Books this year: a book diary

While I enjoyed this book immensely, I don’t know that I’d recommend reading it cover-to-cover at one go, mostly because it can get overwhelming at times. The chapters are mostly independent from one another, which permits browsing, though one ought to read the introduction before anything else. It is, essentially, a collection of essays about the history and development of a dozen or so words - wit, free, life, conscience/conscious, and world among them.

Each of the words he writes about has a sense that he labels the “dangerous” sense, dangerous because it is a relatively recent sense of the word, which has generally become prominent over all previous senses of the word, leading to mis-readings of works older than a hundred and fifty years or so. One example (out of many) is the use of “world” in the Gloria Patri to mean “ages” or “eternity” instead of “earth” or “globe”.

While there was plenty in the book I didn’t know before reading it, there was nothing unexpected, no sense of a word or development of meaning that stopped me in my tracks - until i got to World, and more specifically to the uses of “world” in the New Testament. “World” translates two sets of Greek-Latin pairs, ge-mundus (world in the physical sense) and aion-saeculum (world in the sense of “age” or “period”). When Jesus talks in Matthew’s Gospel about “this world or the world to come,” most people assume he’s talking about this mundus or the next, heaven, the afterlife. But he’s not - he’s talking about the next aion, which started with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

I can’t convey in a blog post how much this blew my mind, and I won’t try. But I read it shortly after hearing Bp. Ken Myers teach for five hours about eschatology (go here for the audio of the conference) - and the next day I read this sermon by N.T. Wright. I’ll end with the relevant paragraph:

“[The book of] Acts, which of course begins with the story of the Ascension, never once speaks in the way […our] whole tradition […] so easily does. At no point in the whole book does anyone ever speak, or even sound as though they’re going to speak, of those who follow Jesus following him to heaven. Nobody says, ‘well, he’s gone on before and we’ll go and join him’. And for a very good reason. When the New Testament speaks of God’s kingdom it never, ever, refers to heaven pure and simple. It always refers to God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, as Jesus himself taught us to pray. We have slipped into the easygoing language of ‘the kingdom of heaven’ in the sense of God’s kingdom being ‘heaven’, but the early church never spoke like that. The point about heaven is that heaven is the control room for earth. Heaven is the CEO’s office from which earth is run – or it’s supposed to be, which is why we’re told to pray for that to become a reality. And the point of the Ascension, paradoxically in terms of the ways in which generations of western Christians have seen it, is that this is the moment when that prayer is gloriously answered.”

Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism that this novel could be read as an African (or North African, anyway) response to and reversal of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The narrator (who remains nameless) tells the story of a Sudanese man who travels to London for school in the 1910s, but instead spends his time having sex with lots of European women - some of whom commit suicide, and one of whom he kills - and then returns to a village on the Nile to start his life over. Except he can’t really let go of the past, and soon after confiding in the narrator (who also studied in London, a generation later), he disappears during a flood - whether his death is accidental or suicide remains open (I suppose it’s not entirely clear that he’s dead at all, as his body is never found).

In a way, reading the novel reminded me of watching The Prestige or Memento: you know Mustafa’s story after 45 pages, and then he disappears. But as the novel goes on, the narrator covers the same ground again and again, peeling back another layer of the story each time, so that when the climactic moment occurs, it stops you in your tracks, even though it’s already been explicitly referred to a half-dozen times.

The big question this novel raises - like Heart of Darkness - is whether the evil in Kurtz and Mustafa was already in them, or if they were somehow infected with it by the foreign land they sojourned in. And, naturally, neither novel answers the question - the texts allow either as possibilities. The question in Season of Migration is further complicated by the setting - post-colonial Sudan - so one can ask if the violence Mustafa does to the women of London is learned from the colonizers.

It’s a challenging novel, like Heart of Darkness - not to belabor the comparison too much - short but incredibly dense, largely ambiguous, raising a lot of questions and answering few, if any. Both are, naturally, well worth the effort, and as relevant to the times as the day they were written.

It might seem a bit odd that Lewis’ last book is, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “an introduction to Medieval and Renaissance literature,” but it is. He’s generally remembered for either Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters or The Chronicles of Narnia, and the fact that he was, by training and profession, a medievalist is largely forgotten.

