Category Archive: Literature
Jacobs on Mendelson
This review by Alan Jacobs of Edward Mendelson’s recent The Things That Matter: What Seven Novels Have to Say About Stages of Life interests me. I haven’t read all of the books Mendelson discusses, but I do appreciate this quotation:
Mendelson also sees the implications of the books’ obviously encompassing themes. For instance, here’s a sentence from the conclusion of the chapter on Jane Eyre, comparing that novel with the masterwork of Charlotte Brontë’s sister Emily: “The unity of Catherine and Heathcliff is so complete that it excludes everyone else. The marriage of Jane and Rochester is so fertile that it embraces others.” (Says Jane at the end of her story, “My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise.”)
That sounds exactly right. I’ve read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but hadn’t compared them in this way. It appears that Mendelson may be a helpful guide.
How to Read Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite novelists.
Describing what makes him good has been compared to “a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what’s good about Mozart” (Chicago Sun-Times). A review of one of his books in The Washington Post Book World said, “If any writer from within genre fiction ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe,” and added that he “reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges, and Nabokov rolled into one, and then spiced with all manner of fantastic influences, from H. G. Wells to Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft to Damon Knight.”  The review later said, “Gene Wolfe has taken science fiction to its highest artistic pitch” and called him “SF’s greatest novelist.”
High praise. But that opinion isn’t limited to that one reviewer. Wolfe has been referred to as “quite possibly the most important writer in the SF field” (John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction), “a national treasure” (Damon Knight), “our Melville” (Ursula LeGuin), “The greatest writer in the English language today” (Michael Swanwick), “the smartest, sublest, most dangerous writer alive today, in genre or out of it” (Neil Gaiman), and “the best novelist in America that you’ve never heard of, let alone read, because you don’t bother with ‘science fiction'” (Washington Post Book World).
When I was a teenager, I loved science fiction and fantasy. When I was in my 20s, however, under the influence of some comments by one of my other favorite writers, Larry Woiwode, I began to think of science fiction and fantasy as a bad form of escapism. God put us in this world, not in some fantasy world, and therefore fiction ought to help us live to God’s glory in this world. Fiction, therefore, ought to be realistic.
That’s Woiwode’s argument in a nutshell, and for a time I bought it. I’m thankful that I didn’t get rid of all my old science fiction novels, however, because that argument no longer persuades me. Just as a story about trees trying to elect a king (Judges 9) can help us live to God’s glory in this world, so can science fiction and fantasy stories. But what persuaded me wasn’t so much that I rethought through Woiwode’s argument and picked holes in it. That came later. What came first was Wolfe.
Shortly after I graduated from seminary, James Jordan introduced me to Wolfe. I read some short stories, moved on to There Are Doors and Endangered Species, and then went back to the (almost) beginning, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and started reading (and sometimes re-reading) everything Wolfe wrote.
I’ve even read some of his stories (“Westwind,” “The Detective of Dreams,” and “The Death of the Island Doctor,” in particular) to my Wednesday night Bible study group, ostensibly so that we could discuss how symbolism works in literature but (I must confess) really because I love these stories and wanted to share them with the group.
That said, Wolfe is not everyone’s taste, which is fine. But perhaps the biggest stumbling block (besides the label “science fiction” or “fantasy” which turns some people off) is that Wolfe is often puzzling. He isn’t always easy to read, and even when you’re galloping through a story and you think you’re catching everything, if you go back and reread you’ll discover a lot more that you missed.  He delights in puzzles and mysteries; he sometimes seems to toy with the reader; he slips in clues and, as he has himself said, he gives a clue only once.
But help is on the way. The latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is dedicated to Gene Wolfe, and it contains not one but three essays aimed at assisting you in reading and appreciating Gene Wolfe. From Michael Andre-Driussi, there’s “Gene Wolfe: The Man and His Work,” which I’d probably recommend reading third. From Michael Swanwick, there’s “The Wolf in the Labyrinth.”
And from Neil Gaiman, there’s the essay to read first, entitled simply, “How to Read Gene Wolfe“. Gaiman provides nine tips, which complement Swanwick’s three. Here’s the seventh:
There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.
I’m glad Jim put me onto Wolfe, and while I still love Woiwode’s own writing, I’m glad I can enjoy more fiction than he’d recommend.
