Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, I finished this book. The Bolan Number for this book is only two (Black Hand and War Hammer, although I did start a Larry Dablemont book as well, so maybe the Bolan Number should have a decimal–albeit, it would be a low decimal, like maybe .05). Perhaps there should be a Bolan Quotient, which would be the number of other books I read divided by the total number of pages in the piece of classic fiction during which I read other books. I mean, I read two plus books in Wuthering Heights, and it’s 326 pages plus an introduction (which I read last, of course). I have since started Dickens’ Davif Copperfield, and it’s twice the length. It hardly seems fair to compare Bolan Number to Bolan Number between these books since one is twice the length of the other.

At any rate, if you have not read the book–and, c’mon, man, this is the 21st century, you haven’t–the main story is, well, it’s too complicated, let me sum up: A landowner brings in a foundling orphan to his house; the orphan and the daughter become close; when the father dies, the older brother inherits and treats the orphan badly; when they’re out together, the orphan and the daughter spy on neighbors, and when the dog bites the daughter, the neighbors take her in but drive off the orphan; the daughter and her new friends, the neighbors, laugh at the orphan once; the orphan runs off, only to return years later, when he’s wealthy, and finds the daughter married to the neighbor; the orphan encourages the affections of the neighbor daughter (younger), marries her, and then abandons her; when she begets his son and dies, the orphan brings the sickly son back home to win the affection of the original daughter’s daughter (believe me, two daughters in the paragraph here is less confusing than all the characters who shared names in the book); they wed, the sickly son of the orphan and the daughter’s daughter, and when the older neighbor who married the daughter dies, the orphan becomes owner of both properties as his son dies, leaving him in control. Well, that’s the first eighty percent of the novel. Maybe ninety.

Although the professor of The English Novel (Timothy Spurgin, if you’re keeping track) ascribes the birth of the frame story and the unreliablish narrator (why is the narrator telling the story?) to Joseph Conrad, this book has the same thing going on. A servant relates most of the story to a tenant who rents the neighbor house from the orphan after he has become master when said tenant meets the residents of Wuthering Heights in real time and then falls ill and asks her about them. So…. Who is Mrs. Dean, and why does she tell this story to a stranger? I mean, throughout even her story, she seems a bit conniving, gossipy, and although powerless to alter the precedings (as she tells it), she still keeps a job (among the other servants who do not). And after the ill tenant recovers and leaves with eight months on his lease, he returns on a lark to find the orphan has died, the daughter’s daughter has fallen for the rustic cousin–the son of the older brother who treated the orphan badly–whom she treated cruelly her part of the first ninety percent of the book, and there might be a happy ending after all!

Yeah, right.

I spent most of this book wanting to beat all of the characters with a stick. Only the original papa that brought in the orphan child eluded my predisposal to violence, but I thought maybe the big reveal would be that it was his own illegitimate son (I see from the Wikipedia entry that some critics have speculated this was the intent). But, no. All a bunch of vapid, cruel, mean, and evil characters; even the nice-seeming ones end up cruel and mean until the end is tacked on.

I read the introduction last, as is my wont, and I discovered just how awesome this book really is. It’s a dream-like musing on brutality of the moors or something. Also, I learned many salacious details of Emily Brontë’s life, like she was a closeted lesbian and/or had an incestous relationship with her brother. Or that Charlotte wrote this book–it appeared after Jane Eyre (which I read in 2019 and prefer). She, Charlotte, did edit a revised edition of the book in 1850 after her sister’s death, but she really insists her sister wrote it. I am not so into textual analysis and literary forensics to dispute it.