The subtitle is a bit misleading, however. It’s not, as one might expect, a list of medieval authors or works that Lewis thinks everyone should read. Rather, it’s his attempt to re-construct for modern readers the worldview - or cosmology, maybe - of the average European of the Middle Ages; Lewis calls it simply “the Model.”

He begins with an overview of the literature (often incomplete or fragmentary) that was transmitted to the Middle Ages from the Classical and ‘Seminal’ (c. AD 205-533) periods. Medieval poets and authors placed a great deal of emphasis on following ‘the authorities,’ so the literature that did survive the Dark Ages was of extreme importance to them. Having an idea of what books they had - and perhaps more importantly, which books they didn’t have - aids one in the attempt to look at the universe like they did.

Lewis then examines the different parts of the Model from the top down, or the outside in. He begins with the Heavens, from the Primum Mobile down to the Moon, where the Heavens end, discussing both how the work and the beings that live in them. He then discusses the Earth, focusing primarily on humanity: the Soul, the Body, the Past.

The book is, as Lewis says in the preface, “based on a course of lectures given more than once at Oxford” - which makes it sound rather dull (as does my brief summary of it, I imagine). It often reads like a lecture - which is not to say that it’s boring, but merely to note the style. There are far more passing references to things Lewis expects his audience to know than in his sermons or books like Mere Christianity. It is obviously intended for a smaller readership; I don’t think I’d recommend it to someone who didn’t know Dante from Chaucer, or either from Milton. (I know that sounds elitist, and maybe it is. But I’ll willingly admit to being elitist.) It’s well worth the time, though, for anyone who in any way engages the art or philosophy or culture of the Middle Ages. Lewis does an excellent job (as usual) of slightly altering our angle of vision, and so showing us something completely new where we thought we had seen it all.

I will admit up front that I was predisposed to like this book. Lewis (along with Tolkien and Williams) occupies a place of honour on my bookshelf, exempt from such mundane categorizations as “fiction,” “philosophy,” or “theology.” Also, I like books about books. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

The first time I read this book was almost ten years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school. That was also the only other time I’ve read it, and this time around I was reading the same copy as I did then - so it had all sorts of things highlighted, the things I thought were worth highlighting back then. An interesting experience, if I may say so.

It wasn’t quite as good as I remember; certainly the prose is awkward at times (although I’ve been spoiled by Williams of late - all prose seems awkward next to his, I think). There’s also a subtext of weird sexuality that doesn’t get developed as fully as it could. (I’m thinking specifically of Ralph, Jack, and Simon climbing the mountain, which reminded me of Michel Tournier’s (later) Friday, and the later killing of the first pig - a female - and the extremely erotic language used to describe it. Oh, and the fact that after that incident, the ‘beast’ in the hunters’ chants becomes masculine.)

Those things aside, however, I still think it’s a classic of depressing, dystopian, misanthropic literature, and worth repeated readings. Certainly it’s not as good as Heart of Darkness, but it’s close. I don’t know why I like books like this so much (see, recently, The Road), aside from my obsession with castaways. While I think it’s a pretty accurate description of the evil human beings are capable of, and the ease with which we can commit brutal atrocities, I don’t think it’s the complete picture. Maybe I need to confront the darkness in order to make the hope I have in God’s infinite grace seem worth having - if I ignore or gloss over the depths of depravity to which we can descend, it somehow lessens or cheapens the wideness of his mercy.

I think, also, that the converse is true. At the end of the novel, the boys, who have become little savages that Hobbes would be proud of, are rescued by a naval officer: the boys are hunting Ralph, and the officer who rescues them is on a hunt for enemy ships. It’s not exactly a subtle parallel. But Golding’s assertion that people are fundamentally bad, no matter what the circumstances - which goes back at least to Hobbes, and was presented in its fullness by Nietzsche - cheapens and ignores the selfless goodness that people are capable of. It is, I think, easier to be a nihilist than a Christian; but that’s a discussion for another day.

This is, hands down, the funniest book about the end of the world there is. It was published in 1990, five and a half years before the first Left Behind book - managing the highly improbable feat of spoofing an entire genre of poorly written, theologically unsound, not-worth-the-paper-they’re-printed-on novels before they were even written. That’s the British for you.