Like Hidden Fire
I’ve read John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle several times. It’s the second of his Peter Hannay stories and it is set during World War I. The Germans have teamed up with the Turks and are working to bring about a Holy War in the Islamic world in the hopes that the Muslims will overthrow the British. Rumors abound about a mysterious figure in the East who is going to lead that Holy War, and Richard Hannay and his friends get caught up in the attempt to stop him.
I enjoyed the novel, but didn’t dream that there was actual history behind it. Which shows you how little I knew about the history of World War I. A while back, when I mentioned Greenmantle on this blog, Paul Baxter recommended Peter Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire. It’s the true story behind Greenmantle — and more!
Sure enough, the Germans and the Turks did plot to bring about a Holy War in order to turn the Muslims in Persia, Afghanistan, and India against the British. Their propaganda even declared that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam and had made a pilgrimage to Mecca!
Hopkirk traces the development of the plot which looked for quite a while as if it might succeed. In fact, Buchan had intelligence contacts and may have had inside information.  His friend, Lawrence of Arabia, once commented that “Greenmantle has more than a flavor of truth.” Buchan’s novel ends with the defeat of Erzerum, but Hopkirk goes further, telling the story of the end of the Holy War as Turkey pushed toward the city of Baku in Transcaucasia.
I’ve heard the complaint that Buchan’s characters often just happen to stumble across plots and clues, making the novels less believable. On the other hand, if the coincidences and mistakes that Hopkirk records were in fiction, the same charge could be levelled against them.
For instance: Would you believe that in fleeing from capture, Wassmuss (the German “Lawrence of Arabia”), who was trying to get the southern Persians worked up to fight the British, would leave behind his code book? And that he wouldn’t report it to his superiors? And that they would end up continuing to use the same code, not knowing that the British could read it? And that they would send a top secret telegram (the Zimmermann Telegram) to Mexico via lines that ran through Britain? And that Britain’s Naval Intelligence Director, Sir Reginald Hall, would have been curious about why Wassmuss tried so hard to get his luggage and, though no one else seemed interested in it, would have examined it and discovered the code book?
In fiction, maybe not. “That’s stretching coincidence,” you might say. But it happened. The telegram was sent from the US consulate in Germany to the US state department, where the German consul translated it and then sent it on to Mexico. But the telegraph lines went via Britain and the British happened to be reading all those telegrams, discovered this one, recognized the code (thanks to Hall), and discovered that the Germans were planning to attack US shipping and were trying to convince Mexico to join in the war in order to reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. And that, of course, had a lot to do with the States entering World War I (though I remember nothing of this from my high school history class).
Hopkirk writes well and I read the final chapters at a gallop yesterday afternoon, trying to discover what was happening to characters such as Ranald MacDonell, left alone in Baku in the midst of Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks and Muslim-hating Arminians and with Turks approaching, Edward Noel, a real-life “Sandy Arbuthnot,” who was famous for his ability to travel great distances in surprisingly little time and whose escapes and adventures were legendary but who left hardly any records of them (alas!), and Reginald Teague-Jones, who was later (likely falsely!) accused of engineering the slaughter of the twenty-six Baku commissars and who had to change his name and disappear to escape reprisals.
I’ll be reading more of Hopkirk. And having read this book, I almost want to go back and re-read Greenmantle again!
Imagine
Last week, I read Steve Turner’s Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts. I’d spotted it in the Medford Public Library and thought it looked interesting. And it was.
Turner is a poet and music journalist and has written several books and articles about musicians, so he knows what he’s talking about.  He does a very good job at pointing out the ways in which the arts contribute to a full life.  Dance, for instance, makes us aware of the beauty and grace of the human body.
Whereas some books on the arts focus solely on artists who are themselves creating new pieces of art, Turner recognizes that not every artist does. Musicians in a symphony simply play the notes that are in front of them. Similarly, there are actors who simply have to say the lines that have been written for them.  It strikes me that Turner is unique in addressing what it means for such artists to carry out their art in a Christian way.
Turner distinguishes helpfully between what he presents as “five concentric circles” of artistic work. In the outermost circle are the sorts of artists I mentioned above, and Turner affirms that there’s nothing wrong with simply playing the notes or acting a role. The creation of something beautiful is valuable, even if no one hearing the musician play those notes would be able to tell that he is a Christian.
The next circle is the kind of artistic work that does express “Christian faith because it dignifies human life and introduces a sense of awe” (p. 83).  Think of a saxophone solo that makes you glad to be alive or a photograph that shows you a beautiful scene or a poem that sheds new light on some aspect of ordinary life.
