Review: The Charlatan’s Boy

It’s a sad day in Corenwald when no one believes in feechies anymore. Specifically, it’s a sad day for Floyd Wendellson and his boy, Grady. The paying crowds pay them no longer. After making a living for years by pretending to be a feechie expert and a genuine feechie boy, they may have to get legitimate jobs.

Ha ha! I’m kidding, of course. What they do next is put up the Ugliest Boy in the World act. As the bad new days run on into years, they make a daring bid to bring back the good old days. Their scheme is unethical and there has to be some sort of law against it, but what do you expect from the charlatan and his boy? They’re neither heroes nor villains, only two showmen trying to turn a pretty penny without any punctilious dedication to the truth.

Jonathan Rogers delivers his story in appropriate style. The book is filled with humor, much of it the sort that is seen by the readers and not the characters. It’s written in first-person, and as you can imagine, a charlatan’s boy will not have the most educated voice. Though to be fair, almost no one in the book does. The editor either had a hard or wonderfully easy time of it, depending on whether she tried to distinguish real grammar errors from style or simply decided it was all one.

The world of The Charlatan’s Boy is constructed with imagination and flair. Unlike most fantasy worlds, Corenwald is more American than European, more modern than medieval. A few things in Corenwald do sound British – the constables, the public houses. But the alligators are decidedly American, and if any other fantasy book mentions watermelons, I haven’t had the privilege of coming across it. American figures come wandering through, re-dressed in Corenwald guise. The traveling snake oil salesman has a lasting place in the American imagination, and the drovers are charmingly familiar. If not the brothers of America’s cowboys, they are at least their cousins. It’s the same trade, but seeing how each generally pursues it, the drovers lack the organization and sophistication of the cowboys. (Perhaps that last phrase is strange to read; it was strange to write.)

Among the rough-and-tumble sorts, constables in blue uniforms and schoolmarms in one-room schoolhouses impose civilization. Yet two things break the mien of the nineteenth-century frontier verging into civilization. For one, the weaponry is bows and arrows, swords and spears. For the other, the good people of Corenwald were seriously told by their forebears that another race lives secretly alongside them, and they are not too far away from believing it.

The Charlatan’s Boy is reminiscent of the old-school episodic novel – Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Penrod, Mark Twain. The main issues of the book are set up at the beginning and steadily – if not urgently – addressed. Yet, lingering over drovers’ fires and doing the phrenology routine, even parts that advance the plot often feel anecdotal. The anecdotes were entertaining, well-told, and even charming. But as they followed one on another, I began wondering when the next shoe would finally fall on somebody.

I would, however, do a disservice to this book if I made it sound as if it went nowhere. It did go somewhere, and the climax and conclusion were marvelous. The humor and the lightheartedness of the story are a joy, and sometimes – suddenly but naturally – sadness pierces through, straight to the heart. The Charlatan’s Boy, with its humor and its heart and its style, is captivating and even, in an unemphatic sort of way, brilliant fantasy.

Great Openings

Note: This is a totally subjective list, comprised of openings I found most amusing, intriguing, or arresting. You will not find “Call me Ishmael” here, largely because I never read the book. It’s a fine sentence, but it’s all I need. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is also excluded, even though I read A Tale of Two Cities and liked it. It’s a good opening, but the appeal has worn thin. Maybe it’s just been quoted one too many times for me.

The universe is infinite but bounded, and therefore a beam of light, in whatever direction it may travel, will after billions of centuries return – if powerful enough – to the point of its departure; and it is no different with rumor, that flies about from star to star and makes the rounds of every planet. Stanislaw Lem, The Seventh Sally (technically, a short story – but who said that wasn’t allowed?)