Alright, so it’s actually a spoof of films like The Omen, at least according to the Wikipedia article about the novel. All the requisite elements are there - the Antichrist (as a human child), the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, the rapid approach of Armageddon, etc. There’s also Crowley (”an angel who did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards”) and Aziraphale (first impression: “intelligent, English, and gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide”), who tend to affairs on earth for their respective employers - and neither of whom is ready to see the earth destroyed. (They like it, after all.) Oh, and the Antichrist has been misplaced, so everyone spends a big chunk of the novel frantically trying to find him before someone else does.

And despite being ‘theologically inaccurate’ in a lot of ways - I almost hate to say that, because it wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t ridiculously inaccurate - it has moments of almost profound truth. Not too profound, of course - they’re British, and this is a comedy, and too much profundity wouldn’t be seemly - but they seem to have understood more of Christ’s message than Tim and Jerry. Not that that’s very hard to do.

This novel is, I think, one of Williams’ most intricately plotted: it’s fugue-like, with two distinct but connected lines of plot, the interaction of which is a third plot. One of them Ken has already discussed on this blog: Wentworth’s movement away from others and into himself, which is the descent into hell.

The other deals with the opposite movement, out of the self and into selflessness. This entire strand of the plot, in fact, is Williams’ (somewhat radical?) intrepretation of Paul’s admonition to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2). Williams argues that the verse has less to do with “mourning with those who mourn” than actually carrying burdens - I think the image he uses is carrying a parcel for someone.

I read Descent Into Hell the first time when I was 17, and something about this idea - which Williams calls “the doctrine of substituted love” - made perfect sense to me then, and is still one of those ideas that I just accept as true: the idea that, since we are in Christ and Christ is in us, we can somehow carry another person’s fear or pain or depression by the power of Christ - as though the burden he gives us, which is easy and light to us, was someone else’s, and too heavy for that person to carry. It makes sense to me, but is really difficult to put into words - easier just to tell people to read the novel, because it makes sense there.

I have a hard time deciding if Williams believes that there is a point at which the descent into hell is irreversible. Lewis, I think, did - certainly that’s the impression I’ve gotten, especially from The Great Divorce. And the final chapter of this novel paints a chilling picture of Wentworth’s descent, into a black abyss without an end. But the story of the dead man, the plot which ‘arises’ from the interaction of the two other plotlines, seems to me to suggest that repentance and redemption are always possible, given enough time - that the love and mercy of God will always prevail, and all men will be saved. I have to hope so, because I don’t think I could remain a Christian otherwise. I suppose, though, that I’ll just have to wait and see, like everyone else.

This was, I think, the first Williams novel I read, at 17, and most of it went over my head. I recently re-read it, and managed to understand at least a little more.

The plot revolves around the original deck of the Tarots and a set of golden images, which move under their own power - the images were wrought by some ancient sage, and the original Tarots painted using the images as a model. When used together, they are a thing of great power and make possible certain knowledge of the future. They were, of course, separated at some point - the Tarots were lost, and the images entrusted to a certain family of Gypsies, and eventually are installed in a house in some remote corner of England. The grandson (Henry) of the man who keeps the images (Aaron) ends up engaged to a woman (Nancy) whose father (Nigel) has inherited a collection of decks of cards from a recently deceased friend - and among those decks is the original deck of the Tarots. Hilarity ensues - sort of - when Henry tries to use the Tarots to kill his future father-in-law, who is extremely rational and ‘modern’ and refuses to hand over the Tarots so the cards can be re-united with the images.

The reason Aaron and Henry want the original Tarots so badly is because of the image of the Fool - it stands, without moving, at the center of all the other images, which dance around it (the dance representing, well, the dance of creation). Without ‘knowledge of the Fool’, their ability to interpret the dance (and thus to see the future) is rather limited.

There is, however, a character in the novel who possesses knowledge of the Fool - Nancy’s maiden aunt (a devoted Christian who is something of a mystic), who can see the Fool dancing, completing the steps of all the other dancers.

As far as plots go, it’s not one of Williams’ best - parts of it seem contrived - but it’s a fascinating novel anyway. There are some incredible passages describing the infringement of the Greater Trumps on the reality we usually see. That’s one of the things Williams is best at, breaking down the wall we put up between ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’. Well worth the effort.

I read this book on the recommendation of my bishop, who happens to be Ken’s dad (his review of the book is here). While it was not the hardest book I’ve ever read (I read it over the course of a long week in Hawai’i), it was difficult, densely reasoned, and well worth the effort.