The third circle is the kind of artistic work that expresses the Bible’s teaching but in a way that is not specificially Christian. Unbelievers, too, can often affirm the importance of forgiveness or appreciate humble care for the poor. The fourth circle is more explicitly Christian, drawing on biblical and theological themes such as original sin. The fifth and central circle is the most explicitly Christian, presenting the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Turner notes rightly that all of these circles are legitimate artistic endeavours for Christians. He traces the history of Christian appreciation and avoidance of the arts. It’s sad to see that, whereas the Roman Catholic church often embraced and supported her artists, the Protestant world often didn’t.  Turner interacts (often sympathetically) with some of the Protestant cautions with regard to the arts.
At various points in the book, he speaks about the superficiality of much of the art that Christians produce. Christians shouldn’t focus their artistic endeavors simply on the gospel as if they were simply interested in propaganda. It’s not wrong to produce music about ordinary life; Christians as much as unbelievers enjoy drinking good coffee or falling into bed at the end of a hard day or loving their wives or walking under the stars and they shouldn’t feel as if singing about these things is less godly or less “spiritual” than singing about Jesus.
Furthermore, they shouldn’t shy away from talking honestly about sin.
Adultery, violence, murder, deceit, fornication, betrayal and pride are clearly important to adult storytelling, whether in fiction, in film or on the stage. A simplistic reading of the situation would conclude that these sins are included to appeal to the base in human nature. Sometimes they are. But it is often more deep rooted than that. Drama depends on conflict. The protagonist must face tests and trials and through overcoming them, reveal his or her true character. Violence and sexual betrayal are among the most extreme tests we can face, which is why they are so frequently used in story lines (p. 39).
After pointing to the stories of David and Saul and David and Bathsheba, Turner continues:
If the obstacles the writer introduces either don’t seem challenging enough (for example, the protagonist is handed back too much change in a store and worries about whether to return it) or doesn’t seem real enough (for example, a fight ensues but no punches are seen to land and no blood is spilled), then evil doesn’t appear evil enough, and if good triumphs, it won’t appear good enough. This is why so much “Christian fiction” lacks the ring of truth. The action doesn’t appear to take place in the “real world” (pp. 39-40).
Turner follows up with some quotations:
Mindful of his Calvinistic heritage Daniel Defoe argued in the preface to Moll Flanders: “To give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give beauty to the penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal spirit and life.” Francois Mauriac said that his job as a novelist was to make evil “perceptible, tangible, odorous. The theologian gives us an abstract idea of the sinner. I give him flesh and blood.” Or, as John Henry Cardinal Newman once observed, “It is a contradition in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man” (p. 40).
Instead, too many Christians shy away from realistic portrayals of sin, presenting a Pollyanna view of life, “paintings of birds and kittens, movies that extol family life and end happily, songs that are positive and uplifting — in short, works of art that show a world that is almost unfallen where no one experiences conflict and where sin is naughty rather than wicked” (pp. 40-41).
But presenting the truth about sin doesn’t mean that the artist has permission to be worldly. Turner warns that we are perhaps most in danger of succumbing to worldly ideas when we’re just watching something for fun, but he is careful to identify what worldliness is and isn’t. It’s the rebellious system of thinking and acting that characterizes unbelieving people; it isn’t a disdain for the world around us.
Confusing these two usages can lead to disaster. Some strict fundamentalist sects show disdain toward creation and culture, and yet in doing so become proud, arrogant and uncaring. They therefore become worldly in the very way the Bible condemns and yet are not worldly enough in the way the Bible commands. We are told to be in the world but not of it. People like this are often of the world but not in it (p. 43).
This sort of “unworldiness” which emphasizes the “spiritual” and rejects “the secular” (that is, anything that isn’t directly about Jesus) — a view which Turner correctly identifies as having its roots in the heresy of gnosticism — can damage people and drive them away from Jesus:
When I was researching my book Trouble Man: The Life and Death of Marvin Gaye I visited an African American church in Kentucky where one of the pastors asked me this question: “Gospel music is made for the glory of God, but for whose glory is pop music made?”
I assumed I was meant to think that if someone wasn’t singing about God, they couldn’t be singing to God’s glory and that if they weren’t singing for God’s glory then they must be singing to the glory of the devil. It’s a tortured logic but one I have seen affect some of the most innovative artists in rock music. It can lead people to think that they are damned for singing a song about the joy of being in love or driving a fast car (p. 46).
