crookedshore

The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver

The basic outline of 'The Post-Birthday World' here is not unusual. Woman (Irina McGovern) in settled relationship is tempted to kiss an attractive, charismatic snooker player (Ramsey Acton). The novel unfolds in alternate chapters detailing the direction her life takes if, on the one hand, she resists the temptation, and on the other, she succumbs.

The author, Lionel Shriver also wrote the shocking novel and runaway literary success ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ which I read a few years ago, and it was on the strength of it that I purchased this one.

It’s a massive, 600 page tome, much too long, but its central idea is stated early on, in the story line where Irina resisted the temptation, it is said,

‘She had only been alerted to her own happiness by a narrow brush against an alternative future in which it is annihilated’ (pg 82).

By it’s end, in the opposite storyline we are told,

‘She has learned the hard way that there is no safety. That there never was any safety. So it is the illusion of safety that she misses, nothing more.’ (pg 589)

And this to me was the problem with this novel. I found it deeply cynical and cold, exampled for me in the fact that there was no lovemaking, only sex. Actually it was really only f**king according to the text. And I’m not sure I want to buy into an idea that you can only appreciate what goodness you enjoy in relationship by toying with its possible annihilation.

We are offered the scenario where Irina faces an inevitable choice between the steady and safe Lawrence and the exciting but dangerous Acton. The one leads to illusory security, predictability but professional frustration, the other to insecurity but great sex and professional success. Choose your poison, but you’ll always be haunted by what might have been.

When Shriver takes residence in the head of Irina, she writes confidently and often memorably. But boy, when she switches to dialogue she crashes and burns. There were times I was in the middle of what I imagine a Mills and Boon novel would be like. There is just no way people talk like this even in the midst of the thrill of new or illicit loves.

It’s an interesting read, certainly thought-provoking, but I’ll not be rushing back.

The Book of Dave - Will Self

First novel of the New Year was a strange one. The Book of Dave by Will Self is a book about London in the recent past and the distant future. The eponymous Dave is a cabbie whose self-loathing and failed marriage leads him to despair and eventual severe mental illness. He writes a book into which he spills his bile, misogyny, racism and his beliefs about how men and women should relate in an ideal world.

He buries this book one night in the garden of his ex-wife and her new husband in the hope that his estranged son will one day discover it and find out what kind of a man his father was. Only he never finds it.

The book is uncovered 500 years later, after London has been reduced to an archipelago by rising seas. Those who find it use it to create a whole new religion and culture, with Dave, the writer, as the deity. Adherents are called ‘davines’, sinful people are ‘chellish’ after Michele his ex-wife. Men and women are kept separate and childrearing responsibilities are shared, mummies keep the children for half the week, then on Changeover Day they are handed over to the daddies. Most of the fatherly responsibilities however are undertaken by the opares, adolescent girls who have not yet borne children of their own.

People greet one another with the blessing ‘Where to guv?’, and the formulaic response ‘To Nu Lundun’ .

Chapters alternate between the life of Dave and his declining mental health, and the adventures of residents of the island of Ham, which turns out to be Hampstead Heath after the flood.

A couple of things. The chapters dealing with Dave are compelling, painting a dark but sometimes funny picture of contemporary London. The alternate future-set chapters are more of a struggle, not least because they feature a specially created language called Mockni which is like a mix between text-speech and cockney (the book even comes with a dictionary). And whilst the whole thing is very dark, it also has moments of great humour.

The book leads to all sorts of questions. Could a religion and ritual be made from the stuff of anyone’s life? What would the world look like if it was shaped in my images and reflective of my darker thoughts and prejudices?

The book is critical of dominating religious powers and this passage on the contemporary church from the close of the book is revealing:

“After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until, speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self-murderers – they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit.

Clear across the flat lands of Essex the spires stabbed up at the sky, abandoned launch pads from which the soul ships had long since blasted off. Inside them, clad in laughably obsolete uniforms – frilly laboratory coats, army surplices – the priests did kitchen-garden juju with corn dollies and ewers full of sour water. They were marionettes and mime artists, fifth-rate impressionists at the end of the world pier, officiating over a state cult for which the state no longer had any use”

It’s hard to hear it despite the brilliant writing.

It’s ambitious, thoughtful, funny, sharply insightful at times but ultimately I’m not sure it all holds together. Self reaches too much for some of his metaphors, sometimes pushes the parallels beyond the nth degree and though love is redemptive at the end it seems a bit contrived.

Maybe if I was more familiar with London it would mean more.

