed along the border on the mexican side, and their impact on Mexicans and Americans alike. Magdalena is the woman who is trying to make a difference. She and Fahey are thrown together and….

Nunn is strong prose stylist, melding biblical cadence with modern sensibilities. Consider this Faulkner-esque masterpiece:

And just for that instant, sea water seeping into his socks, gun held loosely in the crook of an arm, was thoroughly transported…and beheld the boy, not yet sixteen, hunkered at the foot of these selfsame dunes, and the old Dakota Badlander right there beside him, surfboards like graven images of wood and fiberglass set before them, tail blocks sunk into the very sand upon which Fahey now stood, and the boy watching, as the old man waves toward the sea with a stick held at the end of one long arm corded with muscle, burnt by the sun, then uses the stick to trace in the sand the route they will follow and the lineups they will use to find their way among the shifting peaks that stretch into the ocean for as far as the eye can see, wave crests capped by tongues of flame as the mist of feathering lips flies before the light of an approaching sunrise…and this when the light was still pure, before the smog, before the fence at the heart of the valley, before the shit had hit the fan.

Magdalena and Fahey adventure together, and (trust me this is not a spoiler), have what passes for happy endings in Nunn novels. Tijuana Straights has many similarities to The Dogs of Winter – I found the Dogs of Winter to be slightly stronger – but Tijuana Straights is well worth the “2 in the morning” finish it will undoubtedly provoke.

[Update: This post was begging for a soundtrack. Here it is. The Aqua Velvets, Calexico, Chris Whitley, Joe Strummer - these guys were made for Kem Nunn.]

Surf Noir Kings Ride Again – The Aqua Velvets
Crooked Road and The Briar – Calexico
Quattro (World Drifts In) – Calexico
They Drive By Night – The Aqua Velvets
The Ride (Part II) – Calexico
Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
Black Heart – Calexico
Ball Peen Hammer – Chris Whitley
Living With the Law – Chris Whitley
Crystal Frontier – Calexico
Dirt Floor – Calexico

I received a copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s “The Angel’s Game” via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and while I have received many outstanding books through the program, it’s been some time since I was so excited to be chosen. Zafon’s “Shadow of the Wind” was embraced by book-lovers because of the centrality of books to the narrative, and was a highly regarded worldwide bestseller in 2001.

David Martin is an aspiring young writer, laboring under a newspaper editor who

subscribes to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.

Most of the characters in “The Angel’s Game”, small and large, are drawn with similar uniqueness. Like many young artists in novels, David has a rich patron, Pedro Vidal. Vidal gets David fired from his newspaper job in order to push him into a writing career, helps him get a writing contract, and with the proceeds David acquires a gothic nightmare of a house, that’s been unoccupied for 20 years after some kind of terrible event took place.

The study was at the top of a tall tower, a peculiar structure at the heart of which was a spiral staircase that led off the main corridor, while its outside walls bore the traces of as many generations as the city could remember. There it stood, like a watchtower suspended over the roof of the Ribera quarter, crowned by a narrow dome of metal and tinted glass that served as a lantern, and topped by a weather vane in the shape of a dragon.

Writing under a pen name, David produces “City of the Damned”, a fantastical, gothic tale told in serial installments. At the same time, again anonymously, he works with Christina Sangier to ghostwrite (without Vidal’s knowledge) the novel Vidal is drunkenly dictating to Christina. David is smitten with Christina but she rebuffs him. “City of the Damned” draws the attention of the mysterious French publisher Corelli, who has more than a whiff of the supernatural to him. Corelli enlists David to produce yet a third book, one that will help Corelli create a religion, no less. Working with his newly acquired teenage assistant Isabella, David begins to produce the novel Corelli has paid him an extravagant amount to produce. A series of events shatters David’s life, and at the same time makes him more and more apprehensive about Corelli and the uses to which his book will be put.

Spanish gothic in tone and labyrinthine in plot, “The Angel’s Game” is a compelling read. The characters are all wonderfully quirky or mysterious or both. Occasionally the book’s tone or events veer into the territory of the romance novel, but these moments of lightness or predictability are quickly eradicated by darker forces or events. “The Angel’s Game” is no sequel to “The Shadow of the Wind” – this is a much darker, pessimistic work. The wonderful Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which was first introduced in “Shadow of the Wind”, does make an appearance or two in “The Angel’s Game”, but that role is not central.