And so people like Sam Cooke and Jerry Lee Lewis, but doubtless many others, found themselves confronted with a choice: sing gospel music only or leave the church to sing “secular music.” And if you’re going to be treated as a rebel, then you may as well act like one. And so they have, working out the gnosticism their churches taught them.
And yet those aren’t the only choices. The church needs to embrace and appreciate its artists, even though artists often don’t fit in well. And artists need the church, too.
Toward the end of the book, Turner calls Christian artists to be faithful church members instead of edgy outsiders. Turner cites the poet Jack Clemo who left the Calvinistic Methodist church he grew up in but returned to the church later in life:
At first I steered clear of the church, having a sort of “poetry religion,” but a Christian can’t develop much on poetry religion. We all need the religion of ordinary people and the love of other converts. That’s why, in the end, I went back to church; to worship around people who don’t like poetry. It’s a good discipline. I can’t put myself apart from them as someone very special. As a convert I am just an ordinary believer, worshipping the same Lord as they do (p. 122).
Turner adds:
The church humbles us. It is one of the few places in our societies today where we sit with rich and poor, young and old, black and white, educated and uneducated, and are focused on the same object. It is one of the few places where we share the problems and hopes of our lives with people we may not know. It is one of the few places where we sing as a crowd. Although the church needs its outsiders to prevent it from drifting into dull conformity, the outsiders need the church to stop them from drifting into individualized religion (p. 122).
There’s a lot more packed into these 131 pages: including a good discussion of how poets and musicians write (they don’t first have an idea and then start writing; they often just come up with words or phrases that get stuck in their head or sound good with the music, even if they don’t make much sense by themselves), the politics of “Christian worldview” (why is it that some Christians would identify a song against abortion as demonstrating a “Christian worldview” while a song about third-world debt wouldn’t qualify?) and a helpful chapter about U2. Buy a copy for an artist friend. And then read it yourself too.
“The Politics of Long Joy”
Alan Jacobs, whom I first encountered in interviews on the Mars Hill Audio journals, now has a regular column in Books and Culture. His first article, “The Politics of Long Joy,” draws on John Milton as interpreted by Stanley Fish. But don’t let that scare you. It’s worth reading.
Books I Enjoyed in 2006
As is my custom on this blog, here’s a list of the books I particularly enjoyed this past year. The list is in alphabetical order.
* Douglas Bell, Mojo and the Pickle Jar. Not quite as good as some of the rest I read, and perhaps not as good as Jim Jordan’s Amazon review or Gene Wolfe’s praise of it might have led me to believe. Not everything in the book worked for me.  But it’s still a lot of fun. I particularly like the way Bell would suddenly stop the story in places to provide side-comment insights into a character. For instance:
This about Raymundo Castillo: He was the sort of man who would kill you for a dollar and leave a tip. His voice may have been as mellow as a TV game show host’s; his face may have been as open and warm as a rich uncle’s; his smile may have glowed as comfortingly as a night-light in a five-year-old’s bedroom; but his eyes were as hard and cold as black ice on an overpass at four in the morning (pp. 97-98).
Good stuff.
* John Buchan, Mr. Standfast. I’ve read this one three times now. It’s the third in Buchan’s series of books about Richard Hannay, and it’s as good as all the rest.  Which reminds me: I need to read some more Buchan this year!
* Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. This is the first of Chandler’s novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe.
* Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. I’ve read this one three times, too. Didn’t enjoy it so much the second time, but this time I absolutely loved it. I’d forgotten how fun Dickens is to read. I’ve heard that some people think Dickens is too sentimental, not a good role model for Christian writers, but I don’t buy it. For one thing, the same charge could be leveled against Wodehouse. For another, this novel, Dickens’ first, while it’s funny throughout and sentimental sometimes, also presents the dark reality of sin.
I’ve heard people say that Dickens writes characters and situations, not novels. Chesterton makes a crack like that somewhere, if I remember correctly, saying that the only truly plot-driven novel Dickens wrote, and the only one where he played his cards close to his chest so that the reader couldn’t tell how the plot was going to end up, was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Dickens died before he got very far into it.