Reading the Bible With the Dead - John L Thompson

I just love the title of this book - Reading the Bible With the Dead, (which is not to be confused with Reading the Bible With the Damned, which I blogged about here). Someone saw me with it in my hand and, intrigued by the title, asked me what it was about. Jokingly, I replied it was a handbook on leading home group bible studies. He believed me and commented that he needed to buy it.

The subtitle is 'what you can learn from the history of exegesis that you can't learn from exegesis alone'.

It amazes me how we can excise the more difficult passages from the bible. I've blogged about this before briefly, commenting on the tendency of preachers simply to ignore difficult passages, even when they appear in the middle of the texts under consideration.The book tackles some of the controversial/difficult/most often avoided passages of the bible that have recently been resurrected by feminist theologians or liberationists for instance. By examining in brief what questions they are asking, Thompson then trawls through commentaries form the patristics, the medieval and reformation eras and finds surprising commonality of insight. Each chapter ends with things to learn form how the passages have been treated historically.

Texts dealt with include the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter in Judges 11, the imprecatory Psalms and Gomer & Hosea. It tends to get a little same-y or repetitive if read in a sitting, but as a book of reference it is invaluable.

A Community Called Atonement - Scot McKnight

Since finishing my undergraduate studies in theology I have read very few books on systematics. This is not a confession, just a statement of fact. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, far from it. My Prof was John Thompson who had studied under Barth and was a world expert. A fine gentleman as well. He was a gracious teacher who made sytematics exciting, even thrilling sometimes I remember him talking of those places in theology where understanding blurs into paradox - and he wasn't frightened by it (unusual for a Presbyterian).

Anyway, I've read very little since then because the sterile debates of we students often found ourselves in. They just never got anywhere. And as I got back involved in work after study, involved in the real sectarian and community divisions that afflicted us in NI, I realised that unless these theological arguments cut some street-level ice, I wasn't interested. I believed and continued to believe passionately in good theology, I just didn't have the time for sterile debate.

Anyway, I was reminded of all this last week (in a good way) as I read Scot McKnight's latest offering, A Community Called Atonement, my first book of theology in years. This is not a review of the book, but I do want to acknowledge it as the kind of book I wished I had access to in those early years after graduation.

Though I got a bit bogged down in the middle as he building his case, memories of those earlier days came back, the book was wonderfully applied, and the journey through it was worth it to get to the last section on Atonement as Missional Praxis - one of the best examples of applied theology I've encountered.

"I stand here on the threshold of a doorway that few enter: atonement is something done not only by God for us, but also something we do with God for others. This door opens to those who are learning that atonement is also praxis. That we suggest that atonement is also praxis is not an attack on the view that atonement is something God does for us. Instead, it is the conviction that atonement is embodied in what  God does for us in such a way that we are summoned to participate with God in his redemptive work" (p117)

Scot's blog is well worth checking out as an example of careful, thoughtful scholarship,  presented in an irenic spirit. And for a relatively brief and accessible book on atonement theology, this is excellent.

Claiborne, McLaren and Peterson

Three books completed in recent weeks which have been interesting and worth a look. Firstly, McLaren and Claiborne. I met the author of Irresistable Revolution on his visit to Belfast. What I really appreciated was the consistency of his character. I first encountered him through a Speaking of Faith podcast and found him quiet and humble. The book seemed to confirm it and meeting him in person sealed it. The guy is very genuine. Mark H made the point that in our youth (quite a few years ago) we were challenged to a form of radical living by the likes of George Verwer, but he always managed to load us with a burden of guilt. Shane woo-ed his listeners into radical faith in an inspiring and challenging way.

Brian McLaren's latest Everything Must Change is a good read and again is designed to challenge the reader in the face of the crises facing the world. The analysis of the problem is not new (crises of security, equity and prosperity - shades of  the French revolution I thought!!), but the packaging was. So to the solution - a revolution of hope. I'm no expert on McLaren, I've only read his first and last books, in neither of which I found him to be a prose stylist. But his passion is clear. I've met him a couple of times. The second time was in the Sojourners house in DC, we literally bumped into each other, and he recognised me from a previous encounter in Belfast some months earlier. I took that as a mark of the character of the man - he was not indulging the celebrity circuit, but was truly seeking to encounter people.

There are gaps in the work. Craig M wouldn't be happy with me if I didn't mention that he doesn't engage with Paul. He doesn't. Nor is it clear the place of the Holy Spirit. But it's worth the read, if only to see some of the statistics he presents which are truly staggering and which establish his thesis that we are living in a suicide machine.

