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March 11, 2026March 11, 2026

Britannia Calls: A Red Dragon, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and Early Christians Who Didn’t Survive by Being Timid

Selection from Cover Art of "The Halls of the Shadow King: Britannia Calls"

The fourth book in The Halls of the Shadow King series is now available on Amazon Kindle. It’s called Britannia Calls, and is a Christian retelling of Celtic mythology (and possibly an Arthurian origin story!). Set twenty-something years after the adventures of Amal in the first three books in “The Halls of the Shadow King”. My intent is that the reader has the option to treat this as either the fourth book or as a standalone introduction to the series. Here’s the overview:

Highlights of the Action

What are the highlights? Third-century Roman Britain. A red dragon sleeping under a Welsh mountain. A Christian awakening spreading through the island that the dragon finds deeply inconvenient. And a team sent from Antioch—led by Amal, the Shadow King—to do something about it.

They’re joined by Finn McCool and they briefly meet Taliesin. Yes, those two. One is an immortal Celtic warrior who has been fighting supernatural evil longer than most civilizations have existed. The other is a blind former druid who serves a different master now and carries scars from the last time he tried to face the dragon alone.

The early Christians in this story didn’t survive Roman persecution by being cautious people. They survived by being stubborn, brave, and entirely convinced that the darkness was going to lose eventually. A primordial dragon will test conviction in a cavern deep beneath Mount Snowdonia.

Mythical Celtic Setting

Britannia Calls is historical fiction rooted in the third century AD—a few years before the reign of Emperor Constantine. The narrative swims in early Celtic Christianity, and the pre-Roman mythological traditions of Ireland and Wales. The supernatural elements—dragons, Pattern-sight, binding rituals drawn from Hebrew and druidic traditions—are built on that historical and literary foundation, not cartoons layered on top of it.

If you’ve read The Apprentice or Into Deeper Waters, you already know Amal. If this is your first encounter with the series, Britannia Calls works as an entry point. The format keeps it focused—one mission, one mountain, one ancient enemy.

What’s Next?

I’m already thinking about the next project. Another Old Testament prophet, most likely. Different era, different landscape, same fundamental conflict: someone who has been given a gift they didn’t ask for and a task they’d prefer to refuse. He won’t know what hit him.

Find Britannia Calls on Amazon (Kindle only): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GS3PDF8R

Paperback will be available soon in my web store here

The Death of Standards

The postmodern project, at its core, represents a philosophical surrender. Rather than wrestle with the philosophical inconsistencies in Naturalism, then Realism, then Modernism, the postmodernists decided that solving these problems was impossible because truth itself was merely projected by dominant Systems of Thought. This was a pretentious error.

By denying that there can be such a thing as “true good” in art, postmodernism hasn’t liberated us at all from oppressive standards—rather, it has left us defenseless against the tide of trivial and insupportable newly-born standards. When every text is merely another perspective, when every voice carries equal weight regardless of craft or vision, the result is predictable: the market floods with work that previous generations would have recognized immediately as unserious. Walk into any major bookstore today and survey the literary fiction section. You’ll find novels praised to the heavens by prestigious review outlets that lack basic narrative coherence, that substitute cleverness for wisdom, that mistake the transgressive for the profound. This isn’t an accident of taste. It’s the logical outcome of a system that has lost the vocabulary—and the courage—to say that some work is simply better than other work.

Academia’s Capitulation

The academy, which once served as a guardian of literary standards, has become their primary subverter. English departments that once trained students to recognize excellence now teach them to deconstruct it. Now a literary PhD dissertation can be generated by an AI, and it is happening all over.

Close reading—that patient attention to how language achieves its effects—has given way to reading for power dynamics, for representations of identity, for the political implications of competing Systems of Thought. These approaches aren’t completely without value, but when they become the dominant approaches, literature ceases to be evaluated as literature. At that point, it becomes far easier to deconstruct the physical words on a page into representations that reflect whatever system the professional academic rewards. I’ve been occasionally surprised on the literary side of X to find academics who have creatively deconstructed religious works into polemics about post-industrial society and other fashionable concerns. The result? Entire generations of writers emerge from MFA programs unable to distinguish between craft and ideology, between a sentence that sings and one that merely signals. They’ve been taught that traditional notions of beauty, structure, and moral seriousness are suspect—tools of cultural hegemony rather than hard-won insights into what makes language live on the page.

