Category: Books

Francis Spufford, who authored the single finest chapter I read in any book last year, has written something very special in Red Plenty.

In Red Pletny, Spufford tells the story of a strange and wonderful moment at the end of the 1950’s when the Soviets had reasons to believe that within a generation they would have overtaken the capitalist west and won the Marxist utopia long awaited. This seems fanciful to us today for two reasons: firstly we know very little about the Soviet Union and so imagine that the bits and pieces of caricature we have picked up are accurate and secondly, we are constantly told that capitalism is the end of history and it is fanciful and unreasonable to imagine that any other way will ever be conceived.

In other words, this seems fanciful to us today because of our casual ignorance.

In the decade after World War II, the Soviet Union grew, in even the American estimations, at a rate of about 10% a year.

After defeating the Nazis, after the purges of Stalin, after the murderous New Economic Plan, after the invasion of Russia by the White Forces, after the 1917 revolution instigated by only a few thousand people and just a century after most of the population were effectively slaves, this transformation is the stuff of fairytale.

And Spufford is wise enough to root us down in the miraculous narrative by approaching the economic history of a country as if he is writing a novel. What we have in Red Plenty straddles history and fictional narrative and gladly falls head first into politics and philosophy and economics whenever there is need.

This approach isn’t some faddish innovation to avoid turgid economic history. It is fitting in the most appropriate way because the story of Soviet economics in that era was the elaboration of the modified Marxist vision that energised the whole nation. The USSR, no less than the USA, was a nation founded on a story it told itself about itself. With the emergence of computing, mathematicians in Russia slowly became convinced that the progress they had made thus far would now actually accelerate because they could enhance the natural superiority of a centrally planned economy through cybernetic efficiencies.

By fictionalising the historical, Spufford manages us to get down into the contradictions and compromises that people had to make on a day by day basis as they sought to achieve utopia. The tension between belief and unbelief in the Soviet project and the complexity of being in a topia that is destined to become utopia are drawn out beautifully without Spufford having to point at it. It is seriously classy, beautifully written and utterly fascinating.

Behind it all of course is the belief in progress, the cold rationalism that sought to be so unsentimental but ended up being a figment of the 20th Century’s collective imagination. Paragraphs like this stand out with potent clarity:

Electrons have no point of view. They form no opinions, make no judgements, commit no errors. Down at their scale, there are no opinions, judgements, or errors; only matter and energy, in a few configurations from which the whole lavish cosmos jigsaws itself together. Electrons move when forces act on their speck of negative electrical charge or on their infinitesimal pinpricks of mass. They do not choose to move; they do not behave, except in metaphor. Yet the metaphors creep in.

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, p. 108.

The metaphors creep in. The utopia is never realised.

Red Plenty features the finest description of cancer I have ever read and the most immersive description of childbirth I can remember. It moves with the momentum of a novel. It lingers with the thoughtfulness of a political theology.

Your Correspondent, He won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt him

Mr. Hoppy lived in a small flat high up in a tall concrete building. He lived alone. He had always been a lonely man and now that he was retired from work he was more lonely than ever.

There were two loves in Mr. Hoppy’s life. One was the flowers he grew on his balcony. They grew in pots and tubs and baskets, and in summer the little balcony became a riot of colour.

Mr Hoppy’s second love was a secret he kept entirely to himself.

GAH! I must learn more of Mr. Hoppy! This is why we learned to love novels- Roald Dahl’s storytelling genius. I thought I had read everything he had written for kids, then a lovely South African woman from my church gave me this late work and I read it twice in the same day. Once to myself and once out loud to a fascinated audience. Dahl books were always a chief delight of my childhood, especially when read out loud by an adult.

This is typical Dahl – amusing, fast-paced and terribly immoral in what it teaches children about the world. Therefore, it is tremendous.

Your Correspondent, Now he’s ready for some power-nesting.

Beautiful Ruins is the kind of book that justifies beach holidays, so you can read it lounging in the sun. I don’t mean that as anything but a compliment.

Here is a bit I liked, because it is a bit that I resonate with. After all, for all the fancy literary criticism you can read about books much more highly regarded than this intricately plotted musing on memory and love, it always comes down to what we can resonate with:

Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway – its true religion? Wasn’t the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons – but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!

Your Correspondent, Thinks it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

Here is Aidan Mathews, writing a letter about the future to his daughters:

From the moment of your real baptism, which will be closer to thirst than to fonts and freshets, you will be propelled ‘immediately’, as Saint Mark likes to insist with his frequent use of the word ‘euthus’, into a desert experience, into the wilderness of the deep evolutionary interior. God will enter your life there as disaster. Your loneliness will grow around you like a monastery. This is not all, but it is everything. For, as my teacher, the poet Denise Levertov used to say to me, if you bring the Lamb of God into your living room, he will almost certainly ruin your carpet. There will be incommunicable spaces of pain and insight within you which have been set aside by God as the pavilion of his presence, like an oxygen tent or like the tent of meeting itself, for the most intimate of encounters.