Lastly, Eugene Peterson's The Jesus Way his latest addition to the Spiritual Theology series. I found this to be a profoundly political  book. His treatment of the theology and practice of Herod/Pharisees, Caiaphas/Essenes and Josephus/Zealots was one of the best critiques of US/UK international relations I've read. The shape of his analysis was echoed in McLaren's book also, indeed it seemed to be McLaren was either borrowing directly from Peterson or they were using the same source material.

Of the three, Peterson is the most lyrical and engaging, and indeed the most scholarly. Will any of the three find much space among right wing? Probably not.

Incidentally, I found Jim Wallis's introduction to Claiborne's book a little crass, remarking how Shane Claiborne as a young radical 'reminds me of me at that age'!! Come on!

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

Every so often comes a novel the finishing of which leads to a sabbatical. Let me explain, I read a lot, but because I read slowly that doesn’t necessarily amount to a lot of books. But since June I’ve averaged about a book a week.

And let me say something else about my reading. As a ‘theologian’ of sorts, I read comparatively few theological books. Two years after I finished my undergraduate degree in theology I noticed that I was only reading theology books, or books from the evangelical mainstream. I wasn’t pleased. The result was a fast from these types of books during 1997. Not one; preferring to read novels exclusively.

This was prompted for several reasons. I found I was frustrated by the poor quality of writing in many of the mainstream ‘christian’ books. Too many clichés, too many re-hashed sermons which shouldn’t have been hashed in the first place. Too much celebrity status, cheaply earned. But my spirit was being fed by good writing, by literary novels and poetry. Hence the fast.

Now I read novels as a matter of course, with the occasional book of theology, carefully chosen, to salt the mix. Often however, I find that I am consuming books rather than engaging them.

That pattern is sometimes interrupted though. Sometimes I read a book that is so compelling or moving that I must cease reading for a time. Sometimes I need to recover some stability. Sometimes, I must mourn the ending of a narrative world in which I have been engrossed. It’s a rare thing and all the more precious for that.

I’m in one of those Sabbaths now, occasioned by the completion of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Padraig recommended it too me as we sat on the floor catching one another up in someone else’s house. Despite the setting—wartime Munich in the control of the Nazis, and the characters—an adopted child, a poor family, bullies and war-makers, this book is wonderful.

Death is the surprisingly engaging narrator. Funny, wise, tender, self-deprecating and haunted by the humans he takes. We are not offered the standard ‘Allies Good/Nazis Bad’ equation. All war is evil. The only good to be found is in those individuals who retain their humanity the face of atrocity. These souls, when Death collects them, are ready to go and easy to carry because so much of them have been given away in favour of others.

The book is about courage and commitment, and being true to your principles whatever the cost. It is about the enduring importance of relationships both of blood and common humanity. And most of all it is about the power of words, to destroy and to create.

Leisel is the main character, the eponymous Book Thief. She is adopted into the Hubermann family and her relationship with her adoptive father Hans Hubermann is nourished in his night-time visits to calm her after bad dreams. Like here:

Possibly the only good to come out of these nightmares was that it brought Hans Hubermann, her new papa, into the room, to soothe her, to love her.

He came in every night and sat with her. The first couple of times he simply stayed -- a stranger to kill the aloneness. A few night after that, he whispered, "Shhh, I'm here, it's all right." After three weeks, he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man's gentleness, his thereness. The girl knew from the outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear midscream, and he would not leave.

A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY -- Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.

Be warned however. The ending is traumatic. Death is gentle enough to warn the reader early on of what is in store, but that doesn’t rob it of its punch. Zusak risks slipping into melodrama, but I think the overall sweep of the story and the power of the writing keeps him on track.

So I’m on a sabbatical from reading for a while.

Is this my book of the year? All I can say is that if I find a better one this year or next I’ll be especially blessed.

The Road/Kingdom Come

I read these two dystopian novels in July - I guess it must have been the unseasonable weather which drove me to them. That, or the nightly news reports of flooded streets which disrupted life in the UK and Ireland. anyway, I read them both, recalling that odd period in my late teens when I went through a phase of solo addiction to horror movies - a phase I've since grown out of incidentally.

Now I've never read any J G Ballard (Kingdom Come), but read a terrific review of the book last year and it remained in my memory. I'll not be rushing to read more. I couldn't decide whether this was  clever satire, or  just clunky story telling, and it was too much of a  murder mystery novel to quite capture me. I couldn't really see the connections between what I know and what may yet be, to sustain the deceit, even though the dangers of consumerism are written all round us. It was also a little preachy. Every few chapters, one or other of the central characters delivered a monologue as if Ballard himself wasn't confident that the story was holding up.