Publishing’s Moral Vacancy

The publishing industry, always responsive to cultural currents, has enthusiastically embraced the postmodern turn. Editors who might once have rejected a manuscript for technical deficiencies now celebrate those same deficiencies as formally innovative. Marketing departments that once sought to identify lasting work now scramble to ride waves of social media enthusiasm, no matter how shallow. Consider how contemporary publishing determines what’s worthy of publication. Increasingly, the question isn’t “Is this excellent?” but “Does this fill a slot in our diversity portfolio?” or “Will this generate the right kind of attention on Twitter?” These aren’t questions about literary merit. They’re questions about market positioning and cultural optics—and while both have their place in business decisions, when they crowd out questions of quality entirely, literature suffers. When there is no gate on the process for quality and excellence—even in the absence of political bias—the bottom line becomes the only motivator.

The Evidence Is in the Reading

The proof of this decline doesn’t require theoretical argumentation—it requires only that we read. Pick up a celebrated novel from 2020 and set it beside one from 1950. The difference in linguistic precision, in structural sophistication, in moral and intellectual seriousness is often startling. This isn’t nostalgia speaking. It’s the recognition that when a culture ceases to believe in excellence, it ceases to produce it. The postmodern response to this observation is predictable: “You’re merely privileging one aesthetic over another. Who are you to say Hemingway is better than [insert trendy contemporary author]?” But this response itself reveals the problem. It treats evaluation as an arbitrary exercise in power rather than a learned skill requiring attention, knowledge, and intellectual humility. It assumes that because perfect objectivity is impossible, all judgments are equally subjective—a logical leap that would be laughable in any other field.

Recently, I was discussing books with an adult reading enthusiast who had discovered a new passion for H. Rider Haggard. His books are exciting “lost world” adventures written during the late 1800s, and the writing was considered accessible to young children of that era. My friend was surprised that young boys were drawn to these books in the past, because even the average adult reader would find the writing challenging today. There are scores of examples like this of what we have lost by losing our way regarding excellence in literature.

What We’ve Lost

When we abandon the pursuit of objective literary standards, we lose more than just the ability to distinguish good books from bad ones. We lose the cultural infrastructure that allowed great writers to develop. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—these writers emerged in cultures that, whatever their other failings, took literature seriously as a vehicle for truth. They wrote for audiences that expected not just to be entertained or validated, but to be challenged, elevated, transformed. Today’s literary culture, by contrast, often seems content with books that function as mere mirrors—reflecting readers’ existing beliefs back to them, confirming what they already think about the world. This isn’t literature’s highest calling. It’s literature’s unflinching surrender.

The Way Forward

The path forward requires recovering what postmodernism has taught us to abandon: the courage to discriminate between truth and falsehood, the willingness to say that some work achieves what other work only attempts. This doesn’t mean returning to a narrow canon or dismissing new voices, but rather means insisting that new voices, like old ones, be held to standards of excellence rather than given passes based on novelty or identity. Editors should be willing to reject manuscripts that fail to meet high literary standards, regardless of their political or cultural appeal. Critics need to be willing to write honest reviews rather than promotional copy. It means readers willing to demand more than what’s merely current or trendy. Most importantly, it means recovering the belief that drove the greatest writers of the past: that literature matters precisely because it can access truth, beauty, and moral wisdom—not perfectly, not infallibly, but genuinely.

When we believe there’s a “true good” worth pursuing in art, we create the conditions for excellence. When we don’t, we get what we have now: a literary landscape cluttered with forgettable cash generators, while genuine talent goes unrecognized because we’ve lost the language to recognize it. The decline of contemporary literature isn’t a mystery. It’s the inevitable result of ideas taken to their logical conclusion. Postmodernism promised liberation from the struggle to define truth and beauty; it delivered mediocrity. The question is whether we have the cultural courage to admit it.

A Story of Memory and Loss

Berry’s latest novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, reinforces my sense of loss of the past because Berry spends much time dwelling in that place. The story is about his frequent narrator, Andy Catlett, reminiscing over his grandfather Marce, who managed his family farm behind a brace of mules and a plow. The action starts with a distant event when the tobacco buyers monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, uses their leverage to essentially rob Marce of a full year of labor—not just any labor, but one that was needed to provide a source of scarce income that could augment what the farm itself could offer to Marce’s family.