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

You don’t know me yet, so there is no reason you should care that I’m stuck on a highway with a blowout. But maybe we can relate to each other. Cheryl Mckay and Rene Gutteridge, Never the Bride

Marley was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry aloud, impossible to read about. G. K. Chesterton, Tales of the Long Bow

Technically, the cucumber came first. Phil Vischer, Me, Myself & Bob

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this learn carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Ann Coulter, Treason

I don’t remember one thing about the day I was born. It hasn’t been for lack of trying either. I’ve set for hours trying to go back as far as I could, but the earliest thing I remember is riding in the back of Floyd’s wagon and looking at myself in a looking glass. Jonathan Rogers, The Charlatan’s Boy

Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the hidden dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared. At least, he would have brought an umbrella. Stephen Lawhead, The Skin Map


And now a drum roll, please, for our final winner, the mother of all memorable first lines, never forgotten to this day, an irreducible part of Western culture …

It was a dark and stormy night. (I don’t know, and neither do you)

I was going to research the name of the author and novel – I saw it somewhere once – but that would just ruin the mystique. Nearly everyone knows this line, and yet they haven’t the faintest idea where it came from. It has not only outlived its author, it has outlived its book. That deserves recognition.

CSFF Blog Tour: The science, the scam, the history of Phrenology

Phrenology is the study of the structure of the skull to determine a person’s character and mental capacity. This pseudoscience is based on the false assumption that mental faculties are located in brain “organs” on the surface of the brain and can be detected by visible inspection of the skull. The Viennese physician Franz-Joseph Gall (1758-1828) claimed there are some 26 “organs” on the surface of the brain which affect the contour of the skull, including a “murder organ” present in murderers. Gall was an advocate of the “use it or lose it” school of thought. Brain organs which were used got bigger and those which were not used shrunk, causing the skull to rise and fall with organ development. These bumps and indentations on the skull, according to Gall, reflect specific areas of the brain that determine a person’s emotional and intellectual functions. The Skeptics Dictionary, http://www.skepdic.com/phren.html

“Fool and Phrenologist are terms nearly synonymous” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1823.

Phrenology: “The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.” Ambrose Bierce

Ten-Finger is a phrenologist. That’s a showman that “reads” a feller’s character by feeling around for bumps and dents on his skullbone. A bump here means you got a short temper. A dent there means you got a generous heart. It’s real scientific sounding, but I reckon it’s all folderol and moonshine. Jonathan Rogers, The Charlatan’s Boy

During The Charlatan’s Boy, Floyd and Grady take up phrenology in between scams. I had seen phrenology in two other books, and I was tickled by its inclusion in The Charlatan’s Boy.

In Godless Ann Coulter wrote that “evolution fetishists” are turning themselves into “modern-day phrenologists”. This is the modern view of phrenology: a pseudoscience, a fanciful fraud. Helen’s Babies, published in 1876, is dated by many things, and not least that the book takes Helen seriously when she asks her brother to do a phrenological examination of her babies. Phrenology was widely accepted in the 1800s, in America and Britain. The intellectual and well-to-do often embraced it.

I enjoyed the use of phrenology in The Charlatan’s Boy, and I decided to poke around the Internet a bit. Here are some interesting things I turned up:

– Back in the day some employers would ask job candidates to undergo phrenology tests. In The Charlatan’s Boy a man asks Grady to examine his prospective son-in-law, ushering in one of my favorite sequences. Something like this may well have happened once.

– Henry Lavery spent 26 years building the psychograph, a phrenology machine. It had 1,954 parts.

– Sherlock Holmes, paragon of logic and intellection, once deduced a man’s intelligence from his hat size.

– In Huckleberry Finn, the charlatan called The Duke lectured on phrenology and provided “charts of character”. (I found these last two here, along with other examples of phrenology in popular culture.)

– Phrenology and physiognomy were in the 19th century mixed with Darwinism to assert that those with jutting jaws are mentally inferior. This was used against the Irish and the lower classes.

– Maps and charts were part of Ten-Finger’s phrenology kit. Jonathan Rogers described them much like these.

Here you read can the evaluation a phrenologist gave after examining a little girl.

Here is a man’s account (circa 1870) of his brush with phrenology.

– Phrenology always had its critics. One wrote in 1838, “Phrenology is a mass of untruth! Its physics are false and presumptuous, its metaphysics nonsensical, its ethics a gross idiotic blunder! And yet this system has numerous admirers, and its lecturers often appear in public, exhibiting the ignorance and audacity of the charlatan, in every sentence they utter, and they are generally surrounded by a gaping multitude, of bump-feeling people, eager to gain knowledge of the so-called ‘science’.”