Apart from the fantastical elements of the book, The Angel’s Game sometimes evokes the often courtly tone and style of one of Spain’s other great novelists, Arturo Perez-Reverte, and compares favorably with his work. Readers who enjoy Perez-Reverte should enjoy “The Angel’s Game”. While I can’t comment on the fidelity of the translation from the original Spanish, the prose of “The Angel’s Game” is of very high quality and one has no sense whatsoever of reading a translation. Interestingly, the translator of “The Angel’s Game”, as well as “Shadow of the Wind”, is Lucia Graves, the daughter of Robert Graves, the famous poet and author.

The Angel’s Game is a strong novel and stands quite well alone from “Shadow of the Wind”, yet those who loved Shadow of the Wind will enjoy The Angel’s Game. It’s darker in tone, and flags just a bit towards the end, but is well worth the read.

Was lucky enough to win an Early Reviewers copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s new novel, The Angel’s Game. Zafon is the author of the widely admired novel, The Shadow of the Wind, in which a young boy acquires a book from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and has the rest of his life shaped by that event. I just received the Angel’s Game and consumed the first 100 pages last night. Very promising start….

I received a complementary copy of Gladiatrix, by Russell Whitfield, through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program (and a wonderful program it is!). Being a huge fan of Mary Renault, Steven Pressfield (ok he mostly does Greece), Wallace Breem, and of course, the movie Gladiator, I was eagerly anticipating this book. Gladiatrix is the story of Lysandra, the female gladiator. Not a lot of mystery about what this book is going to be about!

First off, let’s get it out of the way: the title. Gladiatrix. With a name like that, you expect some titillation, and some lesbianism – if that’s what you’re looking for, you will not be disappointed. Gladiatrices regularly seem to fight in the nude, and the sex scenes are pretty graphic. The subject matter seems to inspire lurid treatment – for example, witness Roger Corman’s Gladiatrix movie with Pam Grier, or the Discovery Channel Documentary on the Gladiatrix finds in London (less salacious). Between the title, the premise, and the cover art, I think the book will sell heavily, and although there have been other gladiatrix movies, I’d expect another one. But I digress.

The early stages of the book heavily echo the themes of the movie Gladiator – someone from the upper echelons of society, driven by circumstance into the arena – personal misfortune, gladiator school, rising through the ranks because of innate quality. It is heavily derivative from Gladiator, and in the early going I found myself annoyed that it felt so clearly imitative. I got over it before too long – at some level, it is truth in advertising: this book is Gladiator with a female protagonist. I was disappointed early on that some scenes didn’t happen “on camera”: Lysandra is enslaved through a shipwreck and ensuing events – yet the shipwreck and those events are not really rendered – they would have made nice scenes, and a good counterpoint to the constant martial circumstances that follow. I periodically wondered how historically accurate the book was (of course, there were female gladiatrices) – the references to other historical personages seem accurate insofar as I can tell (but I’m no expert here). I don’t know whether Spartan princesses existed, or whether they received battle training, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief on that point. But the historical side of things doesn’t get much play – this isn’t historical fiction ala Saylor or Pressfield. The book at times feels more like a romance novel, oddly enough – due to the interpersonal issues and personal conflicts that drive the novel forward. The dialog is at times stilted, sometimes the prose feels awkward. I believe it’s a first novel and it periodically feels like one. Lysandra comes off as an insufferable teenager (which in fact she is). But after a few hundred pages, I wanted to say to the author, “OK, I get it – she’s arrogant – you don’t have to beat me over the head with it”. I wanted to see more personal development out Lysandra, but perhaps that is to wait for another installment. The book is not explicitly part of a series, but the deus ex machina ending leads me to conclude more is forthcoming.

In the end, I enjoyed the book, and finished it quickly, but I am left wondering who the intended audience is. This is no Renault or Pressfield novel, peering deep into the human condition to find the things that ennoble us. And I don’t believe it’s a juvenile book – the tone feels wrong and the sex is a bit graphic for that. The fights are good and the swordplay frequent. Perhaps it’s just good old fashioned entertainment – just like the Arena was, thousands of years ago.

I recently received an advanced reader’s copy of The White Mary by Kira Salak to review from the publisher, Henry Holt. I was excited to learn of the novel, as I was an avid fan of Salak’s wonderful non-fictional narrative of her kayaking tour to Timbuktu, “The Cruelest Journey”.

