CSFF Blog Tour: The Bone House Day Three

So what does it all mean? That can be a thorny question for any literary work, but for Stephen Lawhead's Bright Empires Series, I think that question is only going to get thornier.

First, there is the question of truth and religion. Lawhead presents several religious traditions in this series. We encounter learned priests from the Christian, Egyptian, Etruscan, and stone age shaman traditions. All are presented with respect and the suggestion that they all have some truth to offer. I suspect Lawhead agrees with the Inklings' notion that pagan religions possess an incomplete version of religious truth that Christ presents in its complete form. I believe you can arrange the various priests/religions along a continuum. The stone age shaman that Kit encounters constructs his bone house in which he will presumably receive religious visions during his dreams on a ley line. The shaman is tightly connected to a particular piece of land. The priests become increasingly abstract in their thinking until we reach Roger Bacon at the other end of the continuum. That religion has tended to move from worship tied to particular places to worship of an omnipresent and omnipotent god is not news, but Lawhead adds a twist as the discovery of the power of the ley lines brings us full circle back to the stone age, a trip that Kit makes literally.

During a conversation between Arthur Flinders-Petrie and his son Benedict as they prepare to make a ley jump, Benedict asks if they will see Jesus where they are going. Arthur answers that Jesus lived in a different time and place, but then muses:

It had long been an ambition to find the line of force that might lead to the Holy Land in the time of Christ. He had yet to find it, but knew it was out there somewhere. The search went on, and Arthur contented himself with the thought that his relentless mapping of the cosmos would eventually yield the location (p. 160).

What would it mean to meet Christ in another place in the multiverse? Is each world fallen and in need of Christ's sacrifice? If there is only one Christ, does he go through the birth and crucifixion cycle in each world? This reminds me of issues raised in C. S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy in which Mars is not fallen, Earth is occupied by the forces of evil, and Venus is on the cusp of falling to Satan's temptations. If intelligent life exists on other planets, are those beings also in need of redemption?

And last but not least, what are we to make of the final scene in chapter 35? Kit, having stumbled out of the stone age (watch your step around ley lines), finds himself on a tropical beach. He journeys inland and comes to a pool of something like water. As usual, Lawhead gives a beautifully detailed and evocative description.

No, not glass--but not water either. Intrigued, Kit stepped closer and knelt down to examine it more closely. Translucent, glimmering, fluid, yet giving off a faint milky glow: a pool of liquid light. As impossible as that might have been anywhere else, here, in this place, it felt natural and right (p. 373).

As he reaches forward to touch the surface, a man carrying a dead woman arrives. The reader knows this to be Arthur Flinders-Petrie and Xian-Li. Arthur steps into the pool and the pair descend beneath the surface. Rings of luminescence spread from the point at which they descended "until the entire pond was the colour of heated bronze glowing fresh from the crucible" (p. 374). When the pair emerge from the pool, Xian-Li has been restored to life. Kit has arrived at the Well of Souls, the prize Flinders-Petrie sought to keep secret. But how does this work? Is this pool like a fountain of immortality, reminiscent of the fabled fountain of youth? Will Kit bring Sir Henry and Cosimo there? What are the theological implications? We will have to wait for The Spirit Well.

In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of The Bone House from the publisher.

Stephen R. Lawhead's website: http://www.stephenlawhead.com/.

To read what other CSFF bloggers are saying, follow the links below.

Noah Arsenault Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse CSFF Blog Tour Carol Bruce Collett Karri Compton D. G. D. Davidson Theresa Dunlap April Erwin Victor Gentile Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Janeen Ippolito Becca Johnson

Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Marzabeth Katie McCurdy Shannon McDermott Rebecca LuElla Miller Joan Nienhuis Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Donna Swanson Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Rachel Wyant

CSFF Blog Tour: The Bone House Day Two

The protagonists of The Bone House interact with several historical personages on their ley travels and I suspect an English Egyptologist served as the inspiration for at least one of the protagonists.

Thomas Young (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) figures in the narratives of Kit and Wilhelmina and I'm hoping he will be back in The Spirit Well. An English polymath, Young made contributions to physics, physiology, and Egyptology, particularly deciphering hieroglyphics. Lawhead provides a biographical sketch of Young in the essay that concludes The Bone House. Wilhelmina describes Young as "the last man on earth to know everything" (p. 43).