And that paragraph brought me to tears when I read it because its talk of ruined carpets and incommunicable spaces and intimate encounter with God put words on that which I don’t have it in me to say, even though all that is in me longs to say it.

And then later he writes:

It’s in the cross, however, in the crucial and excruciating obscenity of casual human violence, that God’s self-description as a saviour is exposed, like a photographic negative, outside the encampment in the rubbish dump of Calvary, where the memory of the killing of one condemned criminal signifies God’s total recall of all humanity, especially of those whom humanity has deemed not to be human at all. So, in the Greek of St. John, our weak and wounded nature is lifted up to hang and is lifted up to heaven in the same moment, by the same verb, for the passion narratives vivisect the beating heart of the violence that we call keeping the peace, law and order, the status quo, social cohesion, self-preservation, public demand, the democratic mandate, the moral imperative.

And in writing the first, so deeply personal, paragraph and then the second so brutally wide-ranging paragraph, he once again reminds me that Christian faith is not a proposition about whether God exists and nor is it a psychological coping mechanism that assuages troubled Western consciences. It is the truth. My interiority and humanity’s exteriority: nothing escapes God’s subversive grace, that perhaps looks like a photographic negative because it is our responsibility to develop it.

This book is a collection of reflections on the Gospel of Mark that Mathews shared on Irish national radio in 2006. I didn’t know they were on. I missed them all. I am now deeply grateful to have copies. It is a beautiful and stunning work by a uniquely articulate fellow pilgrim.

Your Correspondent, Knows drinkers often have writing problems

Dorothy Sayers was a close friend of CS Lewis, she hung out often with Tolkein and she wrote bucketloads of best-selling detective novels. It reflects poorly on us that her writings on Christianity are so little read and rarely discussed. I have sought, in vain, for copies of her play The Man Born To Be King and while my college library has a copy of some essays from close to the time they were written, us chumps who weren’t around in the 1940’s have to make do with ugly reproductions of the original texts which are hard to read and in the case of my particular copy, missing most of page 39.

She was the first woman to be offered the prestigious Lambeth doctorate by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Temple) but she turned it down. The reason she gave was that she thought her potency as an advocate for the pale Galillean would be strengthened by not being seen as someone under a licence from ecclesial authority. One can only speculate that a woman so fiercely committed to orthodox and ecclesial practice was influenced to reject the honour because she had given birth to an “illegitimate child” and wanted to save the church from scandal should this horrendous fact ever be revealed.

Few tricks of Satan were as successful as convincing those who worship an “illegitimate child” that children should be the subject and topic of shame.

The Mind of the Maker exhibits all the same qualities I have enjoyed in everything else I can track down by Sayers. The prose is crisp and sharp and witty and argumentative. The logic is impeccable. The whole effect is refreshing. It helps that her emphases so closely match my own: dogma matters, work should be something from which we reap joy, the market economy is warping our moral vision.

So in The Mind of the Maker she more fully develops an argument that began in early essays. Humans are marked by having a mind capable of creativity. For Sayers, this is the definitive aspect of our being. And the argument in this book is that the nature of that creativity reflects the very nature of reality in that it is Trinitarian.

Therefore, we could propose that Sayers says because authors are, God exists.

Regardless of your stance on the whole Jesus-as-the-son-of-God question, you have to admit that a series of essays that claim that the creative process mimics the character and action of God is pretty audacious.

For Sayers, all creativity is trinitarian but she focuses on the writer because that is what she knows. In short, here is her argument:

The Bible says that God created reality.
The Bible goes on to reveal God as a trinity – one God in three distinct but inter-penetrating persons.
For Sayers, the Christian claim is thus that God the Father composed the idea of reality and redemption, God the Son is the means through which creation and redemption is actualised and God the Spirit is the power of God made available to the subjective experiences of those persons who exist within reality.

Can that be followed?

Sayers then turns her attention to human beings when they create. Firstly, they get an idea. The idea has to be fleshed out, to speak in a simultaneously idiomatic and precise fashion. And when the idea is worked out as a product, it is set free to exert its influence depending on how well it is constructed.

So Rembrandt has the idea of how to paint the return of the prodigal son. Then he has to actually exert the energy to make that real. Then that painting astonishes us as we sit slackjawed in front of it on our trip to St. Petersburg. Or, because she thinks this trinitarian pattern of creativity holds for all our creations, not just the great ones or the ones done by Christians, Dan Brown has the idea for a story, then he writes the story and then we throw the Da Vinci Code across the room in frustrated boredom.