Well, there’s some truth to that. But surely The Pickwick Papers must be regarded as one of the most episodic of all of Dickens’ novels. Looked at one way, it’s just a bunch of people going around from place to place and getting into various situations. But you’d be wrong to think that it’s just a disjointed collection of episodes. There’s a definite plot here and the whole story holds together.Â
In fact, the book is not only coherent, it’s also coherent in its symbolism. Robert Patten, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition I read, points out that the various stories which characters tell from time to time in the novel aren’t simply filler, as some people thought. (And by the way, Dickens didn’t get paid by the word.) And they aren’t just stuck in at random. They are where they are for a reason and they are what they are for a reason. Again and again, the stories (like most of Sam’s witticisms) are dark: they’re cautionary stories, often warning Mr. Pickwick and his friends against certain dangers, warning them in particular that the path they’re on could end up badly, and describing various sorts of responses to adversity and betrayal and hardship. They belong to the story.
It would be interesting, too, to trace (as Patten does) the theme of the Fall through this novel. Again and again, there are scenes where people enter a garden, sometimes as serpents and sometimes to do good. I wish I had more time to flesh this out.
* Susan Howatch, Mystical Paths. Another of Howatch’s Starbridge novels, this one focusing on Nicholas, the son of Jon Darrow, who appears in one way or another in all the novels in this series. Once more, Howatch focuses on the dangers of spiritual pride and immaturity.
* Susan Howatch, Absolute Truths.  The last of Howatch’s novels about the imaginary city of Starbridge and its cathedral (the last, that is, before the related series about Nicholas Darrow), this novel traces the dangers that befall a man who thinks his worst temptations and sins are behind him.
* James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One. A response to various writers who do not believe Genesis 1 presents a literal six-day creation. But there’s a lot more here than that. I usually make my own indexes at the back of non-fiction books so that I can find stuff that jumped out at me fairly easily. My index at the back of this book is several pages long. That’s how many exegetical and theological insights are here.
* James B. Jordan, Theses on Worship: Notes Toward the Reformation of Worship. Great (and provocative) stuff on liturgy. Someday I’ll probably blog some of it. It’s well worth reading.
* Meredith Kline, Images of the Spirit. While there’s a lot here I don’t find persuasive. But there are so many insights that I have to include it as one of the best books I’ve read this year. Again, my index in this one is more than a page long.
* Bret Lott, The Man Who Owned Vermont. I’ve blogged about this one.
* C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. Some junk here, most notably the evolutionistic stuff in the middle of the book, but some great insights, too, a few of which I’ve been blogging recently and at least one more of which I’ll blog soon.
* Jeffrey J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship. I read this one in a spiral-bound edition years ago, but this edition is expanded and even better. The best book on Reformed liturgy I’ve read. Probably the best one out there. Period.
* Brian McLaren, More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix.  There was lots of stuff I questioned or disagreed with here, but there was also a lot that was helpful. In fact, this was probably the most helpful book on evangelism I’ve read. McLaren talks about the importance of building relationships with unbelievers so that they hear the “song” that moves us to “dance” and their feet start tapping along and they want to join us. He writes:
By the way, to be spiritual friends in this way, I think we will find ourselves attending a lot more recitals, soccer games, movies, festivals, parties, and concerts, which will mean we might have to cut back on some of our church activities (p. 89).
Indeed. As he says a page later,
too many of us Christians are invisible, absent neighbors, no neighbors at all — always running to church, to Bible study, to committee meetings, never having time to play golf or go for a walk or catch a cup of coffee with a neighbor… (p. 90).
The book is structured around a series of e-mails between a non-Christian young woman and McLaren. Along the way, her e-mails open up a number of issues for discussion. Above all, they present many of the issues and concerns that people today have. I don’t always agree with McLaren’s approach. I think he’s wishy-washy on some important stuff. But this book is still worth reading for anyone who is interested in doing evangelism.
* Patrick O’Brian. H. M. S. Surprise. The third of the Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin novels (I’ve read a lot of “third-in-a-series” books this year, it seems!). As usual, O’Brian writes beautifully. This is a particularly moving story, largely because of the plot involving Maturin.
* Walker Percy, Lancelot. Perhaps Percy’s darkest novel. The point of it is summed up well in the epigram from Dante’s Purgatory at the beginning:
He sank so low that all means
for his salvation were gone,
except showing him the lost people.
For this I visited the region of the dead . . .
Intriguingly the whole story is told by the main character, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, to … someone whom we learn little about, other than that he’s a priest. Lancelot himself is clearly wrong, but it ends by challenging us to figure out what the right solution is.