Andy only knew of this sad story from hearsay, and admits:

So Marce remembered it to Wheeler, who told it to Andy, who in a world radically changed needed a long time and great care to imagine what he heard, but as he has imagined it he has passed it on to his children, for the story has been, as it is still, a force and a light in their place. (p. 17)

The Cost of Progress

One of the familiar complaints made by Berry is that progress in the form of tractors, automobiles, and cross-national linkages of trains changed outcomes for ordinary families who made lives from the soil. Marce sums up his beliefs about progress in describing his journey to Louisville on a train as only a man who was a master of his own work and place could:

They felt in their flesh the ruled line by which the railroad had pierced the living country, subduing its ancient contours to levels and slants and bends required by the machines that ever after would hurry regardlessly across it. (p. 19)

The Black Sheep and the Beloved Past

One well-worn thread through Berry’s books—especially the ones with Andy Catlett as narrator—is that of the “black sheep” that occasionally rose up in these families and found their way in the community. In Andy’s case, this beloved person was his uncle, an attractive rebel of sorts who always wound up involved in schemes and activities that embarrassed those who loved him. As Andy described his Uncle Andrew, “He was instead one in the sequence of feral offshoots that fairly regularly had dissented from it. He was not an outcast, because he had never been cast out.” (p. 57)

In this book, and indeed in many where Andy is the narrator, he is looking back on the past through an old man’s eyes. He recognizes that life has blessed him and that when younger he took it for granted. About this life, he notes that “He did not know how old it was or what it was worth or how threatened it had come to be. He did not begin consciously to honor and love it until he saw it going away.” (p. 68)

Eventually, after a successful period in the “big agriculture” world outside Port William, Andy returns home and regards the life his grandfather lived as his own native culture, one “shared and practiced in common by all the kinds and races of the country people, a possession of incalculable worth.” (p. 68)

A Hybrid Work

There is nothing surprising in this book for a fan of Wendell Berry. What is unique, however, is the mating of Berry’s agrarian thought with the story of one of his characters. This makes this novel a halfway creation between Berry’s fiction and nonfiction writing. It isn’t as captivating as, say, his story-driven novel Hannah Coulter, but it contains much deep thought that the reader who avoids nonfiction might be surprised to learn.

The sadness around the demise of places with history born in love like Port William is palpable. Berry sagely notes that “Port William’s fatal mistake was its failure to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself.” (p. 110) He continues to describe that rather, the town had believed the values imputed on their small place by outsiders who saw progress as a 180-degree path away from the Port Williams of the world.

Who Is My Neighbor?

In the Bible, a lawyer asks a question of Jesus that is logical for one who lives in an elevated place in a community: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus takes the chance to show the lawyer the extent of his disconnectedness from life and love. In all of Wendell Berry’s books, this question whispers throughout the stories.

In Marce Catlett, we get a very clear declaration:

In stable and lasting communities, people become neighbors to one another because they need one another. The American story so far—which has been so far the Catletts’ story, which they have both suffered and resisted—has been the fairly continuous overpowering of the instinctive desire for settling and homemaking by the forces of unsettling: the westward movement, land greed, money hunger, false economy. The industrial replacement of neighborhood by competition and technology moves everything worthy of love out of reach. (p. 112)

A Vision of the Beautiful Land

Near the close, Andy’s memories of community, family, and neighbors have connected and are now one recollection:

His remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it. (p. 144)

The reader is left uncomfortably wondering if in our new age of progress, this ascendancy of life is any longer possible.

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story is a meditation on memory, community, and the cost of what we call progress—essential reading for those who long for something beyond efficiency and growth.

A Father’s Divine Charter

The Man—though he is one of the few survivors of the cataclysmic events that have destroyed most of the world’s flora and fauna—has a charter. He sees this as a gift from the God who has taken literally everything else away. Early in the novel as he scans the terrain for threats to his day’s journey down the cracking and bubbling interstate to the coast, he ponders this unclear but divine call.

“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” (p. 3)

The descriptions of this fallen world abound. I have a hard time imagining any author other than McCarthy being able to communicate something so unthinkable to our expectations of excess.