CSFF Blog Tour: Building Corenwald

Every fantasy world is a mixing and changing of real-world elements. Corenwald, the setting of The Charlatan’s Boy, is different in which elements are chosen. Unlike most fantasy worlds, Corenwald is more American than European, more modern than medieval.

A few things in Corenwald do sound British – the constables, the public houses. But the alligators are decidedly American, and if any other fantasy book I’ve read mentioned watermelons, I don’t remember it. American figures come wandering through, re-dressed in Corenwald guise. The traveling snake oil salesman has a firm place in the American imagination, and the good old boy coon-hunting with his dogs has a firm place in the American South. More shadowy is the mountain man, but we’ve heard of him, too. He used to roam the Rocky Mountains.

And then there are the drovers, one of my favorite parts of Corenwald. They tend herds of cattle, and regularly drive those herds long distances to sell them for beef at market. In our own day we called them cowboys. In the book itself the drovers are called “cowmen” a few times. Not that they stand to be the brothers of America’s cowboys so much as their cousins. It’s the same trade, but seeing how each generally pursues it, the drovers lack the organization and sophistication of the cowboys. And if you think that was a little strange to read, I found it a little strange to write.

The drovers are awash in the roughness and lawlessness of the Wild West (mythical and historical). I saw another archetype of the Old West blended into them: the rustler. I will say that the blend was done with a fine and unexpected touch.

There are other elements that also give The Charlatan’s Boy a pre-Industrial feel. Schoolmarms teach in one-room schoolhouses, blacksmiths labor at the bellows, horses and wagons dominate the roads. There are miners, farmers, and shopkeepers – but no factory workers. The constables, with their blue uniforms, nightsticks, and stations, look more modern yet.

But there are two things that break the pre-Industrial mien. For one, the weaponry is bows and arrows, swords and spears. For the other, the good people of Corenwald were seriously told by their forebears that another race lives secretly alongside them, and they are not too far away from believing.

Another thing Jonathan Rogers did to build Corenwald – one of the best things, in my opinion – was to create a Corenwald dialect. Great writers have demonstrated to us that a distinctive speaking style can make a character (“Thief! Baggins! We hates it forever!”). Rogers demonstrates that it can also go a long way to making a culture, and a world, and an atmosphere.

Other reviewers have noted the southern style of the dialogue. I would note the set of unique words and expressions. (When the drovers made a bulge for the field, Grady ran like all nation.) Discombobulate is thrown around a few times. I knew this word beforehand: It was my example of words that should no longer be used. Most people don’t know what it means, and so you’ll discombobulate a lot of your audience if you use it. But even more than that, the word sounds a little ridiculous. Discombobulate discombobulate discombobulate …

But in The Charlatan’s Boy, it really does work. (The Dictionary informs me that discombobulate is “probably a whimsical alteration of discompose or discomfit”. This may be why it works.) There were a number of other unusual words whose meaning could be understood from the context – which is a good thing, because you couldn’t find them in the Dictionary. They appeared to be alterations of real words: jobbed (jabbed), jubous (dubious), caterwampus (catawampus), haint (taint, an old Scottish word for a spirit or ghost).

The Charlatan’s Boy made little mention of religion, and on that count Corenwald is hard to judge. Someone remarked on a boy’s “God-given ugliness”, a huckster sold a praying machine, and sincere, earnest prayer was mentioned. One could, I think, read a general monotheism from all this, but nothing more.

All things taken together, Corenwald is foreign but awfully familiar, and the reader slips in comfortably. Corenwald feels complete, genuine. It doesn’t dazzle like other fantasy worlds, but it does charm. Corenwald is one of the accomplishments of The Charlatan’s Boy.

Now for an addendum, placed last for reasons of efficiency, not importance: Jonathan Rogers graciously offered to answer a question or two from the reviewers on the CSFF Blog Tour. I had already been thinking about the resemblance between Corenwald and parts of our own world, so I asked him about his inspiration for the feechies, and whether there were any real-world legends behind them. Here is his answer:

You asked about feechiefolks. They’re really just a personification of wildness. They’re sort of an exaggerated version of some of the wild old boys I knew growing up in Middle Georgia. There was one guy in particular, named Jake, who used to go out in the swamp with some dogs and catch wild boars and carry them out on a pole. (I’ve told his story on my blog here: http://jonathan-rogers.com/?p=239). I never knew anybody who was so blissfully unaffected by civilization. It occurred to me that people like Jake were running around all over the place. I began to imagine Jake and them as if they were a tribe of swamp-dwellers living in parallel with the civilized world…which they kind of are anyway.