Cormac McCarthy I have read before, so I was interested when he won the Pulitzer for The Road, a post-apocalyptic father/son road trip through a grey and ashen country, never named. There were hints of Neville Shute and 'On the Beach', which I read as a teenager on babysitting duties. (I used to babysit for a family, one of the children is now a medical doctor, and they had no TV in the house. Jennifer, the mother, would leave out a selection of books for me each evening, and I would chose and finish one each night).

Once again though I wasn't convinced. There were times I thought that McCarthy had retained the last remaining thesaurus in the world and was intent on getting full use of it. And while he does menace extraordinarily well, I have never warmed to the characters in the books I have read. Over the years I have read far, far more Pulitzer winners that Booker, or Orange or whatever other local prizes there are and this is the first one that I failed to enjoy.

It wasn't only the weather that was disappointing in July.

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan

I guess all of us have regrets of words or deeds done or undone which we wish could be scratched from the record. We may sometimes even wonder what might have happened if we had done other that what we did.

McEwen’s books tend to revolve round a single, out of the ordinary event crashing into the ordinary lives of the subjects – like the observed plane crash in Saturday. The story then unfolds from that point, tracing how lives are reflected in and through the event.

On Chesil Beach is not the same. In it, the central event didn’t happen—a wedding night not consummated and a recovering word unspoken. Unlike previous books this central event happens towards the end of the book and the lives of Edward and Florence are changed utterly. McEwen writes:

“All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience—if only he had had them both at once—would surely have seen them through….This is how the entire course of a life can be changed—by doing nothing.”

The blend of love and patience has intrigued me, there's something theological about it. Edward, awkward and desperate to consummate his love with his new wife lacked the awareness to recognise her need for time, so intent was he on his own fulfilment. Love itself was not enough. Love is a pursuit of sorts, that puts the capture of the object in the control of that object. Otherwise it's just bullying. How many of us, desperate to love, have quashed or crowded the object of our passions? All from lack of patience.

Something More Positive on Cycling

Read two fine books on cycling during the Tour so far. The first is 'The Hour' by Michael Hutchinson. He weaves into his own personal attempt on the Hour record the mystique and mythology of the challenge which has engaged most of the greats. It follows hard on the Graham Obree story at the cinema.

Hutchinson is a Northern Ireland guy who had some success in time trialling in the UK. If you know anything about the Hour record you'll know the outcome of the book, but it is no less fascinating for that. And even if you know nothing about bikes its an engaging and often very funny read.

The second is 'Tour de France-the history, the legend, the riders' by Graeme Fife. He tells the story of Le Tour as he recounts his own assaults on some of the iconic mountains that have graced it. He begins with Alpe d'Huez incidentally and follows with Col du Glandon. He wrote about that mountain as I felt it last year, particularly as the road leaves the village of Le Rivier d'Allemond. The road soon fell away into a murderous but short descent before rising again at 12% and above. It was the closest I've come to tears of despair on the bike. Fife captures it well and lifted my spirits no end - it wasn't just me!

His writing can be a little opinionated at times. He has little time for moody Italian riders, appears to hugely admire Robbie McEwan, and he can therefore do no wrong. But he tells the stories and legends of cycling very well and often with a wonderful turn of phrase.

Again if you have no background in cycling this book will astonish you with the tales of camaraderie on  the road, of astonishing bravery and endurance, and some of the photos of roads in the 30s and 40s are amazing.

He rounds off the book with chapters devoted to each of the tours from 98 to 2006. These may not be as accessible to the rookie but some of the background stories that often go unreported are great.

It seems to me that cycling turns up more than its fair share of philosophers and poets. Where Cantona is the best that football can produce the wisdom, insight and courage of cyclists is remarkable. I guess it must be something to do with the necessity of performing always at the limit in the face of incredible challenges. Riding through pain and illness for hours and hours each day at least gives a rider the time to contemplate. What else can you do when you can hardly grip the handlebars because your hands are ripped raw from a n encounter with the road. Or you can't pull on the bars because you've cracked some vertebrae or a collarbone.

The Short Day Dying - Peter Hobbs

The Short Day Dying is a strange book. It presents itself as a first person memoir from a year in the life of Charles Wenmoth, a young Methodist lay preacher and apprentice blacksmith, in the farthest reaches of Cornwall. The year in question is 1870.