Dr. Thomas Young by

Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Wilhelmina and Kit bring Young, at least the one living in a particular multiverse, into the circle of ley-knowledgeable people. Young at first thinks Wilhelmina insane but the force of her arguments and personality win him over and he agrees to a test. As a scientist, he demands some physical proof of Wilhelmina's claims. The proof turns out to be several items from the future that Kit presents to Young who is on an archeological dig in Egypt. Young's worldview is thoroughly shaken, but he soon recovers and makes forays into the philosophical ramifications of ley travel during a conversation with Kit. Young will serve as a great mouthpiece for voicing some of the themes behind Lawhead's multiverse world which is why I hope he returns in the next volume. Later, Kit guides Young to the discovery of the tomb of Anen, an Egyptian priest from the 18th dynasty who had known Arthur Flinders-Petrie. Young finds a treasure of artifacts in the undisturbed tomb and Kit finds a piece of the skin map. At one point during their conversations, Young tells Kit that his aim is “To unravel the mystery of tombs” (p. 179). We learn later that at least some of the skin map pieces have been hidden in various tombs which adds another level of meaning to Young's statements.

*Statue of Roger Bacon in the

Oxford University Museum of

Natural History.

The next historical figure to make an appearance is Roger Bacon, an English philosopher and Franciscan whom some consider an early champion of the scientific method. Bacon lived from circa 1214 to 1294. Known as Doctor Mirabilis, which means "wonderful teacher," he studied at Oxford and later taught there as well as lecturing at the University of Paris. In his writings, Bacon comments on mathematics, optics, alchemy, astronomy, and astrology. He called for reforms in theology, arguing that the Bible should be placed at the center of study and that scholars should thoroughly understand the languages of their source materials. Posing as a visiting scholar/monk from Ireland, Douglas Flinders-Petrie meets with Bacon in medieval Oxford to acquire his assistance in deciphering the symbols in the skin map.

Turms the Immortal plays a role in Arthur Flinders-Petrie's narrative. Many years previous, when Turms was a young prince, Arthur had been his student. Now the priest-king of the Etruscans, Turms receives omens, foretells the future, and passes judgements for his people. Arthur brings the pregnant Xian-Li to Turms to learn if the child she carries is still alive. Following a divination ceremony, Turms announces to the couple that the child is not only alive but will enjoy a long life. Unlike Thomas Young and Roger Bacon, Turms is not a real person but a deity from Etruscan mythology. Like the Greek god Hermes, Turms is a messenger between the gods and humans as well as the god of trade. The deity's role as a messenger seems appropriate to Turms the Immortal's role as a soothsayer.

Many critics make a career of speculating about and tracking down a writer's sources. While researching Turms, I came across a novel by Mika Waltari, a Finnish writer of historical novels, titled The Etruscan (1956). The story traces the amazing life of Lars Turms the immortal in ancient Greece and Rome. I haven't read Waltari's novel so I can't speculate on the connection between Waltari's Turms and Lawhead's Turms, but the coincidence is intriguing.

Flinders Petrie, in Jerusalem (1930's).

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was an English archeologist and Egyptologist who pioneered systematic methods and artifact preservation. Early in his career he surveyed various Roman and stone-age sites in England then traveled to Egypt to apply the same methods to the ancient Egyptian monuments. During his long career, Flinders Petrie performed excavations in Egypt and Palestine. He discovered the first mention of Israel in an Egyptian source and trained a generation of archeologists, including Howard Carter. Did the archeologist Flinders Petrie serve as an inspiration for Lawhead's Arthur Flinders-Petrie? Both are explorers, pioneers in new methods, and both have an affinity for Egypt.

Photo Credits:
*Photograph of Roger Bacon's statue taken by Michael Reeve, 30 May 2004. This image is used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of The Bone House from the publisher.

Stephen R. Lawhead's website: http://www.stephenlawhead.com/.

To read what other CSFF bloggers are saying, follow the links below.