I do wonder if the Brontës punched above their weight in the canon, though, as Jane Eyre was okay, but this book was not very good, and you don’t really hear about the other novels except maybe Anne’s Agnes Grey and only then when reading about the sisters. Their books were originally published under pseudonyms, which gave them an air of mystery and allowed for speculation, and Charlotte was very active in curating and correcting their works for posterity. Also, they were women writing in a male dominated world, so they stand out for study for that. They also all died young–Charlotte lived the longest, to age 39. If not for all these factors, would only English professors think of them in the 21st century? Just kidding. This is the 21st century, you know–I am not even sure if English professors think of them these days.

At any rate, it does give me reason to run this again, which I first ran in January, 2017, before I re-read Jane Eyre:

I am pretty good on being able to name all three, and I shall probably be able to remember the name of the brother (Branwell) as well. Which will definitely help me in trivia nights if such things ever come to pass. As might knowing that "Wuthering Heights" was Kate Bush’s biggest single, which I just learned in researching this book report. So this book proved educational in 20th century trivia, too.

This book, read a couple days after Black Hand, brings Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number up to 2 the easy way.

This book is a better entry in the series–better than Black Hand anyway. In it, Bolan is on the trail of stolen nuclear triggers that are on their way from California to Iraq (which has just restarted its nuclear program after the first Gulf War). So set pieces include a couple shootouts in California, the Irish coast, and Iraq after getting smuggled in via Turkey.

At any rate, the author clearly has read some of the other Executioner novels at least–he blends some Bolan philosophizing sections into the story and uses similar phrases like “numbers running down” that undoubtedly are mentioned in the outlines of the books given to the house authors but some handle them more deftly than others. The tactics and firing Uzis from the hip to great effect are more informed by watching movies than, I don’t know, serving in the military or firing an actual gun–much less playing realistic military games from the 21st century. As I’ve not done two of those three, I am an armchair novel writer when I criticise that, I know, but still.

A quick read, and then back to the moors of Scotland briefly.

Strangely enough, I started this book before I read Boxer’s Start-Up (which means this does not count against Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number either). However, I put it down and on my chairside table to read towards the end and quite forgot about it for a bit. Enough to push it from the 2020 reading list to the 2021 reading list, which, combined with starting the Reading Year in the last week of the preceding year, explains how I have read four books already in 2021. Through government and corporate accounting rules.

At any rate, this book, as it indicates, includes a number of techniques and drills, kata even, for practicing sparring. It focuses a lot on tae kwon do style kicks, which means really pretty big kicks to the head or higher; my school teaches them, but the crescent kick is a sweeping front side kick where your leg comes up sideways and strikes with the instep, and although it’s a nice distraction–I use it to hide a second strike following it–it plays a large role in a lot of the drills and kata here.

As I have mentioned, these books are best for people who study the arts and want something to review when not in class. This book formerly belonged to a student at a martial arts school–he has written notes beside different techniques along when he should be proficient at them and minor variations (knife hand instead of a punch, for example).

So I didn’t get a lot out of it myself; I am familiar with many of the strikes, and as far as the sparring drills go, I’d have to have a partner to put them into effect–and my school has its own drills, so when I’m partnered up, I’m doing things my kyoshi has selected. I got bogged down in the last bit of it. The last section–60 of the books 140 pages, not quite half, is some thirty different kata that are attack/counterattack drills this are between six and ten sentences and six and nine photos of the two-person kata. So I set it down and might have forgotten about it except I finished an Executioner novel and did not want to pick up Wuthering Heights again right before bed–and I rediscovered this book instead.

So it was probably more worthwhile for the preceding owner. Who might well have been studying martial arts even before The Karate Kid, if you can imagine such a thing.

Technically, this book does not count against Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number as I started reading this book before Wuthering Heights. Also, it’s not a cheap paperback the likes of which will fill my time between chapters of Wuthering Heights. Which, I assure you, I am actually reading.