* J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The last book I read this year was one of the best. This is the fourth (not the third!) of the Harry Potter books, the longest to date when it was published, and perhaps the best so far in the series. Rowling does a great job of bringing in things from earlier in the series. I look forward to the rest of the series, which (I see) Rowling is now finishing. (Seven books in total: how symbolic is that? And the seventh one is the one that involves final rest.)
I still think James Jordan’s suggestion may be correct: in the end, Harry Potter is going to have to die for the sake of the Muggles … and not just the Muggles: for the sake of the Dursleys, his hateful stepfamily. Given Mr. Weasley’s love for all things Muggle (which ought to remind us that there’s nothing inherently wrong with Muggleness) and given the wicked characters’ dislike of the Muggles and their emphasis on racial purity, something has to happen by the end of this series to bring about reconciliation. The dividing wall, to borrow Paul’s term in Ephesians, has to be knocked down.
* Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. I blogged about this one earlier this year.
* Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps. Another great Williams novel about spiritual arrogance and the desire to rule the world, with great stuff about humilty and self-sacrifice. I loved the passage where one character acted helpless and needy in the storm in order to get her brother, who was just about to give in and die in the storm, to pull himself together in order to “rescue” her. As always, thomas Howard’s The Novels of Charles Williams provides great insight into this novel.
* Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Short Sun: On Blue’s Waters, In Green’s Jungles, and Return to the Whorl. The follow-up to Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun, this is one of the more challenging Wolfe novels in some ways (because of the unreliability of the narrator, to some degree, and because there’s a lot that isn’t explained) but also one of the wisest novels I’ve read. If Long Sun is analogous to the Gospels, as in some sense it seems to me to be, Short Sun is analogous to Acts and the rest of church history. There: that’s unclear enough and yet intriguing enough to encourage you to read it, isn’t it?
* Gene Wolfe, Strange Travelers. This collection of short stories was some of the first Wolfe I read, several years ago. Rereading the stories now, I understand a lot more of what’s going on in them and I can see more of the depth. There are still stories that baffle me (“The Haunted Boardinghouse,” for instance), but even some of the ones I initially disliked are starting to grow on me.
Noisy Outlaws….
I came across the title of this book the other day, while flipping through the pages of Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, and loved it. Here it is in full:
Of course, I haven’t read the book myself. But the title is fun.
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Proportion
St. Ives had always felt at home in Captain Powers’ shop, although he would have been in a hard way to say just how. His own home — the home of his childhood — hadn’t resembled it in the slightest. His parents had prided themselves in being modern, and would brook no tobacco or liquor. His father had written a treatise on palsy, linking the disease to the consumption of meat, and for three years no meat crossed the threshold. It was a poison, an abomination, carrion — like eating broiled dirt, said his father. And tobacco: his father wuold shudder at the mention of the word. St. Ives could remember him standing atop a crate beneath a leafless oak, he couldn’t say just where — St. James Park, perhaps — shouting at an indifferent croud about the evils of general intemperance.
His theories had declined from the scientific to the mystical and then into gibberish, and now he wrote papers still, sometimes in verse, from the confines of a comfortable, barred cellar in north Kent. St. Ives had decided by the time he was twelve that intemperance in the pleasures of the senses was, in the main, less ruinous than was intemperance along more abstract lines. Nothing, it seemed to him, was worth losing your sense of proportion and humor over, least of all a steak pie, a pint of ale, and a pipe of latakia (James P. Blaylock, Homunculus, pp. 22-23).
The Man Who Owned Vermont
Last week, I reread Bret Lott’s The Man Who Owned Vermont. I first read it a few years back, before I was married, and I remembered it being fairly moving back then. Now that I’m married, it’s even more powerful.
Guys, don’t let the fact that Lott’s more recent novel Jewel was in the Oprah Book Club fool you into thinking that he’s a “writer for women” and therefore not something you’d find worthwhile. As a matter of fact, I suspect that a lot of guys would benefit from books they consider “written for women,” but even apart from that, this book is about guys.
It’s about ordinary guys: Lott doesn’t focus on celebrities or the rich, on high-paid lawyers or doctors; he writes about blue collar workers and in this case about an RC/Schweppes salesman and about guys going hunting. It’s about the way guys hurt the women they claim to love. It’s about the damage that guys can do to their marriages and what happens to them when they decide their marriages are over.
It’s a melancholy book, but it isn’t hopeless. It’s well worth reading, and as I read it I was driven to repent of my sins and love my wife more. Not a bad thing for a novel to accomplish.