“The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.” (p. 10)

Or the tyranny of needing to search for food in forsaken places that have been multiply ravaged by bands of nihilistic scavengers:

“In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor. Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could be some corn or something. Let’s go, the man said.” (p. 16)

Of the sadness of what has been lost, the reader is given this to experience as the Man inspects the fireplace of an abandoned family home for anything that may assist his survival:

“He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago.” (p. 25)

Mastery and Purposeful Protection

Notable is the absolute mastery of the small, important things of the world that the Man has been able to demonstrate. McCarthy uses this, perhaps, as a foil to demonstrate how even the most competent and experienced can be beset by an evil world. Thinking here about King David in the wilderness. The Man knows how to survive. How did he learn this? Through good preparation before the disasters occurred? Through hard effort and good fortune afterwards? This remains unclear to the reader at the end of the novel, but what is made certain is that the Man has “the fire” to refuse to allow the evil to take him before he can develop his son into a Man who can survive the new reality. This book gives the reader much pause on the difficulties of the intentional protection and development of others.

Hints of Hope

The careful reader will seek out the hints that McCarthy provides of the persistence of the human spirit. They are few and can be missed. The Man takes some roadside cane and makes his son a flute as a distraction:

“The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.” (p. 81)

And as the Boy struggles with the painfulness of his existence and his desire to take a blissful-appearing death—like his mother had quietly done:

“You can’t. You have to carry the fire.” (p. 298)

The Real Story

Though this book won a Pulitzer Prize, many reviewers have chosen to wallow in the meaninglessness that McCarthy is able to weave while describing an utterly fallen world. Even Haiti in 2026 has not yet fallen nearly as far. I’ll admit that it is a true challenge to see through all the depressing atmosphere.

But the real story of the novel is McCarthy’s knowledge that even in the worst possible case for humanity, hope will somehow survive. Some of the very last words are spoken in hope about the Boy (and perhaps others like him yet to be met):

“The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” (p. 306)

The Road is well worth reading, even by more sensitive people. It speaks of preparedness, resilience, and the humanity of passionately holding to hope, even when the senses scream that hope has been destroyed and placed in its grave. Because then the spark is lit and who is to say what God will do with it.

Have you read The Road? What did you discover about hope in the darkest places? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Western Grit Meets Magical Wonder

In places, we see the western stability and rugged individualism characteristic of L’Amour and we garner a notion about the type of book this is. But then the magic and joy of Grill’s world building erupts out of nowhere and takes the reader into an exciting new place for a short while. Once control is regained, we resume the main story—or is it the main story? We don’t know for sure because the author maintains suspense for quite a long time.

Three characters garner the majority of the love from Grill. The main Clint Eastwood plains drifter (or plains Runner as the book describes him) is named Travel. Early on he meets a challenging and powerful young woman named Nichole who has a mission she needs Travel’s attendance to. He has various beliefs about what this mission is, and even though he’s initially reluctant (of course, the heroic journey is featured here as with many of the best novels), eventually he becomes invested, though he still is mistaken about the purpose. Nichole is compelling and surprising throughout, but Travel begins to truly care for her. We learn a truth about Travel and Nichole fairly early on:

“Nichole lived in a haunted world, as did Travel, as did everyone else. It was a world where nothing beautiful could ever rise up without something coming for it.” (p. 102)

This is excellent foreshadowing, but as with heroes in our own real world, neither of these two is affected by these challenges, constantly adapting and seeking to overcome.

My favorite character is perhaps more of a mighty supporting character, a “protector” named Hatchet who is also far more than he appears. What I appreciate about this character is the clothing in humility and grace Grill provides him that enables him to serve and regard the other characters in the novel far higher than himself.

Magical Realism Done Well

Magical realism is featured throughout, often in surprising ways. As with García Márquez, the best examples of this are short and never get fully resolved in the book. This lends these moments a great amount of interest.