Popper spends most of the book analyzing and refuting Plato’s later works, especially The Republic (which I’ve read parts of) and The Laws (which I’d never heard of). The basic argument runs something like this: Plato’s theory of the forms asserts that all we call reality is copies of ‘more real’ objects which exist in an eternal changelessness; the common example is that of the chair: all chairs that exist derive their ‘chairness’ from ‘The Chair’ (of which there is only one - there is not one form of ‘The Armchair’ and another of ‘The Desk-chair’, and that singularity of the Forms is actually important, as I hope will soon be clear). The theory of the forms requires those who accept it to view human history as a downhill slope, running from the perfection of the first society down to the degradation of the present day (Plato’s or ours). This is because, if our reality is merely a copy of the perfect reality, the first copy will be the one which most closely resembles the Form it’s a copy of. It follows, then, that the first society - which Plato reasons was an extremely autocratic, rigidly hierarchical, legalistically oppressive state which would have made the Spartans look like little girls - is the best, by virtue of being oldest.

The practical application of this belief is a socio-political program which seeks to arrest (and, so far as is possible, reverse) all change - to return to rigid, primeval autocracy. The rule of philosopher-kings, which Plato advocates in The Republic, is not the rule of lovers of wisdom; it is the rule of the intellectual elite, of those who have been initiated into the mysteries of the Forms - of those who know what’s best for the people they rule. It’s pretty easy to see the connection between Plato’s political thought and dictatorships, especially those of the 20th ceuntury. Plato would’ve loved Stalin.

Plato was, of course, really wrong about all of this, and Popper does an excellent job of tearing down the edifice Plato built. It’s brilliant.
The part that’s revolutionary, though, is what Popper offers as an alternative to Plato’s closed society - the open society, where advances are made on a piecemeal basis, by individuals or groups trying new ways to solve old problems. It doesn’t seem so revolutionary now, fifty years after Popper wrote about it, but it still is - there are still plenty of systems and organizations (corporations, governments, churches) that want to run things from the top down, rather than letting individual initiative and trial-and-error change things from the bottom up. Give the Man the finger, and go find (and read) a copy of this book.

(A word about the comic - I didn’t choose it (entirely) because of the statement about contemporary politics, but because Plato did in fact advocate the use of lies and propaganda, and would definitely agree with that statement. Also it’s funny.)

I really want to like this book.

It’s a critique of certain aspects of Indian civilization (as one might guess from the title): the rigid caste system, the blind adherence to ancient and obscure religious rituals and practices, cultural, political, technological, and economic stagnation, corruption and laziness at all levels - all of which interact to keep it a backward, third-world country; at least according to Naipaul, who is, after all, Indian.

Except he’s not, really. His parents left India before he was born, and he grew up in Trinidad - still part of the Empire, but not India. And he was educated at Oxford. The first words in the book, before even the title page, are as follows:

“India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.”

This admission doesn’t stop him, however, from casting his essentially Western criticisms as authoritative and “Indian” - which annoys me, because it means I can’t agree with him without some reservations. That’s the problem with forming opinions based on books - they’re full of someone else’s opinions.

So, don’t bother reading this book, unless you have some specific interest in India (like I do). It’s just not worth it otherwise.

This novel is among the bleakest and most depressing I’ve ever read, and it was great. I read it in a single day (much to the annoyance of my wife and child, as I mostly ignored them for that day).

It is, in one sense, post-apocalyptic fiction, as it takes place after a nuclear war. But unlike most novels (or movies) of that genre (or at least the examples I’m familiar with - A Canticle for Lebowitz, the Terminator trilogy, anything with zombies), which are generally broad, even global, in scope, this novel focuses on the struggles of one man and his son to survive in a nuclear wasteland.

In some ways, the novel is quite repetitive, but brilliantly so - the near-constant references to the bleak, dusty grayness of the landscape, the man’s deteriorating health, and the pair’s never-ending search for food, water, and shelter all serve to make vividly real the novel’s world. I have a tendency to imaginatively inhabit the world of any novel I’m reading, so I may be overstating things, but I think McCarthy has done an excellent job of making the hell such a world would be apprehensible, realistic, and, well, vivid.

What made it so depressing and, at various points, suspenseful or horrifying, was not the physical landscape, but the Solzhenitsynian accuracy with which McCarthy imagines the thoughts, emotions, and actions of his characters. I won’t say more than that, or I won’t be able to stop. Worth reading, but only if you don’t vomit easily.