Like every argument for the existence of God, this can come across as sterile theorizing. But while the Internet Atheist is likely the only person who’ll get very excited about it, the benefit of the argument is how it honours and investigates human creativity. This is a strangely compelling little book and the direction it compels the reader is to writing. I have never before realised how deeply satisfying the task of writing fiction might be for my spiritual life. But Sayers is able to give us a glimpse into her vocation as a teller of stories and it is tempting.

I’d love someone with more knowledge about these things to tell me how the following argument influenced or didn’t influence John Howard Yoder in his famous claim that the grain of the universe goes with those who carry crosses. For Sayers, the grain of the universe flows with the creative act. I don’t think that these are incompatible positions, but Yoder is more Biblically accurate and more anthropologically generous. Still, this is not the sort of thing you find in a contemporary apologetics text:

… Newton, being a rational man, concluded that the two kinds of behaviour [apples and planets] resembled one another – not because the planets had copied the apples, or the apples copied the planets, but – because both were examples of the working of one and the same principle. If you took a cross-section of the physical universe at the point marked “Solar System” and again at the point marked “Apple”, the same pattern was exhibited; and the natural and proper conclusion was that this pattern was part of a universal structure, which ran through the world of visible phenomena as the grain runs through wood. Similarly, we may take a cross-section of the spiritual universe at the point marked “Christian Theology” and at the point marked “Art”, and find at both precisely the same pattern of the creative mind; it is open to us to draw a similar conclusion.

But if we do – if we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or pain, or music or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same patterns is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman.

– Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 148-149.

Your Correspondent, He gets drunk on words and hence is rarely perfectly sober

The conceit of The Age of Miracles is that it is a novel about the end of the world, like all the other novels about the end of the world that we are writing because as a culture we can’t imagine any hope big enough to keep the world going against the forces of inertia, entropy or some other invisible entity that inexorably exerts itself against us.

In the case of this novel, that force is time itself. Without giving too much away, this is a book about what happens when the globe itself becomes sluggish. But it isn’t. It is told on the micro-scale of a family of a doctor and a drama teacher and their 11 year old girl, who is our narrator.

Remember when you were 11? The world was still experienced as a confusing mess of many different things that presented themselves to you without any cohesive sense of how they should fit together. And when you were 11 you didn’t know what was about to happen at 12 or at 13. The whole of your short life is the entirety of world history to you and all of a sudden puberty is about to hit. Nothing will be the same. The things that allowed you to navigate through the social spaces you inhabit were about to shift under the strange unspoken power of desire. The certainties that marked out the one coherent territory of life, home, were about to be shaken by the granting of sight to see how complex adult relationships were. And the qualities of life that gave you comfort – your competencies and interests and your sense of time and place – were all about to be accelerated and slowed in random ways by the physical metamorphosis around the corner.

11 was still a pretty deadly time though.

And so this novel charts the slow disintegration of human life as a way to see inside the soul of a girl on that cusp.

Fiendishly clever, eh? But this is not a book that is up itself. It is easy to read and reminded me of those summer days (at about the age of 11) when I first discovered Z For Zachariah. It is tonally very different from that apocalyptic tale about a teenaged girl but it is in the same territory of readability. This child is going through dreadful things, but it isn’t burdensome to join her.

The refrain that lingers in Julia’s narration is: “It is amazing how little we knew”. The effect of lies and the incomplete assumed knowledge passed on to her by her authorities are the obstacles that get in her way, trouble her and I suppose connect her to the larger disaster unfolding all around. But for the most part, this novel resonates in how it articulates this stage of life so vividly through implicit analogy with the “slowing” and its effects.

The eucalyptus first arrived in California in the 1850s. Imported from Australia, the seeds crossed five thousand miles of open ocean before reaching the soil of our state. The trunks were supposed to be a miracle wood, perfect for a hundred different purposes, railroad ties especially. But the wood turned out to be useless. It curled as it dried and split when nailed. The state’s eucalyptus industry went bust before it ever boomed.

But the trees remained – and they spread. They were everywhere in my youth, and in my grandfather’s youth, too. Their slender silhouettes once swayed along the coastal canyons, the beach bluffs,the soccer fields. Their long leaves floated in the swimming pools and the gutters. They drifted along the banks of saltwater lagoons. For over one hundred and fifty years, the eucalyptus thrived in California, surviving every calamity: earthquake, drought, the invention of the automobile. But now the trees were suffering en masse. The leaves were losing their color. Orange sap oozed from openings in the trunks. Little by little, they were dying.

– Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles, p. 267-268.

Your Correspondent, Hears from the future that the past still exists

I might suggest that Aidan Mathews is either the most under-rated figure in Irish literature or I have horrendous taste in books. But if I put the matter that way it would be unfair to Mathews because the chances are that I have an underdeveloped literary palate and still Mathews deserves vastly more attention. English speaking pastors and theologians need to start paying heed to him aswell. In our love of Dostoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson, we have demonstrated ourselves to be able to appreciate wisdom even when it isn’t structured as a list of Papal decrees or systematic propositions. Let me urge you to track down some of Mathews’ poetry, plays, short stories or this, his novel. It will be worth it.

Muesli at Midnight is a discursive novel. It isn’t plot-driven. It features extensive internal reflection from the two main characters, two medical students falling in love and then extensive reflection based in their dialogue. It also features the skeleton of a late Archbishop of Dublin who accompanies them on a cycle around the island of Ireland raising funds for AIDS treatment.

This journey isn’t charted with the kind of geographic enthusiasm that I would have liked. As someone who has fallen in love with this island, I would want lots of descriptions of locale and locality. Instead, the journey that we go on is a sort of voyage through the human condition, never veering far from investigations of sex, faith and death. Ultimately, it is a book that features two annoying know-it-all undergrads, portrayed with such generosity of spirit that we can’t help but love their arrogant naivety. We also can’t help but be touched as they discover just how deep their love is for each other.

Here is Noel, a hearse-driver who gives Theo and Felicity a lift at one point, talking about how he keeps his bright teenaged daughter from reading the Bible without guidance since the worst thing that can happen to an intelligent young person is that they get hold of an idea and run with it:

‘I mean the Sermon on the Mount. If you took that to heart, you couldn’t go on living. Not the way we survive, anyhow. You’d have to commit a kind of suicide, and start all over. From the foundations. Which is fine, of course, except that you have to clear the site first, and the site happens to be your home, a house on a twenty-year mortgage.’

– Aidan Mathews, Muesli at Midnight, p. 237.

 
And that, my friends, is about as good a paragraph on how difficult an idea being born-again actually is for Irish people today as you can hope to find.

Your Correspondent, His personal motto is shrugging his shoulder

Oh woe is the way for the Christian committed to non-violence. Even your friends call you “grossly immoral”!

There is, of course, a small minority of people known as pacifists who reject violence altogether. Their courage and firmness of principle, often in the teeth of public revilement, are much to be admired. But pacifists are not just people who abhor violence. Almost everyone does that, with the exception of a thin sprinkling of sadists and psychopaths. For pacifism to be worth arguing with, it must be more than some pious declaration that war is disgusting. Cases with which almost everyone would agree are boring, however sound they may be. The only pacifist worth arguing with is one who rejects violence absolutely. And that means rejecting not just wars or revolutions, but refusing to tap an escaped murderer smartly over the skull, enough to stun but not kill him, when he is about to turn his machine gun on a classroom of small children. Anyone who was in a situation to do this and failed to do so would have a lot of explaining to do at the next meeting of the PTA. In any strict sense of the word, pacifism is grossly immoral.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, p. 183-184.

In this short, witty, sprawling book, Eagleton takes on the ten major objections to why anyone should ever thing the last of the schoolmen, Karl Marx, still has relevance for the world we live in. If this is political apologetics, then Christian evangelists could learn alot from how broad the references are, how comfortable Eagleton is in moving between disciplines and fundamentally, how enjoyable the book is as a book.

Still and all Terry, there is a kind of pacifism that locates its source not in some purity of thought, but in the purity of action of a Jewish carpenter. That pacifism is fascinating without being grossly immoral but more to the point: it is in harmony with the very nature of created reality.

Your Correspondent, Always preferred C to C++ because he believes in a classless society

Douglas Coupland wrote a brilliant biography of Marshal McLuhan called “You Know Nothing Of My Work!” and I got to read it this week. On a Kindle! McLuhan would have hated that. Considering my last post was a hastily scribbled diatribe against Adam Gopnik’s power-play dressed up as defence of individualism, Coupland’s book is a rare thing – a piece of writing that takes the faith of its subject seriously.

Here is an example of how Coupland, whose own work is so heavily inspired by McLuhan, takes his distinctive voice to the job of praising this strange, angry, Catholic prophet:

But boy-oh-boy-boy did he string together words in a way that now seems like dense, fabulous poetry! And he saw the world as a book created by God, and believed that there is nothing in it that cannot be understood – and that we fail to try understanding it at our peril.

– Douglas Coupland, You Know Nothing Of My Work!, p. 17.

Your Correspondent, This is the best introduction to McLuhan.