At any rate, I picked this book up in December at ABC Books. As you know, I work my way counter-clockwise through my two aisles, the first of which is the martial arts/football/artist monograph aisle (with the local authors at the front of the store at the end of the aisle). This book was in the Boxing section which is mostly biographies and auto-biographies of boxers. So I don’t tend to look too closely in it, but by this time I have basically bought all the martial art books that are not about Tai Chi Walking, whatever that is. Come to think of it, somebody else is buying martial arts books up there–some of the ones I have seen in the past but have not bought aren’t there any more, either–which means nobody likes the Tai Chi Walking books, I guess. Me or this other guy. Come on, we know it’s a guy.

I digress. As I mentioned I looked over the boxing section and picked this up because it’s a how-to book about boxing. #9 in a series, presumably about taking up a sport you’ve never done before. The author here talks about his experience fencing, so I presume that he has also done the article about fencing in the book.

As I might have mentioned (or mention all the time), my martial arts school emphasizes boxing over tae kwon do hand techniques, so I am a bit familiar with the strikes in the book–the jab, the cross, the hook, and the upper-cut. Boxing, apparently, does not emphasize as much hip rotation as our school does.

Of course, I’m all about the comparisons to the martial arts as I’ve been trained. The biggest difference is the fighting stance–this book emphasizes a more fencing-style stance, which presents more of your side to the opponent. It closes off target areas on your own body, but it also puts one side of your body out-of-range for attacks–which might be a bigger deal in martial arts, where feet are employed and where you’re supposed to be ambidextrous, being able to attack with the same combinations (but reversed) if you present your other side.

So the book was a bit of review for me in spots, but it did give me some ideas for drills, such as a head movement drill–I am not so good at head movement (and given how sparsely I’ve attended class the last year and a half, I am probably not so good at sparring at all), so I have started doing some of the rythmic movement that I read about in the book. I watched some boxing a while back, and those guys slip punches very fast indeed.

One definite improvement in this book versus other martial arts books I’ve read is instead of a pair of photos showing before and after the strike, the book includes at least three, with one in process, and the images often have callouts and lines to indicate focus or planes:

That is very helpful, indeed.

The book runs 150 pages plus a glossary; only about two-thirds of it is technique and whatnot. The last third are a history of boxing up until the turn of the century and a journal of the author’s individual lessons with a boxing coach. Interesting, I suppose, but not what I am looking for. Although also interesting is that the book has an AOL email address for the amateur boxing group and a fax number to contact them. Wow, twenty years, huh? I cannot imagine that I would have picked up a book like this for practical information twenty years ago. To research for a novel, perhaps, but to hone my technique? Who knows what the next 20 will bring? Sorry, that’s a little extra reflection you get in a book report around the turn of the year and the turn of a duodecade.

Well, gentle reader, I now have a new metric for Classical literature. Out: The Anna Karenina moment where I’m reading a long piece of literature and determine I could have read a whole other book by that point. The new metric is the Bolan number: The number of Mack Bolan or other paperbacks that I read while reading another piece of literature. This is the first Bolan book that I’ve read while going through Wuthering Heights, and Wuthering Heights will have a Bolan Number greater than 1.

But we’re not here to talk about Wuthering Heights; we’re here to talk about Black Hand, a novel that finds Bolan in Turkey after an attack on the American embassy that is laughably underguarded ten years after Beirut. He teams with a director of counter-terrorism and then an attractive sub-director of terrorism to free some hostages and smash the terrorist group, which is five people. Well, clearly, a diminishing number of people once Bolan gets involved, but they certainly seem to punch above their weight.

So it’s not one of the better entries in the series. One incident in the book that I read out loud to my poor long-suffering but beautiful wife was when a terrorist invaded a hospital to kill the anti-terrorism director. He bypasses a supply closet, shoots a surgeon in the head while the surgeon is in a break room, hides the body, and puts on the surgeon’s white coat as a disguise. Except why hide the body after making a mess in the break room? And just how white is the lab coat going to be after that gunshot luridly removes the surgeon’s head?

Yeah, not one of the best entries in the series, but it helped get me through another couple chapters of Wuthering Heights.