Best Reads in 2005
As is my on-again-off-again custom (though a little earlier than some years), here is my list of the books I enjoyed most this year, in alphabetical order:
* Michael Bond, A Bear Called Paddington and More About Paddington. I read these several times when I was younger and read them again this spring to Aletheia (still in her mother’s womb) and to Moriah, who had never read them when she was a child. The Paddington books are great fun. More recently, we also enjoyed Walter Brooks’s Freddy Goes to Florida and Freddy at the North Pole.
* Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas. I loved U2 in the ’80s, stopped listening to them in the ’90s, and recently began listening to them again. Bono reveals himself in this book as a serious and mature man and, as I read the interviews, my respect for him grew.
* Anita Brookner, Visitors. Moriah brought this one home from the library because it caught her eye. Neither of us had read anything by Brookner before, but we both enjoyed this slow-paced, thoughtful story. (See my blog entry from Feb. 17.)
* John Buchan, Greenmantle. Buchan is one of my favourite writers. I’ve been working my way chronologically through his works. This sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps was particularly good.
* G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades. Fun short “mystery” stories.
* Colin Dexter, The Remorseful Day. Sadly, the last of Dexter’s novels about Inspector Morse, which I’ve enjoyed for years.
* Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out. As you can tell by my blog entries earlier this month, I found this book provoked me to think (and to act) on almost every page.
* Susan Howatch, Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, Ultimate Prizes, and Scandalous Risks. The first four in a series set in and around the cathedral town of Starbridge. It’s somewhat surprising that these novels were bestsellers, not because Howatch’s stories aren’t gripping but because so much of each of these stories (the first three in particular) has to do with spiritual direction and pastoral counselling. In fact, I think I learned a lot as a pastor from them, and I look forward to the rest of the series.
* James B. Jordan, ed., Christendom Essays. This collection of essays was probably the best non-fiction book I read this year (keeping in mind, of course, that much of the year I was struggling my way through John Milbank, which kept me from reading as much other stuff as I’d hoped). Essay after essay was outstanding: “Trinitarian Worship and Confession,” “Is the Church Year Biblical?” and “The First Sabbath Conversation: How Old Is the Earth, Dear?” by Jeff Meyers, “Against ‘Christianity’: For the Church” and “The Sociology of Infant Baptism” by Peter Leithart, “Persecution: The Manifestation of and the Prelude to God’s Victory” by Rich Bledsoe, “Bahnsen on Self-Deception” by Joel Garver, “Trinity in Covenant” by Ralph Smith, “The Full Moon and the Sun of Righteousness (Matthew 1:1-17)” and “Saul’s Nakedness Exposed (1 Samuel 24:1-7)” by Arthur Kay, about whom I’d love to know more, “The Fourth Book of the Psalter” by James Jordan, and a few more besides. You’ll recognize that some of the essays by Meyers, Leithart, and Smith have grown into or been incorporated in their books, but these original essays are somewhat different and still worth reading. Outstanding.
* Harvey Karp, The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Baby Sleep Longer. This, of course, was the year my daughter was born, and so I read a lot of books on babies. This one had some evolutionary junk in it and it was a quick skim, really, but it had enough helpful stuff in it — stuff I wish I’d known earlier! — that I included it here. Think of it as a highish three star on a five star scale.
* C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet. The first of Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Well-written and often beautiful.
* Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain. The second of O’Brian’s wonderful novels starring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. I finished this tonight, and it’s one of the three best novels I read this year.
* Elizabeth Pantley, The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night. Another good book about babies. I like Pantley’s approach and her emphasis on gentleness in helping babies learn to sleep.
* Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard. A great, sometimes frightening, novel about the Romantic poets and the seductive attractiveness of evil.
* Ruth Rendell, Put On By Cunning. Rendell’s eleventh novel starring Inspector Wexford.
* J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I’m a fan. I read the first in the series last year and these ones this year and enjoyed every minute of them.
* William & Martha Sears, The Attachment Parenting Book: A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby. Moriah and I have been very impressed by the Sears books we’ve seen. This book, which introduces “attachment parenting,” was particularly helpful in orienting me as a father and reminding me of the importance of modeling self-sacrifice in raising my daughter.
* Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. Okay, this may look strange. The book caught my eye at the library and for fun I picked it up. I don’t know how accurate it is, but the anecdotes he relates and the experiments he describes are interesting. The book reminded me, too, that, as Christians, we ought not to be bound by the standards of “Enlightenment” science. God’s world may be stranger (and more delightful) than we realize. I was also struck by Sheldrake’s comments about animal sciences are often taught: instead of examining pets, we examine rats and other non-pet animals; instead of talking to people who live and work with animals about their behaviour, we keep at a safe, “objective” distance from the animals we experiment with, and instead of focusing on the whole life of the animal, we tend to dissect dead ones to analyse them and figure out that way how they “work.”