Nothing happens. And therein lies its beauty. This is a stark, melancholic and ultimately redemptive story (perhaps!) painted in sombre hues that reflect the harshness of his life. If this story did not present a faith journey along some roads that I found profoundly familiar, I’m not sure it could have sustained my interest. As it was, I finished it in the wee hours of the morning, unable to put it down as I ached for this sad and lonely man, utterly bewildered by faith as he struggled with doubt, disappointment and the disinterest and apathy of ordinary people to the things of faith.

At it’s centre is a love story that occupies the middle section of the book, only Charles lacks the sensibility to understand that what was going on in him was a process of falling in love. His head is so full of the rational arguments for faith and the mechanical accounting of good works against bad that he has no place for his emotional life, except in so far as the effects of the changing seasons on the countryside can stir him.

I found myself wondering whether this is a blind spot of fundamentalist religion. When life is lived with reference to certainties; black/white, in/out, right/wrong, the true complexities of living, like love and loss are uncharted territory. Wenmouth was skilled at assessing what, for him, were certain and sure, but the true inner life where love dwells was closed. So, though he pastored people, he never really understood them. Or himself. The awareness of love came late to him, and only after his crisis.

Harriet French is the young woman dying of TB who manages, despite the evidence, to retain a vital faith in the face of terrible suffering. Wenmouth struggles with her strength in trial and when he eventually comes down with illness himself it marks the beginning of his struggles with doubt. He questions his desire for heaven by looking back to his chaste relationship with Harriet saying, after her death, ‘There has been a Heaven here and it has been lost why should I long for a new one.’ (p169) (note the sentence structure takes a while to read into, there is little by way of punctuation and it’s very direct and spare.

Thereafter the story shifts from the church to the forge as he undergoes a white hot testing.

Above all this is a story of faith, from the simple certainties of his conversion, the embrace of service to the church, through the dark crisis brought on by loneliness, illness and anger, to a new place where the faith he embraces, if indeed he does, is mixed with doubt and questioning. He describes his faith thus,

“I knew my faith were still there a hard kernel inside of me but deep inside and diminishing. Faith is a stone I could forget were there and live with always and not know what the oppressive weight in me were….It appears that doubt and disbelief have visited me like a shuddering gale brought from far out to sea and I have been caught in open ground with no shelter to come into.” (p181).

As I got further into the book I wondered how it would end, and when I got there I was delighted. It was appropriate. The book which opens with a very direct statement about the old certainties of the days being short and the need to invest time wisely, and ends with the clarity of a simple question…’How else shall we be saved?’

Some may interpret the conclusion as a loss of faith. I disagree. For me, the story’s ending was a new found faith, one tested in and through fire, which leaves room for exploration. I was reminded of Brueggemann’s argument of the move from Psalm 1, and the simple well-ordered life, through the agony of Psalm 73 where the world of Psalm 1 collapses, to a new place in Psalm 150, from orientation to disorientation to reorientation. Or even Fowler’s stages of faith.

Here is a sample from towards the end of the book which moved me:

“The bells still sounded they came discordant across the distance hauling in the early hours of the new year. It were an alluring sound the only sign I had that human life continued tonight. But they called to no one the night were empty. And I saw that there will be no kingdom builded here none of Heaven’s glories to limn this earth. The light of Salvation came once like a beam through the night and shone among these hills but the clouds have thickened and I do not see it now. Feels I am much in need of some light.

The bells grew longer. Seemed for a brief moment that they had slowed and dragged time to slowing with them. That I might breathe of it and delay my breathing until I held time within my lungs that I could make it pause until I had found its measure and we breathed together. But the slowness of my breath were not enough and still the bells returned their toll strange and ghostly in the night the sound lingering like a wraith among the hills before fleeing. And then silence and the year were gone into eternity. It is a new one now.

The years will not be restored to me. They turn over and run in until all this is gone before they pull life from me I can feel the tugging at my chest and belly and the grievous aching pain. My arms and legs too heavy to draw against it. I know what this feeling is it is loss and it is harrowing and I am afraid. I do not know how I will live with it seems it will take everything from me. Strange how much of an animal I feel myself to be at this moment just flesh and bone encasing an empty core and an instinct to cry out for the loneliness of it. Where is the soul that binds this life together?” (p.195/6)

What is that grinding and harrowing loss that frightens him? Is it the loss of love? Or of faith? How would you know the difference?

This is not a book for light reading. If you have not had to walk down any of the roads that Wenmouth walked, it’s probably not for you. But for a challenging, beautifully observed, skeletal, dark but compelling book, this was terrific.