Noah Arsenault Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse CSFF Blog Tour Carol Bruce Collett Karri Compton D. G. D. Davidson Theresa Dunlap April Erwin Victor Gentile Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Janeen Ippolito Becca Johnson

Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Marzabeth Katie McCurdy Shannon McDermott Rebecca LuElla Miller Joan Nienhuis Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Donna Swanson Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Rachel Wyant

CSFF Blog Tour: The Bone House Day One

Stephen R. Lawhead's The Bone House is a strange book. It transports the reader to exotic locales in time and place: ancient and nineteenth-century Egypt, Etruscan Italy, medieval England, and somewhere in the stone age, just to name a few. And, Lawhead renders them all in beautiful detail. It poses questions about the philosophical implications of multiverses between which, in Lawhead's fiction, time flows at different rates. While all those attributes cast The Bone House in some very strange and wonderful shadows, they are not the principal reason for designating The Bone House a strange book. The Bone House is of a breed from which many readers cringe in terror. It's a middle book in a series. The action picks up where The Skin Map, the previous book in the series (see my reviews here, here, and here), left off and ends after an appropriate number of pages. New plot lines have been established and new characters introduced, but almost nothing has been resolved. It's the second ley in a series of jumps. The Bright Empires Series is much more a Lord of the Rings type experience than a Narnia experience. So is The Bone House worth reading? Most definitely, but you must read The Skin Map first and be prepared to feel annoyed when you finish the last pages and discover that The Spirit Well will not be available until September 2012.

The Bone House follows intersecting plots centered around six characters: Kit Livingstone, Wilhelmina Klug, Lady Haven Fayth, Arthur Flinders-Petrie, Douglas Flinders-Petrie, and Archelaeus Burleigh. As in the first novel, Arthur's skin map is the prize everyone is seeking as they jump from world to world, occasionally bumping into each other. For readers of The Skin Map, The Bone House answers a number of nagging questions. First, who is Archelaeus Burleigh and why is he such a scoundrel? The short answer is an unhappy childhood. Lawhead traces Burleigh's rise from a rejected bastard of Lord Ashmole to wily street urchin to personal secretary of Lord Gower to celebrated antiques dealer. Lawhead tells Burleigh's story dispassionately, leading one to feel some pity for the boy Burleigh, whose mother became an opium addict, and admire his determination and resourcefulness, but somewhere along the line, something goes wrong with Burleigh. He loses respect for his fellow human beings, who become little more than tools to achieve his ends. His interactions with various women suggest that Burleigh is incapable of love and intimacy.

At the end of The Skin Map, Wilhelmina appears out of nowhere to save Kit and Giles from certain death in an Egyptian tomb. So when did Wilhelmina go from coffee house owner to master ley leaper? A healthy portion of the chapters on Wilhelmina tell that story. Of all the characters, Wilhelmina most comes into her own in this book. She takes over from Cosimo and Sir Henry Fayth as the driving force in the search for the map. She devises the plans and organizes the participants. One comes to the conclusion that she was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. At one point she tells Kit that the first jump from London to Bohemia, which seemed a disaster at the time, is the best thing that ever happened to her. When she thinks about returning to London to wrap up her affairs, she admits that "[t]he plain truth was she missed nothing about London or her mundane, drudging life there" (p. 168).

Douglas Flinders-Petrie is Arthur's great-grandson and several chapters cover his trip to medieval England in his quest to unlock the secrets of the skin map. But wait, readers of The Skin Map say. Didn't Xian-Li, Arthur's wife, die from Nile Fever before the couple had any children? And who removed the skin map from Arthur's body and hid it all over the multiverse? I won't spoil it, but both questions are answered in The Bone House.

Kit continues to muddle through while always managing to land on his feet, to make the right choice at the end of a string of disastrous ones. Don't think, I found myself saying time and time again, just do exactly what Wilhelmina tells you. He's one of those characters you want to grab by the collar and shake some sense into them. For example, when he stumbles into the stone age, Kit tries to escape from a settlement of cavemen in the middle of the night, not considering what might be lurking in the wilderness after nightfall. A bear comes about as close as possible to eating him.