As for real-world legends, there are all kinds of stories of elusive forest people who are there but never seen–sprites, elves, gnomes, Sasquatches. But a better parallel is probably the North American Indians who could be very skilled at hiding. I remember hearing stories about settlers who never knew if they were being watched by Indians who were hiding in the forests just beyond the clearing. I’ve always thought that was a great setup for narrative tension.

CSFF Blog Tour: The Charlatan’s Boy

(Note: In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.)

It’s a sad day in Corenwald when no one believes in feechies anymore. Specifically, it’s a sad day for Floyd Wendellson and his boy, Grady. The paying crowds pay them no longer. After making a living for years by pretending to be a feechie expert and genuine feechie boy, they may have to get legitimate jobs.

Ha ha! I’m kidding, of course. What they do next is put up the Ugliest Boy in the World act. As the bad new days run on into years, they make a daring bid to bring back the good old days. Their scheme is unethical and there has to be some sort of law against it, but what do you expect from the charlatan and his boy?

A huckster and his assistant are unlikely stars for a fantasy novel. Their duplicity – so consistent and central – puts them out of any category of noble heroes. Yet they can hardly be inducted into the Hall of Villains. They’re certainly underhanded, but after a long line of necromancers, usurpers, evil kings and evil knights … Well, two showmen trying to turn a pretty penny with a fake feechie show simply don’t fit in. Both Floyd and Grady are in their way good characters, even deep characters. In what way that is – well, the reader will spend the book discovering.

Jonathan Rogers delivers his story in appropriate style. The book is filled with humor, much of it the sort that is seen by the readers and not the characters. It’s written in first-person, and as you can imagine, a charlatan’s boy will not have the most educated voice. Though to be fair, almost no one in the book does. The editor either had a hard or wonderfully easy time of it, depending on whether she tried to distinguish real grammar errors from style or simply decided it was all one.

The Charlatan’s Boy reminds me of the old-school episodic novel – Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Penrod, Mark Twain. The main issues of the book are set up at the beginning and steadily – if not urgently – addressed. Yet, lingering over drovers’ fires and doing the phrenology routine, even parts that advance the plot often feel anecdotal. The anecdotes were entertaining, well-told, and even charming. But as they followed one on another I began wondering when the next shoe would finally fall on somebody.

I would, however, do a disservice to this book if I made it sound as if it went nowhere. It did go somewhere, and the climax and conclusion were marvelous. I appreciated the humor and the lightheartedness of the story, and I appreciated the prickles of sadness that suddenly pierced through. Jonathan Rogers handled this expertly: The moments were brief, scattered, and went straight to my heart. It’s a strange thing, but stories and characters need just a little sadness to be deep. Rogers put that sadness in.

I enjoyed The Charlatan’s Boy. Since finishing it I have picked it up to enjoy it again. And I don’t think I’m done, either.

I will be posting again about The Charlatan’s Boy tomorrow. If you want to learn more about the book, check out these links:

The Charlatan’s Boy on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307458229
Jonathan Rogers’ web site: http://jonathan-rogers.com/

And see what the other participants in the blog tour have to say about The Charlatan’s Boy:

Sally Apokedak
Amy Bissell
Red Bissell
Jennifer Bogart
Thomas Clayton Booher
Keanan Brand
Beckie Burnham
Christian Fiction Book Reviews
Valerie Comer
CSFF Blog Tour
D. G. D. Davidson
April Erwin
Andrea Graham
Tori Greene
Katie Hart
Bruce Hennigan
Christopher Hopper
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Jason Joyner

Jeff Chapman
Julie

Carol Keen
Allen McGraw
Matt Mikalatos
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Donita K. Paul
SarahFlan
Sarah Sawyer
Chawna Schroeder
Tammy Shelnut
Kathleen Smith
James Somers
Donna Swanson
Robert Treskillard
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler
Nicole White
Elizabeth Williams
Dave Wilson