Hope as Our Sure Possession

My opinion on the main theme in the novel is that it continually returns to hope. For example, much of the story revolves around searching for a majestic city (à la the Celestial City from Pilgrim’s Progress). Travel isn’t so sure at the beginning of the book, but we learn his thoughts and get insight into his character:

“Travel shrugged. ‘I believe there was once a city, and I’m sure it had its day.’ He paused, and the watchfulness returned. ‘But I don’t believe anything can sustain that kind of hope.'” (p. 86)

I highlighted the theme of hope throughout my Kindle edition of this novel. One phrase that is repeated by many characters is initially thrown out as a surety by Hatchett: “Hope is our sure possession.” How much do we need to hear this in our own era where we have sacrificed hope to the mere tangible? It is food for much thought.

There are many smaller characters like Nivenna who pursue this hope through strenuous and systematic sacrificial investment in the advancement of others. We learn that Nivenna is training groups of young women to become anchors in the community. Grill writes:

“For in addition to the well-known work and provision of their land, there was a quiet, lesser-known work that also sustained the town, whereby these four women took in wayward girls and taught them how to set their sights on something more than the day after. Here, they learned to read, to make plans, to keep a schedule, to garden and cook, to care for animals, to care for people, to stretch a coin and mend a seam and close a wound. These were Occam’s Daughters, and they did more to keep the town from descending into a brothel-pocked ruin than most would ever know. It was dangerous work.” (p. 153)

Those who love horses (like me) will also enjoy this book, for there is a race of horses that are higher and more noble. Perhaps these horses even aspire to the Greek legends of Pegasus, the winged symbol of divine inspiration. What is certain is that they are critical partners to the human teams seeking the blessed city in full hope.

The Journey’s End—and Beginning

Near the end of the book, Travel reaches the City. But has he? He is uncertain, for he detects some adjacent injustice. He meets an important character in a dingy room who addresses the whole issue about the City and the remnants of evil:

“Do not fear him,” he said. “As for you…” he stopped for a moment, and it seemed then that he looked past Travel, at something the horsemaster could neither hear nor see. The Man smiled briefly then returned his gaze. “Did you think I could bring you all the way here, and not finish what I’ve begun?” he asked. (p. 603)

With this advice, Travel moves forward confidently and hopefully into his new life’s work, no longer unaware of who he is and who he is serving.

Travel by Star is an enjoyable read that will alternately leave your head spinning and then focus your attention on the reality that underlies and sustains all of the many symbols that Grill sneaks past our attention.

The Story

The story follows Edward Waverley, a young English nobleman who becomes entangled in the Jacobite uprising of 1745—the doomed conspiracy to restore the Stuart dynasty to the English throne. Scott drew upon his Scottish heritage and conducted meticulous research and local interviews to capture the Highland culture with impressive authenticity. His descriptive prose brought the fierce loyalty and poetic passion of the Highland clans to life, creating scenes that in retrospect bear striking resemblance to James Fenimore Cooper’s later portraits of Native American tribes. Given Cooper’s known admiration for English novels, one wonders if the young American author found inspiration in Scott’s Highlanders when crafting his own tales of upstate New York’s indigenous peoples.

At its heart, Waverley traces the maturation of an idle young man of privilege who seeks purpose through an Army commission, only to find himself plunged into the full spectrum of human experience: treachery and self-sacrifice, unexpected kindness and passionate infatuation, and ultimately, genuine love.

The Characters!

The novel’s strength lies in its memorable characters—ironically, everyone except Waverley himself, who proves the least compelling figure in his own story. The Baron of Bradwardine, a Scottish lowlander and Stuart loyalist, embodies the old feudal order with his antiquated sense of lordship and love of shifting conversations to Latin. His daughter Rose emerges as a surprisingly strong and capable woman who quietly shapes the story’s resolution. The Highland chieftain Fergus Mac-Ivor offers Edward genuine friendship while drawing him deeper into rebellion, while Fergus’s sister Flora—passionate for Stuart glory—reveals that her interest in Edward stems more from political calculation than romance. The erratic thief Donald Bean Lean rounds out a cast that captures the full range of Highland passion and intrigue.

Edward’s gradual awakening forms the novel’s emotional core. He discovers too late that Flora views him merely as a political asset for Prince Charles Stuart, who desperately needs English nobles to legitimize his cause. After early rebel successes give way to inevitable defeat, Edward must find his way back to his family and to the woman who protected him and loved him without calculation.