Salak is a unique phenomenon and a wild spirit – traveling alone as a woman to places most men would be afraid to go in a group. Her non-fiction travel works capture the fear, wonder, and strangeness of traveling alone, a sort of female incarnation of Paul Theroux. I was looking forward to her first fictional work (although one wonders just how fictional it is, exactly). I was not disappointed.

The White Mary tells the tale of Marika Vecera, a journalist/war correspondent. The early parts of novel intertwine her experiences in Zaire reporting on genocide with a somewhat mysterious journey through the jungles of Papua New Guinea. We eventually learn that Marika is chasing the ghost of Robert Lewis, a journalist she worships and who inspired her career. She’s also chasing some ghosts of her own; her time in Zaire has scarred her deeply. The White Mary is in fact an extraordinarily powerful portrait of a person who has “seen too much”. Marika’s near-death experience in the Congo has left her emotionally numb, and walled off from the care of those closest to her. Salak’s rendering of Marika’s psychological problems is done in pitch-perfect detail. The novel is sometimes adult, brutal and violent, and not for early teens or the faint of heart.

Just as folk musicians perform songs in pairs, it’s sometimes interesting to read & review books in pairs. At the same time as I was reading The White Mary, I was also consuming “The Painter of Battles” by the renowned author Arturo Perez-Reverte (one of my favorite authors). The Painter of Battles covers very similar territory in some respects –
the protagonist there has “seen too much” as a war photographer and has given way to despair, retiring to paint a battle that spans all historical battles, and to avoid all human interaction (interestingly one of the key characters in The White Mary is a war photographer). Where the Painter of Battles is deeply philosophical and contemplative, the White Mary is visceral; the Painter of Battles is carefully drawn, exquisitely written and intriguing to read. And yet, three weeks later, the Painter of Battles is not finished, and The White Mary yielded in two sittings. It’s that compelling; I had to finish it. Perez-Reverte’s prose is smoother and more ornate, even in translation (or perhaps because of it), whereas Salak’s prose is more muscular and direct. The writing in The White Mary is occasionally awkward but still compares favorably with that of such a distinguished author as Perez-Reverte.

Salak’s Marika is an extraordinarily well-drawn character; I never doubted her reality for a moment. And Salak regularly captures one of the key aspects of travel – the shock of experiencing fundamentally different cultural assumptions. Marika for example, is sent to the “women’s hut” when she is menstruating, where she rages at the artificial and (to her, of course) ludicrous belief system that requires it. Marika’s progress through something like post-traumatic stress disorder is carefully and believably painted, and you root for her to come back even as she spirals downward in self-destructive behavior.

In short, the White Mary is a powerful and gripping first novel, a cautionary tale full of danger, travel, and adventure, and at the same time gives deep insight into the human condition.

(If you’d like to explore the geography of The White Mary, I’ve plotted many of the locations mentioned in my Books/Google Maps mashup, CodexMap.

The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson, created a minor sensation in the literary world when it went out for bid in 2007. Reportedly, early bids of $1 million were declined. Doubleday eventually came out the winner. Responding to a banner ad from Publisher’s Lunch, I was fortunate enough to receive an Advance Readers Copy, prior to the book’s August 5, 2008 release.

The narrator of The Gargoyle (it seems that he’s consciously never named by the author) had a troubled childhood, and has grown into full-bore bad guy: Pornographer, Drug Addict, and, as the story opens, a Very Impaired Driver on a mountain road. Mysteriously, a volley of burning arrows flies across the road and in front of the car (are they real? hallucinated? Flying through a warp in the space-time continuum?). One too many over-reactions on the Narrator’s part, and he and his car are plunging down the mountainside, toward a crash and an inferno.

By the top of page 3, the narrator is on fire.