And finally, what of Lady Haven Fayth, who appeared to turn traitor at the conclusion of The Skin Map. Lawhead devotes several chapters to her story and attempts rouse some sympathy for her as we learn about her previous meetings with Burleigh and her life with Burleigh after escaping the tomb. She abandoned her friends when certain death seemed imminent, and in her view, she made an expedient decision, better to be alive and have a fighting chance than dead. How many of us would have done what she did? Lawhead suggests that Haven does not trust or like Burleigh and she does warn Kit and Giles when Burleigh enters the coffee house and hands Henry's journal over to Kit. However, Wilhelmina doesn't trust Haven, and I'm inclined to follow Wilhelmina's instincts.

In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of The Bone House from the publisher.

Stephen R. Lawhead's website: http://www.stephenlawhead.com/.

To read what other CSFF bloggers are saying, follow the links below.

Noah Arsenault Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse CSFF Blog Tour Carol Bruce Collett Karri Compton D. G. D. Davidson Theresa Dunlap April Erwin Victor Gentile Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Janeen Ippolito Becca Johnson

Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Marzabeth Katie McCurdy Shannon McDermott Rebecca LuElla Miller Joan Nienhuis Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Donna Swanson Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Rachel Wyant

Recent News and W1S1 Report

I received a note the other day that my story "Blood and Beauty" has been accepted for A.J. French's Satyrs Anthology from Wicked East Press. The anthology features stories about, that's right, satyrs, those half human, half goat beings from mythology. "Blood and Beauty" combines elements from "Beauty and the Beast" and classical mythology in a story about a failed love affair between a half satyr, half lion and a dryad.

I'm taking part in Write 1 Sub 1 this year, the monthly challenge. (There's a weekly challenge for the insane.) The idea is to write at least one story a month and submit one. I noticed when making the rounds of other W1S1 member blogs that many of them were posting progress reports. Seems like a reasonable thing to do, so here's my progress to date.

Month	Story	Word Count	Status
January	"A Mother's Gift"	2900	Published in Silver Blade Magazine
February	"Why the Squonk Weeps"	1300	Published in Digital Dragon Magazine
March	"Shafts to Hell"	1300	Published in How the West Was Wicked (Pill Hill Press)
April	"The Crooked House of Coins"	3700	Published in There Was a Crooked House (Pill Hill Press)
	"The Fletcher's Daughter"	1500	Published in Residential Aliens
May	"Tapestries of Betrayal"	4000	Published in Greek Myths Revisited (Wicked East Press)
June	"Blood and Beauty"	4800	Forthcoming in A.J. French's Satyrs Anthology (Wicked East Press)
July	"Wilson's Thicket"	4200	Forthcoming in Beneath the Pretty Lies (Wicked East Press)
August	"Sixpence and Rye, and a Snake in a Pie"	2400	Forthcoming in Father Grim's Storybook (Wicked East Press)
September	"A Creature of Words"	670	Submitted
October	"A Daughter for a Daughter"		In Progress
	"Under the Bridge"		In Progress

Nine stories accepted and 26,770 words completed. It's been a good year, and without the W1S1 deadlines, I don't think I would have written this many stories.

Story Out and Recent News

Hey, it's my 100th post. Yippee!! What better way to celebrate than to announce a publication, an acceptance, and a new book in a series I'm reading. Wait until you see my eleventy-first post. It will be one heck of a party, but I promise not to disappear. (Tolkien joke in case you're wondering.)

My story "The Fletcher's Daughter" is now available at Residential Aliens. This is a short piece, about 1500 words, and a fun variation on the Cinderella fairy tale.

I heard from the editor at Wicked East Press that my story "Sixpence and Rye and a Snake in a Pie" has been accepted for Father Grim's Storybook. The collection calls for stories based on nursery rhymes or fairy tales, but with a twist. My story is based on "Sing a Song of Sixpence," but as the title suggests, there's something other than blackbirds in the pie. The story roughly follows the nursery rhyme and incorporates some of the details into the narrative. It was fun to write.

Last year I reviewed Kersten Hamilton's Tyger Tyger and also interviewed her. The novel is steeped in tales of Irish mythology and follows a contemporary Chicago family's struggle with a group of goblins determined to kill them. Tyger Tyger is now available in paperback as well as Kindle and the second book in the series, In the Forests of the Night, will be out in November. I am impatiently awaiting a review copy. Check out my review of Tyger Tyger here and my interview with Kersten here.