A Message for Our Time

Scott illuminates an era of political turmoil where religion and geography fractured the British Isles—a situation uncomfortably familiar to our own age of polarization. Then as now, political gamesmanship drew people into dangerous conflicts over grievances both real and manufactured. Waverley represents the privileged young man caught between warring forces through no real fault beyond his failure to take his responsibilities seriously. And like our own time, countless people suffered for decisions made in rooms they could never access.

Waverley reminds us that political upheaval has always carried human costs, and that maturity often arrives through painful lessons about loyalty, love, and the true meaning of duty.

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December 21, 2025December 21, 2025

The Paradox of Self-Centeredness and an Omnipotent God

We have all learned from experience at being humans to ferret out and subsequently be disgusted by self-centeredness. The paradox is that this tendency toward pride in one’s self may be one of the great hallmarks of humanity (and is the plague of those in pursuit as well). And due to the recent collapse of restraining virtues, it has become a condemning feature of our culture at large.

We hate this in others, yet we tolerate it in ourselves. Why?

I’ve been thinking about how God is perfectly justified to be self-centered. He embodies perfection; angels and humans were created to know and worship Him. Does this trigger our revulsion to self-centered behavior? Probably, if we don’t think through the situation much. Perhaps this is a chief complaint made by those offended by God—His glory conflicts with an unreasonable expectation of our own.

But pondering this honestly, we quickly realize that if God is exactly as He describes Himself, He fully possesses the right to be self-centered—meaning, He organizes reality to demonstrate His glory. This would indicate that He is the center of all things and knows this because it is true. Does this still bother us?

One more thing is puzzling—something we as imperfect beings don’t yet understand. The one who should rightly elevate Himself over all others chose to demonstrate that perfect self-awareness also involves sacrifice.

Where Do We See This in Scripture?

All throughout, if one pays attention. For instance, in Hebrews 2 we read:

But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

A Monumental Change Happened

For a “little while” He “was made” lower than the angels. This was not His normal state. He is the one “for whom and by whom all things exist.” But He became lower than the angelic forms and joined humanity.

The Paradox, Resumed

Why did this change happen? The one who is the very definition of truth demonstrated that His form of self-existence was not complete without the rescue of the ones who were created to love and adore Him. For God’s glory is not the shadow of self-centeredness we have authored. It is something true and higher.

December 18, 2025December 18, 2025

A Historically Important Novel you Ought to Consider: “Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot

Image of Gwendolen Harleth at the roulette table.

Recently I’ve been reading books recommended by Chris Scalia in his guide Novels for Conservatives. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda stood out immediately. Since Middlemarch is one of my favorites, I was eager to read Eliot’s final novel.

The Characters

As with all of Eliot’s work, character building and contrast take center stage. Four fascinating personalities orbit around Daniel Deronda, who serves as the linchpin connecting them all.

Daniel Deronda is a young man who has grown up as the unacknowledged son—he suspects—of an English aristocrat. He stands apart: patient with people’s idiosyncrasies, thoughtful, and devoted to others. His main foil is Gwendolen Harleth, a character to whom much has been given and who has received it all in great self-devotion. Eliot spends considerable energy convincing us that Gwendolen is shallow and conceited:

Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in which no will was present. It was not to be so with her; she would no longer be sacrificed to creatures worth less than herself, but would make the very best of the chances that life offered her, and conquer circumstances by her exceptional cleverness.

Gwendolen clearly sees herself as “the main character”—as our young people might say about our modern royalty of self-centeredness—with everyone else mere supporting players in her drama.

Two Intersecting Stories

Deronda meets Gwendolen at the peak of her social success, just before she loses her fortune overnight. That brief encounter stays with her through the ups and downs that follow, including a miserable marriage of convenience to a weak but manipulative British aristocrat. Watching Deronda’s visible kindness and encouragement—qualities she utterly lacks—she begins to recognize virtue outside herself. This recognition is perhaps the best thing we can say about Gwendolen.

But the novel’s other pillar tells a strikingly different story. The jarring contrast between Gwendolen’s self-absorption and the selflessness on this second side seems intentional. This strand involves Jewish people—folks segregated from polite British society.

Deronda saves the life of Mirah, a beautiful and talented young Jewish woman who despairs over her lost family. A singer exploited by her scoundrel father across Europe, she escapes to Britain where Deronda rescues her and provides a new family. Though Christian, they are kind, and Eliot uses them to explore the nature of Jewishness in British society.