* Jeff Smith, Bone. This long graphic novel saga is great fun.
* Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage. The fourth of Trollope’s Barchestershire series, this novel concerns a clergyman who, wanting to be accepted in “fast” society, becomes surety for a friend (Prov. 6:1-5; 11:15).
* Jack Vance, The Dying Earth. Beautifully written stories.
* Rikki Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark. Very helpful study of the Gospel of Mark.
* Douglas Wilson, Standing on the Promises: A Handbook of Biblical Childrearing. I’m not sure that “handbook” is the right word. This book certainly doesn’t cover all the bases. But what it does say is very helpful.
* Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days. A great collection of short stories, articles, and interviews.
* Gene Wolfe, Litany of the Long Sun and Epiphany of the Long Sun. The other two best novels I read this year, though you could consider them also as four novels (which is how they were first published) or, most accurately, as one long novel. One of my friends identifies these books as the best pastoral theology he’s read. I can see why. It’s also a very rich story, full of puzzles, beautifully told, and very rewarding. Probably the best book(s) I read this year.
* Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians. Moriah and I read from this volume after supper and found Wright’s comments on these books of the Bible solidly orthodox, very readable and often helpful.
Wodehouse & Lewis
I’ve been reading through P. G. Wodehouse’s works (or at least the ones I have or can get my hands on), roughly in chronological order. The early Wodehouse isn’t as funny — or at least isn’t funny as frequently — as the later, though the discerning eye does spot flashes of that later brilliance. The Inimitable Jeeves, of course, is priceless.
Last week, I finished Ukridge, a collection of somewhat related short stories, all involving James Corcoran, the narrator, and the disreputable Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, always coming up with some new scheme to make a fortune. Some of the stories were better than others and there are some very funny moments or turns of phrase. But somehow the stories didn’t grab me.
So let me ask the Wodehouse fans out there: I know there are fans of Berty and Jeeves, fans of Blandings Castle, fans even of Mr. Mulliner or of Psmith. But … are any of you great fans of Ukridge?
In other reading, I recently read (for the third time) C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and loved every minute of it. Each time I read it, I find more in it to appreciate.
From the cover of my old Macmillan edition, however, it’s pretty clear that the illustrator hadn’t read it. The picture shows a man in a space suit standing on a barren wasteland with weird globes floating in the air around him. The cover of the newer edition (linked above) actually attempts to show Ransom in a boat with a hross.
Clerical Fiction
As I look back over the fiction I’ve read recently, it occurs to me that a lot of it has to do with the church and specifically with ministers in the church. “Clerical fiction” (you could call it “pastoral fiction” if the historical use of the word “pastoral” didn’t call up images of shepherds in Arcadia) isn’t a genre you find in most bookstores. Still, I suppose you could say that’s what I’ve been reading.
Early this year, I read Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, the fourth of his Barsetshire novels. More recently, I devoured Gene Wolfe’s wonderful Litany of the Long Sun and Epiphany of the Long Sun, which one of my colleagues referred to as the best pastoral theology he’s read, good enough to prompt him to ask himself in various situations, “What would Patera Silk do?”
Since this summer, I’ve also read Susan Howatch’s Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, and Ultimate Prizes, the first three of her Starbridge novels, all of which I found not only particularly enjoyable but also particularly helpful pastorally.
In addition, in the past months I read William Kienzle’s The Rosary Murders and Death Wears a Red Hat, which were okay mysteries, though nothing great, and Andrew Greeley’s The Cardinal Sins.
And perhaps I should add that in the past I’ve also read, enjoyed, and benefitted from Jan Karon’s Mitford novels, about which see Lauren Winner’s recent article. I really would like to read them again.
As I said above, many of these books — Howatch and Wolfe, especially, but also Karon — have not only been enjoyable reads but have also been beneficial to my pastoral work. They have shown me aspects of my calling and taught me to be more faithful in carrying it out.
So do any of you have recommendations for more clerical fiction I ought to read? (Someone’s bound to point me to George Bernanos, and I do intend to read him sometime. Still, you’re welcome to tell me about him again to whet my appetite. Oh, and there’s Father Brown, of course….)