The opening of the Gargoyle is like a stiff Scotch, accidentally swallowed down the wrong pipe. It burns going down (you’ll pardon the metaphor), with fumes all up your nose, and you’ll want to take a deep breath. And like a great scotch, once the first drink settles, you’ll want more:

I imagine, dear reader, that you’ve had some experience with heat. Perhaps you’ve tipped a boiling kettle at the wrong angle and the steam crept up your sleeve….I want you to imagine something new…Imagine turning on one of the elements of your stove – let’s say it’s the electric kind with the black coils on top. Don’t put a pot of water on the element because the water only absorbs the heat….a slight violet tinge will appear, nestled there in the black rings, and then the element assumes some reddish-purple tones, like unripe blackberries. It moves towards orange, and finally – finally! – an intense glowing red. Kind of beautiful, isn’t it? Now lower your head so that your eyes are even with the top of the old stove and you can peer through the shimmering waves rising up…..I want you to trace the fingertips of your left hand gently across your right palm, noting the way your skin registers even the lightest touch. If some else were doing it, you might even be turned on. Now, slam that sensitive, responsive hand directly onto the glowing element.

And hold it there. Hold it there as the element scorches Dante’s nine rings right into your palm, allowing you to grasp Hell in your hand forever. Let the heat engrave the skin, the muscles, the tendons; let it smolder down to the bone. Wait for the burn to embed itself so far into you that you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to let go of that coil. It won’t be long until the stench of your own burning flesh wafts up, grabbing your nose hairs and refusing to let go, and you smell your body burn….I want you to do one more thing….lean down, turn your head to one side, and slap your check against that same element. I’ll let you choose which side of your face…Now you might have some idea of what it was like for me to be pinned inside that car…

Clearly Davidson has made a deep study of burns and their treatment. On occasion his hypnotic renderings of fire make you wonder if he played with matches too much as a child. Davidson gives all the gory details (literally) of burn treatment, the methods, rationales, and dangers. We follow the Narrator into the hospital and follow his recovery, where he is eventually discovered by Marianne Engle, who appears to be a somewhat deranged artist that likes to sculpt in the nude. Marianne apparently knows our Narrator from the Middle Ages (she apparently has a very long lifespan which our Narrator does not). Marianne attends to our Narrator during his recovery, and begins a Scheherazade-like series of tales involving….well, you’ll need to read the book for those. Along the way, the Narrator also acquires a metaphorical (or is it?) Snake: a voice of self doubt and the personification of Morphine addiction.

The series of tales start in the Middle Ages in Germany, and wend their way into other times and locations, including the aforementioned Hell of Dante. The two-track structure of the novel, alternating between modern times and the Middle Ages, is often reminiscent of Crichton’s Timeline. Yet Crichton’s time-travel has a meticulous and well-articulated (if speculative) mechanism for this time duality. I never felt a clear grasp of the intended mechanism in the Gargoyle, and as a result had some trouble achieving Coleridge’s state of “willing suspension of disbelief” required for fantasy to really work to the fullest extent.

The “Tales of a Thousand and One Nights” structure generally works well and is quite entertaining. This is a first novel, and a fine one – but in places the book feels forced, and I found some of the transitions from one tale to the next to be artificial and abrupt. And some of the stories seem a bit unmotivated and arbitrary. In particular, the Viking interlude featuring Sigurðr, while thoroughly enjoyable, in the end doesn’t seem to really take the book anywhere. Nonetheless the prose is crisp throughout – the occasional awkwardness comes more from the structure of the story than from the language, which is often quite powerful. As the stories progress, I often found myself trying to figure out who was re-incarnated, and who was not? But perhaps that is part of the experience….

The primary criticism of the novel that I have is that the transformation of the Narrator from Bad Guy into what he becomes seems to happen off-camera, as it were – I did not feel as though I was really participating in the internal dialog, the wrenching psychological changes that occur to the Narrator, until near the end of the book.

Those criticisms aside, the book was wonderful fun. Marianne is rendered larger than life – wild hair, flashing green eyes, carving grotesques and sleeping on them in the nude. The Snake is an ever-present voice, whispering poison into the Narrator’s ear (or mind) – a wonderful manifestation of the self doubt we all feel at times. The novel is sprinkled throughout with wonderful historical asides and filled with arcane Medieval history – the history of German translations of Dante, the parallels between Dante’s cosmography and the views and trials of Galileo, and the fundamental strangeness of Medieval German Christian Mysticism via the mortifications of the flesh and self-flagellation. And of course, Gargoyles, and how they are different from Grotesques (you probably have them mixed up, you know – if it doesn’t channel water, it’s not a Gargoyle, it’s a Grotesque). It’s an entertaining read. It has a few rough edges, but read it – I don’t think you’ll regret it.