While searching for Mirah’s missing mother and brother, Deronda meets Mordecai—a deathly-ill but vividly alive Jewish mystic and Kabbalah student. Daniel finds him remarkable, though he’s puzzled by Mordecai’s disappointment that he speaks no Hebrew. Increasingly, Deronda’s thoughts shift from his aristocratic life toward this unusual man and his urgent vision.

Transformation and Vision

Mirah flourishes in the home of Deronda’s college friend, where his mother and sisters adore her. She becomes a blessing, teaching singing to wealthy students. Gwendolen is drawn to her—perhaps due to Mirah’s character, but likely because of her connection to Deronda.

In one pivotal exchange, Gwendolen reveals her understanding that Deronda admires Mirah’s blamelessness while surely despising her own mercenary marriage. But Deronda sees deeper—that Gwendolen’s real problem is her extreme self-centeredness:

“Then tell me what better I can do,” said Gwendolen, insistently.

“Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action—something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot.”

This exchange gives her food for thought for years.

Meanwhile, Mordecai reveals that he’s seen Deronda in visions as a kindred spirit who will continue his work for the Jewish people after his death. Though puzzled, Deronda feels an inexplicable empathy for the plight of British Jews. In a powerful pub discussion with Mordecai and his philosopher friends, Deronda is stirred by Mordecai’s fervent dream of a Jewish homeland:

Let the torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion.

After further plot twists, Deronda realizes his calling is now intertwined with Mordecai’s vision. The novel makes an abrupt decision to sunset Gwendolen’s story, which dissipates predictably.

Historical Impact

I’m deliberately avoiding plot spoilers—read it yourself for those details. What fascinates me is this book’s influence on world events. Written in 1876, Daniel Deronda was one of the first exposures polite society had to Jewish suffering and the dream of returning to a homeland.

Many readers actually hated the Jewish plotline, preferring Gwendolen’s aristocratic drama instead. Her recklessness and pride fascinate like a car wreck. But Eliot revolutionized the portrayal of Jewish people in English literature and set events in motion that—regardless of how one views them—have shaped much of world history since.

Fifty-one years after publication, the British issued their support for establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East. Historian Paul Johnson noted in History of the Jews that Daniel Deronda was “probably the most influential novel of the 19th century” and that “to hundreds of thousands of assimilated Jews the story presented for the first time the possibility of a return to Zion.”

A Word on Reading This Novel

This is an important work that should be read. But readers need to know it will challenge our iPhone-depleted attention spans. The writing bears no resemblance to the staccato dialogue patterns of modern novels. Paragraphs stretch on. Dialogue is rich in detail and insight but long in words. Occasionally Eliot dives into reveries the reader struggles to follow. As a writer and student of the classics, I understand her efforts to communicate deeply, though I generally (sadly?) choose to edit such episodes from my own work in response to modern reading fashions.

I hope potential readers are challenged by this but not dissuaded. I’ll say it again: this is an important book. And it also makes the case that people aren’t always completely reducible to groups. A woman from a Caucasian British background was able to communicate the thoughts and desires of an underprivileged minority group with a very lasting effect. In this sense, Daniel Deronda fulfills the highest goals of a novelist—carefully and graciously stepping into another’s life and earning the right to tell someone else’s story.

Highlights of the Action

Mythical Celtic Setting

What’s Next?

Other LINKS about this Novel

The Death of Standards

Academia’s Capitulation

Publishing’s Moral Vacancy

The Evidence Is in the Reading

What We’ve Lost

The Way Forward

Other Links of Interest

A Story of Memory and Loss

The Cost of Progress

The Black Sheep and the Beloved Past

A Hybrid Work

Who Is My Neighbor?

A Vision of the Beautiful Land

Other Links of Interest

Other Links of Interest

A Father’s Divine Charter

Mastery and Purposeful Protection

Hints of Hope

The Real Story

Other Links of Interest

Western Grit Meets Magical Wonder

Magical Realism Done Well

Hope as Our Sure Possession

The Journey’s End—and Beginning

Other Links of Interest

The Story

The Characters!

A Message for Our Time

Where Do We See This in Scripture?

A Monumental Change Happened

The Paradox, Resumed

Other LINKS of interest